When the hide of a gannet is lovely
And the tide at Cross does come in
I’ll say you are lovely, dear Lucy,
But at present a falsehood is sin.14
In spite of the long-term truth of Kavanagh’s assertion, ‘If roots I had they were in the schoolbooks’, the organic connection between reading poetry and ‘poeming’ proved a slow growth and there was a ten-year latency period while he absorbed the cadences and diction of schoolbook verse from Shakespeare and Milton to Gray, Tennyson and Mangan, without these having any perceptible influence on his own verse.
Another reason that the effect of the schoolbook verse was so slow to penetrate his own verse is that his staple reading was not confined to the canon of English poetry. He was also devouring the patriotic ballads and the sentimental romantic or religious verse found in popular magazines, and these were much more easily imitated than Pope or Milton. His flyting of Lucy, for instance, suggests that he was familiar with the autograph book verse that was enjoying a vogue, especially among convent schoolgirls, at the period. By far the most easily accessible popular journals were Old Moore’s Almanac and The Messenger of the Sacred Heart, which were to be found in every country house. Farmers bought the Almanac for its long-range weather forecasts, bringing it home from the fair or market about September.15 Their wives bought The Messenger, a pamphlet-sized religious monthly with a red cover which promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.16 Brian O’Higgins contributed Christmas-card style religious verses to The Messenger and at the back of the Almanac there were ballads and elegies. These Almanac verses were often delightfully ridiculous, never more so than when the intention was to be serious and pathetic, but it is probable that in his early teens Kavanagh was not as aware of their comic potential as he would be later. It was, in fact, the painter Seán O’Sullivan who drew his attention to one of the funnier examples of Almanac verse, an elegy on the death of an Irish baby written by an American relative:
Across the raging seas was heard
The feeble infant’s dying roar . . .17
Ireland’s Own, the popular weekly designed to offer an Irish ethnic alternative to the flood of English pulp magazines, was also read in the Kavanagh household. It published patriotic ballads and nostalgic doggerel in praise of a native place. Kavanagh continued to peruse it well into the 1940s; a copy of Ireland’s Own left lying on a Dublin café table indicated that P.K. had been there, he said.18
Much of Kavanagh’s early versifying attempted to imitate the homespun models in Ireland’s Own or Old Moore’s Almanac or the popular ballads found on the coloured ballad sheets sold at fairs in Dundalk and Carrickmacross. In the beginning his verse was designed for family or public entertainment, like his father’s melodeon-playing or the stories told by customers and hangers-on in the cobbler’s shop. In the 1920s, when possession of a wireless set was still a rarity (the Kavanaghs did not own one until 1933), the local community was largely self-reliant in the matter of entertainment and the talent of holding an audience was highly prized.
He had a local role model or rival, the well-established ballad-maker, John McEnaney (1872–1943), known as the bard of Callenberg. The bard wrote amusing verses about local people and local happenings such as football matches (‘Inniskeen Grattans versus Maghera Mac Finns, Co. Cavan’, 1888; ‘The Sports of Inniskeen’, 22 June 1901). Sometimes his effects are unwittingly comic as when his pre-advertisement for a sports day to be held on 29 June is larded with poetic diction — references to ‘That limpid Fane, dear purling Fane’ — but he was also a consciously humorous poet, casting himself as comic butt, as in ‘The Pledge’, composed after 1904 when the Temperance movement was recruiting heavily in Inniskeen, which concludes:
I hear you ask the reason why, in drink I’m not indulging
Well, facts are facts, who will deny, and truth I’ll be divulging
When I was boozing bear in mind, the ‘Peelers’ oft assailed me
And by them often I was fined and once or twice they jailed me.
An Orangeman in Dundalk town, had me incarcerated
For being drunk, and fallen down, and something more I stated.
So take advice, yourselves enrol against all strong potations
And save your poor immortal soul from Hell’s dreadful damnation.19
The poem of McEnaney’s that Kavanagh most enjoyed, his flyting of the Inniskeen grocer, Phil Magee, is humorous at the bard’s own expense as well as the grocer’s:
The welkin was ringing
And off I went singing
For in Inniskeen I’m well pleased for to be
But in less than an hour
Male, pollard and flour
Was whipped off me cart by consaitey Magee . . .20
The bard could not afford the goods. For many years to come Patrick would associate humour with local balladry and he took pains to avoid it in his serious verse.
After a first attempt that got stymied because he tried to rhyme the unrhymable ‘Monaghan’,21 he settled down to write doggerel with a strong dash of local piety about the more rhymable Inniskeen, its river, the Fane (Mucker had to be avoided for obvious reasons) and its guerilla fighters, presented in archaic rhetoric as ‘brave Irishmen who long the tyrant power defied’, marching ‘to break the slaves’ chain or fill an honoured grave’. His tribute to the Inniskeen Volunteers is closer to the patriotic verse of the ballad sheets or Ireland’s Own than to McEnaney’s comic tones:
On the whin-covered slope in fierce battle array
Stood the Inniskeen men at the close of the day
With their guns on their shoulders and their banners on high
Waving proudly yet gently in the evening’s wind sigh.
And fiercely they gazed o’er the flower decked plain
Those warriors bold from the banks of the Fane . . .22
Kavanagh, it must be said, did not attain the bard of Callenberg’s competence as a maker of local ballads. His supposedly comic verses on the Inniskeen pipers’ band or the sample he himself recorded of his ballad style — lines about a local wedding hooley which some men had tried to crash — both lack McEnaney’s humour and bite, even his fluency:
Farrelly climbed in by the window
But Dooly fell back with a souse
And the singing and shouting was terrible
Around the half-barrel of stout . . .23
The bard of Callenberg’s legacy was something of a poisoned chalice, not only on account of his superior skill as a balladeer, but because as a drunken reprobate, so impoverished that a collection had to be taken up for him on the occasion of his marriage, he brought the role of poet into disrepute. In the local lexicon of terms of abuse, ‘bard’ was on much the same level as ‘bastard’, yet Kavanagh was going public on his poetry by the age of 20, if not before, and when he sent verses to local and national newspapers, he did not take the precaution of using a pen-name, indeed sometimes even unnecessarily added Mucker to his address, as if to ensure identification.
The impulse to express himself publicly in verse was so well established by the age of 20 that in April 1925, when he returned from having his collar bone set in the Monaghan County Infirmary, he sent a sheaf of verse epistles instead of postcards to the patients of the Murray ward, addressing a comic ‘ode’ to each inmate with whom he had shared a four-day stay a couple of weeks previously.24
At first he probably only went public on his more jocular or patriotic ballads and his attempts at rendering private experience in verse were more secretive. However, a poem dating from his time as a fever patient in autumn 1923 suggests that he was sitting up in bed in the public ward writing in full view of the other patients:
The sun through the window is shining
The dark gloomy night faded away
And I on my pillow reclining
Am praising the lord for the day.
For night is the dread of the sick and the weak
I sit up in bed and fondly stare<
br />
Through an hospital window at green hills fair,
And ponder on joys that I cannot share
Out in the bracing morning air.
A 1923 entry in the Cobbler’s Account Book expresses a private moment of rapture, yet he wrote it in a book which the entire family perused:
I’m sitting on a bag of oats on the loft; the sun is shining most beautiful on me; 8th May 1923
It is a poignant literary moment, catching the future poet in chrysalis as it were. When he tries to record a genuine experience that is outside the framework of local ballads or textbook poems, he is almost inarticulate, but the lines live because of the circumstantial honesty of the writing. It would be years before he would have the courage to bring the poetically sanctioned shining sun and the utterly unsanctioned bag of oats as a seat into conjunction in a published poem. His weak grammar and punctuation at this point expose the gap between his daily speech and the elegancies of textbook verse.
Though Inniskeen was monolingual in Patrick’s youth, there was still a school and a home language just as there had been in his grandfather’s days in Kednaminsha, when most of the pupils spoke English at school and Irish at home. In the schoolbooks and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury the subjects and happenings he read about were remote from cobbling, subsistence farming, local football matches and ‘hoolies’. Their words and phrases, many of which belonged to an outmoded poetic diction rather than to current standard English in any case, were doubly strange, almost a foreign language compared to the local dialect Kavanagh heard around him every day. In the fragments of early verse that survive, he is occasionally to be seen in transition between the schoolbooks and his own situation. He is obviously heavily reliant on William Cowper’s much-anthologised ‘The Poplars’ in
The tree is felled that shaded me
On many a summer’s day . . .
The playful ‘Address to an Old Wooden Gate’, which he published on 2 February 1929, is his most sustained early attempt at adapting schoolbook verse to Inniskeen conditions:
Battered by time and weather; scarcely fit
For firewood; there’s not a single bit
Of paint to hide those wrinkles, and such scringes
Break hoarsely on the silence — rusty hinges:
A barbed wire clasp around one withered arm
Replaces the old latch, with evil charm . . .
The precursor poem here is ‘The Deserted Village’; the poem attempts to imitate its heroic couplets and catch its tonal blend of elegy and whimsy, yet the overall effect is not all that dissimilar to the bard of Callenberg’s offerings with their amusing juxtaposition of archaic poetic diction and local vernacular. In Kavanagh’s case it was possibly the exigencies of rhyme that compelled him to include the local dialect word ‘scringes’ (scraping, grating sounds) among the poeticisms ‘Ere long’ and ‘fair tryst’, and to arrive at an unconventional pairing of ‘sentry’ with ‘country’. For the first time he is taking notice of familiar and ‘unpoetic’ sights like ‘rusty hinges’, ‘barbed wire’ and ‘cows’, but his dismissal of local poetry as ‘entertainment only’ is signalled by his publication of this piece in the Dundalk Democrat, the same newspaper favoured by the bard of Callenberg.
His first serious poems had already begun to appear in a national newspaper, the Irish Weekly Independent. The paper offered a weekly prize of half a guinea for the best contribution to its poetry column, ‘A Selection of Irish Verse’, a real enticement to the perennially hard-up young Kavanagh. Fifteen times between 1 September 1928 and 8 June 1929 he got as far as being published as one of a number of runners-up, but he never succeeded in winning first prize. In later life, he liked to pretend that he had once been pipped to the post by someone who put forward Joyce Kilmer’s ‘A Tree’ as his own work. His Independent verses with their outdated poetic language and fake sentiments all too obviously expose their roots in the schoolbooks:
O break, cold heart!
Thou’rt lost
For want of wine . . .
(‘The Pessimist’, 22 September 1928)
I knocked at your door and craved
One grain of gold,
It would not ope to my knocking . . .
(‘To Fame’, 2 March 1929)
As his Inniskeen readers would not have been slow to remark: ’Twas far from wine and gold he was reared. Looking back on his early struggles to imitate the poetry favoured by Palgrave and the schoolbook anthologists, he humorously observed that ‘the Assyrian came down like a wolf’ on most of it.25
Already a new influence had supplanted Palgrave and the school readers, though because of the usual time lag between what he was reading and writing it did not yet show. While attending the Saturday grass seed market in Dundalk on 22 August 1925, he happened to come upon a copy of the Irish Statesman, the journal of arts and ideas edited by Æ, in R. Q. O’Neill’s, a newsagent. When he visited either Carrickmacross or Dundalk he was in the habit of browsing through whatever newspapers and journals were on display, usually buying Ireland’s Own, the Weekly Independent and John O’London’s Weekly. But the Irish Statesman was different, opening up new literary horizons whose existence he had never suspected. For the first time he had come across a highbrow Irish weekly entirely devoted to literary and cultural concerns. It was the first time he had heard the names of such modernists as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In particular, he was ecstatic about Æ’s poem ‘Cities’ in this issue, not an innovative or avant-garde piece but the first twentieth-century poem with literary pretensions he had ever encountered:
Fairy shall dance in
The streets of the town
And from sky headlands
The Gods looking down.
The basis of the poem’s appeal, apart from its accessibility, pronounced rhythm and clear rhyme — qualities that appealed to him at this time — was that it linked the rural and the urban, headlands and streets, the past and the future, the fairies of folklore and the modern city of which he knew only by repute. The mythological ‘gods’, rather than the singular deity of Roman Catholicism, set up daring associations between poetry and paganism. If overhearing or reading Mangan’s ‘A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century’ was Kavanagh’s first literary epiphany, Æ’s poem ‘Cities’, read over and over again on a Dundalk pavement shortly before his twenty-first birthday, was his second. He was so excited that he memorised it and possibly cut it out of the journal so that he could reproduce it accurately twelve years later in The Green Fool. Whenever he could, he bought the Irish Statesman and after he acquired his Uncle Jimmy’s bicycle he cycled into Dundalk every week to pick up a copy and was furious if it was sold out. He had neither the cash nor the confidence at this point to have a copy reserved for him.
Much of the Irish Statesman must have been well above his head, accustomed as he was to lowbrow popular journals, but that was one of its main attractions. As he would put it in The Green Fool:
. . . it had a meaning and a message that had come from hills of the imagination far beyond the flat fields of common sense.
The way in which Kavanagh’s future genius showed itself at this point was mainly in an ambition to push beyond the intellectual and cultural boundaries of his own milieu, a continual straining towards some rarefied, ideal world of the intellect and imagination. The Irish Statesman was his university, indoctrinating him through its editor’s articles and reviews in a particular aesthetic. Its influence was one that he was a long time shedding and perhaps never entirely shook off.
His aesthetic guide was now Æ, mystic and intellectual, kindly patron and fosterer of many young Irish writers, the ‘most famous Irishman living permanently in Ireland’. One of the founding fathers of the Literary Revival, Æ had settled on the twilight verse of the 1890s as his appropriate mode. He was a visionary, his ‘heart drunk with a beauty’, his ‘eyes could never see’ and his poetry was preoccupied with the creation of a dream world. Its indistinct images, vague diction and other-world
ly aspiration were the debased remnants of a Shelleyan poetics and its metrics owed much to Swinburne and Morris.
The autodidact seeking a literary education in the pages of the Irish Statesman between 1925 and 1930 was indoctrinated in the poetics of late romanticism. Kavanagh’s views on poetry were shaped by such aesthetic pronouncements as:
. . . it is out of the dream consciousness that poetry is born . . .
(29 August 1929)
In what way did Shelley, Keats, Coleridge or Wordsworth mirror the life of their time? When they dealt with it directly they were rarely practical. They were at their highest in creating romantic or ideal worlds, and it is possible that the greatest of American writers to come may turn from their swollen cities to nature, and seek refuge in spiritual depths from those riotous surfaces . . .
(10 October 1925)
Prose comes from the conscious mind, while verse comes from the subconscious or dream mind, whose creations seem timeless . . .
(17 October 1925)
He was taught that poetry deserving of praise is ‘simple and fresh’, ‘touched with wonder’, ‘naively joyous or sad’, and he must have been comforted to learn that ‘the peasant who has no subtle words to express what he sees, does yet see more often than the city dweller the Eternal Phantom in air, sea and earth . . .’26
As editor of the Irish Statesman, Æ favoured idealistic, dreamy or incantatory lyrics, short, rhymed and usually with four-line stanzas, and translations or adaptations of Gaelic verse. It was a poetry at odds with the texture and idiom of contemporary life. Even the ‘Nocturne’ of a modernist like Thomas McGreevy conformed to this predilection for cosmic vagueness:
I labour in a barren place,
Alone, self-conscious, frightened, blundering;
Above me stars wheeling in space,
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 9
