Derek Mahon: Rage for Order

Poem Title

Original Publication

Rage for Order

Lives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972

CP Page no

Length / Form

Eight short stanzas

Allusion to Classical figure

Nero

Allusion to Classical place

Relationship to Classical text

.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts

Classical/post-Classical intertexts

The title is borrowed from a line in Wallace Steven’s poem ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’. ⁽Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber), p.130.) Mahon takes a despairing view which critiques Stevens’ meditation on the shaping power of poetry and questions the role of the poet in a time of chaos and unrest. His art is portrayed as being inevitably detached from reality

Further Comment

Further Analysis

The ‘Grandiloquent and/ Depracating’ figure of the poet, ‘far/ From his people’ is compared, in his use of rhetoric, to a Claudian emperor, ‘Nero if you prefer’, presumably fiddling stanzas while Northern Ireland burns.