patrick kavanagh personal response essay

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“patrick kavanagh is a poet of the ordinary” – discuss.

Kavanagh writes about the ordinary world around him; about a world of ‘whins’ and ‘bogholes’ and ‘cart-tracks’ and ‘old stables’. He has learnt anew to look at the ordinary in an extraordinary way.   This is part of Kavanagh’s greatness as a poet: he is content with his own world, his own reality.  It may not be a sophisticated world, but no matter.  This willingness and ability to be faithful to himself and his world is part of his simplicity.  Simplicity, after all, is just the ability to be satisfied with oneself, no matter how ridiculous one may seem to others.

All through his poetry, Kavanagh has a respect for the commonplace, the ordinary.  He wants to ‘wallow in the habitual’.  In ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’   he tells us what it was like to be a poet in a peasant community where he was an outsider.  It’s a July evening and all the locals are celebrating at the local barn dance.  Kavanagh is alone on the road.  He knows now the price that is to be paid for his gift of poetry; the price is isolation and loneliness.  Poet or no, he has human needs, the need for human contact, the need for romance.  He dismisses the pretentiousness of the intellectuals, ‘I have what every poet hates in spite of all the solemn talk of contemplation’.  This is the ordinary, it is the authentic voice of the outsider who yearns to be loved.

In his poem  ‘Advent’ , he feels that he may perhaps have lost some of the wonder that lies in the ordinary.  He may be beginning to lose respect for the everyday world because of over-familiarity, ‘we have tested and tasted too much…..’  he sets out to recapture that fascination that he once found in the ordinary.  He is going to renew himself through suffering during the penitential season of Advent by eating only ‘the dry black bread and the sugarless tea of penance’.   He has decided to regain his state of childish innocence and then he will once again revel in the ordinary, in ‘the whins, the bogholes, the cart-tracks, old stables …’  the ordinary will once again be wonderful, a ‘black slanting Ulster hill’ will be spirit shocking’; it will touch his soul.  The boring chat of an old fool will no longer be tedious.  It will again have a newness; it will contain ‘prophetic astonishment’.  The common everyday world will fascinate him; there will be wonder in the ‘whispered argument of a churning’.  From now on his interest will be ‘wherever life pours ordinary plenty’.  He is going to settle for the ordinary, ‘the banal’.  Instead, he will now no longer over-analyse the world of the senses, ‘please God we shall not ask for reason’s payment’.  He won’t ask the ‘why’ of things, ‘nor analyse God’s breath in common statement’.

There is nothing pompous or pretentious about Kavanagh.  He respects the commonplace, whether it is in the Monaghan of his youth or in the canal area around Baggot Street of later years.  He enthuses about the swan going by ‘head low’ or the fantastic light ‘that looks through the eyes of bridges’, or again the common sight (in Kavanagh’s day) of a barge on the canal. When he dies he wants no ‘hero courageous tomb’.  He’ll settle for something much more humble, ‘just a canal bank seat for the passer-by’ – for the ordinary man in the street.

There is more to be said about Kavanagh’s treatment of the ordinary: he often takes the ordinary and elevates it to a new level; he gives it a heroic dimension.  The little waterfall on the canal becomes Niagara Falls.  Even the little patch of grass at Baggot Street Bridge becomes his Mount Parnassus, his place of inspiration.  The barge on the canal is also given legendary status.  It is bringing ‘mythologies’ from afar like Jason’s Argos no doubt.  The barge men, too, will have yarns to tell in Dublin pubs, these yarns may be just well-made lies about strange sights they claim to have seen in that world beyond Sallins!  Kavanagh elevates these events and now they become ‘mythologies’.  Athy may be a not-very-important little town some forty miles from Dublin but it is elevated by Kavanagh to the status of heroic places like Athens and Rome.  Athy becomes a ‘far-flung’ place.

Elsewhere in his poems, we have the same elevation of the ordinary.  His own humble plight as a lonely soul becomes equated with that of Alexander Selkirk.  A bird building a nest is an ordinary sight but in his poem ‘Canal Bank Walk’  it takes on a greater significance.  In that nest, new life will be born and through that new life God will reveal himself; in that nest, the Word will be made Flesh.  In this poem we also see that the canal water is no longer mere canal water; it is now elevated to the Jordan (where Christ is baptised by John), ‘the green waters of the canal pouring redemption for me’.  In ‘Advent’ he can see Christ in a January flower and the ‘decent men who barrow dung to gardens under trees’ are engaged in great work, they are helping God to continue the work of ongoing creation.  They are, he proposes, co-creators with the Almighty.

Finally, we come to Kavanagh’s language and diction.  His language is not strictly poetical, not pompous, not sophisticated.  It is the language of every day, it is colloquial.  We don’t find Kavanagh resorting to poetic diction.  He uses the phrasing and rhythms of ordinary speech.  The result, of course, is that his poetry has often been adversely criticised for its rugged rhythms.  Kavanagh would not be over-concerned about this.  He had, he said, developed ‘the philosophy of not caring’.  ‘The bicycles go by in twos and threes, there’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight’ – that’s a perfect example of ordinary, colloquial language. Examples like these occur everywhere in Kavanagh’s poetry.  This ordinary diction conveys the simplicity, integrity and total lack of pretension in Kavanagh.  He is, indeed, a poet of the ordinary.

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Complete Guide: H1 Leaving Cert English Guide 2025

The 2025 guide is for students who start fifth year is 2023 and plan to graduate in 2025. If you are graduating in 2024, please use the Complete Guide: H1 Leaving Cert English Guide 2024 .

Leaving Cert English 2025 notes, sample essays, text analysis, examiners’ advice, video – it’s all in there. Contents:

Essentials Paper I

Section I Section II Quotations in essays Speech/Talk/The Language of Persuasion Article / Opinion piece / Discursive Essay / Language of argument Report/The language of information Personal essay Letter – Letter to the Editor – Personal letter Descriptive essay Short story

Introduction Themes Style Sample essay: “In King Lear the villainous characters hold more fascination for the audience than the virtuous ones.” (2010) Sample essay: “In the play, King Lear, the stories of Lear and Gloucester mirror one another in interesting ways.” (2006) Sample essay: “Reading or seeing King Lear is a horrifying as well as an uplifting experience.” (2006) Sample essay: “ In King Lear honour and loyalty triumph over brutality and viciousness. ” (2010) Sample essay: ” King Lear is not only a tragedy of parents and children, of pride and ingratitude, it is also a tragedy of kingship “. (2010) Short notes on other recent questions (2021, 2018, 2016 – both titles from each year)

Frankenstein

Themes Style Quotations Characters Key question Sample essay: “The consequences of Victor Frankenstein’s passion for scientific knowledge and experimentation in Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, are both fascinating and disturbing.” (2022) Sample essay: “Is the Creature a child? Discuss the idea of parenthood and childhood in relation to Frankenstein.” Sample essay: Discuss the role of Robert Walton in Frankenstein. Consider Walton’s contribution to the themes and style of the novel. Sample essay: Discuss the importance of companionship in shaping the reader’s understanding of the characters and the events of Frankenstein. Sample essay: Discuss the narrative purposes served by Mary Shelley’s inclusion of letters between various characters throughout her novel, Frankenstein. (2022) Sample essay: Discuss how the use of imagery and symbolism plays an important part in the themes of Frankenstein.

Comparative

General guidance Link words Cultural Context General Vision and Viewpoint Theme or Issue Comparisons: making a comparative table (examples Educated, Never Let Me Go, Ladybird , Frankenstein, Rebecca, The Shawshank Redemption, Pride and Prejudice, Knives Out, Sive, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Where the Crawdads Sing)

Unseen poetry

General guidance Sample answer

Prescribed poetry

General guidance

Eavan Boland

Introduction Detailed analysis of each poem individually The War Horse Child of Our Time The Famine Road The Shadow Doll White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland Outside History The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me This Moment The Pomegranate Love Sample essay: “Boland’s reflective insights are expressed through her precise use of language.” Write your response to this statement, supporting your answer with suitable reference to the poetry on your course.

Emily Dickinson

Introduction Detailed analysis of each poem individually “Hope” is the thing with feathers There’s a certain Slant of light I felt a Funeral, in my Brain A Bird came down the Walk I heard a Fly buzz – when I died The Soul has Bandaged moments I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to A narrow Fellow in the Grass I taste a liquor never brewed After great pain, a formal feeling comes Sample essay : “Dickinson’s use of an innovative style to explore intense experiences can both intrigue and confuse.” Discuss this statement, supporting your answer with reference to the poetry of Emily Dickinson on your course.

Introduction Detailed analysis of each poem individually The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Preludes Aunt Helen A Game of Chess Journey of the Magi III, Usk IV, Rannoch, near Glencoe East Coker Sample essay: “The poetry of T.S. Eliot often presents us with troubled characters in a disturbing world.” Write a response to this statement with reference to both the style and the subject matter of Eliot’s poetry. Support your points with suitable reference to the poems on your course

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Introduction Detailed analysis of each poem individually God’s Grandeur Spring As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame The Windhover Pied Beauty Inversnaid I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day No worst there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief Sample essay: “Hopkins’ innovative style displays his struggle with what he believes to be fundamental truths.” In your opinion, is this a fair assessment of his poetry? Support your answer with suitable reference to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins on your course. (2013)

Patrick Kavanagh

Introduction Detailed analysis of each poem individually Iniskeen Road: July Evening Shancoduff Advent A Christmas Childhood Epic Canal Bank Walk Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin The Hospital On Raglan Road Sample essay: “Aspects of Kavanagh’s poetry could be seen as dated and irrelevant, but his unique poetic language has enduring appeal.” Do you agree with this assessment of his poetry? Support your points with suitable reference to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh on your course.

Derek Mahon

Introduction Detailed analysis of each poem individually Grandfather Day Trip to Donegal Ecclisiastes After the Titanic As It Should Be A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford  Rathlin The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush  Kinsale, Antractica Sample essay: “Mahon uses language and imagery to transform personal observations into universal reflections.” Write your response to this statement with reference to the poems by Derek Mahon on your course.

Sylvia Plath

Introduction Detailed analysis of each poem individually Black Rook in Rainy Weather The Times are Tidy Morning Song Finisterre Mirror Pheasant Elm Poppies in July The Arrival of the Bee Box Child Sample essay: “Plath makes effective use of language to explore her personal experiences of suffering and to provide occasional glimpses of the redemptive power of love.” Discuss this statement, supporting your answer with reference to both the themes and language found in the poetry of Sylvia Plath on your course.

Tracy K. Smith

Introduction Detailed analysis of each poem individually Joy (Elegy One) Dominion Over the Beasts of the Earth The Searchers Letter to a Photojournalist Going In The Universe is a House Party Museum of Obsolescence Don’t you wonder, sometimes? It’s Not The Universe as a Primal Scream The Greatest Personal Privation I am 60 odd years of age Ghazal Sample essay: “Tracy K. Smith’s demanding subject matter and formidable style can prove challenging.” Discuss this statement, supporting your answer with reference to the poetry of Tracy K. Smith on your course.

This guide aims to replace a revision course for 2025. Everything is in one place. We know how hard it can be, and it is our passion to make it easier for the students who come after us. Our team, composed of people who got 625+ points, distilled our own best notes, past paper answers and tips on each part of the course – so that you don’t have to fight these battles on your own or reinvent the wheel. Whether you want 625 points, or to simply maximise your points, the Leaving Cert English 2025 guide will – guaranteed – have useful insights to make your life easier.

This Leaving Cert English 2025 guide is especially useful if:

✔ you are stuck at a given grade despite all your effort

✔ your teacher’s approach isn’t perfect for you

✔ you don’t know what to do to improve

✔ you are counting English for points

You will get:

✔access to the key Leaving Cert English skills video

✔access to 625Lab: we will give you feedback on one typed up essay corrected. Use the 625Lab submission form

✔priority access for Leaving Cert study advice. Email [email protected] with your query

✔notes as detailed above (383 pages, or 125 thousand words)

What does the guide  not  cover ?

The guide has a wealth of useful information. As the syllabus required each student to choose from over 40 individual texts and over 50 poems it was neither required, nor feasible to cover everything. 

Does it come in the post? It’s a download, so there’s no need to wait for the postman. You automatically get a download link straight into your email inbox. If you run into any problems with the download, we will sort you out – simply reply to the email you get from us.

Can I print it?

Yes. All notes are printable.

• Post author: Martina
• Post published: August 1, 2021
• Post category: English

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Eavan boland’s use of symbols and metaphors to deliver truths about society for leaving cert english #625lab, eiléan ní chuilleanáin leaving cert sample essay #625lab, the secret to writing great essays.

Patrick Kavanagh, a poet who never shunned hard truths, inspires a new generation

The lea-green down features more than 60 new poems responding to kavanagh’s work.

Some of the poets who contributed to The Lea-Green Down

This November, Offaly poet Connie Roberts read her poem My People at the Boston College Conference, Towards Transitional Justice. Roberts spent her childhood in various institutions, experiences she wrote into poems which subsequently won her The Patrick Kavanagh Award (2010) with her debut collection, Little Witness (Arlen House).

Although a fellow Offaly woman, it wasn’t until July of this year I met Connie for the first time in a quaint teashop on New York’s Lower East Side. It was my pleasure that day to hand over her contributor’s copy of The Lea-Green Down, an anthology of response poems to the poetry of Kavanagh which also includes the originals. Her response poem takes its title from Kavanagh’s version, using his visual template to create a scaffolding for a contemporary work, brimming with social and political energies. Roberts speaks for those who have suffered abuse, asking the question; “Can you blame them for wanting/wrongs righted?”

In similar vein, Jean 0’Brien’s Child, in response to Kavanagh’s To a Child, is dedicated to the lost children of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home. Her closing lines are prophetic in light of the Government’s recent decision to exhume and identify these children: “The unforgiving sky is full of stars/the dome of dank earth/is full of missing children./Hush, we know you are lost child/we will find you.”

Artist Paul McCloskey’s cover image of Patrick Kavanagh

Throughout The Lea-Green Down, which features more than 60 contributing poets (established, emerging and those publishing for the very first time) are responses which take the Kavanagh originals as a starting point. As President Michael D Higgins said in a speech he made at the Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen in 2014, it’s a fact “that if you wanted insight into the truth of Irish existence, you had to turn to literature”. Such truths are in abundance between the pages of The Lea-Green Down in poems that offer insight into a rapid changing Ireland 50 years on from the death of Patrick Kavanagh, himself a poet who never shunned the hard truths.

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The plan to publish this anthology through my small, independent press, Fiery Arrow, was put together in mid-2017. I wasn’t sure however, if the idea would gather momentum. It would require a fair amount of commitment, not only from myself, but from a range of poets (I wanted to be as inclusive as possible). Right from the beginning, there was huge enthusiasm for the task. The first poem came to me within hours, the Kavanagh poem, The Weary Horse ably responded to by Joan Power’s The Garden. Her entreaty to Kavanagh regarding the redemptive power of language is in her opening lines: “Oh pour me poetic redemption, Paddy/to ease this new banality of living/stripped of wonder or beauty./Pass me the bones of your words/for there is no chink of light,/no wink and elbow language of delight/only the Babel of Google/to barrow my brain/with dreeping dung.”

The arrival of The Beast from The East ensured the work got done. While the country ground to a halt, poets all over the land were revisiting the works of Kavanagh and being beguiled anew. Though the storm raged, I received a blizzard of new poems. Reading those poems as they came in was nothing short of miraculous. They kept me warm although temperatures dropped.

The Lea-Green Down as title was ready made in one of Kavanagh’s early poems, Ploughman: “I turn the lea-green down/Gaily now,/And paint the meadow brown/With my plough.” It’s a perfect metaphor for how the poetic process itself turns the lea-green of imagination into poetry, the pen being the plough. Included in the collection is a poem and a significant essay by Gerard Smyth in which he makes the point that “To the young poets who gathered around him in Dublin in the 1960s, Kavanagh transmitted a new message: the need to push the boundaries of Irish poetry, the necessity of renewing tradition rather than echoing it.” Smyth’s poem Carnaross: A May Evening, in response to Inniskeen Road: July Evening, describes a typical evening of dance in a country setting. Evocative lines include : “Later when the singer is gone, his wild accordion/back in its box, his songs will linger/and those still standing continue to dance/to the ghost of a tune that’s an old country waltz.”

Mary 0’Donnell’s The Blackbird, God Almighty and Allah, mourns and remembers the dead children of Syria, murdered by Bashar al Assad. Her powerful poem begins: “There you are again this bitter spring,/taking position at crown of birch./You hold forth like God Almighty,/or Allah, fresh arrived to change terrible places/to green-shook and calm.” Geraldine Mills in I Keep Looking, describes a mother’s anguish over a daughter lost to the streets, her lines renewing Kavanagh’s rhythms: “Every young girl I see/in school uniform or knee-torn jeggings/might some day say to me/I am still your daughter.” Pat Boran’s Pocket Watch comes in response to Gold Watch and describes memory as a museum, filled with things “he can’t let go of or that won’t let go of him”. Lani O’Hanlon’s The Traveller’s Wife (in response to Kavanagh’s Tinker’s Wife) describes a man from the travelling community coming to her door after the death of his wife. He is offered a pancake in lieu of money, an offer he refuses because “She loved them you see./He’d always take one out/to her waiting/in the white van,/all honeyed up/and warm from the pan.”

Una Agnew, A Kavanagh scholar and academic, has been a steadfast supporter of this publication. Agnew launched the collection in her customary articulate way and also contributed a poem Swans on the Canal, a response to Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin. Agnew’s reflection on Kavanagh’s being commemorated near water is lyrical and moving: “And bridges resonate with filtered light/Shedding a fractured aura on the waters/That carry myths and legends of your past/And bring you home in triumph, safe at last.”

In Memory of my Mother is a poem where Kavanagh remembers going to the market town of Carrickmacross with his mother, a poem where imagination is described as “the oriental streets of thought”. Ivy Bannister’s In Memory of my Sister takes Kavanagh’s poem as the starting out point of her journey to reclaim the sister that she tragically lost in a plane crash, September 1998. The poem begins: “It’s on the Atlantic coast/that we meet – you float in /on the waves, your face lit/by this magic place./Where salt embraces strand,/water washes our feet,/and there behind you/the tow headed children/you longed for/rise from the sea.” Both Kavanagh and Bannister use memory in devastating ways to recapture what’s been lost. Both poets, however, heal the pain of loss through the redemptive gifts bestowed through language. Kavanagh takes his mother again through the shops and stalls and markets while Bannister melts away the “bruised black past” through the act of recalling.

As a poet, how do I relate to Kavanagh? Poems like A Christmas Childhood and Ploughman remain personal favourites, sharing as they do glimpses of the divine. Kavanagh’s railing against institutional structures reminds me of another poet I would always want to read, William Blake. Kavanagh shared with Blake the desire to show reality as it was and not in a sentimental way (which Kavanagh abhorred). Thus, The Great Hunger (published by Horizon in 1942) reveals the devastation and loneliness of trying to eke out a living from the land (through the prism of a lone voice, Paddy Maguire). The sonnet I respond to in like kind is Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. In Praise of the Dance, contrary to Kavanagh’s “No, no, no,” opens with “Yes, yes, yes.” In Praise of the Dance writes the source of my first poetic rhythms, my mother’s sewing machine. “I left behind my mother’s rhythmic Singer sounds/Her quick-quick-slow-quick time, her patterned rows.”

While there are over 60 poets in The Lea-Green Down, it’s fair to say that if resources allowed, I would have liked to publish a much larger work. There are unintentional omissions. Trying to catch what Kavanagh once described as “a standing army” of poets would prove futile in this instance. But that said, the poets who are here represent every county in Ireland and they have undoubtedly succeeded in creating a legacy which will stand the test of time.

Poets included in the Lea-Green Down are as follows:

Jane Clarke/Pat Boran/Gerard Smyth/Brian Kirk/Nessa 0’Mahony/Clairr 0’Connor///Gavan Duffy/Doreen Duffy/Mae Newman/Tony Shields/Tony Bardon/Mairide Woods/Marie Gahan////Geraldine Mills/Susan Connolly/Enda Coyle Greene/Maggie 0’Dwyer/Susan Condon/Tanya Farrelly/David Butler/Brigit Eoin Flynn/Niamh Byrne /Larry Scully/Trish Best/Joan Power/Georgina Casserly/Anne Marron/Lani 0’Hanlon/Ann Leahy/Anne Fitzgerald/ Grace Wells/Celia de Freine/Ruth Timmons/Harry Clifton/Eileen Casey/Trish Nugent/Paul Maddern/Maria Wallace/Derek Fanning/Jim Hyde/Mary Guckian/Phil Lynch/Pauline Fayne/Chris Allen/Breda Joy/Rosemarie Rowley/Connie Roberts/Georgina Casserly//Lani 0’Hanlon/Mary O’Donnell/Jean 0’Brien/Doreen Duffy/Eithne Lannon/Gerard Smyth/Ivy Bannister/Christine Broe/Colm McGlynn/Derek Fanning/Michael J. Whelan/Orla Grant-Donoghue/Liz McSkeane

The Lea-Green Down owes a debt of gratitude to all its contributing poets, Offaly County Council and South Dublin County Council, The Patrick Kavanagh Resource Centre, Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, Una Agnew, Gerard Smyth, designer Eoin Flynn and artist Paul McCloskey for his cover image of Kavanagh, Man and Poet.

The inclusion of Patrick Kavanagh’s poems is by permission of The Patrick Kavanagh Trustees via The Jonathan Williams Literary Agency. The Kavanagh Poems are taken from Collected, 2004, edited by Antoinette Quinn and span the years, 1929-1959.

The Lea-Green Down, edited by Eileen Casey, is available in Dubrays Book Shop, Grafton Street, Dublin and Shop Street, Galway, Amazon, Books Upstairs, Kenny’s, Galway and The Patrick Kavanagh Resource Centre, Inniskeen, Co Monaghan.

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Patrick kavanagh.

(1904 - 1967)

Poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh was born in rural Inniskeen parish in Ireland’s County Monaghan. The fourth of ten children of a cobbler, he left school at age 13 to apprentice to his father. The young poet had no talent for shoemaking, so instead, he worked on his family’s small farm. Although he lacked formal education, Kavanagh found himself drawn to literature and wrote poems beginning in his teenage years. His writing was first published in local papers in 1928. Following that achievement, he submitted poems to the Irish Statesman ; its editor, the Irish Literary Revival figure George Russell (known as Æ), encouraged and eventually published Kavanagh’s work.

Alienated from the denizens of his country townland, who viewed his poetic inclinations with bemused tolerance, Kavanagh was invigorated by finding a kindred spirit in Russell. He walked 50 miles to Dublin to meet with the elder artist, who introduced him to a broad swath of reading material, instilling a late literary education, and to the city’s creative circle. Kavanagh found early success there: he published his first poetry book, Ploughman and Other Poems , with Macmillan in 1936. He lived in London briefly, then settled in Dublin in 1939, hoping to embark on a literary career. However, Dublin was not the artistic enclave he’d yearned for: he found himself tokenized as a peasant-poet, due to the Anglo-Irish literary elites’ sentimental adulation of traditional Irish farming life. Kavanagh wrote one early prose work relying in part on that persona, The Green Fool , which he later rejected. His famed 1942 work, “The Great Hunger,” took a more cold-blooded look at the realities of peasant life in Ireland, rebuking its romanticization by Irish Revival writers and artists. This long narrative poem set him up as an opponent to the dwindling Revival and found him wider audiences across the Atlantic.

Kavanagh worked as a journalist for many years, wearing the hats of gossip writer, film critic, and more for a range of periodicals. He was well-known—and not infrequently disliked—for his sharp, satirical pen, which never swerved from uncomfortable truths about politics, his peers, and major Irish social institutions. During this time, he published the poetry collection A Soul for Sale and the novel Tarry Flynn , the latter of which was briefly banned. In 1952, his brother financed a journal for him to edit, Kavanagh’s Weekly . The magazine folded after 13 issues. Soon after this, Kavanagh pursued and lost a libel case against the magazine The Standard over an anonymous article that depicted him as a fool and a drunk. He also had a lung removed due to cancer.

From this nadir, Kavanagh experienced a rebirth as a poet. While recuperating by Dublin’s Grand Canal, he was inspired to lay aside his acerbic wit for an acceptance of things as they were, making space for a newly optimistic poetics. The new collections Recent Poems and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling emerged, as well as a Collected Poems . He was awarded a lecturing post at University College Dublin and traveled to United States colleges to speak. Kavanagh married his longtime companion, Katherine Barry Moloney, in 1967. He fell ill that year after attending a staging of his Tarry Flynn at the Abbey and died a week later.

A favorite to this day among Irish readers, Kavanagh’s poetry is beloved for its vision of Ireland’s storied country life. However, a deeper vein runs through his work, combining rural nostalgia with a critical, realistic eye that punctures the prior decades’ often superficial glorifications of Irish peasantry. In this effort, per Eavan Boland, Kavanagh “has seemed…not only a signature writer of the Irish twentieth century, but something more as well: a figure creating a revelatory momentum within Irish poetry, and—wider than that—the history of poetry.”

Learn more about Patrick Kavanagh

Resource: An RTÉ installation on Kavanagh's life, featuring video, audio recordings, and text

Text: Eight short poems by Kavanagh at Trinity College Dublin's Patrick Kavanagh site

Audio: Kavanagh's poem "The One" read on On Being's Poetry Unbound

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Patrick Kavanagh's Advent: unifying the miraculous with the banal

At first you could almost imagine that the speaker in this week's poem, Advent by Patrick Kavanagh, is Adam, addressing Eve some while after the Fall. Calling the addressee "lover", after all, implies a close and carnal relationship. But the "too much" that the speaker and lover have "tested and tasted" is more inclusive than sexuality. The intellect is implicated in the word tested, although the tongue-tickling alliteration might seem to privilege sensation. In a poem whose deepest concern is with poetic integrity, the Muse herself may be identified with the "lover".

The "chink too wide" reinforces the idea that "wonder" is lost, both through bodily indulgence and excessive self-consciousness. The advent fast takes place in darkness – "the Advent-darkened room" – and external light would interfere with the sense-deprivation necessary to the act of penance. The paradoxical "luxury" that the penance will "charm back" resembles the birth in poverty of the infant Jesus – the restoration of "a child's soul".

Underlying the emotional charge of the poem is Kavanagh's sense of his native village in Inniskeen as an eden he sacrificed for the corrupt metropolis, Dublin. His outcry is not, I think, against knowledge, but city-slick, poetically useless knowingness. If such knowledge belongs originally to "Doom", as the speaker says, it must be perceived as truly terrible, and perhaps represent the worst that could happen to this poet: the loss of local roots leading to the decay of imagination.

Although the poem is nostalgic, its metaphysics reach wider than nostalgia. The Wordsworthian myth that a child arrives with inborn "intimations of immortality", later lost in the process of maturation, permeates Advent. Two vivid examples of childhood epiphany are contrasted in the second stanza. The word "wonder" reappears, heightened by the intensifier "spirit-shocking". That black Ulster hill is iconic for Kavanagh, and brings biblical associations in other poems. For example, in A Christmas Childhood , he looks up at "Cassidy's hanging hill" and imagines three whin bushes, or gorse, as the three wise kings riding across the horizon. Here, the "spirit-shocking" hill seems almost the metaphorical expression of the "prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking …" The half-rhyme (spirit-shocking/talking) unifies the miraculous with the banal.

Kavanagh's adult mind is arguing with itself, wanting to believe in the resonant words, but acknowledging the speaker as "an old fool". Christ-like, the poet both redeems and judges. His "Advent" is not simply the joyous arrival of the redemptive child: it also foreshadows the second coming.

The restored sense of place is what will urge "you and me" to go outside, not to look upwards, but to see the ordinary things with fresh eyes. The impetus is similar to that of the speaker in Thomas Hardy's " The Oxen ". In fact, Kavanagh's "old fool". with his words of "prophetic astonishment", seems not unrelated to the elder who says of the cattle: "Now they are all on their knees." But there are no kneeling oxen in Kavanagh's rural vision, simply "the whins/ And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins". Notice these are "old stables", not the singular stable of the nativity narrative. "Time begins" in an ordinary stable, provided the spectator looks on the scene with rejuvenated consciousness.

The inclusive rush of that line signals an exultant mood in the last stanza. The future tense is assertive: Christmas will compel a new start. It will bring childhood unforgettably alive again, and allow ancient processes to recommence. In those first four lines, Kavanagh's rhymes are thick and muddy, tactile and insistent. Poetry itself is set alight by "an old phrase burning" through the ordinary human domestic voices heard "in the whispered argument of a churning…" Again, Kavanagh presents his ideal world of farm and village realistically. Those "lurching", unruly local boys are no less valued than the busy women churning butter and the "decent men" who "barrow dung" – a terrific use of an unexpected verb – to nourish their gardens. "The difference" between false and real is grounded in honest, and above all, unselfconscious physical activity.

Language "pours ordinary plenty" in that last stanza, though it's not always so ordinary. "Dreeping", in "dreeping hedges", might be a coined word, fusing together the words "dripping" and "deep"; it also contains the Scots "dree", to endure, adding further density and rootedness to the hedges. "Clay", in "clay-minted wages", is an echo of the despairing opening words of Kavanagh's The Great Hunger : "Clay is the word and clay is the flesh." So "the clay-minted wages/ Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour" connect with failures of imagination and linguistic energy.

The shape of the poem is interesting: two stanzas of seven lines, and one of 14, joining up two sets of seven. This structure suggests the four weeks of the advent period, and the poem could be read as two rough-hewn sonnets. The rhyming is irregular, and some lines have no end rhyme. Kavanagh is more engaged with the weight and sound of words than with cadenced finesse. Although he uses "clay-minted" as a negative phrase, it might be an apt description of this awkwardly beautiful poem. The final couplet's epiphany, extending the birth-miracle into the new year, discovers Christ in an early flower, itself a product of the winter-darkened clay.

We have tested and tasted too much, lover – Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder. But here in the Advent-darkened room Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea Of penance will charm back the luxury Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking Of an old fool will awake for us and bring You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching For the difference that sets an old phrase burning – We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching. And we'll hear it among decent men too Who barrow dung in gardens under trees, Wherever life pours ordinary plenty. Won't we be rich, my love and I, and please God we shall not ask for reason's payment, The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges Nor analyse God's breath in common statement. We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour – And Christ comes with a January flower.

• Carol Rumens's poem of the week

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AWAITING MOSCOW'S GRAIN RESPONSE

AWAITING MOSCOW'S GRAIN RESPONSE; News Analysis

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By John F. Burns, Special To the New York Times

• Aug. 9, 1982

President Reagan's decision to propose a one-year extension of the Soviet-American grain agreement has set off a guessing game here about whether the Kremlin will negotiate on Mr. Reagan's terms or let the six-year-old pact lapse. Generally, Western diplomats and businessmen who follow the trade think that the Soviet Union's pressing need for grain imports will impel it to accept a 12-month extension, just as it did when a similar extension was offered last year. This year's Soviet harvest will be a poor and possibly even disastrous one, and Western forecasts are that the Kremlin will be looking abroad again for at least 40 million tons of wheat, corn and other grains.

But the Soviet decision is by no means certain. A week after President Reagan announced his decision, choosing a middle course between those in the Administration who wanted a long-term agreement and those who favored abandoning it, the Soviet press has offered no comment on the American move. This in itself suggests that there is debate inside the Kremlin about how to react.

Complaining by Moscow

Doubtlessly there are Soviet officials at senior levels who would like to rebuff President Reagan by declining a short-term renewal of the pact that has regulated Soviet-American grain trade since 1976. Fulminations in the Soviet press against the American use of embargoes and other trade restraints have become insistent in recent months, spurred by the array of sanctions Washington imposed on the Russians in the aftermath of their crackdown in Poland last December.

The grain situation offers the Soviet leaders an opportunity to demonstrate the themes that have been sounded by Pravda and other Soviet organs - if they choose to take it. These themes are, primarily, that United States embargoes have little or no effect on the Soviet Union, since it can seek supplies elsewhere, and that the United States is shooting itself in the foot by passing lucrative trade deals to other Western nations.

President Reagan, of course, is not proposing an embargo. But he has linked his refusal to negotiate a long-term grain agreement, which the Kremlin and many American farmers would prefer, to the situation in Poland. That makes any grain negotiation at this point inherently irksome for Moscow. It is all the more so for the fact that the grain trade was the target of the first major American embargo in recent years - the cutback imposed by President Carter after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. Grain Bought Elsewhere

To some extent the Russians have already demonstrated their independence of the United States in grain. When Mr. Carter limited American purchases in 1979-80 to the 8 million tons provided for in the grain pact, farmers in the United States lost many million tons of orders, and much of that went to other countries, mainly Argentina. Mr. Reagan lifted the Carter limitations in April 1981, but the figures for the current year suggest that the Carter action has had a lasting effect on Soviet buying patterns.

With a month still to run on the agreement, Soviet purchases from the United States have reached about 14 million tons out of a total of about 45 million tons bought abroad. That is barely 30 percent, compared with the market share of nearly 75 percent that was held by the United States in the last full year before the embargo. And the share was rarely less than 65 percent in the years before that, going back beyond the disastrous Soviet harvest of 1975 that put the Kremlin into the international market in a big way.

Despite the advantages that the United States offers, including superior shipping facilities, a broad range of grains in varying qualities and the capacity to move large quantities swiftly, the Russians have found substitute suppliers who have adequately met their needs. This year Argentina, once a minor factor compared with the United States, will sell the Soviet Union 14 million tons, about equal to the American figure. If No Agreement Existed

Politically, rebuffing the Reagan proposal must be tempting to the Kremlin.

The absence of a pact would not keep the Russians from buying in the United States. The situation would be like the one before the ''great grain robbery'' of 1972-73, when uncontrolled Soviet purchases pushed up the supermarket prices of American bread and cereal products. That experience persuaded Washington of the need for a grain agreement, and the result was the pact that committed the Russians to buying a minimum of 6 million tons a year, with a maximum of 8 million, before they were obliged to notify United States authorities of additional purchases.

By refusing to negotiate an extension, the Kremlin might also be stirring political trouble for President Reagan in the farm belt of the Middle West, a dividend that could attract Soviet leaders at a time when they are locked in confrontation with the Administration on arms issues, East-West trade, the Middle East and other matters. Soviet pronouncements have suggested a growing frustration at the Kremlin's seeming lack of leverage with Washington, and grain trade is one place where they have obvious potential for impact.

But there are at least as many considerations that run the other way. While abandoning the agreement might hurt President Reagan, it would be a one-shot thing, whereas maintaining the pact gives the Russians a continuing lien on a part of the American political process. And many diplomats are convinced that from an economic standpoint any grain agreement with Washington is better for Moscow than none at all.