Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.
The Nameless OneJames Clarence Mangan (18031849)
R
That sweeps along to the mighty sea;
God will inspire me while I deliver
My soul of thee!
Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
That once there was one whose veins ran lightning
No eye beheld.
How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom,
No star of all heaven sends to light our
Path to the tomb.
Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,
He would have taught men, from wisdom’s pages,
The way to live.
And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,
He fled for shelter to God, who mated
His soul with song.
Flow’d like a rill in the morning beam,
Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid:
A mountain stream.
To herd with demons from hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even death.
Betray’d in friendship, befool’d in love,
With spirit shipwreck’d, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove;
(And some whose hands should have wrought for him,
If children live not for sires and mothers),
His mind grew dim;
The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,
And pawn’d his soul for the devil’s dismal
Stock of returns.
And shapes and signs of the final wrath,
When death, in hideous and ghastly starkness,
Stood on his path.
And want, and sickness, and houseless nights,
He bides in calmness the silent morrow,
That no ray lights.
At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,
He lives, enduring what future story
Will never know.
Deep in your bosoms: there let him dwell!
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,
Here and in hell.