After Ireland by Kiberd Declan;

Author:Kiberd, Declan; [Kiberd, Declan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

16. Derek Mahon’s

Lost Worlds

The dandy confronts the deteriorations of modernity with a face which registers no tremors, but that impassivity is just a pose: inside, the heart is breaking. Derek Mahon wears his rue with a difference. He addresses modern decline with a sense of real outrage, but the indignation is itself a pose. For one thing, it leads him to a fascinated detailing of the minutiae of modern life, beyond whose listings he seldom likes to move; and, when he does make such a move, he takes such a long historical view that he is hard put to sustain a sense of crisis. Things, he sighs, have ever been thus. If they are not getting very much better, analogies with the ancient world also suggest that they are not getting very much worse:

Now we are safe from monsters, and the giants

Who tore up rocks twelve miles by six

And hurled them out to sea to become islands

Can wrong us no more. The sticks

And stones that once broke bones will not now harm

A generation of such sense and charm.1

Up to a point perhaps. These lines were written in all innocence before Northern Ireland erupted into renewed violence.

The ruined dandy, like the destroyed Gaelic bards, knows that his life is over; and yet, inexplicably, it goes on. What is the appropriate grammatical tense to capture such a state? Like Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, the poet feels himself already dead, yet somehow he can hear the song of the birds. One ear is tuned to the melody of the present moment, the other to the distant sounds that come in on the strange frequencies of a long-forgotten civilization. Such a long view compels the poet also to imagine the future, for if the past was once somebody’s hoped-for civilization, so the anticipated future will turn out to have been some even more evolved people’s past. In ‘An Image from Beckett’ the poet contemplates the fate of Matthew Arnold’s optimistic version of culture and places it in balance with Beckett’s mordant view of a life created astride the grave, gleaming for an instant before it is gone:

But in that instant

I was struck by the

Sweetness and light,

The sweetness and light,

Imagining what grave

Cities, what lasting monuments,

Given the time.

They will have buried

Our great-grandchildren, and theirs,

Beside us by now. (NCP 41)

The bleak, glittering images are austere in their bare intensity, as stripped and reduced as the shards of phrasing in Beckett’s own writing; and the anticipatory nostalgia of the speaker indicates a longing to release the present moment, in its capacity to condense all past and future meanings. The landscape, however, is imagined as soon enough bereft of our human presence, which throws the value of this poetic utterance into question:

Still, I am haunted

By that landscape,

The soft rush of its winds,

The uprightness of its

Utilities and schoolchildren –

To whom in my will,

Thus, I have left my will.

I hope they have time,

And light enough, to read it. (NCP 42)

Andrew Marvell, in ‘To his Coy Mistress’, had asked for ‘world enough and time’,2 but Mahon fears also that there may not be enough ‘light’.

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