Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

years, or within a period which does not extend back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers -the Jeffreys and Broughams-are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes up the physician's art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.

This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of" poetical poetry," to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the English language-one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become too exquisite and our poetry

too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet's mind is an impertinence in his art.

I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a "poetical poet;" but he is, at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel's opinion, and treating one of his "translations" from the Arabic as an original

poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here the lines of which I am now speaking:

THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES.

I.

"My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey,
I am bowed with the weight of years;
I would I were stretched in my bed of clay,
With my long-lost youth's compeers!

For back to the past, though the thought brings

woe,

My memory ever glides—

To the old, old time, long, long ago,

The time of the Barmecides !

To the old, old time, long, long ago,

The time of the Barmecides.

[ocr errors]

II.

"Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will, And an iron arm in war,

And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar's hill,
When the watch-lights glimmered afar,
And a barb as fiery as any I know
That Khoord or Beddaween rides,
Ere my friends lay low-long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides;
Ere my friends lay low-long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides.

III.

"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.

[ocr errors]

"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!

« AnteriorContinuar »