Night singer: Mangan among the birds

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.