Day trip to donegal

From ZuluNotes - Free Leaving Cert Notes

English Poem
Day trip to donegal
Subject	English
Section	Poetry
Paper	2
Poet	Derek Mahon
On syllabus	2008, 2009
Note

The sea is a favourite place for Mahon for a poem. ... Donegal seems to slip out of Mahon’s mind as they “change down into the suberbs”. ... Its almost as if being out at sea is like alienation and he tries to compare this with the oppressed people of the world, on the other hand it may suggest the deepest fears of people such as the thought of facing death alone with “no promise of rescue” In the poem, we see how Mahon can take a nice simple trip to Donegal and turn it into a nightmare full of terrifying images.

Mahon was born and raised in Northern Ireland. Unlike his more celebrated contemporary, he is city-bred--a native of Belfast--and he is culturally a Protestant."Day Trip to Donegal" at first seems to be a straightforward narration of an excursion to the wild maritime county mentioned in the title: "We reached the sea in early afternoon,/ Climbed stiffly out. There were things to be done,/ Clothes to be picked up, friends to be seen." Mahon's account of the trip clips right along; typically he wastes little time setting the scene and providing atmosphere. The poet feels sorrow for the fish as they epire by the pier and take their last breath top stay alive. They have 'attitudes of agony and heartbreak'. He likens the fishes plight to human emotions and perhaps it is the plight of the fish suffering n human land that give rise to his dream of drowning in the fishes territory

Here is how Mahon describes Donegal: "As ever, the nearby hills were a deeper green/ Than anywhere in the world, and the grave/ Grey of the sea the grimmer in that enclave." The famous greenness of the Irish landscape stands in contrast here to versions of that color elsewhere; the poem assumes that the reader is, like the poet himself, from somewhere else. Mahon paints the sea's greyness not in terms of color value, but morally, in terms of its grimness. When the party leaves Donegal, the drive back is rendered crisply, in a six-line stanza made up of three couplets:

The bad dream is the flip-side of the liberating Donegal landscape and seascape. He feels isolated and alone 'far out at sea'. He felt as if he had noone, 'no promise of rescue'. He has found himself struggling to stay adrift on the ocean and the waves 'washes against his skull'