NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 17 June 1920, Page 26

NOTES

Coleridge on Ireland In Coleridge’s Table Talk we find the following passages which are as true to-day as when they were written : “ Union With Ireland. — any modification of the Union takes place, I trust it will be a total divorce a vinculo matrimonii. lam sure we have lived a cat and dog life of it. Let us have no more silly saving of one crown and two legislatures; that would be preserving all the mischiefs without any of the goods, if there are any, of the Union.

I am deliberately of opinion that England, in all its institutions, has received injury from its union with Ireland. .

How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh! for a great man— one really great man, — who could feel the weight and power of a principle and put it unflinchingly into act ! But truly there is no vision in the land and the people accordingly perisheth. See how triumphant in debate and action O’Connell is ! Why ? Because he asserts a broad principle and acts up to it, rests all his body on it, and has faith in it. Our Ministers—true Whigs in that, —have faith in nothing but expedients de die in diem. Indeed, what principles of government can the// have, who in the space of a month recanted a life of political opinions, and now dare to threaten this or that innovation at the huzza of a mob, or in the pique of a parliamentary defeat?” What a pity Coleridge did not know the Welsh renegade who not only sold all his friends but also put traitors and German traders into office in war-time! The Irish Touch Apropos of the popularity of Gaelic literature in recent years, and of the countless imitations of the real thing, a correspondent calls our attention to the following paragraph by the late Dr. Heneberry, a Gaelic scholar whose enthusiasm we knew and admired in past days :

“The Irish were near to the vision-; they enjoyed a power of vision but were not visionary. Hence the latter-dav sham of the so-called Celtic Note in English literature with its purposely weird and misty indecisions, so purposely flabby and boneless of motive, so purposely void of logic, so purposely antagonistic to common-sense and all ideas of manliness, so purposely mincing and muling, and shaping at all points to be diametrically opposed to all that is big, clean, strong, manly, sensible, artistic, and Celtic, hence that gear must be denied as too widely at right angles with common scientific truth and relegated as speedily as possible to the limbo of MacPherson’s Ossian.” Dr. Hen eberry is strong in his condemnation of the imitators of the true Celtic Note, and they were legion a few years ago. How different their stuff is from the writing of the Poets of the Easter Rising! Pearse, Plunkett, MacEntee, and their predecessors heralds of the movement like Ethna Carbery and Moira O’Neillstruck the clear, pure Celtic Note in which was no falsetto, no thin scrannel piping, but

the pure call- of the soul of Erin. Pass over the shams and' go back half a century and you hear it again in Davis and in Mangan. And once you know the real Note the imitation will never deceive you. Mangan Just as Davis and Mitchel were the spiritual forefathers of the Sinn Fein leaders, Mangan was the precursor of the poets of the new age in Ireland. He was heart and soul with the men of ’Forty-Eight, and in his prose and verse we still can feel the beating of the great heart of an impassioned patriot poet. His life was a lonely and a sad one. In Dublin, where the past never dies, his ghost still lives. He haunts the narrow streets and the old quays, just as Dante haunts Florence to-day and always. Lovers of Mangan cannot walk through Dublin without recalling the dreamer with the song of Dark Rosaleen in his heart and the strange light of genius in his blue eyes, just as in. Ravenna or Florence the lovers of the great Italian poet still almost expect to meet the gaunt figure of the man who saw hell. Like Dante, poor Mangan did see hell in his lifetime, and he knew how hard were the steps of the stairs of strangers, while he “hungered for better bread than can be made of wheat.” As Lionel Johnson said of him, “Life had struck him in his affections and emotions: he could never recover from the blow, could but magnify it in memory and imagination, conceive himself marked by it, go apart from the world to hide it, go astray in the world to forget it.” And yet this strange blighted, lonely man gave us our most radiant and glorious poetry, and is perhaps the very greatest of all our Irish singers, not excepting Yeats.

Dark Rosaleen ” Mangan did much work that was not worthy of his genius, but we must not forget that a starving man cannot wait for the moment of rapture. To find him at his best and highest we must turn to Dark liomleen, that wonderful poem by which he is best known. The hearts of millions of Irish boys and girls have been thrilled and fired by hearing those imperishable verses recited in schoolroom, in hall, or by the firesides of Irish homes, and nobody who ever” heard the glorious verses could fail to recognise that here was leal genius and true poetry. It is among the verv greatest of the world’s lyrics. It is “one of the fairest and fiercest in its perfection of imagery and rhythm : it is the chivalry of a nation’s faith struck on a sudden into the immortality of music.” If Mangan Lad never written another verse he would be loved by Irishmen for the sake of the rapturous, flashing lines of his Dark Itosaleen: All day long in unrest To and fro do I move, The very soul within my breast Is wasted for you, love! The heart in my bosom faints To think of you, my queen, My life of life, my saint of saints, My Dark Rosaleen ! My own Rosaleen ! To hear your sweet and sad complaints, -M-y life, my love, my saint of saints. My Dark Rosaleen ! O the Erne shall run red ‘With redundance of blood, »The earth shall rock beneath our tread, And flames wrap hill and wood, And gun-peal and slogan cry, Wake many a glen serene. Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die. My Dark Rosaleen ! My own Rosaleen ! The judgment hour must first be nigh Ere you can fade, ere you can die * My Dark Rosaleen !