Sample:What is the relevance of the poetry of Derek Mahon today?
From ZuluNotes - Free Leaving Cert Notes
| Sample Derek Mahon Essay | |
|---|---|
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| Subject: | English |
| Paper | 2 |
| Section | Poetry, Derek Mahon |
| Question | 2 |
| Level | O/H |
| By | questiongirl |
Question: What is the relevance of his poems to the lives of young adults in 2007?"
Derek Mahon, broadly, as young adulthood goes, is not a great counsel. His themes are rooted in the best one can hope for out of time, which in his poetry tends towards something of a suspension in abandonment- or the suspension of time when one is left alone- before everything goes to death and rot.
"Disused Shed" is an uneven poem, and would have been a good one had he not brought up Treblinka and Pompeii at the end. There is a philosopher named Theodor Adorno who wrote after the Second World War that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." This is taken out of context, but "Disused Shed" is a good argument for why. No matter how tragic, mushrooms cannot stand up to Treblinka. Ever. Strangely, this unevenness is also what makes it "relevant to young adults in 2007". Be forewarned, I'm going into this with the assumption that the young adults of 2007 have a lot of responsibility on their brains and shoulders.
In a way, Mahon is going right up against this declaration by juxtaposing the idyllic and the barbaric. And he is right to. Where do tourists visit on vacations, to relax? Sites of immense human suffering- the Inca ruins, the shabby-chic torments of Irish famine. Is he suggesting that someday Treblinka will be a memento mori pleasure destination? Probably not. But there is something of a festering world here- not literally invisible to us- but living so surreptitiously among the dead that it might be.
He talks about the mushrooms in the second stanza "What should they do there but desire?" I'm treating this as judiciously as I can, but if there's one realization that hangs heavy on our generation, it is that the world would be absolutely fine without human intercession. Mushrooms, no matter how domesticated, would not have any reaction one way or the other towards a lack of human intercession, especially in the environment described here. If mushrooms were small children- or even the rhododendrons- we might wish them greater expansion into the world beyond that deceptive keyhole; but mushrooms are a fungus, and there is nothing more that a mushroom enjoys more than being left alone to multiply in dark, wet spaces.
He is trying to create a startling image here- and it would not be a huge jump to draw a parallel between the history of the 20th century and its obsession with genetic perfection, inclusive of those judged undesirable and parasitic to this perfection- and the image of starved mushrooms huddling towards the light, forgotten for fifty years after being experimented upon. There is also here imagery of the train rides to concentration camps that, after days of brutishness, end in brutish death, along with the inhumane transportations of the latter 20th century (and early 21st) that somehow ends in 'causes celebres'.
The fault of this stanza and, as it leads into the rest, the poem, would be on the suspension of abandonment, and keying it towards rot. Just as mushrooms, after the abandonment of their caretaker, will actually adjust to their environment, rather than lay down to die in it; victims of torture and war do, for the most part, assimilate back into a society, even if it is not that one from that which they were abandoned to- though this too does happen- and though it will never be wholly comforting.
The space of which he is speaking is not redeemed by release, however, into death or life, but sort of an insensate prolongation of animacy. In the cruelest sense, one can imagine a train car to a concentration camp simply being abandoned in the middle of nowhere, locked shut- its human content never meeting with certain death nor liberation, but merely fading away. While the Holocaust is the dominant imagery of 20th century terror, this stands in as well for the Potato Blight, to which he also makes reference, and the slow, quiet deaths of millions.
While the interminable present, with its accompanying sense of immortality, is usually a vice specifically attributed to the young- "thinking one will live forever," etc.- this is not strictly true anymore, nor does it have the positive connotation of immortality. Rather, the eternal present accompanies both Auschwitz and famine; and the immediate temptation, throughout society- is to resign this interminable present to death. In "Disused Shed," this is done that we might be pleaded with to revive it. While Mahon expresses a certain discomfort with just such a tendency ("You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary/Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!") he perpetuates it throughout the preceding stanzas ("They have been waiting for us in a foetor/Of vegetable sweat since civil war days.")
Poems do not stand as paragons against hypocrisy, and should not be made to. This is a standing point as well, as far as young adulthood in 2007 is concerned. To add it a little bit of history- it was not really until the mid-nineteenth century that childhood was seen as a phase of life distinct from adulthood, and it is in a period now of receding back into ambiguity with adulthood.
