In Old Goa
Maxwell, Cliff
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...
...And between the leaves of the mango and rain trees shone a light that was incredibly rose-gold...
...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...
...Both possessed the romantic yearning for the impossible...
...This poem is a desperate cry, a wail of deep despair, of Iscariot hopelessness...
...here, too, the dark-avised pagans whom they sought...
...He hears a prophetic voice from the hewed tree in the sawmill: "For this grieve not...
...It was enough for Mangan's fame that he is the poet of The Dark Rosaleen...
...bees drifted everywhere...
...Both struggled through the veil of darkness...
...At a well in the centre of the garden a lissome, dark-eyed girl drew a bucket of water...
...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...
...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...
...It was a picture surely, or a dream: here were houses and churches, but neither man nor beast was about...
...They died in the same year under very similar circumstances...
...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...
...Only scattered crosses mark the former locations of the ancient city's many churches and convents and hospices...
...From overhead came the mournful lament of a dove...
...showed us vestments of great beauty...
...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...
...We gazed, spellbound, at its weatherbeaten exterior...
...Timelessness...
...He enjoyed the Orient of his own creation as did Moore, Byron, Hugo and Fitzgerald...
...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...
...Mangan derived from this source the use of sonorous, successive lines...
...They dreamed kindred dreams...
...That was the keynote of the great structure...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It opens his soul and reveals the anguish which was constantly gnawing at it...
...It has a hidden charm which stays the morning star in its steep course...
...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 died in the same year--I847--as Hartley Coleridge and Emily Bronte...
...For example, in The Sawmill, a traveler pauses on the bank of the River Mourne and sighs for everlasting rest...
...The Irish and American poet had much in common...
...Both studied the occult sciences with keen interest...
...thou knowest what thanks The weary-souled and the meek owe To death...
...Fading light streamed in through the tall tinted windows, gave an unreality to everything it touched...
...The air was heavy with the odor of ten thousand flowers...
...He used this curious involved diction in his writings from I839 to I84I...
...Through its doors we were admitted into a perfumed dusk...
...Out of the dusk a priest came quietly to us...
...at its statuary and cornices...
...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...
...Both men adored beauty...
...relics of antiquity...
...Two poems which have mere extrinsic value yield their opening stanzas as arch specimens, The Winniger Winehouse, and The Kiosk of Moostanzar Billah...
...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...
...then, setting the full bucket atop her shapely head, started off homeward down one of the cool forest aisles...
...The church was but a great dark shadow that brooded among lesser shadows in the satin haze o~ an eastern dusk...
...Then in the late afternoon we drove out between low hills to see Goa and the towers of its great churches massive above it...
...Here on the walls were faces of the martyrs, gentle and compassionate...
...Mangan's Nameless One is his own and differs from all his other literary attempts...
...Could I not hear their footfalls in the echoes of our own...
...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...
...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...
...Then he showed us to the garden...
...The Karamanian Exile, which reiterates "Karaman, O Karaman" illustrates more clearly this device...
...This poem has the manner, the mastery of detail and the grotesque turns of Poe...
...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...
...She smiled shyly...
...Miss Guiney points out that Mangan has the advantage of priority...
...Any differences may be accounted for by Poe's education and Attic tastes...
...Poe is the poet of eternal fame...
...The comparison cannot be stretched when a discussion of poetic attainment is involved...
...I awoke and heard four planks Fall down with a saddening echo, I heard four planks Fall down with a hollow echo...
...As we topped the rise leading out from the little hamlet, I turned back for a final look...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 26
