Derek Mahon: Harbour Lights

Relationship to Classical text Mahon's depiction of Daphne's writhing hands and hair, in arboreal form, strongly evokes Ovid's Metamorphoses book 1, 452ff. The same source text is evident in the earlier poems 'A Garage in Co. Cork' and 'Going Home' (CP, p.95 and p.130). "everything is water, the world a wave" alludes to the dictum of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Thales (Aristotle gives an account of Thales' philosophy in his Metaphysics I 983b; see also Mahon’s later poem ‘Water’) (published in An Autumn Wind, Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2010). It also recalls Mahon's references to the philosopher Heraclitus (for instance, in ‘Heraclitus on Rivers', CP p.114), to whom the notion of constant flux is attributed in texts such as Plato's Cratylus, 401d-402a.

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Lines from Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea (London: Staples Press, 1955, p.123) preface Mahon's poem. The transformed nymph, Daphne, occupies the same mythic land-and-seascape as the Celtic hero Cúchulainn and the shrine' of the Catholic Virgin Mary, who is similarly transfixed on the shoreline. Hugh Haughton (2007, p.359ff) traces numerous intertextual poetic references, to Coleridge, Stevens, Mallarmé, Yeats and others (H. Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Note Also collected in New Collected Poems, Gallery Press, 2011, p.  281-287