Derek Mahon: VIII: Ovid on West 4th

Length/Form Mostly rhyming couplets

Allusion to Classical figure Procne, Tereus, Itys, Philomela, Furies

Allusion to classical place Athens, Styx

Relationship to Classical text The echo of ‘Ovid in Tomis’ (CP p.157-162) in the poem’s title hints at the personal parallels Mahon is drawing to his own failed marriage, the impact of this on his children, and his own exilic status in New York, where he is working. While the poem stays true to Ovid’s sequence of events and the pace of his narrative, anachronisms are peppered throughout and disrupt the distinction between the mythical and autobiographical.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts The poem is a reworking of the Procne and Philomel episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book VI, 647ff).

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Preceded by a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, on the female survival instinct being misconstrued as ‘cruelty’. The influence of Robert Lowell’s fusion of classical mythology and with the autobiographical/confessional can be felt in many of the poems in The Hudson Letter and the image of the Nightingale is present in many of the poems.

Further Comment Mahon breaks from his reworking of Ovid at the end of the poem to dismiss a range of supposed ‘sub-texts’, suggesting that this is really a story ‘about art/ and the encoded mysteries of the human heart.’