Monday 10 June 2013

O’Hussey’s Ode To The Maguire by James Clarence Mangan


For fakery there was none to excel Mangan and much of his ‘after’ poetry was no more than the febrile fumes of the alembic of his mind and the swirling aftershocks of his doping. Shane MacGowan regards him as his pattern saint. He stumbles into poetry.

Notice the Gaelic alliteration and opposing epithets, 'pale bright’ and the interjections, I think, meseems, I scarce know. James Joyce arch mocker and giber apes him in The Citizen episode of Ulysses.

Find more of his work at Mangan



|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

O’Hussey’s Ode To The Maguire

James Clarence Mangan


Where is my chief, my master, this bleak night, mavrone?
O cold, cold, miserably cold is this bleak night for Hugh!
Its showery, arrowy, speary sleet pierceth one thro’ and thro’,
Pierceth one to the very bone.

Rolls real thunder? Or was that red vivid light
Only a meteor? I scarce know; but through the midnight dim
The pitiless ice-wind streams. Except the hate that persecutes him,
Nothing hath crueler venomy might.

An awful, a tremendous night is this, meseems!
The flood-gates of the rivers of heaven, I think, have been burst wide;
Down from the overcharged clouds, like to headlong ocean’s tide,
Descends grey rain in roaring streams.

Tho’ he were even a wolf ranging the round green woods,
Tho’ he were even a pleasant salmon in the unchainable sea,
Tho’ he were a wild mountain eagle, he could scarce bear, he,
This sharp sore sleet, these howling floods.

O mournful is my soul this night for Hugh Maguire!
Darkly as in a dream he strays. Before him and behind
Triumphs the tyrannous anger of the wounding wind,
The wounding wind that burns as fire.

It is my bitter grief, it cuts me to the heart
That in the country of Clan Darry this should be his fate!
O woe is me, where is he? Wandering, houseless, desolate,
Alone, without or guide or chart!

Medreams I see just now his face, the strawberry-bright,
Uplifted to the blackened heavens, while the tempestuous winds
Blow fiercely over and round him, and the smiting sleetshower blinds
The hero of Galang to-night!

Large, large affliction unto me and mine it is
That one of his majestic bearing, his fair stately form,
Should thus be tortured and o’erborne; that this unsparing storm
Should wreak its wrath on head like his!

That his great hand, so oft the avenger of the oppressed,
Should this chill churlish night, perchance, be paralysed by frost;
While through some icicle-hung thicket, as one lorn and lost,
He walks and wanders without rest.

The tempest-driven torrent deluges the mead,
It overflows the low banks of the rivulets and ponds;
The lawns and pasture-grounds lie locked in icy bonds,
So that the cattle cannot feed.

The pale-bright margins of the streams are seen by none;
Rushes and sweeps along the untamable flood on every side;
It penetrates and fills the cottagers’ dwellings far and wide;
Water and land are blent in one.

Through some dark woods, ’mid bones of monsters, Hugh now strays,
As he confronts the storm with anguished heart, but manly brow,
O what a sword-wound to that tender heart of his, were now
A backward glance at peaceful days!

But other thoughts are his, thoughts that can still inspire
With joy and onward-bounding hope the bosom of MacNee;
Thoughts of his warriors charging like bright billows of the sea,
Borne on the wind’s wings, flashing fire!

And tho’ frost glaze to-night the clear dew of his eyes,
And white ice-gauntlets glove his noble fine fair fingers o’er,
A warm dress is to him that lightning-garb he ever wore,
The lightning of his soul, not skies.

Avran.

Hugh marched forth to fight: I grieved to see him so depart.
And lo ! to-night he wanders frozen, rain-drenched, sad betrayed;
But the memory of the lime-white mansions his right hand hath laid
In ashes, warms the hero’s heart!



3 comments:

skholiast said...

I first encountered Mangan in Susan Howe's The Nonconformist's Memorial. She makes him out as a kind of real-life proto-Bartleby of sorts. Should have realized there'd be an online archive of some poetry. Thanks for this.

ombhurbhuva said...

Weather dull and rainy after fortnight of sun, sun,sun.

The Ode is in a school collection called Senior Poetry and in the Questions and Exercises section:
The Ode to the Maguire burns with a noble ferocity in lines of the highest Homeric simplicity and grandeur. Illustrate this statement by quotations from the poem. Point out how closely Mangan’s version keeps to the original Gaelic.

History may have eaten my homework but I must find the original and see just how closely they correspond. I can see each stanza going with a comic book panel.

Howe would have learned of Mangan from her mother Mary Manning the Abbey and Gate actress (b.1905- d.1998) who moved to America when she was 29. Internet Archive has a clean epub etc. version of Mangan’s Selected Poems edited by Louise Guiney (1897) with a good introduction which makes the claim that he was no drunkard but rather a desperate fraught doper.
http://archive.org/details/jamesclarenceman1897mang

skholiast said...

Having followed yr lead, or one of them, I discovered this recording of Mary Manning reading Joyce in what I take to be her stage adaptation of the Wake.