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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
SONNETS TO JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN, by DAVID WHEATLEY Poem Explanation First Line: Fishamble street, the civic offices %turning the sky a bureaucratic grey Last Line: And scorch the centuries to come with song | |||
1 Fishamble Street, the Civic Offices turning the sky a bureaucratic grey above a vacant's lot rent-free decay: craters, glass, grafitti, vomit, faeces. One last buttressed Georgian house holds out precariously against the wrecker's ball or simply lacks the energy to fall and rise again as one more concrete blot. Ghost harmonics of the first Messiah echo round the Handel Hotel and mix with bells long redeveloped out of use at Saints Michael and John's, a ghostly choir rising and falling until the daydream breaks… Silence. Of you, Mangan, not a trace. 14 Let the city sleep on undisturbed, new hotels and apartments blocks replace the Dublin that we brick by brick erase; let your city die without a word of pity, indignation, grief or blame, the vampire crime lords fatten on its flesh and planners zone the corpse for laundered cash, but let your heedless cry remain the same: "The only city that I called my own sank with me into everlasting shade. I was born the year that Emmet swung and died my fever death in '49: my words are a matchstick falling through the void and scorch the centuries to come with song." | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...MEN WHO MARCH AWAY' (SONG OF THE SOLDIERS) by THOMAS HARDY CORONATION by HELEN MARIA HUNT FISKE JACKSON A LITTLE CHILD'S HYMN; FOR NIGHT AND MORNING by FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE TO SCIENCE; SONNET by EDGAR ALLAN POE VERLAINE by EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON THE HOUSE OF LIFE: 78. BODY'S BEAUTY by DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI EMBLEMS OF LOVE: 25. ENVY ACCOMPANIES LOVE by PHILIP AYRES TO MY FRIEND MR. THOMAS FLATMAN, ON THE PUBLISHING OF THESE HIS POEMS by FRANCIS BARNARD (D. 1698) |
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