Desert Island Poems: 'North Wind' by Derek Mahon

"Lambasting, lamentation and love poem all at once, it captures the essence of his work."

My first encounter with the poetry of Derek Mahon was in my first year at university in London, at an excellent lecture on ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, given by an English ‘Professor of Irish Literature’ who repeatedly mispronounced his surname as ‘Mahóne’ instead of ‘Máhon’. This mispronunciation, however trivial, has come to symbolise for me the ambiguity, and conflicted identity at the heart of Mahon’s poetry.

One of the great writers about the coast, particularly the north coast of Ulster, in North Wind he captures its bleakness and beauty. In his essay ‘The Coleraine Triangle’ he paints a fairly grim view of the area but does concede at one point that it’s ‘a sort of Ulster riviera, with Portrush as its Nice.’ 

The poem opens with the simple, inviting phrase ‘I shall never forget the wind/ on this benighted coast’ with ‘benighted’ meaning both obscured by darkness or contemptibly ignorant, morally and intellectually. This sense of ambiguity reverberates throughout the poem. The opening’s simple yet assertive tone echoes Louis MacNeice’s opening to Wolves: ‘I do not want to be reflective anymore’, another poem (in a long line of Irish poems) about windy weather, in which he does not want to stress the ‘flux’ or ‘permanence’ of the tide, as he attempts to block out ‘the wolves of water/ who howl along our coast’. Permanence is exactly what Mahon is exploring in this poem, however, as he writes, darkly, of the ‘stricken souls/ no springtime can release’ and ‘our hearts starred with frost/ through many generations’, and refers to the howling wind as ‘like the high keen… condemned for eternity’. The use of ‘keen’ emphasises the sense of wailing and lamentation, while the ‘starred’ gives a sense of the people being distinct yet somehow diseased, perhaps referring to the ‘wrapped-up bourgeoisie’, the Northern Irish or simply the Irish. Mahon, then, is confronting the wind and everything it symbolises as opposed to trying to block it out ‘with talk and laughter’ like MacNeice.  

Comparable to Heaney’s ‘Storm on the Island’, too, both poems are concerned with the Romantic idea of the sublime. We only need to compare Heaney’s ‘We are prepared; we build our houses squat’ with Mahon’s ‘best prepare for the worst… were we not raised on such expectations.’ Both poems about storms, they become larger metaphors for Northern Ireland. In Mahon’s poem, however, the wind seems to be less violent than Heaney’s ‘tragic chorus’ and more persistently nagging as he characterises it as a ‘weird, plaintive voice,’ which ‘sings now and for ever.’ This is not Muldoonian ‘new weather’ but rather old weather ‘here to stay’. Mahon’s use of ‘sings’ also hints at beauty or at least enchantment, and leaves us with a finely balanced ambiguity about his relationship with Portrush, the north wind, and indeed Northern Ireland. The sea is ‘scarred but at peace’, after all. 

But, we have come to expect such ambiguity from the poet who famously stated ‘poetry is the other thing that is the other thing.’ Indeed, the coast features so much in his writing that we can view it as a symbol for ambiguity in itself. John Montague (a kindred poetic spirit to Mahon, I think) wrote ‘on the edge is best’, and North Wind is a poem on the edge, literally and figuratively. Lamentation, lambasting, and love poem all at once, it captures the essence of his work.