Patrick Kavanagh's Poetry Essay Sample
In his poetry, Kavanagh celebrated the ordinary, commonplace detail of life. He invests the ordinary, the local with beauty usually associated with far-flung places and grand themes. The ordinary becomes beautiful 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 wisdom. 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.
In Advent, Kavanagh celebrates renunciation and the self-denial of Advent as a route back to the innocence, astonishment and wonder of childhood. 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 richness “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. 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 at 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 rural childhood, where his own “time” began The images are from rural life: “creeping 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 such as poetry, music, sculpture and 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..”. The poem is more successful as a song. The layering of assonance reflects this and 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 name there, and her dark hair..”. The poem is a passionate declaration and the poet is haunted by the memory of his lover, her ghost is everywhere in the Dublin of his youth such as Grafton Street and Raglan Road, the “quiet street where old ghosts meet”. The final mood is one of regret and loss.
Canal Bank Walk is another poem rooted in a beloved place which amplifies the theme expressed in “Advent”. The canal bank is his route back to the innocence and wonder which time and habit have erased. 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 light, suffused with a new light, a new vision “the bright stick trapped”, the lovers in “the fabulous grass”. He will put on this changed 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, vision. Colours are more vivid “green and blue things”. This is a celebration of the life of innocence, of instinct: “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.
The sonnet entitled ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal’ is basically different from Canal Bank Walk It doesn’t have the delicate imagery of Canal Bank Walk. It is a public sonnet, a direct address from the poet to the reader and as such its tone is serious. Its style is very elegant but really closer to prose rather than poetry “O commemorate me where there is water, Canal water preferably…”. In Canal Bank Walk he has rejected society for the intimacies of private experience. Now, in this sonnet, there is a new sense of communication: there is a wish to renew his links with others and to share with them his experience and this is why he addresses his reader using terms of affection “Brother Commemorate me thus beautifully…”. As usual with Kavanagh, the sonnet creates a visual scene. He provokes his interest through simple images; a swan, the light under bridges, a barge. The images are sharp, descriptive, and precisely used, he speaks of a certain time and place.
