Derek Mahon: Lucretius on Clouds

Length / Form Latin hexameter is translated into rhyming couplets.

Allusion to Classical figure Lucretius

Relationship to Classical text Mahon's translation follows the source text closely, illuminating the ancient author's poetry and use of simile/metaphor, whilst presenting itself as contemporary English verse.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts Mahon supplies details of the source text, which is Lucretius' De Rerum Natura VI, 451-526.

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Lucretius is among a number of classical philosophers (including Heraclitus and Thales) whose water imagery Mahon draws on, as a way of imagining the act of poetic composition or of thought. See, for instance, 'Heraclitus on Rivers' (CP, p.114) and 'Harbour Lights' (p.61-67 in the same collection as this poem).

Comment This is the first of a number of 'cloud poems' interspersed throughout Harbour Lights, which pick up on Mahon's resolution "to study weather, clouds and their formation", expressed in the previous poem, ‘Resistance Days’.

Mahon also translates an extract from De Rerum Natura (II, 1-2) in the earlier poem 'XIV: Key West' (The Hudson Letter (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1995, p.215-217). See p.175 in E. Kennedy-Andrews Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008 (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008) on Mahon's use of Lucretian imagery to describe the process of poetic distillation.