Hi everyone and welcome to this Studyclix podcast episode on the poet Patrick Kavanagh. My name is Peter and I’m an English teacher. I’ve also got a channel on YouTube, called MrTobinLeavingCertEnglish so be sure to check it out for more free resources and videos on other aspects of the Leaving Cert Course. In this podcast, we’ll take a look at Kavanagh’s background, what makes his poetry stand out and examine the poems that have been chosen for the Leaving cert syllabus.

I will go through each of the poems on the course and cover common elements of Kavanagh's poems including: 1) Themes 2) Key images and language 3) Stylistic features and 4) Tone. 

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Below is a transcript of this full podcast packed full of top tips and H1 notes. Make sure to copy these into your notebook to use on the day of your exams!

Patrick Kavanagh was born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan in 1904. The son of a farmer and cobbler, Kavanagh left school at the age of 13 to become an apprentice cobbler as well as help his father work the land. As shoe-making became less and less relevant with the opening of shoe shops and factories, the Kavanagh family focused exclusively on farming, expanding their land to 25 acres. Much of the work fell to Patrick and his brother but, when Patrick was 25, his father died and his younger brother went to Dublin to train to be a teacher. This meant Patrick remained on the farm with his mother, running the family business. 

Despite his leaving school at a young age, Kavanagh, in the few spare minutes he got from running the farm, read and wrote poetry. In 1928, the year before his father died, he had his first poem published in the Irish Independent Weekly but it was his connection with George Russel, who published some of Kavanagh’s work in the Irish Statesman, that really catapulted Kavanagh from his rural home in Monaghan into the literary circles in Dublin and, later, London. 

In 1931, Kavanagh walked the sixty miles or so from his home in Inniskeen to Dublin to meet George Russell and left with an armful of books as well as support and encouragement to continue on his poetic enterprise. It is this six or seven year time period where Kavanagh is described as a farmer by day and poet by night. He continued to work the family farm while spending the evenings writing his poetry and eventually, in 1936, had his first collection of poetry published by a London publisher. 

This first collection of poetry saw Kavanagh often patronised as a country or peasant poet. While he was keen to show the realities of rural life in contrast to lots of other poetry common at the time that idealised country life, he also recognised that the peasant quality of both him and his work was what attracted some audiences to his work. It is in this first collection that we begin to see the theme of the difference between the “half-talk code” of farming people in Inniskeen and the ‘solemn talk’ of serious poetry and poetry people, emerge.

In her introduction to his collected works, Antoinette Quinn says that “In 1936, Kavanagh was still a full time farmer, hopeful that some rich Dubin person would pluck him from the fields. When this failed to happen, he decided to try his luck in London.” In 1937, in London, Kavanagh was commissioned to write his autobiography, which he completed in a matter of months. It was called ‘The Green Fool’ and, although Kavanagh later came to hate it because he thought it amplified the stereotypes and peasant quality of rural life, it was very well received and announced Kavanagh on the literary stage in both London and Dublin. 

Disaster soon struck however. Someone mentioned in the autobiography, Oliver St John Gogarty – an Irish poet and former free-state senator, sued the publisher for libel for a throwaway remark made by Kavanagh about him. When referring to a visit to Gogarty’s home, Kavanagh wrote "I mistook Gogarty's white-robed maid for his wife or his mistress; I expected every poet to have a spare wife." Gogarty, who had taken offence at the close coupling of the words "wife" and "mistress", was awarded £100 in damages and the book wasn’t republished for another 30 years in 1967, the year Kavanagh died. 

So penniless, and with another collection of poetry being rejected by various publishers as well as the publisher of The Green Fool arguing that Kavanagh owed him money on account of the successful libel, Kavanagh couldn’t afford to stay on in London and returned to Ireland. Rather than returning to Monaghan, Kavanagh stayed with his brother in Dublin and attempted to get work as a journalist as well as working on his poetry. He was determined to abandon farming altogether and focus solely on writing but his arrival in Dublin coincided with the outbreak of World War Two. Ireland’s position of neutrality made Ireland and its literary scene outsiders to the literary community at large and there was no appetite for Irish writing at this time amongst audiences in the UK and America. 

Kavanagh struggled in the years that followed to hold down jobs as well as to find publishers for his poetry. Although he was a prolific writer, turning out hundreds of poems, Antoinette Quinn writes that Kavanagh at this stage “still had no sense of direction, was unable to distinguish between the good and bad among his own verses and asked advice of almost everyone he knew.” She goes on to add that Kavanagh was “a hit and miss writer, occasionally turning out a fine lyric”. 

This time spent in Dublin was also spent socialising with many poets of the time as well as a variety of writers and intellectuals. Much of this interaction only served to make him more aware of his own lack of education, having left school so early and it is in these years that he begins to develop issues around alcohol. In these years he felt that he was an outsider in the city and lived a hand-to-mouth existence, working variously as a film critic, columnist, editor and contributor to various literary publications. 

In 1942, disillusioned with the relationship with the Irish state and the Catholic Church, Kavanagh wrote the poem ‘The Great Hunger’ which was controversial not just because it involved criticism of the Church but also detailed descriptions of the reality of the bachelor farmer’s life in Ireland, not a romanticized version of country life. While it was controversial and received with hostility in certain quarters, it was celebrated by many of Kavanagh’s fellow writers and recognised as a remarkable literary achievement. With the publication of The Great hunger and the death of WB Yeats three years earlier, Patrick Kavanagh was announcing himself as one of the preeminent poets in Ireland at this time. 

It was not to be sustained however and despite successes including some well received poems and another autobiographical novel, Tarry Flynn, in 1948, Kavanagh struggled to establish himself with regular collections of work. 

Throughout the 1940s and 50s Kavanagh had occasional gems but struggled to both keep jobs and stay sober. He became known around Dublin as a character and was liable to insult any adults who assumed familiarity with him. Towards children, he was reputed to be kind and affable, telling them stories and giving them sweets. This sense of Kavanagh as outsider or misfit amongst Dublin’s writerly class was emphasised by the way he dressed and carried himself. Antoinette Quinn says “To those he befriended, he was an entertaining and endearing man; to those he deliberately alienated, a monster.”

Through these years drinking and writing columns, Kavanagh made many enemies around Dublin and was constantly attacking what he saw as the complacent and self-congratulatory sense of Ireland’s own cultural importance. He despised the talk in the pubs of literature and saw it as a replacement of the actual work of writing. He lashed out at the church, the state, Fianna Fail and the Irish middle classes and the previous poetic establishment, headed by Yeats. Kavanagh himself was attacked in a column in 1952 in a Dublin magazine. He sued, was unsuccessful, appealed and was eventually successful but he was humiliated during the trial and it took a lot out of him. 

In 1955 Kavanagh was diagnosed with lung cancer. He underwent surgery, made a recovery and had a sort of spiritual renewal. There are a number of poems from this period on the course, including his ‘canal poems’ and ‘A Christmas Childhood. A number of poems from this period were also published in his 1960 collection ‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’. 

After this collection and for the remaining years of Kavanagh’s life he still hoped he would reign in his drinking and his gambling but, unfortunately, he never did. The more he drank, thanks to regular work for the Farmer’s journal and the RTE Guide, the more his poetic output shrank. And in these years too, as he was recognised for the skill and innovation of many of his earlier works, he was constantly compared to WB Yeats whom he had a very complex relationship with. 

The Ireland of WB Yeats was the protestant, middle upper class Ireland that viewed the peasant as magical and mythical, reducing the farming classes to simple stereotypes in an idealised, romanticised version of rural life. Kavangh, who was representative of that Catholic, Irish peasant railed against this characterisation and, although at the beginning, it was precisely this characterisation that got him admitted to literary circles, he rejected it throughout much of his poetry – primarily in The Great Hunger and was determined to show how the Irish farming class were treated by the government of the day and the catholic church – likening their lives to that of prisoners – Patrick Maguire in The great Hunger is imprisoned by the land, the church and his mother.

At the very end of his life, Kavanagh began to enjoy the recognition he sought throughout his life. His Collected Poems has been published, as well as reissues of Tarry Flynn and a stage adaptation of the same book. He was even awarded a British Arts Council Award in 1967 in recognition of his work and was almost as well known in Britain as in Dublin. In Ireland, however, he received no state acknowledgement, no financial assistance, no state pension. The lack of recognition from the state, a state that he had attacked in print mercilessly for years for what he saw as neglect and hypocrisy as well as collusion with the Catholic Church, was somewhat balanced out by the reputation he had among his fellow writers and a new generation of students and poets as Ireland’s leading poet.

Kavanagh died in Dublin in 1967 and was buried in Inniskeen. Perhaps vindicating someone who had struggled with insecurity and self-confidence his whole adult life, that same year, a few months before his death, his work was added to the Leaving Cert Curriculum and has been there ever since.

Kavanagh explores many ideas in his work but there are some themes that emerge again and again and are especially useful to be aware of when studying Kavanagh for the Leaving Cert. Seamus Heaney, who was a devotee of Kavanaghs and who cited Kavanagh as a major influence on his own work, said of Kavanagh “He cherished the ordinary, the actual, the known, the unimportant.” The main themes of Kavanagh's work we will discuss are:

First and foremost, Kavanagh is a poet of place. Whether it’s ‘Shancoduff’, ‘Inniskeen’ or the Grand Canal in Dublin, Kavanagh identifies the most innocuous of details, shines his light on the ordinary to make the everyday, epic, to make the specific, universal.  

The only difference, according to Heaney, between things, men, places, events being important and not is the “light of the mind that is playing on them”. In other words, things are made important by the quality of the poet that writes about them. In Kavanagh’s case, He focuses on small details in order to bring to life the universal importance of everyday things – whether it’s a simple dispute about land in ‘Epic’ or ‘a green stone lying sideways in a ditch’ in ‘A Christmas Childhood’, whatever he shines his light on or brings his focus to is transformed. 

This leads us to another important theme in Kavanagh’s work which is the role of the poet and the life of the poet. We see, both in Kavanagh’s life and in poems such as ‘Inniskeen Road’ a detachment from society. It’s almost as if to have that keen eye for detail, to be able to depict what he sees around him, he needs to be detached from that society. This obviously has profound effects on the poet – Kavanagh spent his years in Dublin feeling like an outsider but it was exactly this outsider status that allowed him to write some of his finest poems such as ‘The Great Hunger’.

There is an interesting irony in these ideas as Heaney, writing about Kavanagh, said “For thirty years he lived the life of a small farmer’s son in the parish of Inniskeen, the life of fairs and football matches, of mass-going and dance-going … Yet all the time, as he stitched himself into the outer patterns of his place, there was a sensitivity and a yearning that distinguished him. For this poet whom we recognize as being the voice of a communal life had a fiercely individual sense of himself.”

But Kavanagh himself, years before said, “A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him.”

It’s clear then that much of Kavanagh’s poetry is concerned with poetry itself – the power of it, the process of it and the role of the poet themselves. 

Other themes that are explored in Kavanagh’s work include rural life, the Irish countryside and nature more generally. Kavanagh often gives us an unflinching portrait of the struggles and realities of rural Ireland. In describing the countryside, the natural world, we see his love for it. He has spoken often about his attachment to and love for Inniskeen and the County Monaghan landscape and we see him often comparing aspects of it to more famous places – such as Shancoduff and the Alps – in order to metaphorically suggest that Shancoduff is just as important and impressive to him as the Alps are. 

And despite his love for the countryside, he’s also deeply critical of the life of the farmer in rural Ireland. The Great hunger explores the constraints that are places upon people living in rural Ireland by society, the church, each other. Nature also is often used to indicate the passage of time, the movement of the seasons and as a way into memory as seen in ‘A Christmas Childhood’.

Finally there is the collected themes of identity, isolation and loneliness. As we’ve seen, Kavanagh lived his life as and felt like the outsider. A poet farmer misunderstood and unable to engage with his local community on an authentic level, he was stereotyped and alienated in the more literary cities of London and particularly Dublin. The loneliness that stems from this experience is clear in a poem like ‘Advent’ where a life is lived disconnected from simple, everyday experiences. Similarly, there’s the importance of personal history in the creation of identity.

Patrick Kavanagh also has a distinctive poetic style that we can identify. One of Kavanagh’s signature techniques is his simplicity, particularly in his vocabulary. Again, Heaney, when writing about Kavanagh, said: “From his earliest success in the sonnet “InniskeenRoad, July Evening”, with its luminous, laddish notice of “every blooming thing” … right down to the spontaneous opulence of the Canal Bank sonnets, the poems are where he finds and keeps a marvellous balance between his resolute down-to-earthness and his equally undeniable impulse to transcendence.”

Kavanagh is deliberately aiming for simplicity and through this simplicity, moments of illumination arise. Kavanagh himself said that the best thing about modern poets (of his time) was their utter simplicity. Kavanagh doesn’t write dense, inaccessible poetry. He aims for simplicity to highlight his own creative genius. 

Another element of style frequently seen in Kavanagh’s work is his use of vivid imagery. He paints pictures for the readers through his descriptions, usually of places, or things within certain places. We see it again and again throughout his poetry where a small detail – the hills hoarding the bright shillings in shancoduff or the wet sack, flapping about the knees of time in The Great Hunger – is vividly describing bringing Kavanagh’s ideas and description to life. 

Aside from all the other devices, the similes, the metaphors, the alliteration and the assonance, that Kavanagh uses, one of the things that really marks his poetry as unique is the tone. He often uses colloquial language, everyday words, the sort of language used in the places he’s writing about to add to the sense of authenticity. There are fragments of speech, idioms and sayings that bring us into the world of the poem but there’s also humour and satire. He frequently critiques cultural and societal norms using a playful yet cutting tone. Sometimes too, tone is deployed to create a reflective or even philosophical mood within his work helping him to explore deeper questions about existence, identity, the human condition, loss of innocence and the desire for spiritual renewal.

Now that we have an idea of what Kavanagh explores in his poetry and the techniques and style he uses to do it, let’s take a look at Kavanagh’s poems on the Leaving Cert course.

This is the earliest of all the Kavanagh poems on the Leaving Cert syllabyus. Appearing in 1936, it was written when Kavanagh lived as a farmer-poet as described earlier. While he loved livin in Inniskeen, he was worried at this stage that he would remain their for his whole life and the sense of disconnection between him and the community around him emerges in this work. 

The poem describes a summer evening in Kavanagh’s native village. In form, it is a sonnet. The first 8 lines or the octet shows us two images of Inniskeen Road – the first is the road filled with people on their way to the dance in

and the second is the empty road after everyone has gone in. 

We see Kavanagh’s use of colloquial language in the opening few lines when he talks of “Billy Brennan’s barn” and also his skill at manufacturing a sense of bustle and busyness through his use of alliteration and the poem seems to move quickly, mirroring the flow of people moving toward the dance. The reference to the

and the

is effective in positioning the speaker outside of this code, observing but not a part of it. 

The second image comes in lines 4 to 8 – it is the same scene but it is suddenly still and quiet. The pace of the lines slow down and we have  the long ‘o’ sounds in ‘road’, ‘thrown’ and ‘stone’ help to create a mournful mood and the use of negatives – ‘no’ and ‘not’ in these lines emphasise the absence on the road and add to the sense of stillness and quiet. The secrecies of stone, like the coded half-talk in the opening lines, add to the idea that the speaker is not admitted to these things, he’s on the outside looking in.

Line 9, the first line of the sestet, sees the speaker turning the focus on himself and using ‘I’ and we see that he does not enjoy the isolation of his situation and the fact that he has chosen this life, the poet’s life, for himself doesn’t make this isolation and loneliness any easier to bear. The idea that he has chosen this path for himself is reinforced by the reference to Alexander Selkirk in these lines – Selkirk was a voluntary castaway. So Kavanagh clearly believes that poets have an exalted status in society but it’s a position that comes at a cost. 

There is ambiguity in the last lines of the poem where the speaker refers to himself as king of every

Blooming here could be viewed positively as referring to nature and the flowering and flourishing of plants and maybe even of the creative inner spirit. But it could also be a colloquial way of referring to the area around him conveying a bitterness and maybe even an enviousness of the other people that were present in lines 1-4. It’s up to the reader to decide which way they think Kavanagh is leaning. 

In this poem, Kavanagh dramatizes his position in the local community and uses the sonnet form to counteract the colloquial language that captures the essence of the place. The tensions between these two ideas – the formality of the poetic form and the ordinariness of a dance at Billy Brennan’s barn is also mirrored in the tension between Kavanagh’s desires to connect and be part of the community and the necessity, in his mind at least, for the poet to be detached and aloof.

This poem is another of the early ones, written a couple of years before Kavanagh left Monaghan for London. This is actually one of Kavanagh’s favourite poems and refers to an area of land half a mile from the Kavanagh home that the family bought in 1926. The land was poor – hilly and bad soil – but Kavanagh loved it. 

In "Shancoduff," Kavanagh opens with a vivid depiction of the landscape, emphasizing the bleak and rugged nature of the hills. The imagery of "black hills" that

conveys a sense of perpetual darkness and hardship. This sets the tone for the poem, highlighting the challenges faced by those living in such an environment.

The poet’s deep emotional connection to the land is evident throughout the poem. Despite the bleakness, there is a sense of pride and attachment in Kavanagh’s descriptions. He refers to the hills as

indicating a personal and possessive relationship. This pride is further underscored by the defiance in his tone, as he acknowledges the hardships but remains steadfast in his attachment to Shancoduff.

Kavanagh’s use of personification brings the landscape to life, making it an active participant in the poem. The hills are depicted as having their own moods and characteristics, such as being

on a dull day. This personification emphasizes the poet’s view of the landscape as more than just a physical space; it is a living entity with which he interacts on a deeply personal level.

The reflective tone of the poem invites readers to consider their own connections to place and heritage. Kavanagh’s introspective musings on the impact of Shancoduff on his life and identity resonate with universal themes of belonging and rootedness. The poem encourages readers to reflect on how their own environments shape their experiences and sense of self.

The critic, Antoinette Quinn, suggests that the ending of the poem, particularly the ambivalence introduced by the lines

Emphasise his insecruties and fear of judgement by those unfamiliar with the place. She says: "Shancoduff is a reflexive poem in which Kavanagh dramatizes his ambivalence towards localising his verse of exposing what is near and dear to the detached appraisal of outsiders.”

The Great Hunger was first published in 1942 and attracted a great deal of controversy and admiration. Controversy in the themes it dealt with and the criticisms it levelled and admiration for its scope, scale and the technical skill on show. The section of The Great Hunger that’s on the leaving cert course is part of a much longer poem. The full work is 14 sections, 756 lines providing a powerful and poignant critique of rural Irish life, focusing on the character Patrick Maguire, whose life is marked by unfulfilled desires, isolation, and the oppressive monotony of farming. The poem explores themes of spiritual and emotional desolation, highlighting the sacrifices and constraints imposed by tradition and societal expectations.

The Great Hunger was the name Irish peasants gave to the Irish famine of the 1840s. Aside from mass emigration and starvation, the famine also had a profound effect on marriage in Ireland. After the famine the average age of marriage increased dramatically as economic instability meant that people had to wait much longer before they had the financial means to start a family. Many young men waited until their mothers died before marrying – meaning that some stayed single their entire lives, and also, there was a huge decline in population so there weren’t as many available partners for people to marry even if they wanted to. 

It is precisely this phenomenon of lonely, isolated, unmarried bachelor, Patrick Maguire, who Kavanagh introduces us to in The Great Hunger. The poem begins with a stark portrayal of Patrick Maguire's life, rooted deeply in the monotonous and grueling routines of farming. The opening lines immediately establish the somber tone and the sense of entrapment that pervades the poem. The imagery of

serves as a powerful metaphor for both the land and the people who work it. The repetition of "clay" underscores the inescapable connection between the farmer and the earth, suggesting a life that is as unchanging and inert as the soil itself.

Throughout this section, Kavanagh emphasizes the theme of isolation. Maguire's existence is depicted as solitary, despite being surrounded by other workers. His life is dominated by routine and physical labor, leaving little room for personal fulfillment or meaningful connections. The repetition of

highlights the monotonous cycle of work, and the phrase

suggests a lack of recognition and appreciation for the toil and sacrifice involved in farming.

Kavanagh delves into Maguire's inner world, revealing his unfulfilled desires and emotional desolation. The protagonist is depicted as a man who has sacrificed personal happiness for the sake of duty and tradition. His unfulfilled sexual and romantic desires are poignantly captured. The imagery here conveys a sense of longing and loss, with the

symbolizing the freedom and passion that Maguire has been denied. His suspicion of women indicates a deeper fear of vulnerability and intimacy.

The reference to the queen in line 12 can be read to mean the soil,

it is unable to satisfy the needs to the farmer – the man who loved her. The relationship then is one that does not produce anything except a sense of futility and despair. The queen could also be, as Antoinette Quinn believes, a reference to the Virgin Mary. In Catholicism, Mary, the mother of God, is often used as the model of purity and chastity for other women to match up to. This also relates to the Catholic church’s teaching about sex and the fact that it created a stigma around sex, that it was inherently sinful and shameful. This had a profound effect on Irish people in an overbearingly Catholic environment.

Kavanagh employs rich natural imagery and symbolism to illustrate Maguire's plight. The rural landscape is depicted as both beautiful and oppressive, reflecting the dual nature of Maguire's existence. The

and 

symbolize the pervasive sense of despair and stagnation that characterizes his life. These lines evoke a sense of entrapment, with natural elements such as bushes, hedges, and furrows acting as metaphors for the societal and personal constraints that bind Maguire to his land.

One of the most interesting aspects of this poem is the attitude of the narrator to Maguire himself. Many people have understood the Great Hunger to be reflective of Kavanagh’s anguish and pain at the waste and suffering in rural communities across Ireland, communities that he is deeply familiar with and came from, as well as a critique of the devastating impact arbitrary societal norms and religious rules can have on the human spirit. But the narrator is not sympathetic to Maguire. At times he even sounds patronising towards him. This irony at the heart of the poem is one that readers have to grapple with and try to understand for themselves. 

The power of The Great Hunger is not to be understated. The Irish poet, John Montague, said in an article after Kavanagh’s death that “With The Great Hunger(1942) the reality of rural life appeared for the first time in Anglo-Irish poetry. The ripples from that extraordinary work are still spreading, for, as well as being a masterwork, it changed the whole course of Irish poetry. Henceforth, whatever their background, education, and obsession, poets would have to measure themselves against Kavanagh’s breathtaking honesty of vision.”

This poem appears in the same collection as The Great Hunger in 1947 but shows a movement away from the harsh criticisms of Irish society and life and more towards a broad acceptance of the world as it is, maybe even admitting some joy and happiness too. 

The poem is written as two sonnets – perhaps appropriate for a poem entitled Advent. Advent is the four weeks leading up to the 25th of December – Christmas Day.  It is a time characterised by restraint and order – Kavanagh mentions the dry bread and sugarless tea. The sonnet form obviously is strictly ordered and Kavanagh was attracted to the discipline of it. We see the sonnet form also in Inniskeen Road: July Evening. 

This poem, Advent, opens with the speaker, in this case Kavanagh himself, addressing his love, most likely Kavanagh’s artistic muse or soul. There is a possibility it could be read as Adam addressing Eve. The loss of innocence or the loss of the garden of eden is a them explored in the poem. The overarching theme of the poem is spiritual and poetic renewal. In fact, the poem was initially entitled Renewal and Kavangh suggests that deprivation – either of luxuries or of the current way of life can lead to this renewal. Because of this some have argued that all Kavanagh is doing is reinforcing Catholic teaching that pleasure is somehow sinful but others suggest that Kavanagh is saying that depriving oneself of easy luxuries purifies the self and makes one more open to experiencing Christ. 

The poem opens with a contemplation on the theme of loss and the yearning to recover a lost innocence. The opening lines set a reflective and somber tone, highlighting the idea that through excessive experience, the wonder and innocence of life have been lost.

symbolizes a period of reflection and penance, suggesting that through austerity one might regain a sense of purity and wonder.

Kavanagh contrasts the corrupted present with a nostalgically remembered past. The theme of regaining innocence is central to the poem, suggesting that through the process of Advent—characterized by waiting and preparation—one can experience spiritual and emotional rejuvenation. These lines evoke a return to simpler, more meaningful experiences. The everyday sounds of rural life, such as the

or

are imbued with a sense of magic and significance that modern life has lost.

Kavanagh’s use of imagery and symbolism throughout the poem is vivid and evocative. He employs religious and pastoral imagery to underscore the themes of purity, renewal, and the cyclical nature of life. Here,

symbolize the ephemeral rewards of earthly pleasures and knowledge, which are discarded in favor of a more profound spiritualChrist comes with a January flower awakening. The image of

symbolizes new beginnings and the potential for spiritual rebirth following a period of penance and reflection.

Kavanagh contrasts the innocence of childhood with the disillusionment of adulthood. The loss of childlike wonder is lamented, and the poem expresses a desire to reclaim that sense of purity and joy. The

suggests that excessive exposure to the world's complexities has diminished the capacity for wonder. The austerity of

represents a return to simplicity, through which the

can be regained.

There are strong thematic links between advent and the next poem we’re going to look at – A Christmas Childhood. This nostalgic poem recalls the magic and innocence of Kavanagh's own childhood Christmases, celebrating the wonder and simplicity of youth. The difference between the Chritsmases of his youth and those of his later years living in Dublin was stark. He said of his later years:

There is some irony here in that Kavanagh’s romantic, nostalgic recollections of childhood focus on the magic and wonder of the child where the ordinary became extraordinary but it overlooks the spiritual, sexual and psychological poverty as described in The Great Hunger. It’s a creative recreation of the past. 

The poem opens with a recreation of childhood wonder for the world around them. This idea of wonder and magic continues when Kavanagh describes the children leaning their heads against the fence post to hear the hum of the wire reverberating through the wood. Every sound and sight seems to add to the young child's delight. Kavanagh imagines that a gap between the hay ricks is a

An apple tree is compared to the tree in the Garden of Eden. This adult world tempted Kavanagh and took away his innocence. There is a sense of regret and resentment.

The difference between part I and part II is the absence of the adult commentator in part II. The second part of the poem is filled with the child's memories. The adult voice, with its regret and resentment, vanishes as the poet loses himself in the excitement of the childhood Christmas. The rhyme scheme also recedes and we are left with an unmediated, unadulterated, childhood experience. 

Ultimately what Kavanagh seems to be saying in this poem is that as we age, we lose our childlike wonder but this view or way of seeing can be recaptured even in adulthood if we are able to tune into the magic and music of the ordinary world.

One of Kavanagh’s most famous poems, On Raglan Road was written to be set to music and sung, most famously by Luke Kelly. Published in 1946 it is a poem about failure in love, something Kavanagh personally experienced many times through his life. It is written as a ballad and describes the failure of the love affair leading the speaker to warn the reader not to love too much, that it can backfire and cause pain and suffering. If we follow the language closely, we see that it is not the most flattering portrayal of Kavanagh as a man or potential romantic partner. 

As discussed earlier, Kavanagh is a poet of place. In this case, the place is Raglan Road in Dublin. He uses other Dublin street and place names in an effort to communicate to readers the ordinary everyday nature of these events happening around them in the city. The speaker talks about seeing and falling in love with a dark-haired woman who, in reality was a 22-year-old medical student, Hilda Moriarty, who Kavanagh, by then aged 40, became infatuated with. When she rejected him, he was bitterly disappointed. 

The poem transitions from autumn, a time of endings and decay, through November to some future undefined moment when the former lovers pass as

The month of May is mentioned also giving us a sense of time passing as well as moving through a succession of feelings such as sorrow, regret, pride and even arrogance. 

It is difficult to feel much sympathy for Kavanagh in this poem despite the rejection because we get the sense that he’s not taking much responsibility for the failure of the relationship – if that’s what it was. He signals bitterness by saying he threw away happiness in gambling on love, he seems to think that she should have been more grateful for the

he gave her – in essence, his poetry, - and because he showed her insights into the poetic process – the secret sign.

The end of the poem further highlights this attitude from the speaker – maybe even a certain arrogance or a suggestion again of the position of the poet in society. He bitterly regrets falling for this woman who, he realises now, was not the heavenly being he thought she was and instead is earthly, mortal and

 By falling for this woman, he himself has had his wings clipped so to speak

This woman, this dark-haired temptress is dragging him down from his lofty position of an intellectual, a poet and he’s better off, at least in terms of his poetic vision, without her. There is of course sadness and regret there too but, as we’ve seen, it’s not easy to feel sympathy for the speaker.

Seamus Heaney said of the next poem we will look at that “His sonnet “Epic” is … his affirmation of the profound importance of the parochial.” The poem was written at a time when Kavanagh was shifting from the savage satirical attacks on church, state and rural stereotypes to a calmer, more reflective handling of memory and place. 

In this poem, set in 1938 in the build-up to the outbreak of WWII, at a time when the ideas of boundaries and borders in Europe was very important, we see a local border row and how Kavanagh magnifies its importance and makes it universal. 

The opening lines attest to the fact that this border dispute is faintly ridiculous – it’s a half rood – an eighth of an acre of rocky land – but the following lines underscore the serious aspect of these disputes – the phrases

and

brings to mind war and we see, despite the small scale, parallels with wider conflicts on the global stage. Kavanagh’s opening declaration that he has

could well be seen as humourous – it’s clear that this dispute, played out in a field in County Monaghan is not a great event – but maybe it’s as great as anything else. Perhaps it is just as Heaney has said, that it shows the “profound importance of the parochial”, that greatness is a quality bestowed by the person who shines their light on an event. In that sense, the boundary dispute in Epic is just as important as larger border disputes in Europe and further afield. Who’s to judge otherwise?

We’ve seen Kavanagh utilise the sonnet form previously in a number of poems and he does so again here with great skill. The octet – opening 8 lines – details the local dispute while the sestet – following 6 lines – is more reflective, looking at why the subject matter was chosen with regards to wider conflicts in Europe. The combination of the classic sonnet form with local details – place names, colloquial language is effective in raising the importance of the local to that of anywhere that has had sonnets written about it. 

As in ‘On Raglan Road’ there is a sense of the poet’s sense of his own greatness, although it’s much less pronounced here and it could very well be playful, but the reference at the end to homer and the Iliad and the line Gods make their own importance could be seen as the speaker putting himself on the same level as Homer, one of the greatest epic poets of all time. High praise from himself indeed!

The last three poems we look at, the first of which is ‘The Hospital’, stem from the spring of 1956 during Kavanagh’s recovery from surgery for lung cancer. This was a time of spiritual rebirth for Kavanagh and there’s a distinctly different tone to these poems. There is much less bitterness and these poems, again, focus on place. Perhaps reflecting the time he has spent in Dublin now, he compares the Grand Canal, his new Eden, with the Monaghan countryside, his first Eden. 

This poem again uses the sonnet form to explore love of place. The first eight lines, the octet, described a hospital ward. It’s a surprising thing to declare your love for but, as we know with  Kavanagh, this isn’t so much about the hospital ward itself, it’s the idea of place and even moreso, the idea of finding something extraordinary in the ordinary. 

Kavanagh does not hide how plain the object he sees in the octet are, but nothing, regardless of how plain it appears, is

Here Kavangh is exploring further his longstanding concern with the idea that  beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or, in this case, the poet who sets his gaze on the object. You can, it seems Kavanagh is saying, love anything. It’s to be found in the ordinary. Almost as if it’s a choice. 

The sestet that follows then deals with the idea that this love transforms the object in turn. Love should be honest and true and, if it is, Kavanagh seems to be saying it can preserve things. Recording them can make them last forever, it can counteract the passage of time. So the gate that’s been bent after a truck drive into it, properly observed, properly recorded can stand as a monument to love. 

Despite Kavanagh’s appeal to simplicity and the recording of love’s mystery

there’s still a lot of sophisticated poetic technique to admire in the poem. The sonnet structure itself of course with it’s rhyme scheme and metre as well as the gradual movement from the simple descriptions in the octet to the final, deeper reflection using more sophisticated language in the last line.  

This poem is the first of two of Kavanagh’s canal sonnets on the leaving cert course, and they signify, as we’ve already mentioned, the idea of a new eden, a rebirth for Kavanagh after his health problems. It’s almost as if the Grand Canal has helped him come to terms with his new life away from Monaghan, it just took him a few years to adjust. 

The sonnet opens with a beautiful, sensuous description of the power of the water to help him reconnect to nature, be redeemed and, as a result be reborn or perhaps even rebaptised. There’s a connection here between the original love of Shancoduff, his original Eden, and the canal in Dublin. He once recognised the importance of place, of the land, of nature and how it fed him spiritually, sustained him. He’s moved away from that, he’s spent years drifting but now, since his health problems and his recuperation, he’s rediscovered the power of nature, of observing simple things

to restore him.

The second quatrain, or set of four lines, describes the speaker sitting still and watching a couple kissing, a bird gathering sticks – things that are representative of love, of the natural way of the world. In this frame of mind, it is easy for him to be reborn, to grow with nature. There’s also the idea of the word -  a reference to the book of Genesis that describes God bringing the world into being by naming things. The poet here names and through naming the things that are seen, it becomes an act of creation. There is a sense of harmony, everything is performing

and is in its right place – even the speaker.

Similarly to ‘The Hospital’, the sestet of the sonnet marks a departure in terms of language. He moves from colloquial, simple language in the first 8 lines to something altogether more reverential and elevated. It starts with ‘O’, almost like a prayer, and he goes on to express the hope that this new enchantment he feels with nature, with life, will go on. He recognises that he is need of this current state of mind, but he hopes that it will last – a recognition perhaps of the brevity or temporality of this state of happiness. 

At the heart of this poem, and some of Kavanagh’s other sonnets is an appeal to the sudden, instinctual recognition of nature, the power of the natural world, the spiritual application of what he sees as God’s will. But of course, these are carefully crafted pieces of work – notice the octet and sestet, the strict adherence to rhyme scheme, the gradual shift in tone and language in each of the ones we’ve looked at so far. So while the impulse or the feeling may be sudden or

but the result – the poem – is a carefully crafted monument to that impulse. 

Kavanagh himself said, “That a poet is born, not made, is well known. But this does not mean that he was a poet the day he was physically born. For many a good-looking year I wrought hard at versing, but I would say that, as a poet, I was born in or about nineteen fifty-five, the place of my birth being the banks of the Grand Canal. Thirty years earlier, Shancoduff’s watery hills could have done the trick, but I was too thick to take the hint. Curious this, how I had started off with the right simplicity, indifferent to crude reason, and then ploughed my way through complexities and anger, hatred and ill-will towards the faults of man, and came back to where I started.”

This is the final poem we will look at and it suitably discusses Kavanagh’s wish to be memorialised or commemorated by the banks of the Grand Canal. Today there is a statue and a bench on the Grand Canal commemorating the poet, just as he wishes here. 

In this poem, we see many of the aspects of Kavanagh’s work that we’ve discussed previously. He focuses on place – the Grand Canal here – and through naming and describing, he expresses his love for it. Also, through exaggeration. We saw in Shancoduff, the comparison between a small hill in Monaghan and the Matterhorn – here the water is compared, surreptitiously, to Niagra Falls through the lovely word

He encourages the reader to

and, by extension

furthering his concept of the poetic eye – bringing attention to ordinary things here a barge coming from Athy – in order to magnify them and truly experience them. 

There are many symbols in the poem – we see the barge, the light, the swan and also the idea of Mount Parnassus, that those who sit by the canal, will feel inspired as if they are at the home of the muses of poetry, music and learning. We have seen Kavanagh’s craft at work throughout the poems we’ve examined but obviously, there is also Kavanagh himself at the heart of this poem.

We’ve seen Kavanagh’s sense of himself appear at times through his work. The idea that he was separate, necessarily so, from his community in Inniskeen because he was a poet surfaces in Inniskeeen Road: July Evening. The idea that he’s somehow in the same company as Homer appears in Epic. The poems from his early years in Dublin are replete with his savage critique of church and state and we could be forgiven for thinking him presumptuous to expect or ask to be commemorated but, even though that’s what he’s doing, it doesn’t come across as arrogant. He is self-effacing and the sense of the poet’s ‘I’ Kavanagh’s own person is kept in the background in favour of the poet’s ‘eye’ e  y  e – forefronting the idea that it is poetic vision that should be commemorated or memorialised moreso than the poet themselves. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of Kavanagh’s poetry, always use at least 4 poems in detail in your essay and quote as much as you can throughout!  Finally, remember to check out studyclix.ie for more sample answers. Best of luck!

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