‘The only way out of “the tongue-tied profanity”’: Calvinism, Rupture and Revision in the Poetry of Derek Mahon

Abstract

As discussed in Chapter 2, at the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland, Heaney expresses his hope in the communicability of poetry amidst the chaos of sectarian violence by casting himself in the role of iconographer. Heaney creates icons that are Catholic as well as New Critical, imbuing these poetic forms with sacramental significance. Longley, as shown in Chapter 3, tests the limits of such poetic images by inspecting and at times defacing the material of their construction. He sculpts religious architecture but does so iconoclastically, fracturing these forms. Such fissures are in turn made meaningful within the collection of poems as a whole, and in the catechistical ‘call and response’ the poems are in across collections and with the reader. Turning to Derek Mahon in this third movement, we find a different view of poetry, one that diverges from that of both the iconographer and the iconoclast. In theological terms, Mahon’s poetry represents and incorporates a Calvinist perspective on the fundamental problem of language. Mahon perceives iconography and iconoclasm as two sides of the same coin, insisting instead on an unbridgeable divide between language and truth which poetry can only attest to and lament. Poetic adequacy is not something in which Mahon can believe, nor poetic priesthood.