Eliza Craven Green - The Bee Gees Bronze Statue - Loch Promenade - Douglas, Isle of Man
Posted by: Mike_bjm
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The poem 'Ellan Vannin' by Eliza Craven Green is inscribed behind the Bee Gees Bronze Statue on Loch Promenade in Douglas.
Waymark Code: WM14RXN
Location: Isle of Man
Date Posted: 08/18/2021
Views: 2
The poem 'Ellan Vannin' by Eliza Craven Green is inscribed in both English and Manx Gaelic, behind the Bee Gees Bronze Statue on Loch Promenade in Douglas.
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The English translation of the poem, in full, is shown below:
'ELLAN VANNIN
When the summer day is over
And its busy cares have flown
I sit beneath the starlight
With a weary heart alone
Then rises like a vision
Sparling bright in nature's glee,
May own dear Elland Vannin
With its green hills by the sea.
Then I hear the wavlets murmur
As they kiss the fairy shore,
Then beneath the em'rald waters
Sings the mermaid as of your
And the fair Isle shines with beauty
As in Youth it dawn’d on me
My own dear Ellan Vannin
With its green hills by the sea.
Then mem'ries sweet and tender
Come like music's plaintive flow
Of the hearts in Ellan Vannin
That lov'd me long ago
And I give, with tears and blessings
My fondest thoughts to thee
My own dear Ellan Vannin
With its green hills by the sea.'Eliza Craven Green - 1854
The English translation was completed in 1900 by John Nelson.
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ELIZA CRAVEN GREENBest remembered today for having written the lyrics for ‘Ellan Vannin’, Eliza Craven Green was a highly renowned actress on the Douglas stage during the 1820s – a period that she recalled in her poetry for the rest of her life.
Born in Kirkgate, Leeds, on the 10th of December 1803, Eliza Craven came to the island as an actress for the New Theatre on Athol Street in 1824. Although she became very popular, it did not halt the theatre’s financial troubles which brought its closure in July 1825.
Her short time on the island had a deep effect on her as she fell in love with the island and its folklore. It was this that stood as the inspiration to her first published work, A Legend of Mona, a story based on Manx folklore which was published in 1825. This connection to the Isle of Man stayed with her even after she came to leave her adopted home at Ballaughton in Braddan to return to the North of England in July 1825. She continued to write of the island and its folklore in poems and stories which were published in the press both in England and in the Isle of Man, initially as Eliza S. Craven, and then as Eliza Craven Green after her marriage in 1830. It was under this name that she published her collected poems, Sea Weeds and Heath Flowers, or Memories of Mona, in 1858.
By the time she came to die in Leeds on the 11th of March 1866, her poem ‘Ellan Vannin’ was already effectively established as the Manx “national anthem,” as it was known before 1907 when the current National Anthem was introduced.'
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