Before going further, I want to pinpoint that "At Tara" phrase, as this is where Dr. Petrie, advising James Clarence Mangan, got the Gaelic wrong.

I see the word spelled Atomriug, I guess there are other spellings. Anyway, that is where Dr. Petrie went wrong. He told Mangan it meant "At Tara." More careful English translations render it "I rise." Okay, that's that seen to.

"A Swiftly Tilting Planet," now, has this stanza built into the book in more ways than one. The dying old woman, Mrs. O'Keeffe, haltingly recalls the whole stanza in Chapter 1, and it recurs in later chapters. Besides that, I wish to copy the book's table of contents: in other words, the list below is the headings of each chapter in the book.

Contents

1. In this fateful hour
2. All Heaven with its power
3. The sun with its brightness
4. The snow with its whiteness
5. The fire with all the strength it hath
6. The lightning with its rapid wrath
7. The winds with their swiftness
8. The sea with its deepness
9. The rocks with their steepness
10. The earth with its starkness
11. All these I place
12. Between myself and the powers of darkness


And so, to Mangan. As Mrs. L'Engle never spoke of James Clarence Mangan that I know of, and it's too late to ask her now, we shall never know if the source by which she was introduced to Mangan's version even mentioned the translator. Perhaps she never knew? Mangan's poems, though they took until the 1990's to have a critical edition published, have been available in one form or another -- the popular ones have -- from shortly after Mangan's lamentably premature death to the present day. Here, for example, is the stanza in question, and it comes from an edition dated 1904; it would not surprise me, if this stanza were printed in other places with no name attached other than that of St. Patrick.

(from "St. Patrick's Hymn Before Tarah")

At Tarah to-day, in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it hath,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness,
All these I place
By God's almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

Published in Dublin by M. H. Gill & Son, 1904