“One golden goblet illumed my board,
One silver dish was there;
At hand my tried Karamanian sword
Lay always bright and bare;
For those were the days when the angry blow
Supplanted the word that chides—
When hearts could glow—long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides;
When hearts could glow—long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides.
IV.
“Through city and desert my mates and I
Were free to rove and roam,
Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky,
Or the roof of the palace dome.
Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro,
Which only sloth derides:
Men spent Life so—long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides;
Men spent Life so—long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides.
V.
“I see rich Bagdad once again,
With its turrets of Moorish mould,
And the Kalif’s twice five hundred men
Whose binishes flamed with gold.
I call up many a gorgeous show
Which the Pall of Oblivion hides—
All passed like snow, long, long ago,
With the time of the Barmecides;
All passed like snow, long, long ago,
With the time of the Barmecides.
VI.
“But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey,
And I bend with the weight of years—
May I soon go down to the House of Clay,
Where slumber my Youth’s compeers!
For with them and the Past, though the thought wakes woe,
My memory ever abides,
And I mourn for the Times gone long ago,
For the Times of the Barmecides!
I mourn for the Times gone long ago,
For the Times of the Barmecides!”
This is the poem claimed by Mangan to be from the Arabic. I have no means of knowing whether it is or not. There is one translation from the Persian, one from the Ottoman, and according to Mitchel, one from the Coptic. But seeing that he turned into verse a great number of Irish poems from prose translations done by another, and that he did not know a word of that language, I think it may be safely assumed that The Last of the Barmecides is original. This poem is so old a favourite of mine that I cannot pretend to be an impartial judge of it. When I hear it (I can never see a poem I know well and love much) I listen as to the unchanged voice of an old friend; I wander in a maze of memories; “I see rich Bagdad once again;” I am once more owner of the magic carpet, and am floating irresponsibly and at will on the intoxicating atmosphere of the poets over the enchanted groves, and streams, and hills, and seas of fairyland, or harkening to voices that years ago ceased to stir in my ears, gazing at the faces that have long since moulded the face cloth into blunted memories of the face for the grave.
On the 20th of June, 1849, Mangan died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin. Having been born in 1803, he was, in 1849, eight years older than Poe, who died destitute and forlorn at Baltimore in the same year. Both poets had been in abject poverty, both had been unfortunate in love, both had been consummate artists, both had been piteously unlucky in a thousand ways, and both had died the same year, and in common hospitals. Two more miserable stories it is impossible to find anywhere. I would recommend those of sensitive natures to confine their reading to the work these men did, and not to the misfortunes they laboured under, and the follies they committed. I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for himself. Poe, in his Raven, is, all the time of his most pathetic and terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye. When Mangan opens his bosom and shows you the ravens that prey upon him, he cannot repress something like a laugh at the thought that any one could be interested in him and his woes. See: