Derek Mahon: Lives

 (Page numbers given refer to Collected Poems: Derek Mahon [CP]: The  Gallery Press, 1999)

Allusion to Classical figure Elpenor

Allusion to Classical place Aeaea, Ithaca

Relationship to Classical text The second episode in the poem references the burial of Elpenor on the shore of Aeaea, marked with his oar (as in Odyssey 12, 8-15).

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Dedicated to Seamus Heaney. Mahon playfully mocks his friend’s quasi-anthropological preoccupation with genealogy as an ‘insolent ontology’. Here, a repeated cycle of re-birth and metamorphosis leads to the declaration ‘I know too much/ To be anything any more’. (See p.157 in E. K. Andrews, Writing home: poetry and place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008).)

Further Comment The same scene is recalled in the thirteenth staza of ‘Light Music’ (CP, p.70ff), where the oar is described as ‘a crumbling monument [...] pointing towards home.’