SOURCE: Taylor, Robert. “Derek Mahon: The Lute and the Stars.” The Massachusetts Review (autumn 1987): 387-92.

In the following essay, Taylor addresses Mahon's relation to Ireland, suggesting that Mahon's position as detached artist allows him to revisit the realities of past and current strife with greater empathy and creativity.

I am the widower—dim, disconsolate— The Aquitainian prince in the ruined tower. My star is dead, my constellated lute Emblazoned with the black sun of despair. 

Thus Derek Mahon translates the opening of Gerard de Nerval's haunting 1854 sonnet, “El Desdichado,” from Les Chimères. The poem, an exalted expression of Romanticism (T. S. Eliot borrowed the shattered masonry of the tower at the end of “The Waste Land”), also sets forth an autobiographical statement of Nerval's vicissitudes. In the limpid light of Mahon's customary verbal rigor, however, the passion of the French poet appears anomalous. Only when one realizes...