The Special Place of Patrick Kavanagh in Irish Poetry

In a recent conversation, a friend and I agreed that Patrick Kavanagh had a special influence on us. The both of us rural Irish, we have that affinity with his particularly Irish view of the world.

For all Yeat’s heroic Irish peasant, Kavanagh was closer to the truth of it, and his insight is correct:

O stony grey soil of Monaghan

The laugh from my love you thieved;

You took the gay child of my passion

And gave me your clod-conceived. 

You clogged the feet of my boyhood

And I believed that my stumble

Had the poise and stride of Apollo

And his voice my thick tongued mumble.

And yet, Kavanagh knew the gold in his experience: in ‘A Christmas Childhood’, the child’s imagination is remembered, and expressed with snow-crisp freshness:

“My child poet picked out the letters

 On the grey stone,

 In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,

 The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

 Cassiopeia was over

 Cassidy's hanging hill,

 I looked and three whin bushes rode across

 The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.” 

Kavanagh saw poetry where most saw the dank misery of rural living. 

“They laughed at one I loved -

The triangular hill that hung

Under the Big Forth. They said

That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges

Of the little farm and did not know the world.

But I knew that love's doorway to life

Is the same doorway everywhere.”……………..from ‘Innocence’ 

And then there is Kavanagh the universal poet; where TS Elliot starts ‘The Wasteland’  

“April is the cruellest month, breeding  

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  

Memory and desire, stirring  

Dull roots with spring rain.” 

Kavanagh starts ‘The Great Hunger’: 

“Clay is the word and clay is the flesh

Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move

Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.

If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove

Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book

Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs

And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.

Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?

Or why do we stand here shivering?

Which of these men

Loved the light and the queen

Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised marriage to himself

Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe'en?

We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,

Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay

Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles

Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.”

 

But it is the beautifully observed detail of lives and landscape that makes Patrick Kavanagh special to writers such as myself and my friend. If he was a painter, I would call it his painterly consideration of the minute.

“One side of the potato‑pits was white with frost—

How wonderful that was, how wonderful!” 

“The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,

 A green stone lying sideways in a ditch

 Or any common sight the transfigured face

 Of a beauty that the world did not touch.” …from ‘A Christmas Childhood’

 

A poet from 'our place'; Kavanagh released the Anglo-Irish strangle-hold from around the necks of Irish poets.