Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Derek Mahon’s "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford" is one of the most haunting and politically resonant poems of the twentieth century, fusing history, philosophy, and poetic craft into a meditation on abandonment, memory, and the burden of witness. Mahon structures his poem around a striking central image—mushrooms growing in a long-forgotten shed—but uses this as a means of contemplating the larger tragedies of history, from war to genocide. The poem’s gradual revelation of its metaphor, alongside its elegiac tone, makes it both a lament and a quiet plea for recognition.

The epigraph, taken from George Seferis’ Mythistorema, immediately situates the poem in a mythic and tragic mode, urging remembrance of the “weak souls among the asphodels.” The asphodel, a flower associated with the underworld in Greek mythology, hints at the theme of death and forgotten spirits that pervades the poem. Mahon dedicates the poem to J.G. Farrell, a novelist known for his historical fiction about colonial decline, reinforcing the sense of an elegy for the forsaken.

The poem begins in a contemplative mode, with the assertion that “Even now there are places where a thought might grow.” This phrase is deliberately ambiguous: it suggests both literal spaces where growth occurs and figurative spaces where ideas—memories, histories—persist in obscurity. Mahon moves through various forgotten or abandoned landscapes: “Peruvian mines,” “Indian compounds,” and “lime crevices.” These images evoke places of colonial and economic exploitation, their decay serving as a metaphor for history’s indifference. The world moves on, leaving behind these sites where only silence remains.

The setting shifts to “a disused shed in Co. Wexford,” where mushrooms thrive in the darkness, growing towards the light of a keyhole. Mahon invests these mushrooms with a strange, almost human-like desire, describing the keyhole as “the one star in their firmament.” The mushrooms are waiting, yearning for something beyond their confined existence. The anthropomorphizing of the fungi suggests that they stand for something more than themselves—something alive but forgotten, something enduring yet excluded from history’s gaze.

As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that these mushrooms symbolize the forgotten and abandoned, particularly the victims of history’s violence. The reference to the “expropriated mycologist” who once studied them but never returned hints at forced displacement, war, and colonial exile. The shed, left untouched since “civil war days,” becomes a metaphor for forgotten tragedies, both personal and historical. The poem’s descriptions—“the grim / Dominion of stale air and rank moisture”—conjure a world of suffering and stagnation. The repetition of time in the phrase “a half century, without visitors, in the dark” deepens the sense of abandonment.

By the fourth and fifth stanzas, the mushrooms have taken on an eerie, almost grotesque presence. They are “powdery prisoners of the old regime,” likened to political dissidents or victims of oppression. The phrase “Web-throated, stalked like triffids” fuses the organic and the monstrous, drawing from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids—a novel about invasive, sentient plants—to suggest a transformation beyond nature. Mahon introduces the metaphor of the “flash-bulb firing squad,” an image that unites the act of photography with execution. This moment crystallizes the poem’s moral position: the observer—whether poet, historian, or tourist—is complicit in witnessing suffering, yet risks reducing it to mere spectacle.

The final stanza shifts to direct address, as the mushrooms, representing the lost souls of history, “beg” for recognition. The plea “Save us, save us” echoes the voices of the forgotten, linking them explicitly to “Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii.” By pairing the Nazi concentration camp with the ancient Roman city destroyed by Vesuvius, Mahon collapses time, making historical suffering continuous. This juxtaposition suggests that neglect and oblivion are not bound to any one era but recur throughout human history. The poem’s closing lines—“You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary”—turn the gaze outward, challenging the reader, the historian, the observer. Are we passive tourists, merely documenting the past without truly engaging with it? The final plea, “Let not our naive labours have been in vain,” is poignant in its ambiguity. It could refer to the mushrooms’ biological persistence, but more likely it speaks to the anonymous lives that history has erased, asking for remembrance.

Mahon’s structure and style amplify the poem’s emotional weight. The long, flowing lines, rich with internal rhyme and assonance, create a meditative rhythm that mirrors the slow passage of time in the shed. The poem’s imagery is layered and carefully controlled, moving seamlessly from the intimate to the universal. The subtle shifts in perspective—from the poet’s reflections to the imagined voices of the mushrooms—allow for a complex interplay between witness and subject, history and memory.

Ultimately, "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford" is a poem about moral responsibility, about the need to bear witness to history’s forgotten corners. Mahon transforms the image of the mushrooms into a powerful metaphor for those whose suffering has been ignored—whether the victims of war, colonialism, or totalitarianism. The poem does not offer easy consolation; instead, it leaves the reader with the burden of remembrance. In doing so, it affirms the power of poetry to speak for the silenced, to shine light into history’s neglected spaces.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...