Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Derek Mahon’s "The Banished Gods" is a meditation on nature, time, and the displacement of ancient divinities from the modern world. With its sweeping imagery and quiet reverence for places untouched by industry, the poem envisions a world where the old gods—exiled by technological progress—still exist in hidden, primordial spaces. The title suggests a mythic underpinning, evoking classical deities who have lost their domains but still linger, unseen, in the natural world. Mahon's treatment of this theme is not nostalgic in a sentimental sense, but rather reflective, recognizing both loss and endurance.

The poem opens with an image of Paros, the Greek island famed for its luminous white marble, described as a “far-shining star of dark-blue earth.” The contrast between light and dark, the celestial and the terrestrial, establishes the poem’s underlying tension between presence and absence. Paros, “revert[ing] to the sea, its mother,” suggests an inevitable return to origins, a dissolution into something more fundamental. The “tiny particles” of rose quartz and amethyst “panic into the warm brine together,” reinforcing the idea of disintegration, as if the island’s material essence is dissolving into the ocean. There is a sense of entropy here—civilization, beauty, even the stones themselves are eventually reclaimed by the elements.

Mahon then shifts to another remote location, “near the headwaters of the longest river,” where a forest clearing exists in a state of quiet otherworldliness. The setting is characterized by mist, “light [standing] in columns,” and birds whose song is unnervingly unnatural, described as “a noise like paper tearing.” The unnatural simile suggests a rupture, an intrusion of the modern world into this ancient space. The emphasis on mist and shadow gives the scene an almost sacred atmosphere, as if this clearing were a sanctuary for something ancient and spectral.

As the poem expands its scope, it moves further into the vastness of the natural world, depicting an “unbroken dream-time” of penguins and whales, a realm untouched by human presence. The seas, “sigh[ing] to themselves,” recall “the days before the days of sail,” a time before human expansion and conquest. Mahon’s phrasing suggests an oceanic memory, a consciousness inherent in the waters that predates—and outlasts—human ambition. This theme of time stretching beyond human reach recurs throughout the poem, reinforcing the idea that nature holds its own history, independent of civilization’s narrative.

The moor, another location untouched by industry, is depicted as “seething in silence,” an oxymoronic phrase that suggests a hidden vitality beneath stillness. It is a place “scattered with scree, primroses, / Feathers and faeces,” a landscape of raw, unfiltered life. The hawk is its natural guardian, a creature tied to ancient landscapes. Most hauntingly, the moor “hears / In dreams the forlorn cries of lost species.” This personification implies that the land itself holds memory, that it mourns for what has vanished. The mention of “lost species” acknowledges the environmental devastation wrought by modernity, adding a contemporary ecological dimension to the theme of exile.

Finally, Mahon reveals where the banished gods reside—not in the heavens, but in the hidden, untamed corners of the earth: “It is here that the banished gods are in hiding.” They do not fight against their exile; instead, they “sit out the centuries” embedded in “stone, water / And the hearts of trees.” This vision of divinity is radically different from the anthropomorphic gods of classical mythology—Mahon’s gods are now fused with the natural world itself, less like Zeus or Athena and more like the animistic spirits of indigenous traditions. These gods are not figures of power and intervention; they are passive, lost in a “reverie of their own natures,” as if they themselves have become part of the world’s memory.

The final stanza delivers a striking contrast between the gods’ hidden world and the modern one. The gods' “reverie” is of “zero-growth economics and seasonal change,” a world in harmony with itself, untouched by the relentless expansion of human civilization. The phrase “zero-growth economics” carries a subtle critique of modern capitalism, which is built on perpetual expansion and consumption. The gods remember a time “without cars, computers / Or chemical skies,” a pre-industrial past where knowledge was organic, connected to the land rather than extracted from it. The final lines provide a vision of wisdom that is tactile, elemental, and quiet: “where thought is a fondling of stones / And wisdom a five-minute silence at moonrise.” This wisdom is not the analytical, data-driven intelligence of modernity but something more intuitive and meditative. The “fondling of stones” suggests an ancient, almost childlike curiosity, an understanding derived from touch and presence rather than abstraction. The “five-minute silence at moonrise” evokes a contemplative, almost ritualistic practice—one that acknowledges the sacred in the simple act of observing the natural world.

Structurally, "The Banished Gods" moves through a series of landscapes, each increasingly remote and elemental, reinforcing the idea that these gods now exist only in the untouched places of the earth. The poem’s tone is one of quiet mourning but also resilience—though banished, the gods persist. Thematically, it aligns with Mahon’s broader concerns: the impact of modernity on tradition, the relationship between civilization and nature, and the possibility of transcendence through attentiveness to the physical world.

Ultimately, "The Banished Gods" is not just about exiled deities but about what has been lost in the human world—an intuitive connection to nature, a reverence for the organic rhythms of life, and a form of wisdom that does not seek to dominate but to observe. By the end of the poem, the reader is left with a choice: to live in a world of “cars, computers, / Or chemical skies” or to reclaim the gods’ way of thinking, where wisdom is not about control but about silence, reverence, and touch.

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