Poems I Like: "The Woman of Three Cows" by James Clarence Mangan

Some lines from this poem came into my head just now, so I've decided to include it in my series.

James Clarence Mangan is fairly well-known in Ireland, but I would be surprised if anybody (other than people interested in Ireland) know him abroad. He died in 1849. He was the archetypal romantic poet, known for his cloak, poverty, doomed love affair, and addictions.

Mangan wrote some very moving and lyrical poems, but this isn't one of them. This is a sparkling piece of satire or social commentary, translated from an Irish original.

The main thing I love about this poem is simply its virtuosity. It hops, skips, leaps, and jumps. Mangan is in complete command of the format. He comes up with rhyme after rhyme for the refrain "woman of three cows", with an impression of sheer effortlessness. Its emphatic metre is a pleasure in itself.

I also like the gusto of the poem. Somehow I imagine Mangan greatly enjoyed writing it. He was truly a Byronic figure in both senses; he had Byron's romantic melancholy, but also Byron's mordant comic glee, when the mood took him.

The Woman of Three Cows is the sort of person who, until recently, had a stock description in the Irish vernacular: "Tuppence-ha'penny looking down on tuppence."

Mangan was an Irish nationalist, and it's wonderful how he's stitched allusions to Irish history through the whole length of the poem. You'd expect this in a patriotic lyric, but somehow it's even more powerful in a piece of invective like this, where the Irish historical references (many of which are lost on me) simply form the background, the world of the poem. I'm constantly sad and ashamed that Irish writers just dropped the Gaelic Revival, or the Celtic Dawn, or whatever you want to call it, a few decades after independence. It had room for infinite variation.

I've said above that this isn't a moving and lyrical poem. That's not quite true. Although it's basically a satire, there are some loftier strains in it, such as this one:

O, think of Donnell of the Ships, the Chief whom nothing daunted --
See how he fell in distant Spain, unchronicled, unchanted!

It had never occurred to me before, but this poem is quite reminiscent of Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" (the poem from which the film Kind Hearts and Coronets takes its title), although Tennyson's poem is not comical.

Mangan throws Irish dialect words in liberally enough. "Agraw" means "my dear"; "Movrone" means "alas!", and "inagh"...to be honest, I don't know what that one means.

Trigger warning: the last verse contains an endorsement of violence towards women. We must remember Mangan never attended a sensitivity training course.

The Woman of Three Cows by James Clarence Mangan

O, Woman of Three Cows, agraw, don't let your tongue thus rattle!
O, don't be saucy, don't be stiff, because you may have cattle.
I've seen -- and, here's my hand to you, I only say what's true --
A many a one with twice your stock not half so proud as you.

Good luck to you, don't scorn the poor, and don't be their despiser,
For worldly wealth soon melts away, and cheats the very miser,
And Death soon strips the proudest wreath from haughty human brows;
Then don't be stiff, and don't be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!

See where Momonia's heroes lie, proud Owen More's descendants,
'Tis they that won the glorious name, and had the grand attendants!
If they were forced to bow to Fate, as every mortal bows,
Can you be proud, can you be stiff, my Woman of Three Cows!

The brave sons of the Lord of Clare, they left the land to mourning;
Movrone! for they were banished, with no hope of their returning --
Who knows in what abodes of want those youths were driven to house?
Yet you can give yourself these airs, O, Woman of Three Cows!

O, think of Donnell of the Ships, the Chief whom nothing daunted --
See how he fell in distant Spain, unchronicled, unchanted!
He sleeps, the great O'Sullivan, where thunder cannot rouse --
Then, ask yourself, should you be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!

O'Ruark, Maguire, those souls of fire, whose names are shrined in story --
Think how their high achievements once made Erin's greatest glory--
Yet now their bones lie mouldering under weeds and cypress boughs,
And so, for all your pride, will yours, O, Woman of Three Cows!

The O'Carrolls also, famed when Fame was only for the boldest,
Rest in forgotten sepulchres with Erin's best and oldest;
Yet who so great as they of yore in battle or carouse?
Just think of that, and hide your head, good Woman of Three Cows!

Your neighbour's poor, and you, it seems, are big with vain ideas,
Because, inagh! you've got three cows, one more, I see, than she has.
That tongue of yours wags more at times than Charity allows,
But, if you're strong, be merciful, great Woman of Three Cows!

Now, there you go! You still, of course, keep up your scornful bearing,
And I'm too poor to hinder you; but, by the cloak I'm wearing,
If I had but four cows myself, even though you were my spouse,
I'd thwack you well to cure your pride, my Woman of Three Cows!

Misty

I've been reading about British comics recently. I grew up reading British comics: The Eagle, Battle, Roy of the Rover, and Transformers. (Yes, Transformers was British. There was a British comic separate from the American comic.)

Reading an article about British comics in the eighties, I was surprised to learn that there was a girls' horror comic called Misty. In fact, there were several girls' horror comics.

I find this fascinating in itself-- it's so niche!-- but it also "triggered" an important memory from my childhood, which I've mentioned before on this blog.

I don't know exactly how old I was at the time of this memory. I'm not even entirely sure where I was. I know I was in Limerick, visiting my aunt and uncle on their farm, but I don't remember if I was in the car we arrived in, or if I was in the house-- or both.

Anyway, I found a girl's comic, and I had a strong reaction to this-- though I don't remember whether it was subconscious or conscious. I didn't even realize that here were girl's comics. The realization that such a thing existed astonished and delighted me.

That was the same night that I saw more stars than I'd ever seen before or (it seems) that I've ever seen since. It wasn't my first time on the farm, so I'd been away from the light pollution of Dublin. But for some reason my uncle and aunt weren't there when we arrived this time, and we were standing outside the house for quiet a while. I had lesiure to look at the sky. Every time I looked, it seemed there were more stars.

The sense of discovery, wonder and the exotic of both these occurrences-- the girl's comic, and the starry sky-- runs together in my mind, and is best expressed by the famous lines from Keats:

Then felt I like a watcher of the skies
When some new planet swims into his ken..

The funny thing about the girl's comic was that it was so similar, in one way, to the boy's comics that I was familiar with, and yet so different in other ways. Real meaningful diversity seems to me one of the most precious things in the world. And no difference is more primordial than the man-woman difference. I think it's well expressed in Adam's words on first seeing Eve: "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." The first thing Adam expressed was belonging and similarity, not otherness-- as essential as otherness is to the man-woman relation.

(I think whole tracts could be written about the relationship between familiarity and otherness. They seem to need each other, and to blend into each other, without ever collapsing into each other. The progressive notion that "othering" is an act of aggression seems to me like an assault on life and joy.)

But aside from the man-woman aspect, my sense of joy and discovery-- "here is something that was always there, that's a whole world to be explored, but whose existence I didn't even expect"--  is something that I frequently experience in other contexts. I wish there was a word for it. "Discovery" doesn't cover it. "Startling discovery" is better, but doesn't quite do it.

I can barely remember anything of the comic itself, apart from a few significant details. I remember a story about a girl in some sort of Himalayan-type mountain range, that involved some sort of magical monastic character (good or bad, I can't remember), and also featured an avalanche.

I've tried to identify this story using the internet. Obviously, it's not much to go on, but I did learn that Himalayan adventures and magical monastic figures were quite a standard in girl's comics of this time. And this, to me, is very interesting.

I know next to nothing about Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, but it's interesting that we all carry a sort of mental set (in the sense of a film-set or a theatre-set) of this part of the world around with us, as seen through fiction and imagination. I recognized it even when I was a kid. You can call it a set, an atmosphere, an idyll, a stereotype, a cliché, a romanticization-- whatever you choose to call it, I think it greatly enriches life. And such "sets" don't only apply to regional and national cultures, but to everything-- historical periods, ways of life, stages of life, sports, hobbies, political groups, genres of fiction, etc. etc.

I rejoice the more such "sets" there are in the world, and I fret at the loss of them. I think the loss of them is just another name for disenchantment. And the fact that these sort of girl's comics no longer exist-- not to mention their male equivalents-- seems to me a loss of enchantment.

(Although I've just learned of a UK comic called Phoenix which was launched in 2012, and seems very similar to the sort of comics I knew growing up. That's heartening-- especially as it's not a revival aimed at adult, despite the title.)

Favouritism

There's been quite a flap about the fact that Sir Keir Starmer, according to an interview in The Guardian, admitted that he didn't have a favourite novel or poem. This provoked various opinion pieces indicting him as a soulless robot. (This happened a little while ago, but I've only heard about it today.)

I think it's a stretch to call someone soulless because they don't have a favourite poem or novel-- to say the least. But it has got me thinking about favourites, and the whole business of having favourites.

Personally, I've always had favourites. I like having favourites. I like thinking about favourites, and deciding on favourites, and awarding favourites.

I've realized that other people are different. In fact, lots of people make a face if you ask them for their favourite film, book, etc. "I don't really have a favourite", they reply, in the same tone that people say: "I don't have a television."

I find this irritating. Back when I was on Facebook, I asked people to their name their favourite film (or something), but added: "If you're one of those tiresome, precious people who don't have favourites, just tell me a few that you especially like." (Or something like that.)

Anyway, I'm a favourites kind of guy, for good or ill. Here are a few of my favourites.

1) Favourite overall author: G.K. Chesterton.

2) Favourite poet: W.B. Yeats.

3) Favourite poem: "Ulysses" by Lord Alfred Tennyson.

4) Favourite song: "Night Fever" by the Bee Gees.

5) Favourite film: Groundhog Day.

6) Favourite horror film: either The Wicker Man or Dead of Night (1945).

7) Favourite word: Kaleidoscope.

8) Favourite book of the Bible: Ecclesiastes.

9) Favourite Shakespeare play: The Tempest.

10) Favourite TV show: The Office (US)

11) Favourite dinner: Steak, chips, pepper sauce, onions, peas, Coke.

12) Favourite colour combination: Red and white.

13) Favourite sound: the hum of voices in the air. (Runners up: the sound of cheering and commotion coming from far way, the sound of billiard balls hitting each other, the sounds of a busy train station in the morning.)

14: Favourite female beauty: Kate Beckinsale circa her Van Helsing period.

15: Favourite environment: the cinema.

16: Favourite animal: Crow.

17: Favourite place: Chiocca's, an eatery (more precisely, a ratskeller) in Richmond, Virginia.

18: Favourite phrase: Softly falling snow.

19: Favourite historical period: the 1970s.

(I do have this in common with Sir Keir: I can't name a favourite book. Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis is one candidate. Dead as Doornails, a memoir of literary Dublin in the forties and fifties by Anthony Cronin, is another.)

The Magic of a Title

Recently I've found myself musing on the title of a book I read many years ago, certainly more than ten  years ago: University Ghost Story by Nick DiMartino.

To be pedantic, I didn't actually read it. I listened to it on MP3 Player. I was going through a phase of listening to audio-books at this time. It never really stuck, but I have a few warm memories of the practice.

Ridiculous as it sounds, I can't remember whether University Ghost Story was a good book or a bad book. I can't even remember the plot.

But I like the title very much! It's so simple, and strangely audacious. I remember wondering how nobody had ever called a novel University Ghost Story before.

I've worked in a university for my entire working career-- twenty-five years on the fifteenth of October (on the same date that, by coincidence, this blog will be fifteen years old). I love the atmosphere of universities but it's a constant struggle to appreciate it, for it not to become invisible to me.

Some titles never cease to enchant me, like (as I've mentioned many times before) The Winter's Tale. They seem to have a concentrated sort of existence. A good piece of fiction draws on broad human experience, a particular aspect or territory of existence; it's already a concentration; and the title is a concentration of that.

A Quotation I Like

The list of G.K. Chesterton quotes that I treasure would be very long. Here is one that isn't even one of my favourites, but I still really like it:

Mr. Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs, to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air. The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way to enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with characteristic contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot see why I should keep Shakespeare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand Shakespeare's birthday—and Shakespeare's poetry.

The passage occurs early on in Chesterton's book George Bernard Shaw. I don't think I've ever read the whole book.

I treasure this passage because it's a sort of photo-negative of what I would wish for, both for myself and everybody else. The more living traditions the better; the more college customs the better; I wish we had more toasts and sing-songs. In this passage, Chesterton is describing something which has no exact word to cover it. I know, because I've often looked for one.

Alas, there isn't nearly enough of such things in the world for my liking, and certainly not enough in my own life. In fact, there's hardly any in my own life. My attempts to create traditions and running jokes and customs have been almost entirely unsuccessful. Nobody is interested. Even when it comes to this blog, all my little traditions-- posting "The Burning Babe" by Robert Southwell at Christmas, changing the colours to reflect the liturgical seasons, throwing in random pictures of Dirk Benedict-- never really provoked the slightest interest or amusement.

Yes, I want cheese with this whine.

I often want to ask people about their personal traditions, school traditions, etc. But I suspect they'd just think I was trying to be whimsical. It's socially bad form to talk about anything that's actually interesting.

Happy St. Kevin's Day!

Today is the feast-day of St. Kevin of Glendalough!

One of his name-sakes is the footballer Kevin Keegan, who played in the seventies and eighties and became a manager in the nineties and millennium. And I swear a Kevin Keegan quotation came into my mind this morning, without me realizing the saints' day connection.

Keegan credits his career to the encouragement of a nun. He went to Catholic school, got married in a Catholic church (and he's been married to the same woman for fifty-one years), and I even found one reference to him giving a talk to a school on his faith.

Although he was a legendary player and manager, Keegan's greatest talent might be his commentating. He regularly came out with glorious gaffes that have come to be known as "Keeganisms". Here are my five favourites, though I won't vouch for their authenticity. (I suspect they're all kosher as they regularly appear on lists of Keeganisms.

1. "“Life wouldn’t be worth living if you could buy confidence because the rich people would have it all and everybody else would… would have to make their own arrangements." (This is my favourite.)

2. "There'll be no siestas in Madrid tonight."

3. "The 33 or 34-year-olds will be 36 or 37 by the time the next World Cup comes around, if they're not careful."

4. "England can end the millennium as it started– as the greatest football nation in the world."

5. "Despite his white boots, he has real pace."

There are lots more out there. You can find them pretty easily.

I also like (non-ironically) Keegan's hit single from 1978, "Head Over Heels In Love With You", both lyrically and musically.

(Incredibly, as I was about to publish this blog post, I discovered that Kevin Keegan announced he has stage four stomach cancer just yesterday. I thought of not publishing it out of respect, but then I thought...well, it's clearly an affectionate post, I hope, and it's highly unlikely that him or anyone in his family will see it. But if they do, I assure them of my prayers. God bless him and them! But if anyone thinks this is the wrong choice, let me know.)

The Sources of Energy

I was re-reading my diary entry for Halloween night of 2023. That night, I watched The Wicker Man from 2006 (not exactly my choice) and I was also reading a book called Christmas: A Biography by Judith Flanders. What I wrote really does express some of my most enduring and powerful feelings, whatever that may mean to anyone else.

My entry refers to "the sources of energy", a phrase from Freud that I've come to think as "talismanic", as I put it. I encountered it more than twenty years ago in A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson. Freud (a staunch atheist, of course) used it when he was urging a friend to raise his son as a Jew: "If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew, you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else." Of course, I'm not thinking of its application to Judaism per se (for all my profound respect for Judaism), but rather its application to tradition and the sacred and everything that is excluded by mere rationalism.

I was glancing through a book, Christmas: A Biography. I was moved by the description of the Puritans in America. Even though I love Christmas, I’ve always been strangely sympathetic to the Puritan antagonism to Christmas. Perhaps because it means they’re taking it seriously. It’s the same way I’ve always had a sympathy for book burners and people who riot at plays.

I felt very moved and even agitated, thinking of holidays and traditions, observances, rituals, customs, all that kind of thing. Halloween and the Wicker Man and the Christmas book and thoughts of poetry all ran through my head.

My whole life seems to be about going against the stream of utilitarianism and rationalism and sameness and disenchantment. Observing holidays and reading long poetry and cultivating eccentricity and attending Mass and praying the rosary and reading the Bible somehow all seem to be a part of this. What Freud called “the sources of energy”, a phrase that seems talismanic to me and that recurs to me over and over again.

I guess I feel a sort of faith that it’s the poetic, the symbolic, the immaterial, the imaginary, the intangible, the visionary that really fuels culture and society. And even if it isn’t, even if the dialectical materialists are right, I will always be on the side of those things. And I feel a contentment and eagerness in thinking of that.

I don’t think it’s incompatible with Christianity at all. I think all good things are compatible with Christianity. The important thing is not to lose sight of what’s MORE important. People and their welfare are more important than traditions. Eternal salvation is the most important thing. But that doesn’t mean that these things AREN’T important. They contribute to the joy and meaning of life, and I think they are also ennobling and may well be an aid to salvation.

Reading poetry, especially long poetry, is particularly important. Even if it has no immediate benefit. It’s so counter-cultural it’s immeasurable.