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Derek Mahon: The Mute Phenomena

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

Poem Title

Original Publication

CP Page no

82

The Mute Phenomena

The Snow Party,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 (The poem was simply given the title ‘After Nerval’ in the original publication.)

Length / Form

Fourteen lines, as in Nerval’s sonnet, but the meter is irregular.

Allusion to Classical figure

Pythagoras

Allusion to Classical place

 

Relationship to Classical text

Following Nerval, Mahon’s poem alludes to the ‘Golden Verses’ (vers dorés) attributed to Pythagoras and, specifically, the supposedly Pythagorean tenet, rendered in French as ‘tout est sensible’ (‘Everything is susceptible’, in Mahon’s version). However, Nerval is actually quoting from Delisle de Sale’s De la Philosophie de la Nature (1977) and specific notions attributed to Pythagoras therein. (As noted in G. le Breton, ‘Le pythagorisme de Nerval et la source des ‘Vers dorés’. La Tour Saint-Jacques 13-14 (janvier-avril 1958), p.79-87. See also ch.8 of F. Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination. The Pennsylvania University Press, 1996)

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts

 

Classical/post-Classical intertexts

The poem is a very free interpretation of Gérard de Nerval’s ‘Vers dorés’, from the sonnet sequence Les Chimères (1854, appended to the short story collection Les filles du feu).

Further Comment

Nerval’s theme chimes with the ecological concerns which run through The Snow Party and with Mahon’s sense of the transient ‘man-made’ world encroaching, temporarily, on the natural order. Consequently, his reworking is far more scathing and cautionary than the French source.

Further Analysis

 

 

Derek Mahon