Mangan, the Irish Dreamer
Toole, Helan Maree
670 THE COMMONWEAL October 30, 1929 effort, to supplement existing agencies and to lead them to better standards. The diocese alone was duly quali- fied to speak for Catholic philanthropic...
...Two poems which have mere extrinsic value yield their opening stanzas as arch specimens, The Winniger Winehouse, and The Kiosk of Moostanzar Billah...
...Timelessness...
...Sir Samuel Ferguson and Mangan interpreted the Gaelic Boatman's Song...
...Any differences may be accounted for by Poe's education and Attic tastes...
...Out of the dusk a priest came quietly to us...
...The air was heavy with the odor of ten thousand flowers...
...They died in the same year under very similar circumstances...
...His disturbed mind is revealed in Rest Only in the Grave...
...As we topped the rise leading out from the little hamlet, I turned back for a final look...
...at its statuary and cornices...
...The epic prose poem of Roisin Dubh, when translated at random from the Gaelic, is crude...
...A note of grim tragedy was struck in his youth which clouded his later life, making him morbid and sensitive...
...Still undaunted Mangan tried a third time...
...A nameless minstrel of the Tyrconnell chief, Hugh Roe, used to sing for his lord melodies of his native land...
...For example, in The Sawmill, a traveler pauses on the bank of the River Mourne and sighs for everlasting rest...
...I awoke and heard four planks Fall down with a saddening echo, I heard four planks Fall down with a hollow echo...
...The church was but a great dark shadow that brooded among lesser shadows in the satin haze o~ an eastern dusk...
...The other Mangan, the Irish dreamer was well acquainted with the Muse Euterpe...
...His biographer and contemporary, Mitchell, says that Mangan had the "unmistakable alabaster shine" of Coleridge and De Quincey...
...This early explorer of the Gaelic past living in the dawn of the Irish revival and the noon of the English romantic movement seems to have struggled in vain...
...For the training of leaders and workers we must have schools...
...The Irish and American poet had much in common...
...Louise Imogen Guiney says that Mangan "seems to blight and then revivify all he touches...
...670 THE COMMONWEAL October 30, 1929 effort, to supplement existing agencies and to lead them to better standards...
...These poems lack any vein of humor or merriment...
...The next hour, a paramount struggle seized him...
...Above everything else they need leaders and workers who are inspired by the finest ideals and who have a thorough appreciation and understanding of the best modern methods in the care of the needy and afflicted...
...Love, either passionate or frivolous, is absent...
...Surely our guide heard them, for even while he spoke he held his head as though listening for a sound other than that of his own voice...
...One hour exotic, strangely iridescent dreams of power and pageantry floated before his mind...
...The various allusions to Rome and Spain refer to aid promised by their rulers...
...bees drifted everywhere...
...He died in the same year--I847--as Hartley Coleridge and Emily Bronte...
...He hears a prophetic voice from the hewed tree in the sawmill: "For this grieve not...
...One was well known to the police, a man dominated by drugs or liquor, crouched in a Dublin gutter...
...He keeps very close to his thoughtful and spiritual model...
...He used this curious involved diction in his writings from I839 to I84I...
...Then in the late afternoon we drove out between low hills to see Goa and the towers of its great churches massive above it...
...In 1845 the poet combined the best in the fascinating Roisin Dubh with his own concept of the theme...
...He called Ireland "Roisin Dubh," the black-haired little rose...
...Mangan was drawn to Orientalism by his favorite Germans who delved into the thought of the East...
...Both men adored beauty...
...Mangan's Nameless One is his own and differs from all his other literary attempts...
...The comparison cannot be stretched when a discussion of poetic attainment is involved...
...You must see the sunset here," said he, and in his quiet way seemed proud that he could lead us to such a place at such an hour...
...here, too, the dark-avised pagans whom they sought...
...Poe is the poet of eternal fame...
...They cannot be permitted to acquire their experience and technique at the expense of the weakest and most helpless members of the community...
...They dreamed kindred dreams...
...Hearing the soft chant of priests we stepped forward with all care, but the sound of our footsteps echoed and rei~choed through the high-ceilinged interior...
...In The Woman of Three Cows, Mangan is at ease, having immediately the racy and daring sarcasm of the original...
...He began to translate and paraphrase the lyrics of these men, embroidering the product with Mangan illusions and metaphors...
...His chief passion was not the work of Goethe or Heine but rather that of Schiller, Rueckert, Freiligrath, Uhland and Burger...
...and brought us down great sweeping stairs to a corridor where iron cells had once housed those elder priests who came to Goa in the long ago...
...The Dark Rosaleen, full of sonorous and sensuous beauty, edged with wistfulness and power, finds the seed of its theme in ancient Gaelic days...
...The second attempt remained naive and prose-llke...
...She smiled shyly...
...Mangan derived from this source the use of sonorous, successive lines...
...In 1915 not a single diocese in the United States had a scientific plan of Catholic charities...
...Both studied the occult sciences with keen interest...
...At the present writing some thirty dioceses have adopted fairly systematic programs...
...From overhead came the mournful lament of a dove...
...Through its doors we were admitted into a perfumed dusk...
...He broke into the weird and symphonic strains of the immortal song of Ireland, The Dark Rosaleen...
...He fails to catch the sailor-like, whimsical mood of the sea, while Ferguson dashes along in a Masefield manner scooping the dusky Kerry sails...
...Mangan has written: "The Gorgon's head, the triple-faced hell dog, the handwriting on Belshazzar's palace walls, the *fire globe that burned below the feet of Pascal are all bagatelles beside the phantasmagoria which evermore haunt my brain and blast my eyes...
...His own translation of an extract from Schiller might have been his epitaph: "His dreams were of great objects, He walked amidst us of a silent spirit, Communing with himself ; yet I have known him Transported on a sudden into utterance Of strange conceptions...
...Mangan was born in 18o3, the year that Moore became Admiralty Registrar at Bermuda and that Mrs...
...He rewrote the poem three times...
...at the repairs that had been made here and there by loving, priestly hands to save the great edifice from the deteriorating effect of the climate...
...MANGAN, THE IRISH DREAMER By HELAN MAREE TOOLE HERE were two Mangans in James Clarence...
...At a well in the centre of the garden a lissome, dark-eyed girl drew a bucket of water...
...In the flowering-time of Keats, Shelley and Byron he studied in a desultory and haphazard manner whenever his clerical duties subsided...
...His incomplete autobiography states concerning his father: "Me, my brothers and sisters he treated habitually as a huntsman would treat refractory hounds...
...Only scattered crosses mark the former locations of the ancient city's many churches and convents and hospices...
...showed us vestments of great beauty...
...Hemans published her first volume of sentimental verse...
...When the northern clans battled with Queen Elizabeth's army and the Jacobite insurrection was seething Ireland was, according to the song of the MacGregors, "nameless by day...
...That was the keynote of the great structure...
...This poem has the manner, the mastery of detail and the grotesque turns of Poe...
...Then he showed us to the garden...
...It opens his soul and reveals the anguish which was constantly gnawing at it...
...Both possessed the romantic yearning for the impossible...
...IN OLD GOA By CLIFF MAXWELL ~ROM Donna Paula to Goa we rode along an austere highway, amid the scenery of India, but with signs of Latinity on every hand...
...He enjoyed the Orient of his own creation as did Moore, Byron, Hugo and Fitzgerald...
...Both struggled through the veil of darkness...
...The Fair Hills of Eire, and Ellen Bawn have found better renderings than his...
...Tyranny and poverty forced the studious boy to abandon the forlorn schoolhouse in Derby Square...
...It was his boast uttered in pure glee of heart that we would run into a mousehole to shun him...
...And between the leaves of the mango and rain trees shone a light that was incredibly rose-gold...
...Even in the closing apostrophe to the colossal and broken cliff Mangan's words are weak while Ferguson's are vital, warm and strong...
...Here on the walls were faces of the martyrs, gentle and compassionate...
...Strange it was that crumbling 'dobe walls and ruins suggestive of old Portugal did not seem more out of place in this far eastern country that was old when Portugal was young...
...He found pleasure sitting in a nook with a book or soaring into the empyreal sphere seeking inspiration for his art...
...This poem is a desperate cry, a wail of deep despair, of Iscariot hopelessness...
...The same chords appear in The Three Talismen, The Wayfaring Tree, Last Words of A1 Hassan, Time of the Barmecides, Wail and Warning of the Three Khalendeers, and The Dark Rosaleen...
...relics of antiquity...
...From very humble beginnings fifteen years ago the diocesan programs of Catholic charities in the United States have come to a position of leadership not only in Catholic work but in social work as a whole...
...The rising and falling cadences of melancholy sound added to the lonesome beauty of the place and a wrinkled, weather-beaten old Hindu convert in loin-cloth and tattered turban, girdled with the keys to the church, completed the picture as he sat in silent meditation on the rear steps of the edifice...
...We gazed, spellbound, at its weatherbeaten exterior...
...The most delightful of his shorter German translations is Rueckert's mosaic, Und Dann Nicht Mehr, at once tender, plaintive and musical...
...In many of his October 3 o, I929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 67x oriental poems, Lionel Johnson suggests, "Mangan has poured out of his darkness of the shadow all a captive's longing for the sunlight, for the fragrance of roses, for the burning blue: and also his half-sad, half-smiling sense of life's fleetness and illusion...
...His first interpretation possessed little blending of words and rhythm to express the spirit...
...Mangan's transformation of it was an arduous task...
...To crown all, an unfortunate love affair in which he was spurned shattered all his ideals of love...
...But I have an inward feeling that to him I owe all my misfortunes...
...Mangan, according to Lionel Johnson, is the poet of much that is imperishable, but above all he is the "poet of a poem foremost among the world's poems of inspired patriotism...
...When Mangan was very young the thought and mysticism of the German poets and philosophers attracted him...
...Nevertheless there is the typical Mangan addition all unwarranted and new...
...The sun dropped, with an almost audible splash, into the Indian Ocean and only a solitary ray touched the tops of the jungle monarch and the tip of one of the church spires as we climbed into our waiting car to return to the small boat that would take us back to the ship...
...His offerings to the Muse from Gaelic sources thrill with denunciations against Ireland's thraldom, with pride of her stout-hearted heroes and with a plaintive lament for the dead...
...The last stanza throbs with a noble ferocity in lines of Grecian simplicity and power: "O, the Erne shall run red, With redundance of blood, The earth shall rock beneath our tread, And flames wrap hill and wood, And gun-peal and slogan-cry Wake many a glen serene, Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, My Dark Rosaleen ! Mangan's calmer Irish poems are less admired, for all their charm...
...A comparison of the two versions forces the latter into second place...
...Could I not hear their footfalls in the echoes of our own...
...Soon he became a victim of drugs...
...It has a hidden charm which stays the morning star in its steep course...
...Fading light streamed in through the tall tinted windows, gave an unreality to everything it touched...
...The success of the diocesan organizations of Catholic charities will depend very largely on the type of leadership and service they provide...
...The opening and close of this bardic fragment substantiates the testimony of scholars that this is an allegory of proscribed patriots...
...thou knowest what thanks The weary-souled and the meek owe To death...
...kindling into splendor, His soul revealed itself, and he spake so That we looked round, perplexed upon each other, Not knowing whether it was craziness, Or whether it were a god that spake in him...
...The Karamanian Exile, which reiterates "Karaman, O Karaman" illustrates more clearly this device...
...Miss Guiney points out that Mangan has the advantage of priority...
...It was enough for Mangan's fame that he is the poet of The Dark Rosaleen...
...then, setting the full bucket atop her shapely head, started off homeward down one of the cool forest aisles...
...It was a picture surely, or a dream: here were houses and churches, but neither man nor beast was about...
...We stirred up the dust of a deserted village, through streets that were a relief to our sun-tired eyes, stopping at last beside the cathedral and within the benediction of its shade...
...The diocese alone was duly qualified to speak for Catholic philanthropic work as a whole...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 26
