Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.
James Clarence Mangan. 18031849665. The Nameless One
ROLL forth, my song, like the rushing river, | |
That sweeps along to the mighty sea; | |
God will inspire me while I deliver | |
My soul of thee! | |
Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening | 5 |
Amid the last homes of youth and eld, | |
That once there was one whose veins ran lightning | |
No eye beheld. | |
Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour, | |
How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom, | 10 |
No star of all heaven sends to light our | |
Path to the tomb. | |
Roll on, my song, and to after ages | |
Tell how, disdaining all earth can give, | |
He would have taught men, from wisdom’s pages, | 15 |
The way to live. | |
And tell how trampled, derided, hated, | |
And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong, | |
He fled for shelter to God, who mated | |
His soul with song. | 20 |
—With song which alway, sublime or vapid, | |
Flow’d like a rill in the morning beam, | |
Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid— | |
A mountain stream. | |
Tell how this Nameless, condemn’d for years long | 25 |
To herd with demons from hell beneath, | |
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long | |
For even death. | |
Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, | |
Betray’d in friendship, befool’d in love, | 30 |
With spirit shipwreck’d, and young hopes blasted, | |
He still, still strove; | |
Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others | |
(And some whose hands should have wrought for him, | |
If children live not for sires and mothers), | 35 |
His mind grew dim; | |
And he fell far through that pit abysmal, | |
The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns, | |
And pawn’d his soul for the devil’s dismal | |
Stock of returns. | 40 |
But yet redeem’d it in days of darkness, | |
And shapes and signs of the final wrath, | |
When death, in hideous and ghastly starkness, | |
Stood on his path. | |
And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow, | 45 |
And want, and sickness, and houseless nights, | |
He bides in calmness the silent morrow, | |
That no ray lights. | |
And lives he still, then? Yes! Old and hoary | |
At thirty-nine, from despair and woe, | 50 |
He lives, enduring what future story | |
Will never know. | |
Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble, | |
Deep in your bosoms: there let him dwell! | |
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble, | 55 |
Here and in hell. |