The answer to the rhetorical question posed in the above epigraph is clearly "no one". "Beyond Howth Head" sets up a clear polarity between "self-knowledge" on the one hand and "prelapsarian metaphor" on the other.l But in Mahon's work as a whole the individual's pursuit of artistic statement can not so easily be wrested from collective history. Self-knowledge and prelapsarian metaphor can not be exchanged unproblematically. Rather, the "ironic conscience" uses metaphor to propose a brief continuity between the antithetical categories of self-knowledge and home and then destroys the metaphor to separate the categories again. It is this sticking point which can give a clue to the question of belonging as it is expressed in Mahon's poems. By not completely separating art and history, himself and his people, Mahon professes some kind of allegiance - no matter how muCh he qualifies it - to the idea of an overlap between these antithetical areas.