James Clarence Mangan

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 18, 30 April 1903, Page 2

James Clarence Mangan

t Chesterfield said in a letter to his son in 1746 • I am very sure that any man of common understand-! ing may, by proper culture, care, attention, and labor make himself whatever he pleases except a good p oet ' Chesterfield merely casts in another mould the wellknown dictum of Horace regarding the poets that are born such, and the manufactured variety of verse-spin-ners. Ihe true poetic instinct seems to break out somehow, as a spring will force its way even through the pores of a rock. It broke, for instance, through the hardest obstacles in the case of James Clarence Mangan the centenary of whose birth falls on May-day-Friday of this week In the literary world Mangan is comparatively little known. And yet he was, perhaps, the most striking genius that was ever produced by the Land of Song, and one of the most remarkable poets of the nineteenth century. His poems are marked by a rare tenderness and pathos, and a richness of imagery that has seldom been surpassed. Mangan's career gives a point to the saying of Josh Billings, that ' most awl the good poecicry was rit up a garret.' He was born in poverty in Dublin on May-day, 1803. He received a meagre training at a poor-school near his birthplace Amidst the hard and grinding drudgery of his boyhood and early youth he contrived to devour books in a random and erratic way, and to explore the literary treasures of several modern European languages— German, French Spanish, etc. Somewhere in the thirties he secured employment in the Tiinity College Library, and there he wrought mechanically and dreamed the days away and swallowed the contents of great tomes while roosting upon a ladder. He was a strange compound of filial affection, exquisite sensibility, fine impulses, and (like Edgar Allen Toe— another child of genius) of hopeless intemperance. He was the bond-slave of opium and firewater. • There were two Mangans,' says his publisher, Mitchel, ' one well-known to the Muses, the other to the police. . . Sometimes he could not be found, for weeks, and then he would reappear like a ghost or a ghoul, with a wildness in his blue, glittering eye, as of one who had seen spectres. . . Yet he was always humble, affectionate, almost prayerful,' and ' the cry of his spirit was ever : " Miserable man that I am, who will deliver me from the wrath to come ? " '

The shy, sensitive, reticent Mangan lived a life apart Jn the midst of his poor home and family and friends. There, are lines in one of his best-known translations fiom the German that seem to fit the man whose hair was white and whose face was ghastly and corpse-like at thirty-five :—: —

' Time's defacing waves Long have quenched the radiance of my brow — They who curse me nightly from their graves, Scarce could love me were they living now ; But my loneliness hath darker ills — Such dun duns as Conscience, Thought, and Co., Awful Gordons ! worse than tailors' bills Twenty golden years ago ! ' Here is the closing stanza :—: — ' Tick-tick, tick-tick — not a sound save Time's, And the wind-gust as it drives the rain — Toitured torturer of reluctant rhymes, Go to bed, and rest thine aching brain ! Slci-p ! no more the dupe of hopes or schemes ; Soon thoii fcleepest where the thistles blow — Curious nnti-climax to thy dreams Twenty golden years ago ! ' One day in June, 1549, Mangan went to bed to rest his aching brain. It was in a miserable lodging-house

in Dublin. There was cholera raging like fire in his veins. He was brought to Mercer's Hospital, and there his spirit went forth. He died old and decrepld at »ix-and-forty. The once brilliant intellect of the favored child of song went out like the smoke of a tallow candle.