ISOLATION


The characters who appear in Mahon’s poems are often remarkable in their loneliness   tragic events of the night that the ship went down. From being a prosperous, successful socialite, he became an outcast, ‘humbled at the inquiry’ for his perceived cowardice. Now he is portrayed in a ‘lonely house behind the sea’ where he hides from society and any curious visitors. Even so, his conscience continues to be tormented as the sea itself seems to persecute him, leaving ‘broken toys and hatboxes / silently at [his] door’. We  lonely, tormented soul. He is standing on the Antrim coast, frustrated and powerless to do anything as his family is murdered, along with all the other victims, on Rathlin Island. In both cases Mahon is sparing with the language used to describe these men’s suffering. Instead, we are given the stark description of Somhairle Buí as he hears the ‘screams of the Rathlin women / borne, seconds later, on a north-east wind’. We are left to imagine the full horror and dread he experienced. The violence itself remains ‘unspeakable’.


Another isolated character is Captain Lawrence Oates, as we see him ‘goading his ghost into the howling snow’ of an Antarctic blizzard. His isolation is self-imposed through an   remote band of human beings on the planet. Then Captain Oates voluntarily removed himself from their company in the hope that without him, they might survive. The image of him forcing himself away from their tent and into the vast and murderously hostile snowstorm is memorable: he is described as a ‘ Solitary enzyme’ – a microscopic spec set 


362 VERSE 2025


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