LEAVING CERT ENGLISH - HONOURS - KAVANAGH
PATRICK KAVANAGH. A. Towey.
In his poetry Kavanagh celebrated the ordinary, commonplace detail of life. He invests the ordinary, the local with a beauty and exoticism usually associated with far-flung places and grand themes. The ordinary becomes beautiful---a fit subject for poetry,--- transfigured by the poet’s eye. He searches among the grey things of life for that first fresh wonder of childhood, for that innocence that was really wisdom, an Eden before the Fall. Kavanagh is alive to the wonder and beauty of ordinary things. He celebrates the transfiguring power of love. His poetry is rooted in place. Place names are important to him. Naming, he said, is an act of love----Shanconduff, Rocksavage, Cassidy’s Hill….
In Shanconduff we see his sense of possession, of ownership: “My black hills”. The hills are personified as “incurious”, content with their unexotic location. Yet for him, climbing these bleak, windswept hills to carry fodder to his cattle, is a journey as exotic as climbing the Alps. Provincial they may be, but his love and possessiveness render them beautiful in his eyes. He personifies them, loving them as one would a wife or child, offended to hear them criticised. The cattle-drovers know nothing of his love for these hills, seeing them as uneconomic and barren. Kavanagh’s beautiful images perfectly catch the wintry, Northern landscape. The hills “hoard the bright shilling of March / While the sun searches in every pocket”. The “sleety winds fondle the rushy beards” of the hills. The repetition of names underlines Kavanagh’s celebration of the local. Repeating the names gives a reality, stature and presence to his native place. It has an importance, a grandeur, which outsiders cannot grasp.
In Advent Kavanagh celebrates renunciation and the self-denial of Advent as a route back to the innocence, astonishment and wonder of childhood, Eden before the Fall. Here he will see the world anew, with a new poetic vision that needs neither books nor formal knowledge. Paradoxically it is through limitation, restriction, self-denial, a narrowing of focus, and a rejection of luxury that a new beauty is born. The senses have grown weary with material opulence “we have tasted and tested too much…” “Through a chink too wide …comes in no wonder” Self-denial (like the fasting of Advent) may shock the senses back to that first, original taste of beauty and wonder.
In this simple ordinariness, rejecting all sensual luxury, he will encounter the God of wonder, the freeing of his poetic gift. Where is this purity to be found? He will find it “Wherever life pours ordinary plenty”. He will reject “reason’s payment” that is, the certainties of the striving, rational world, and all its luxuries. (For Kavanagh the rational can act as a barrier preventing access to the innocent, the poetic, the pre-rational). He is in search of that lost Eden, that “spirit-shocking wonder”, the “heart-breaking strangeness” that first, fresh vision. Kavanagh wants to de-familiarise, make the ordinary strange, so that we look on it with fresh eyes. He will achieve this by celebrating ordinary things “bog holes”, “cart tracks”. He rejects analytical knowledge in favour of the innocence of the Christ child “the stable where time begins”. This innocent Nativity scene echoes also his own rural childhood, where his own “time” began The images are from rural life: “dreeping hedges” “cart tracks”
On Raglan Road is a ballad, a poem written for a specific melody “The Dawning of the Day” . This poem too deals with the idea of a vanished Eden, a time of lost enchantment. He describes his doomed love affair with the dark lady, the femme fatale who caught him in her “snare” . The poem passes through time and season, ---beginning on that fateful “Autumn day”---mirroring the changing nature of love itself, Their love transcends the merely physical, they were fellow artists, appreciating the life of the mind. There was an immediate connection between them, that those who know the true meaning of love and art share-- “the secret sign”. He helps her appreciate the different art forms----poetry, music, sculpture, painting “The true Gods of sound and stone….and word and tint…” He gave her his greatest gift, his poetry. He sees now that he fell in love with an impossible ideal and invested his love in a mere mortal woman. “…the angel woos the clay..” There are ominous fore-shadowings in the poem, some clouds on the horizon. “…her own dark hair / Like clouds over fields of May” The poem is really more successful as a song. The layering of assonance reflects this----the songwriting of Bob Dylan comes to mind. “I said let grief be a fallen leaf” . The repetition, assonance and refrain remind us of the poem’s origin as a song “With her own name there, and her own dark hair..”. The poem is a passionate declaration---the poet is haunted by the memory of his lover, her ghost is everywhere in the Dublin of his youth---Grafton Street, Raglan Road, the “quiet street where old ghosts meet”. The final mood is one of regret and loss.
The Hospital revisits the theme of Advent: restriction and limitation can awaken wonder. The poet’s hospitalization and near brush with death brought about a kind of re-birth, a re-awakening to the wonder and beauty of the world. All things are remade, embraced by love’s all-seeing eye “Nothing whatever is by love debarred”. Even the functional ward of the hospital is transfigured by love. “This is what love does to things” . The message of the poem is beautifully expressed : we must learn to live in the moment, to be really alive to the wonder and beauty of ordinary things. This time is all we have..
The poem is a sonnet a form Kavanagh often uses. The first eight lines are descriptive, and the sestet explores the theme.
Canal Bank Walk is another poem rooted in a beloved place which amplifies the theme expressed in “Advent” and “The Hospital”. The canal bank is his route back to the innocence and wonder which time and habit have erased. The poet is on fire with some new vision. Everything seems beautiful, different and vividly real. This is a beautiful poem , full of colour and sound---the sound of pouring water, the waters of rebirth, the waters of Baptism “pouring Redemption for me” He has been given a second chance, to redeem himself, to remake the world anew. Everything seems lit, suffused with a new light, a new vision---“the bright stick trapped”, the lovers in “the fabulous grass”. He will put on this transfigured world like a new wonderful garment which is unworn, that is, worn for the first time, unused “O, unworn world enrapture me.” Everything is changed in this new, rapturous vision. Colours are more vivid “green and blue things”. This is a celebration of the life of innocence, of instinct, of the non-analytical: “arguments that cannot be proven”. The ordinary flotsam and jetsam of life flow in the canal waters. He wants his poetry to flow too, full of celebration of ordinary things, written in ordinary colloquial language.. The poem has a religious, prayer-like intensity, full of mysticism and wonder.
In his poetry Kavanagh celebrated the ordinary, commonplace detail of life. He invests the ordinary, the local with a beauty and exoticism usually associated with far-flung places and grand themes. The ordinary becomes beautiful---a fit subject for poetry,--- transfigured by the poet’s eye. He searches among the grey things of life for that first fresh wonder of childhood, for that innocence that was really wisdom, an Eden before the Fall. Kavanagh is alive to the wonder and beauty of ordinary things. He celebrates the transfiguring power of love. His poetry is rooted in place. Place names are important to him. Naming, he said, is an act of love----Shanconduff, Rocksavage, Cassidy’s Hill….
In Shanconduff we see his sense of possession, of ownership: “My black hills”. The hills are personified as “incurious”, content with their unexotic location. Yet for him, climbing these bleak, windswept hills to carry fodder to his cattle, is a journey as exotic as climbing the Alps. Provincial they may be, but his love and possessiveness render them beautiful in his eyes. He personifies them, loving them as one would a wife or child, offended to hear them criticised. The cattle-drovers know nothing of his love for these hills, seeing them as uneconomic and barren. Kavanagh’s beautiful images perfectly catch the wintry, Northern landscape. The hills “hoard the bright shilling of March / While the sun searches in every pocket”. The “sleety winds fondle the rushy beards” of the hills. The repetition of names underlines Kavanagh’s celebration of the local. Repeating the names gives a reality, stature and presence to his native place. It has an importance, a grandeur, which outsiders cannot grasp.
In Advent Kavanagh celebrates renunciation and the self-denial of Advent as a route back to the innocence, astonishment and wonder of childhood, Eden before the Fall. Here he will see the world anew, with a new poetic vision that needs neither books nor formal knowledge. Paradoxically it is through limitation, restriction, self-denial, a narrowing of focus, and a rejection of luxury that a new beauty is born. The senses have grown weary with material opulence “we have tasted and tested too much…” “Through a chink too wide …comes in no wonder” Self-denial (like the fasting of Advent) may shock the senses back to that first, original taste of beauty and wonder.
In this simple ordinariness, rejecting all sensual luxury, he will encounter the God of wonder, the freeing of his poetic gift. Where is this purity to be found? He will find it “Wherever life pours ordinary plenty”. He will reject “reason’s payment” that is, the certainties of the striving, rational world, and all its luxuries. (For Kavanagh the rational can act as a barrier preventing access to the innocent, the poetic, the pre-rational). He is in search of that lost Eden, that “spirit-shocking wonder”, the “heart-breaking strangeness” that first, fresh vision. Kavanagh wants to de-familiarise, make the ordinary strange, so that we look on it with fresh eyes. He will achieve this by celebrating ordinary things “bog holes”, “cart tracks”. He rejects analytical knowledge in favour of the innocence of the Christ child “the stable where time begins”. This innocent Nativity scene echoes also his own rural childhood, where his own “time” began The images are from rural life: “dreeping hedges” “cart tracks”
On Raglan Road is a ballad, a poem written for a specific melody “The Dawning of the Day” . This poem too deals with the idea of a vanished Eden, a time of lost enchantment. He describes his doomed love affair with the dark lady, the femme fatale who caught him in her “snare” . The poem passes through time and season, ---beginning on that fateful “Autumn day”---mirroring the changing nature of love itself, Their love transcends the merely physical, they were fellow artists, appreciating the life of the mind. There was an immediate connection between them, that those who know the true meaning of love and art share-- “the secret sign”. He helps her appreciate the different art forms----poetry, music, sculpture, painting “The true Gods of sound and stone….and word and tint…” He gave her his greatest gift, his poetry. He sees now that he fell in love with an impossible ideal and invested his love in a mere mortal woman. “…the angel woos the clay..” There are ominous fore-shadowings in the poem, some clouds on the horizon. “…her own dark hair / Like clouds over fields of May” The poem is really more successful as a song. The layering of assonance reflects this----the songwriting of Bob Dylan comes to mind. “I said let grief be a fallen leaf” . The repetition, assonance and refrain remind us of the poem’s origin as a song “With her own name there, and her own dark hair..”. The poem is a passionate declaration---the poet is haunted by the memory of his lover, her ghost is everywhere in the Dublin of his youth---Grafton Street, Raglan Road, the “quiet street where old ghosts meet”. The final mood is one of regret and loss.
The Hospital revisits the theme of Advent: restriction and limitation can awaken wonder. The poet’s hospitalization and near brush with death brought about a kind of re-birth, a re-awakening to the wonder and beauty of the world. All things are remade, embraced by love’s all-seeing eye “Nothing whatever is by love debarred”. Even the functional ward of the hospital is transfigured by love. “This is what love does to things” . The message of the poem is beautifully expressed : we must learn to live in the moment, to be really alive to the wonder and beauty of ordinary things. This time is all we have..
The poem is a sonnet a form Kavanagh often uses. The first eight lines are descriptive, and the sestet explores the theme.
Canal Bank Walk is another poem rooted in a beloved place which amplifies the theme expressed in “Advent” and “The Hospital”. The canal bank is his route back to the innocence and wonder which time and habit have erased. The poet is on fire with some new vision. Everything seems beautiful, different and vividly real. This is a beautiful poem , full of colour and sound---the sound of pouring water, the waters of rebirth, the waters of Baptism “pouring Redemption for me” He has been given a second chance, to redeem himself, to remake the world anew. Everything seems lit, suffused with a new light, a new vision---“the bright stick trapped”, the lovers in “the fabulous grass”. He will put on this transfigured world like a new wonderful garment which is unworn, that is, worn for the first time, unused “O, unworn world enrapture me.” Everything is changed in this new, rapturous vision. Colours are more vivid “green and blue things”. This is a celebration of the life of innocence, of instinct, of the non-analytical: “arguments that cannot be proven”. The ordinary flotsam and jetsam of life flow in the canal waters. He wants his poetry to flow too, full of celebration of ordinary things, written in ordinary colloquial language.. The poem has a religious, prayer-like intensity, full of mysticism and wonder.