‘Wordsworth’s story is symptomatic of the historical moment, but it is not paraded as being representative; the pression of the poem’s occasion launches it beyond allegory and exemplum. Its principles development and its structural and rhetorical life are to be found not in any designs he has upon a readership, not in an self-exculpation or self-dramatisation, but in the autonomous babits of the poet’s imagination. The “I” of the poem is at the eye of the storm withint the “I” of the poet.’ (p.126; Finder Keepers, p.115.)
‘Like the disaffected Wordsworth, the Northern Irish writers I wish to discuss take the strain of being in two places at once, of needing to accommodation two opposing conditions of truthfulness simultaneously, and at times their procedures are every bit as cautious and oysterish as those of Eliot [in The Waste Land]. They belong to a place that is patently riven between notions of belonging to other places.’ (p.127).
‘The fountainhead of the Unionist’s myth springs in the Crown of England but he has to hold his own on the island of Ireland. The fountainhead of the Nationalist’s myth lies in the idea of an integral Ireland, but he too lives in an exile from an ideal place. ... the condition is chronic and quotidian but not necessarily terminal. ’ (p.127).
When Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons and I were having our first books published, Paisley was already in full sectarian cry and, indeed, Northern Ireland’s cabinet ministers regularly massaged the atavisms and bigotries of Orangemen on 12 July.’ (p.128.)
‘The only reliable release for the poet was the appeasement of the achieved poem. In that liberated moment, when the lyric discovers its bouyant completion, when the timeless formal pleasure comes to its fullness and exhaustion, in that moment of self-justification and self-obliteration, the poet makes contact with the plane of consciousness where he is at once intensified in his being and detached from his predicaments.’ (p.129.)
Heaney comments on Mahon’s ‘beautifully orchestrated’ poem “Disused Shed [...”] where it is not just a single life that is given voice, but a whole Lethe full of doomed generations and tribes, whispering their unfulfilment and perplexed hopes in a trickle of masonry, pleading for a hearing in the great soft gestures of mushroom growths that strain from the dark towards a guiding start of light in a keyhole.’ [Quotes the last two stanzas.]
‘This could be called visionary or symbolic: it is about the need to live and be known, the need for selfhood, recognition in the eye of God and the eye of the world, and its music is cello and homesick. A great sense of historical cycles, of injustice and catastrophe, looms at the back of the poem’s mind.’ (p.131.) [Note the phrase 'could be called visionary or symbolic' is deleted from the version of this lecture in Finders Keepers, p.120.]
‘Mahon, the poet of metropolitan allusion, of ironical and cultivated manners, is being shadowed by his unlived life among the familiar shades of Belfast. Do not turn your back on us, do not disdain our graceless stifled destiny, keep faith with your origins, do not desert, speak for us: the mushrooms are the voices of belonging but they could not have been heard so compellingly if Mahon had not [va]cated the whispering gallery of absence not just by moving out of Ireland but by evolving out of solidarity into irony and compassion. And, needless to say, into solitude.’ (p.133; also quoted in William Wilson, ‘A Theoptic Eye: Derek Mahon and the Hunt by Night’, in Eire-Ireland, 25, 4, 1990, pp.120-21.)
‘I do not [var. don ‘t: Finders Keepers, 2001, p.123] want to reduce Derek Mahon’s poems to this single theme of alienated distance, for his work also abounds in poems where the social voice is up and away on the back of Pegasus, cutting a dash through the usual life of back-kitchens and bar counters, but I would nevertheless [deleted in FK, 2001] insist that I am not forcing his work to fit a thesis. It is present in all his books, this dominant mood of being on the outside (where one has laboured spiritually to arrive) only to end up looking back nostalgically at what one knows are well-nigh intolerable conditions on the inside. The mood ... of his best poems ... [is] as rinsed of political and ethnic glamour as a haiku by Baso, but their purely poetic achievement is further enriched when we view them against the political and ethnic background of Mahon’s origins.’ (p.135.)
[Note: In Finders Keepers, 2002, the final sentence following ‘inside’ - is thus altered: ‘It is treated in a number of his best poems, which dwell on the sufferings of those he called in an early poem “the unreconciled in their metaphysical pain”. These poems of the displaced consciousness are as rinsed of political and ethnic solidarity [sic] as a haiku by Basho, but their purely poetic achievement ...; &c.] (FK, (p.123.)
‘Penshurst Place ... focuses [134] Mahon’s sense of bilocation’ (pp.134-35); [...] Mahon’s displaced angle of vision is not a Nelson[-like ploy to avoid seeing what he prefers not to see but a way of focusing afresh.’ (p.137.)
Remarks on Paul Muldoon, pp.137-39 (Sect. III). Remarks on Longley, pp.139-44.
See also Seamus Heaney, ‘The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh’, in Terence Brown & Nicholas Grene, Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry (Macmillan 1989), pp.18-93.
See also under Michael Foley, supra.