Last Minute notes on - Kavanagh

Emu McEmuerson

(again.. hope they help)


Patrick Kavanagh [1904-1967]Relevant Background
• Major poet of rural Ireland in the mid 20th century, examined many factors of rural life and the creative process. He was born on a farm in Co. Monaghan, only had primary school education, became an apprentice shoemaker to his father and a family farm worker, but dropped shoemaking and started writing poetry in his teens while continuing his farm duties.
• He felt he was an outsider long before he left the family farm in 1939 for a new life as a journalist and poet in Dublin. He joined Dublin’s barstool writing set. He wrote as a displaced bachelor gazing with a sneer into his society. He evoked the spiritual, emotional and sexual hungers of rural Ireland.
• He pursued a writing career as a journalist, novelist and lecturer at various times and at all times as a poet. Much of his poetry depicted the conflicts, loneliness and frustrations of rural life; he penned poetry that protested at repression of manhood and creativity by church and society. He always had a social vision of what was wrong with peasant society, but behind this was always an aesthetic and spiritual vision of the beauty of common things and nature.
• Kavanagh idealised childhood, praising it for its natural sense of wonder. He resented rural working life for its inhuman, mechanised boredom. Kavanagh was an angry poet, but felt his anger was truth. He rebelled against a pastoral and sentimental image of the rural Irishman that he believed other writers had fostered. He always stressed the importance of the local, of the here and now.
• In 1955, Kavanagh faced death but overcame cancer to survive for twelve years, writing a warm lyrical poetry of celebration, a humble yet ecstatic poetry that tried to undo his earlier poetry of protest. At this point, he experienced a rebirth of long lost childhood perception and wonder. He developed a knack of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary, focusing intensely, joyously and jovially on the here and now.


Themes

Kavanagh’s poetic career spanned three periods: the protesting peasant poet, the protesting Dublin poet and finally the reconciled, celebrating Dublin poet.
His childhood provided euphoric material; his adult life yielded bitter experiences until his spiritual rebirth after the cancer operation sparked renewed euphoria.



• Kavanagh believes the childhood sense of wonder is essential to adult happiness. He laments society’s disregard for childlike perception. He celebrates childhood and tries to re-create the inner child:

How wonderful that was, how wonderful[Christmas Childhood]

And when we put our ears to the paling post
The music that came out was magical [Christmas Childhood]

I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood’s [Christmas Childhood]

Grow with nature again as before I grew [Canal Bank Walk]


• Kavanagh delights in commonplace beauty in nature:

I am king of banks and stones and every blooming thing [Inniskeen Road]

The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff [Shancoduff]

An apple tree with its December glinting fruit [Christmas Childhood]
Any common sight the transfigured face of a beauty [Christmas Childhood]

Leafy-with-love and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me [Canal Bank Walk]

A web of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech [Canal Bank Walk]

Canal water…so stilly greeny at the heart of summer [Lines Written on a Seat]


• Kavanagh despises the loneliness, conflicts and frustrations of rural life:

The plight of being king and government and nation [Inniskeen Road]

Who owns them hungry hills? [Shancoduff]














• Kavanagh reveals a talent for imaginative perception. He explores imagination and the craft of creative vision:

A footfall tapping secrecies of stone [Inniskeen Road]

I made the Iliad from such
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland [Christmas Childhood]

Snatch out of time the passionate transitory [Hospital]
Give me ad lib to pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech [Canal Bank]

A new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven [Canal Bank]

No one will speak in prose

Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands [Lines Written on a Seat]
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges [Lines Written on a Seat]


• After writing many poems of protest at the spirit sapping values of Irish society, Kavanagh reconciles himself with life and Ireland by writing poems of celebration and euphoria:
Protest
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation [Inniskeen Road]

My black hills have never seen the sun rising [Shancoduff]

They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn [ Shancoduff]

Nothing whatever is by love debarred [Hospital]

The inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard [Hospital]

We must record love’s mystery without claptrap [Hospital]

That I do the will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal [Canal Bank]

O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass…
Feed the gaping need of my senses [Canal Bank]

Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars [Lines Written on a Seat]

O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb—just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by [Lines Written on a Seat]


Style
Tone: Kavanagh ranges from bitter despair to euphoria. He is critical in much of his earlier poetry, but sublimely happy in his three later sonnets on the course. His tone can be ironical, didactic, enthusiastic, hopeful, matter-of-fact, mocking, proud, humble, doubtful, appreciative, lonesome, self-pitying, sympathetic, scornful, angry, poignant, confident, humorous, ecstatic and self-mocking.

Form: Kavanagh favours the highly structured sonnet form, using it to arrange his thoughts, to compare emotional states, to present a situation and then to reflect on it, to express his manifesto of the moment. Sometimes, Kavanagh performed variations on the rhyme scheme and on the quatrain or octave-sestet structure to convey freshness or excitement, to create the impression of a seamless transition of thought or emotion. Kavanagh also favoured the ballad form, and his original use of this form is lyrical.

Language: Kavanagh uses compound words like ‘spirit-shocking’ and creates new words [neologism] like ‘niagaroulsy’ in order to convey a precise, fresh thought or emotion. A lot of Kavanagh’s speech is colloquial, often addressed in a companionable or intimate fashion to the reader. Thus, his diction is mainly ordinary, commonplace and conversational. But it is always lyrical.

Imagery: Kavanagh’s imagery is the most striking feature and the main appeal of his poetry. He uses many original metaphors and similes as well as personification. Comparison is at the heart of his poetic techniques. Natural, religious and childhood imagery dominates Kavanagh’s thoughts. Many of his references to religion are metaphorical. He also uses hyperbole or exaggeration.

Verbal Music: Kavanagh uses the typical poetic devices of line rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration, consonance, sibilance and assonance to beautify his subject or to enhance meaning and tone. He also uses onomatopoeia to create sound effects, such as the opening of a canal lock. He produces both euphony and cacophony to deepen meaning through musical effect.