"Persisting for the Unborn": Derek Mahon's Elegiac Poetics

Derek Mahon displays both a piquant ability to craft memorable lines of verse and a relentless fascination with a world relieved of its human burden; in these ways, he might appear—like Jude the Obscure—to be a sculptor of epitaphs. Accordingly, he should be read as following in the wake of Thomas Hardy's advocacy for an "evolutionary meliorism" rather than as extending Rudyard Kipling's service to the Imperial War Graves Commission.¹ No hired memorializer of a world that has lost its way, Mahon has a knack for crafting gem-like lines that may very well remain to haunt a future ripe with the catastrophes he fears—"Persisting for the unborn / Like a claw-print in concrete"² And concrete is essential to this self-revealing simile, because while typifying his own use of what Hugh Haughton calls the "language of objects," concrete is at once a technological key to human advancement upon the globe and a reminder that something has been covered over and lost in the bargain.³

Concrete is also a medium that can last, and upon which the peripatetic living creature may leave a mark. For all its large-scale utility and structural integrity, concrete's malleability allows it to register and fix an instant of immediate presence (or more accurately, the instant's passage onward) like the bird's flight. Though emblematizing the human desire to build lasting structures, concrete is more than a medium for the "claw-print" inscription; it also models poetic form. As a figure for form, the concrete contains the claw's print as opposed to the claw or lost body to which the epitaphic print refers. This is the impression of absence itself, the trace of what once was here.

Mahon's poetry is replete with the actual, "concrete" artifacts from the worlds of lived lives. But his attentiveness to the concreteness of language, and to the structural possibilities of form, belies his more fundamental concern with what remains in the aftermath of loss and even catastrophe. His poetry is at once an acknowledgement of mutability and a resistance to the forces of obliteration, and those final lines from "A Refusal to Mourn" speak for a poetry that takes as one of its principle themes: lasting. Of course, lasting—or survival—presumes a crisis of loss that serves as origin for this new condition of persistence. While the bird print figures the bird's presence and its having flown, the bird's trace also bespeaks uncertainty about what might truly remain. What do we know, but that the bird is gone? Inscription, print, passing, void: what is there now as a voice or text articulates this curious place and time—the epitaph and the instant of its communication to a passerby—in which life is suspended with death.

W. B. Yeats's poem "Memory" elegantly represents the form of poetic memory as the everlasting presence of a loss manifested in the impression of absence. "One had a lovely face, / And two or three had charm, / But charm and face were in vain / Because the mountain grass / Cannot but keep the form /Where the mountain hare has lain."⁴ The leaves of "the mountain grass," like poetry, possess for Yeats the ability to "keep [only] the form" of the now-absent visage, character—or "mountain hare." In memory, the absence of the beloved is shaped as a trace of the presence now gone. In Michael Longley's "Form," from The Ghost Orchid (1995), a poem that goes further than Yeats in expressing an anxiety with the inadequacy of language to "tell it all to you and cover everything," Michael Longley addresses this idea of memory's form as shaped absence. For Longley, such an effort "is like awakening from its grassy form the hare: / In that make-shift shelter your hand, then my hand /Mislays the hare and the warmth it leaves behind."⁵ In attempting to capture something of life, not only do the hands in "Form" lose the hare itself, they lose "the warmth it leaves behind." This inability of the structuring...