Derek Mahon: Ghost

Length/Form One of Mahon’s shortest stand-alone poems: a single stanza of ten lines.

Allusion to Classical figure

Allusion to classical place Pompeii

Relationship to Classical text

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Ibsen’s play Ghosts (1881) was written during a stay in Sorrento, where this poem is set, and Hugh Haughton detects the influence of his depiction of ‘trans-generational haunting’ in Mahon’s poem (p.320 in H. Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Further Comment      Mahon’s depiction of ‘the lives our parents never knew’ recalls ‘A Bangor Requiem’, in which he reflects on his Mother’s life and death, confessing ‘Oh, I can love you now that you’re dead and gone’. The exhumation of Pompeii’s entombed ‘little houses’ evokes the afterlife of this relationship with his parents, and conflicting sentiments associated with his Ulster upbringing. Pompeii also features in the much earlier poem ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ (CP p.89). Here, light-starved fungal forms ‘waiting for us..../...since civil war days’ are exposed to the light of day and the glare of the flash-bulb.