Derek Mahon: Derek Mahon: Going Home

Poem Title

Original Publication

CP Page no

95-96

Going Home

Poems 1962-78, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979 (Given the title ‘The Return’ in the original publication.)

Length / Form

Ten six-line stanzas.

Allusion to Classical figure

Ovid, nymphs, metamorphic characters such as Daphne or Baucis and Philemon (...’if I lived/ Long enough in this house/ I would turn into a tree/ Like somebody in Ovid’).

Allusion to Classical place

Mythic pastoral setting

Relationship to Classical text

Mahon plays on links between English Pastoral and the mythic landscape of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This borrowed homeland (i.e. England) is presented as an unreal fantasy, to which he can never belong, and is contrasted with the bleak, ‘almost tragic’ qualities of the Northern Ireland to which he is reluctantly returning.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts

Classical/post-Classical intertexts

Dedicated to the poet John Hewitt. Hewitt’s poem ‘The Return’ also describes returning home after a stay in England, whilst ‘The Colony’ brings together Irish tree-myths with the wood-nymphs of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, depicting native ‘dryads [...] waiting for a bitter revenge’ on their colonial oppressors. (See J. Hewitt, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991).) Hewitt’s essay ‘The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer’ argues that the Ulster writer ‘must be a rooted man’ with a sense of his native place. (p.114-5 in J. Hewitt, Ancestral Voices: The selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed.Tom Clyde (Belstaff: Blackstaff Press, 1987).The influence of Yeats’ poem ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ can also be felt in the ironic references to the rosebush, absent from the ‘stony ground’ of Mahon’s vision. (p.247 in W.B Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1990).)

Further Comment

Further Analysis