“This Love the tyrant winces,
Alas! an omnipotent might,
He darkens the mind like night,
He treads on the necks of Princes!
O mother, my bosom is glowing,
I’ll go whatever betide,
I’ll go where the mariners going,
And be the mariner’s bride!
“Yes, mother! the spoiler has reft me
Of reason and self-control;
Gone, gone is my wretched soul,
And only my body is left me!
The winds, O mother, are blowing,
The ocean is bright and wide;
I’ll go where the mariner’s going,
And be the mariner’s bride.”
This appears among the Apocrypha, and is credited by Mangan to the “Spanish;” but it is safe to assume when he is so vague that the poem is original. It is one of the most bright and cheerful he has given us. The only touch of sorrow we feel is for the poor mother who is about to lose so impulsive and vivacious a daughter. The time of this delightful ballad is not clearly defined, but we may be absolutely certain that we of this moribund nineteenth century will never meet except at a function of a recondite spiritual medium even the great grandchild of the Mariner’s Bride. How much more is our devout gratitude due to a good and pious spiritualist than to any riotous and licentious poet! The former can give us intercourse with the illustrious defunct of history; the latter can give us no more than the image of a figment, the phantom of a shade, the echo of sounds that never vibrated in the ear of man. All persons who believe the evidence adduced by poets are the victims of subornation.
A saw-mill does not seem a good subject for a “copy of verses.” Mangan died single and in poverty, and was buried by his friends. Listen:—
THE SAW-MILL.
“My path lay towards the Mourne again,
But I stopped to rest by the hill-side
That glanced adown o’er the sunken glen
Which the Saw-and Water-mills hide,
Which now, as then,
The Saw-and Water-mills hide.
“And there, as I lay reclined on the hill,
Like a man made by sudden qualm ill,
I heard the water in the Water-mill,
And I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!
As I thus lay still
I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!
“The saw, the breeze, and the humming bees,
Lulled me into a dreamy reverie,
Till the objects round me—hills, mills, trees,
Seemed grown alive all and every—
By slow degrees
Took life as it were, all and every!
“Anon the sound of the waters grew
To a Mourne-ful ditty,
And the song of the tree that the saw sawed through
Disturbed my spirit with pity,
Began to subdue
My spirit with tenderest pity!
“‘Oh, wanderer, the hour that brings thee back
Is of all meet hours the meetest.
Thou now, in sooth art on the Track,
And nigher to Home than thou weetest;
Thou hast thought Time slack,
But his flight has been of the fleetest!