Patrick Kavanagh *

Patrick Kavanagh (1904—1967) is one of Ireland’s best-loved poets. He was born in County Monaghan, and published his first collection Ploughman and Other Poems (MacMillan) in 1936. In 1938 he briefly moved to London in search of literary work, finally settling in Dublin in 1939.

The folk group The Dubliners put Kavanagh’s poem “On Raglan Road” to music (released in 1971). It has since been recorded many times, perhaps most-significantly on the Van Morrison and the Chieftains album Irish Heartbeat (Mercury Records, 1988). The Irish Times surveyed ‘the nation’s favourite poems’ in 2000, and ten of Kavanagh’s poems were in the first fifty.

Last month my wife and I visited Dublin for the first time, and I had the chance to seek out his sculpture on a bench along the Grand Canal. It is there to honour him for his poems “Canal Bank Walk” (which can be read here), and “Lines Written On a Seat On the Grand Canal. Dublin”.

On the back of my Penguin paperback of his Selected Poems, there’s a quote from Seamus Heaney regarding Kavanagh’s verse: “These poems… make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading… ‘You must change your life’”.

Ploughman

I turn the lea-green down
Gaily now,
And paint the meadow brown
With my plough.
I dream with silvery gull
And brazen crow.
A thing that is beautiful
I may know.
Tranquillity walks with me
And no care.
O, the quiet ecstasy
Like a prayer.
I find a star lovely art
In a dark sod.
Joy that is timeless! O heart
That knows God!

Sanctity

To be a poet and not know the trade
To be a lover and repel all women
Twin ironies by which great saints are made
The agonising pincer-jaws of Heaven

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Patrick Kavanagh: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Patrick Kavanagh*

Patrick Kavanagh (1904—1967) is an Irish poet from the farm country of County Monaghan. He was self-educated, and when he moved to Dublin, did not fit in with its literary culture. His early poetry was not exceptional, and his first critical success was his biographical novel The Green Fool in 1938. It exploited the romantic image of the peasant poet, which his contemporaries idealized, but did not respect. He soon desired to distance himself from this stereotype.

He countered this with the long, narrative poem The Great Hunger (1942) which many critics feel is his finest creation. It presents an anti-sentimental view of rural Ireland, and the despair of being tied to an unproductive farm.

For many years Kavanagh supported himself through journalism, developing a sarcastic bite, which he aimed at the Irish cultural elite. He lost a lot of energy, and nearly died of cancer, through these combative years.

In 1959, a former opponent helped him to be posted to the faculty of English at University College, Dublin. Here he became a popular lecturer, and chose a path of forgiveness and contentment. The sonnets in his collection Come Dance With Kitty Stobling (1960) were praised by Richard Murphy in the New York Times Book Review, as "a lyrical celebration of love fulfilled in man by God."

The following poem is all the more powerful when you know the struggle Patrick Kavanagh faced in becoming a significant poet.

Having Confessed

Having confessed he feels
That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of the emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow’s judgement—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Patrick Kavanagh: first post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Micheal O'Siadhail

Micheal O'Siadhail is an Irish poet who has published fifteen books of poetry, including his Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013). His first collection, The Leap Year, appeared in 1978. His 2005 collection, Love Life, is about his relationship with his wife, who recently died in June of 2013 after 43 years of marriage.

He quotes Patrick Kavanagh, who he calls the best Irish poet of the 20th century, as saying "that any poet worth his salt is a theologian." He added, "I think he means that what a poet would have in common with a theologian is dealing with questions of meaning and of context, the context of our lives. I often use the phrase 'the ministry of meaning,' and I see an artist as a minister of meaning in many ways. I'm trying to ask the big questions about why we're here, what we're doing."

The following poem is one of three written by Micheal O'Siadhail for N.T. Wright's book Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013).

Collection

Earlier three birds on a tree
But now only one.
Imagine swoops of homing rooks
As evening tumbles in
Cawing and wheeling to gather
In skeleton branches
With nodes of old nest blackening
Into the roosting night.

Treetop colony
A rookery congregates.
Dusky assemblage.

Whatever instinct makes us hoard,
A desire to amass,
Toys, dolls, marbles, bird’s-nests and eggs
We fondle and brood on
Or how we’d swoop like rooks to nab
Spiky windfalls stamping
Open their milky husks to touch,
Smooth marvels of chestnut.

The collector’s dream
To feel, to caress, to keep.
A bird in the hand.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Micheal O'Siadhail: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh (1904—1967) is one of the most popular poets among the Irish people. He left school to follow his father in his profession as a cobbler, but found he had no aptitude for it. He worked the family farm, until 1931 when he moved to Dublin to seek success as a poet and journalist. He says, “I dabbled in verse and it became my life.” Seamus Heaney said in a review of Kavanagh’s Collected Poems for The Guardian that “Kavanagh is a truly representative modern figure in that his subversiveness was turned upon himself: dissatisfaction, both spiritual and artistic, is what inspired his growth.”

In his introduction to No Earthly Estate, a collection of Kavanagh's poems of the Spirit, parish priest Tom Stack points out that more than half of all of his poetry includes references to Christian faith. He attributes to Patrick Kavanagh a “sacramental perspective” which “'sees' the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, the eternal in the historical. Properly understood this will never be mistaken for some kind of idolatry, pantheism or magic. True sacramentality affords the Christian believer something of a glimpse of God.”

Primrose

Upon a bank I sat, a child made seer
Of one small primrose flowering in my mind.
Better than wealth it is, I said, to find
One small page of Truth's manuscript made clear.
I looked at Christ transfigured without fear—
The light was very beautiful and kind,
And where the Holy Ghost in flame had signed
I read it through the lenses of a tear.
And then my sight grew dim, I could not see
The primrose that had lighted me to Heaven,
And there was but the shadow of a tree
Ghostly among the stars. The years that pass
Like tired soldiers nevermore have given
Moments to see wonders in the grass.

Canal Bank Walk

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Patrick Kavanagh: second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca