Patrick Given – Somebody Thinking of You

Through the long lock-down of last year, when the world had gone quiet and there was little to do of an evening but read, the reading turned — rather more of it than usual — to the three uncommonly gifted Given brothers of Cullybackey: Patrick, Samuel and Thomas. The youngest, Thomas, was already a familiar name about this desk, chiefly through his cheerful contributions to the local paper and his turn as a parish magistrate. The other two were strangers until then. A piece on each of them is the plan, in time — and the place to begin is where it seems right to begin, with the eldest, and the one who by most accounts had the most about him: Patrick Given.

Patrick Given was born on the 13th of April 1837 at Dunnygarron, a townland near Cullybackey in the Barony of Toome — close to three hundred acres, and home in those days to fewer than two hundred souls.

His earliest schooling was at the village school, before he moved on to the Ballymena Model School. It was plain from the off that the boy would go far — and his record bears it out handsomely.

Ballymena Winter Lectures of 1856 and 1857

In the winters of 1856 and 1857, Ballymena played host to a course of public lectures on chemistry and physics — advertised the length and breadth of the country, free to all comers, and much remarked upon at the time. At the close of each winter the attenders sat an examination, and there was a catch to it, a rather fine one: you were permitted to sit the test only if you had taken no notes whatever during the lectures themselves. A trial of the memory, then, dressed up as a trial of the understanding — and a cruel one for the diligent scribbler.

It troubled Patrick not at all. He came top both years, and carried off the medal both years — and not, you understand, for merely taking part.

The young man’s gifts were not going unnoticed. He was taken on as a pupil-teacher at the Model School, and before long made principal of the Bridge End National School. To fit him for the post he was sent to the Training Institution in Dublin, and on finishing the course he came home to take up the reins again. And here the man shows his hand: the headship did not suit him. Not because the work was too hard, mind, but because it left too little room for the learning he was still after. He resigned the principalship after a matter of months — a schoolmaster handing back his own school because the teaching kept getting in the way of his studies — and enrolled instead as a student at Queen’s College, Belfast.

There followed four years in which coming first became something of a habit with him: chemistry, logic, Greek, Latin, history, English literature — the prizes mounting up like letters a man means to answer and somehow never does.

Shakespeare Tercentenary competition

The prize that drew the most notice, though, had nothing to do with the laboratory. In January 1864 the Northern Whig — a Belfast weekly — got up a poetry competition to mark three hundred years since the birth of Shakespeare. The best original poem in honour of the Bard of Avon would take the laurels. It was widely trumpeted, and the entries came in by the heap.

First prize went to Patrick Given of Cullybackey.

This young man had talent to burn. He was going places. He had the world at his feet.

In the Midst of Life 

And then, after taking suddenly unwell at his lodgings on the Ormeau Road in Belfast, Patrick Given was dead. Seven months after the Shakespeare prize. August 1864.

The papers gave him four plain lines in the deaths column and no more — his name, his college, the date, and the door number of the house on the Ormeau Road where it happened. That was the whole of it.

Poetical Genius

Had he lived, there’s little doubt Patrick Given would have made a name far beyond Cullybackey, and beyond Ireland too. He would, one could have imagined, have been the Seamus Heaney of the 1800s. He was so talented.

The editor of the Ballymena Observer marked his passing as well, noting the poetical genius and the studious habits that had promised so much — and observing, with a quiet pride that does the paper much credit, that the first essay Patrick ever published and the last both appeared in its own columns. The paper’s editor wrote:

There is a second loss folded inside the first, and it surfaced only in the course of this research. Nine years after Patrick’s death — in December 1873 — his brother Thomas placed a notice in the local paper asking for the return of a volume of Patrick’s unpublished work: poems written in competition for the Burns centenary, lent to some person now forgotten and never handed back. So it was not enough that the young man was taken so soon; a book of his own words went out the door after him and never came home. Whoever held it has held it the better part of a century and a half by now. The family would surely still be glad to have it.

The book was never returned. A century and a half on, it remains lost — and with it, who knows how many of Patrick’s lines that no one will ever read now.

Reflections of an Old Student

Wind the clock on near enough forty years. In December of 1902 a Judge James J. Shaw, K.C. — County Court Judge for Kerry, and once a first-year student at Queen’s alongside Patrick — gave the opening address to the college’s Literary and Scientific Society. He called it “Reflections of an Old Student,” and a large and distinguished company turned out to hear it.

He spoke of three classmates whom nature had marked out, to his eye, above all the rest for originality — and of how all three were dead before their course was run. Patrick Given. Thomas Richardson. James McKee. To his listeners, he allowed, they were only names. To him they were the friendships of his youth. And of the three, he said, it was Patrick alone who had the gift of verse — who sang his thoughts in musical lines, who had read more widely in the poets than any of them, and whom Shaw still remembered chanting his favourite passages aloud on long walks over the Black Mountain and the Cave Hill, with all a poet’s fervour.

Forty years on, the loss still smarted in the telling. There is no higher tribute than to be missed that long.

In his address, Judge Shaw dwelt on the promise that went into the ground with Patrick Given — all the man might have been, had he only been spared the years to become it.

Ballymena Observer, 9th January 1903

Somebody Thinking of You

One of Patrick’s poems turned up in an old Ballymena paper — a rare gem, and one that, so far as anyone can tell, was never printed again. It is a young man’s love-song, set down in the early 1860s, somewhere near a hundred and sixty years ago now.

The lovely thing about it, is its plainness. The very best writers take the largest subjects and make them simple, and Patrick does it without fuss or showing-off — much as John Lennon did in Grow Old With Me, itself drawn from Browning.

Direct, honest, unguarded. Love, it turns out, keeps poorly to its own century; it reads as fresh now as the evening he wrote it.

Better to close where the man himself might have wanted closing — not on the dates of a short life, but on the fact that he sang at all. Patrick Given of Dunnygarron: gifted well past the common run, taken far too soon, and worth every bit of the remembering.

There is somebody thinking of you, my own.
Somebody thinking of you.
This is what love bade me write just now.
Don’t you believe it true?
There are white little clouds and whispering winds,
That roam through the summer bowers,
Beautiful stars in Heaven so bright,
And carolling birds and flowers.
O flower, O clouds, O beautiful star,
O birds that warble and sing;
Yes, question them all and often, my dear.
This is the answer they’ll surely bring—
There is somebody thinking of you, sweet one,
Ah, speech may be fettered, but thought is free.
And so it will fly to you.

Written early 1860s, published subsequently
Ballymena Weekly Telegraph, 18th Aug 1900