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Derek Mahon: Dawn at St. Patrick’s

Poem Title

Original Publication

CP Page no

Dawn at St. Patrick’s

 

Poems, Oldcastle: The Gallery Press/ London: Penguin, 1991

169-171

Allusion to Classical figure Niobe

Relationship to Classical text Niobe’s petrification and perpetual tears are described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses VI but it is not clear whether Mahon is drawing on this source (though he clearly does so in many of his other poems which explore transformation and displacement).

Classical/post-Classical intertexts The poem contains many references to Robert Lowell’s confessional poem ‘Wakening in the Blue’. Here Lowell describes fellow patients at a Boston psychiatric hospital as ‘victorious figures of bravado ossified young’, much like Niobe, with whose image Mahon’s poem begins. (R. Lowell, Life Studies (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p.53).

Derek Mahon