Abstract
Birds have long lived in literature as versatile symbols of human experience. Whether one thinks first of Aristophanes’ fourth-century BCE comedy The Birds or the eighteenth-century Irish poet Cathal Buidhe MacElgun’s ‘The Yellow Bittern’, the caged warbler in Chaucer’s ‘The Manciple’s Tale’, whose ‘libertee this brid desireth’, or the lark in Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet, ‘at break of day arising / From sullen earth’, birds have resiliently stood for the soul, love, the brevity (and longevity) of life, the composer composing as well as (in the beauty of its song) the thing composed, or, to put it another way, the artist and the art. It is the last of these tropes on which I wish to focus in analysing a small group of bird poems published by James Clarence Mangan between 1833 and 1838, in which three birds significantly figure: the nightingale, the raven and the parrot. The selection and trajectory of species is itself worth noting, tracking as it does a progression from pure melody, a sound beyond speech, to a harsh, guttural bird call, which nonetheless possesses the capacity for vocalization, to mimic and reproduce human language. Taken together, these bird poems map Mangan’s developing voice in this formative period of his literary career, and, when placed within contexts of literary tradition and contemporary natural historical debates, provide an aperture into the critical differences of history and place that tempered Romanticism in Ireland.
If you tie a red ribbon to the leg of a sea-gull, the other gulls will pick it to death. To the soul of Clarence Mangan was tied the burning ribbon of genius.
W. B. Yeats1
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Notes
W. B. Yeats, ‘Clarence Mangan’s Love Affair’, in Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, ed. John P. Frayne, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1970), I, p. 195.
Thomas Alan Shippey, ‘Listening to the Nightingale’, Comparative Literature, 22, 1 (1970), p. 49.
Frank Doggett, ‘Romanticism’s Singing Bird’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 14, 4 (Autumn 1974), p. 550.
James McKusick, ‘The Return of the Nightingale’, The Wordsworth Circle, 38 (2007), p. 37.
For the ideological significance of birds in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, see Lorenz Eitner, ‘Cages, Prisons, and Captives in Eighteenth-Century Art’, in Images of Romanticism, eds. Karl Kroeber and William Walling (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 13–38; and
Fred V. Randel, ‘Coleridge and the Contentiousness of Romantic Nightingales’, Studies in Romanticism 21, 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 33–55.
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook has demonstrated the presence of such natural-historical inquiry in her illuminating analysis of Smith’s poem ‘The Swallow’. See Cook, ‘Charlotte Smith and “The Swallow”: Migration and Romantic Authorship’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 72, 1 (March 2009), pp. 48–67.
Robert Mayo, ‘The Contemporaneity of the “Lyrical Ballads”’, PMLA, 69, 3 (1954), p. 494, n. 12.
John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, 1820), pp. 107–12; William Cowper, ‘To the Nightingale’, in The Poetry of Birds, eds. Simon Armitage and Tim Dee (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 187; Mary Robinson, ‘Ode to the Nightingale’; ‘Second Ode to the Nightingale’, in Poems by Mrs M. Robinson, 2 vols (London, 1791), I, pp. 29–37; John Thelwall, ‘Sonnet to the Nightingale. 1788’, Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801), p. 101; Wordsworth, ‘O Nightingale! Thou Surely Art’, in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth 1806–1815; S. T. Coleridge, ‘To the Nightingale’ (1796) and the better-known ‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem’ in Lyrical Ballads (1798); Robert Southey, ‘Sonnet. To a Nightingale’, in Poetical Works (1829), II, pp. 10–12; “Lord Byron, ‘It is the Hour’, in Select Works of the Right Honourable Lord Byron, 2 vols (London, 1823), II, p. 23; John Clare, ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’, in The Rural Muse (1835); Felicia Hemans, ‘The Nightingale’s Death-Song’ and ‘The Nightingale’, in Poetical Works (1836), pp. 236 and 268. There is a wealth of critical work on the nightingale throughout literary history, but lor studies in the nineteenth century,
see Elizabeth A. Fay, ‘Romantic Men, Victorian Women: The Nightingale Talks Back’, Studies in Romanticism, 32, 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 211–224. For the changing symbolism of the bird from the Romantic to the Victorian period, see
Wendell V. Harris, ‘Where late the sweet birds sang: looking back at the Victorians looking back at the Romantics looking back …’, Victorian Poetry, 16, 1/2 (Spring/Summer 1978), pp. 167–75.
Martha Adams Bohrer argues that The Natural History of Selborne was a formative context lor Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800); she suggests that Edgeworth used the methodology of natural history to legitimate local knowledge. See Bohrer, ‘The Natural History of Selborne and Castle Rackrent’, Modern Philology, 100, 3 (February 2003), pp. 393–416.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems, ed. Richard Holmes (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 309.
Dr Currie, The Life of Robert Burns, by Dr. Currie: With His Correspondence and Fragments (London: Dove, 1826), p. 393.
Wallace Stevens, ‘Autumn Refrain’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), p. 160.
Ciaran Carson, The Irish Tor No (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1987), p. 49.
Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Parrot Culture (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 2.
One of the oldest zoological gardens in Europe, Dublin Zoo opened in 1831 and proved one of the most popular attractions of the city during the nineteenth century. See Juliana Adelman, ‘Animal Knowledge: Zoology and Classification in Nineteenth-Century Dublin’, Field Day Review, 5 (2009), pp. 108–21.
Manushag N. Powell, ‘Parroting and the Periodical: Women’s Speech, Haywood’s Parrot, and its Antecedents’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 27.1 (Spring 2008), p. 64.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), p. 204.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 123, 132.
See Laura Brown, Tables of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Seamus Heaney, ‘Singing High: James Clarence Mangan’, The Poetry Ireland Review, 77 (2003), p. 12.
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© 2014 Sinéad Sturgeon
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Sturgeon, S. (2014). Night Singer: Mangan Among the Birds. In: Sturgeon, S. (eds) Essays on James Clarence Mangan. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273383_6
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