With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove.
There may be lyrical impulse here, but it is of quite an ordinary quality. The much vaunted line about “veins that ran lightning,” could, I think, be paralleled out of previous poets, and the first half of it is clumsy and cacophonous. “Night-hour” and “light our” might have stepped straight out of the comic poets, and the same may be said of “years long” and “tears, long,” which J. K. Stephen would have chortled over for a “metrical effect.” And when we come to “still, still strove” we are among the librettists with a vengeance. I have seen James Clarence Mangan collocated with Poe. If comparisons with America must be made, we should range him alongside that bright spirit, Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
For Sir Samuel Fergusson, he has been highly praised by Mr. Swinburne, Aubrey de Vere, and, of course, by Mr. W. B. Yeats. Mr. Yeats pronounces him to be “the greatest poet Ireland has produced, one who, among the somewhat sybaritic singers of his day was like some aged sea-king sitting among the inland wheat and poppies—the savor of the sea about him and its strength.” Harken to the ancient sea-king:
“Then dire was their disorder, as the wavering line at first
Swayed to and fro irresolute; then all disrupted, burst
Like waters from a broken dam effused upon the plain,
The shelter of Kilultagh’s woods and winding glens to gain.
…
But keen-eyed Domnal, when he stood to view the rout, ere long