‘that dark permanence of ancient forms’
Mahon’s poems express a horror of the values that underpin the dreams of the
combative‘families’ or tribes. It is such horror that one finds, for example, in his
‘The Last of the Fire Kings’, in which the poet is ‘through with history’ and refuses
to ‘perpetuate|The barbarous cycle’.^9 What the communities want, says the poet,
is precisely an epic writing of their world, the trace of the seductive but destructive
sound of ‘Sirens’ where rioters face their enemies with dustbin lids as drums and
shields (Davids facing the Goliath of the British Army, but also using a problematic
symbol, a quasi-parody of the shield of the epic hero) and block up their own
windows, refuse to see, choose to live in a ‘darkened’ world. For them, far from
proposing a civilized elsewhere to the chaos of the present, the poet should ‘serve’,
be the ‘creature’ of the combatant:
But the fire-loving
People, rightly perhaps,
Will not countenance this,
Demanding that I inhabit,
Like them, a world of
Sirens, bin-lids
And bricked-up windows—
Not to release them
From the ancient curse
But to die their creature and be thankful.
One might also draw attention to the apparently secondary but, in fact, strategic
aside: ‘rightly perhaps’. This interpolation can be read as a means of foregrounding a
sense of doubt in a world which apparently knows no doubt. Whereas the epic bard,
at least in the nationalist reading of the epic world, shows no doubt, knows very
precisely where the ‘good’ lies, in which violent action it expresses itself and how
fate of various sorts makes sense of events, for Mahon there are no such certainties.
In this absence of certainty, this inhabiting of a space of radical doubt, Mahon
is the inheritor of a twentieth-century tradition of outsiders—Beckett, Camus,
Lowry—for whom the notion of ‘home’ and the dreams of a historical teleology
become problematic, but for whom a sense of the radical reality of suffering remains.
What also remains for Mahon is the mass of victims, those who suffer the fall-out
of epic projects, the ‘survivors’ of mass violence, the ghosts who find themselves
imprisoned in the limbo of history, the beings whom he inscribes in what is
arguably the finest single poem to come out of the Troubles: ‘A Disused Shed
in Co. Wexford’. In this poem, the mushrooms found in the disused shed come
to symbolize multiple incidents of extreme violence—the conquest of Peru, the
French Revolution, the Irish civil wars, Treblinka—and enable the poet not just
to serve as witness to the intolerable suffering caused but also to pay tribute to the
(^9) Derek Mahon, ‘The Last of the Fire Kings’, inPoems 1962–1978(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 65.