His intellectual recoil from Lough Derg’s display of peasant piety seemed of a piece with the quarrel between poetic imagination and Catholicism in the unfinished poem ‘Why Sorrow?’, so he decided to include a Lough Derg sequence in it. The poet-priest hero, Father Mat, makes his way to St Patrick’s Purgatory, where he immediately encounters Catholicism’s antipathy to nature, art and carnal desire. On Lough Derg’s island
. . . every leaf that is green is changed to fire
And everything that makes art and literature
Is a thing to be abhorred — impure desire . . .
Where long ago monks walled themselves in against the temptations of the flesh, today’s anaemic pilgrims
. . . said to life: ‘Stay out’
Life that was not coming in . . .
To Father Mat, many of the pilgrims are hucksters bartering penance for favours:
A few more shillings in the till,
A rival crushed,
A few more bullocks on a hill.
For this they prayed . . .
A middle-class devotee on the make, who punishes herself in the hope of securing a civil service post for her dull-witted son, is a figure of fun:
She bent
The power of prayer and self-made punishment
So he might stagger through the oral test —
‘That Gerry may pass, O Lord, that we may rest’
Was it for honours in his examination
She added on an unrequired Station?
However, Kavanagh’s disaffection gives way to compassion when he contemplates needy as opposed to greedy pilgrims, those like himself who long for employment or a lover. Indeed, two of the pilgrims he invents in ‘Why Sorrow?’ are in some ways mirror images of their maker: one an out-of-work clerk praying for a job so that he may marry recalls Kavanagh’s own daily quest for clerical employment; the other, a spinster, who for years has sought in vain for a husband at dances and fairs, has a long nose, like the poet, and is in her mid-30s.
Yet Kavanagh’s ambivalence in the face of credulous Catholicism overwhelmed and scuppered the poem. The only extant typescript of ‘Why Sorrow?’ is unfinished and it peters out during the St Patrick’s Purgatory sequence. Perhaps it was never concluded, because in what had started out as a mere episode in his priest-hero’s life-crisis, the poet discerned the emergence of another and altogether different poem on Irish Catholicism, pilgrimage-centred rather than priest-centred.
On Sunday, 3 May 1942, Kavanagh was in Knock reporting on the pilgrimage there for The Standard, the report that won him favour with Archbishop Walsh. It was the kind of social occasion he enjoyed. Walking among the groups of pilgrims and eavesdropping on their talk, he observed how ‘laughter and the ordinary business of life . . . is woven with religion in the texture of country life’. Typical of this was the way in which a farmer interrupted his recitation of the litany — ‘Star of the Sea, pray for us, Queen of peace, pray for us’ — to remark on ‘that bit of oats of Micky’s down there’. Such instances of the easy intermingling of the pious and the profane he invariably found entertaining.
Now that, under the aegis of O’Faoláin and O’Connor, he had come to look on literature as a vehicle for documenting and interpreting Irish life, he conceived the idea of writing a poem on the Lough Derg pilgrimage. This poetic project would be his most sociologically and religiously ambitious undertaking to date: an anatomy of the collective national psyche as represented by the prayers, petitions and talk of a group of pilgrims — a cross-section of Irish life, as it were.
Whereas The Great Hunger had focused exclusively on the subsistence farmer class, he now wished to conduct a more inclusive analysis of Catholic Ireland, taking in the upwardly mobile middle classes and the urban poor and unemployed. St Patrick’s Purgatory, already perceived by him as a manifestation of ‘the Irish mind’, was particularly suited to serve as the locus of his poem because men and women from town and country, from all parts of Ireland and from all walks of life, were to be found assembled there. As an island pilgrimage it had the additional advantage of presenting his subject to him in self-contained isolation, a vision of Ireland at its most monolithically and intensely Catholic. Whereas other Irish pilgrimages lasted only a few hours and were relatively unstructured, the three-day duration of the Lough Derg ordeal would give him time to familiarise himself with various aspects of his subject. The routine of prescribed communal exercises would also provide a ready-made documentary structure.
His previous trip to Lough Derg had been sprung on him unexpectedly. This time he would make his way there purposefully. By the time the annual Lough Derg pilgrimage season opened on 1 June he was fully determined to brave St Patrick’s Purgatory once more in the interests of his art. Since The Standard liked to report on the opening of the pilgrimage, the editor, Peadar O’Curry, was easily persuaded to commission an article on the topic, so all expenses were covered. Fortified with a secret stash of sandwiches, the poet set out to confront his subject.
His newspaper report for The Standard betrays the uncertainty of response which would trouble the poem. He declares that his ‘first and strongest impression’ of Lough Derg was of the ‘freshness and recency of Christianity’, ‘the excitement of the new truth . . . stirring the imaginations of men and women’, but then proceeds in a contradictory vein, deploring the Victorian smugness of the pilgrims, their impenetrable coat of heavy protective piety, the absence of obvious mental or spiritual conflict among them. Bearing in mind that he wished to stay in the good graces or on the payroll of The Standard’s editor, his recording of such reservations about the pilgrim faithful suggests a high degree of private distaste for Irish piety. He would be more open about his feelings in the ensuing poem.
Lough Derg inverts the narrative strategy of The Great Hunger in which the local encapsulates the national and the timespan is a human lifetime. Here all Ireland, north and south, is reduced to parish size and its emotional and spiritual gamut charted over a three-day period. Men and women from town and country and from twelve of the thirty-two counties are represented: priests and laity, the professional classes, civil servants, shopkeepers, farmers, the urban and rural poor. A catalogue listing pilgrims by profession and place of origin is one economical method of extending the poem’s regional and social range of reference:
A baker from Rathfriarland [sic]
A solicitor from Derry
A parish priest from Wicklow
A civil servant from Kerry . . .
As in The Great Hunger, the narrative mode in Lough Derg is cinematic. Numerous shots of pilgrims at different named locations and in a variety of pious or relaxed poses, accompanied by snatches of prayer, hymns and dialogue, convey a realistic picture of life on the island. They are portrayed flocking into the chapel for benediction on their first evening; queuing with outstretched arms to renounce the world, the flesh and the devil; ‘tripping one another’ around the penitential stone rings, almost mindless with hunger, fatigue and pain; pulling bare feet close to their bellies during the cold all-night vigil; stumbling bleary-eyed from the hostel after their first night’s sleep; and waving and singing ‘O Fare Thee Well, Lough Derg’ as they return to the mainland by boat, their purgatorial stint completed. The sociable side of Lough Derg is not neglected: homely chat, the exchange of confidences, even flirtation. Lough Derg’s linear narrative follows the time scheme of the pilgrimage and the frequent references to the time of day or night at which the action takes place is both a documentary and a mimetic device, chronicling the slow passage of the penitential ordeal. Although it is not divided into numbered sections, Lough Derg otherwise imitates the irregular structure of The Great Hunger, being written in paragraphs or rhymed sequences of different lengths, with rhythm and rhyme sometimes obtrusive, sometimes almost disappearing under colloquial or rhetorical pressure from speakers or narrator.
Kavanagh was anxious to achieve more than mere cinematic reportage in his poem: he wanted to penetrate the minds
and hearts of his pilgrims. The better to understand their motivations, their aspirations, their conception of the divine, he read the written petitions they left on the altar. As in The Great Hunger, he assumes the role of the privileged commentator, here penetrating the secret recesses of the pilgrims’ consciousness, in particular using prayer as an expository technique. In a series of four prayers ‘shaped like sonnets’ he flouts the expectations of Shakespearian sonnet form by substituting the ‘banal beggary’ of the Irish poor for the customary sophisticated discourse. These sonnet-prayers are spoken by a would-be husband and farmer, a country spinster, an unemployed builder’s labourer, an elderly farmer plagued by lust. Rather than narrate case histories, the sonnets, addressed to figures of popular Catholic devotion, St Anthony, St Anne and the Sacred Heart, create the uncreated consciousness of ‘meanly poor’ Irish Catholics.
As in The Great Hunger, the poet-narrator of Lough Derg is a not altogether successful creation, but on this occasion the difficulty is not that he is over-persuasive; rather that he introduces a pervasive narrative uncertainty. Kavanagh is here confronting what attracted and repelled him in contemporary Catholic Ireland. The subject was probably too intimate or written up too soon after its occasion to allow sufficient artistic detachment. The narrator’s status in the text wavers between that of observer and pilgrim-poet, outsider and insider; emotionally he veers between alienation and empathy. Where The Great Hunger is sometimes flawed by a too strident polemicism, Lough Derg fails because its prejudices do not amount to a sustained parti pris. Whether or not Kavanagh went to Lough Derg to scoff and remained to pray, his poem begins contemptuously and concludes compassionately and the conflict between satiric superiority and pastoral charity ultimately destabilises the work.
The poem gets off to an unreliable start, its sneering authoritativeness undermined by inadmissible bias:
From Cavan and from Leitrim and from Mayo,
From all the thin-faced parishes where hills
Are perished noses running peaty water,
They come to Lough Derg to pray and fast and beg
With all the bitterness of nonentities, and the envy
Of the inarticulate when dealing with the artist.
While contempt for the snivelling, grovelling aspect of Irish religion, an association of piety with the peaty, is both legitimate and comic, the accusation of aesthetic envy is completely unwarranted and appears to derive from personal paranoia. It is inherently absurd to claim that the pilgrims are preoccupied with their philistinism, and nothing in the poem supports this initial outburst. Unexorcised painful memories of the start of Kavanagh’s disastrous 1940 pilgrimage seem to be intruding at the outset of his literary pilgrimage. It is unfortunate that the reader should begin by distrusting the narrator.
For the first third of the poem the poet-narrator struggles to strike a balance between scorn and sympathy. His dominant impulse is to sneer, yet he attempts to check it and reminds himself and his readers that some of the pilgrims are sincere. However, he finds it difficult to tell Lough Derg’s story ‘straight’ or straight-facedly. Humorous irreverence manifests itself in the rhyming of ‘Ireland’s national apostle’ with ‘the men’s hostel’ and in the choice of incongruous similes to describe the pilgrims: they are ‘shooed through the chapel door . . . like hens to roost’; they pray with outstretched arms ‘Like young police recruits being measured’; as they watch the arrival of newcomers they smother
. . . the ridiculous cheer
That breaks, like a hole in pants,
Where the heroic armies advance.
Lough Derg records the poet’s wavering faith not in God but in his co-religionists. He rails against the half-pilgrims, the uncommitted who represent ‘the true/Spirit of Ireland’, but the poem’s special animus is directed against the middle classes. With the exception of a Castleblaney grocer, who is arbitrarily awarded the gift of mystical vision, the middle classes are excluded from the narrator’s charity. They are acccused of a distrust of aestheticism or sensuousness: love, flowers, light are to shopkeepers and small lawyers ‘heresies up beauty’s sleeve’. The middle classes are the ‘smug too-faithful’ and their trials and tribulations are set to a callously cheerful tune to illustrate the vanity of human wishes:
Solicitors praying for cushy jobs
To be County Registrar or Coroner,
Shopkeepers threatened with sharper rivals
Than any hook-nosed foreigner.
Mothers whose daughters are Final Medicals,
Too heavy-hipped for thinking
Wives whose husbands have angina pectoris,
Wives whose husbands have taken to drinking.
At one point the sight of four middle-class men methodically calculating their way through the prescribed religious exercises and apparently unruffled by the spiritual or physical stresses of the pilgrimage provokes a homicidal fury in the poet-observer:
This certainty in men,
This three days too-goodness,
Too neighbourly cries
Temptation to murder
Mediocrities.
Although the narrator is only occasionally an actor in his poem, he is its most important character. His moody, mercurial presence dominates throughout. While not ostensibly a journey into his personal and poetic psyche, like Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, Lough Derg is nevertheless at times either covertly or overtly confessional. Unlike Heaney, Kavanagh is not artistically in control of his introspective processes; he appears to be struggling with his own partialities and preconceptions in order to achieve some semblance of objectivity and, in the concluding stages, enthusiasm. Lough Derg is really an extended lyric in the guise of a cultural commentary. Its increasingly positive attitude towards pilgrimage and Catholicism is due to a more buoyant and charitable personal mood, a willing suspension of superiority. Perhaps Lough Derg is not a masterpeice because it is such an honest poem. Kavanagh is struggling with his own tribal prejudices, caught in a love-hate relationship, familial in its intensity.
As well as centring on the poet-narrator’s personal reactions to the pilgrimage, the poem is covertly autobiographical. In the first sub-plot, Robert Fitzsimons, the farmer-pedant with his pompous, over-intellectual and self-defeating approach to courtship, resembles Kavanagh’s self-portrait as the failed lover of May Crawley in Stony Grey Soil. He keeps Aggie at arm’s length with his pseudo-philosophical discourse while she, who does not understand a word, wishes he would stand closer so that she could hold his hand. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the pedant’s attraction towards the ‘fallen woman’ also recalls his grandfather’s liaison with Nancy Callan, though Aggie’s tale of ‘birth, bastardy and murder’ is not based on Kavanagh’s maternal grandmother’s history. The second sub-plot of a Franciscan monk’s sexual intercourse with a young schoolgirl derives from Kavanagh’s own first sexual experience with the gymslip-clad 15-year-old who confided that she had been sexually assaulted by a priest. The priest’s paedophilia is not dwelt upon and the episode concludes laconically:
’Twas a failing otherwise
Lost him his priestly faculties.
Readers of the poem may be puzzled that Kavanagh has gone out of his way to drag in this atypical incident gratuitously at a time when clerical paedophilia was an unmentioned and unmentionable topic in Ireland. It is only when the personal relevance of the story is known that it becomes evident he is unburdening himself of a guilty secret.
One of the most quoted lines from Lough Derg encapsulates the numbing sensation of cultural severance consequent on Ireland’s neutrality in the Second World War:
All Ireland that froze for want of Europe . . .3
Kavanagh makes a poetic virtue out of de Valera’s isolationist policy of neutrality, defiantly flaunting the fact that he has chosen to write about a remote island pilgrimage in time of the breaking of nations:
They must seem realer, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler,
Than ideas in the contemplative cloister.
Are more significant than a peasant’s emotional problem.
But wars will be merely dry bones in histories
And these common people real living creatures in it
On the unwritten spaces between the lines . . .
His insistence on the importance of apparently obscure individuals is here made to derive from the Bible:
Only God thinks of the dying sparrow
In the middle of a war . . .
At the conclusion of his poem he deliberately juxtaposes his interlinear narrative with contemporary newspaper reportage of the war:
All happened on Lough Derg as it is written
In June nineteen forty-two
When the Germans were fighting outside Rostov . . .
He would always distrust newspaper definitions of the important: ‘the day’s loud lying’.4
Kavanagh’s Ulster literary hero, William Carleton, had inaugurated a successful career with the story ‘A Lough Derg Pilgrim’; his own attempts to derive copy from the pilgrimage were conspicuously less successful. All that he salvaged from two sojourns on St Patrick’s Purgatory and five attempts to write about the subject was one newspaper report in The Standard.
Why did Kavanagh apparently make no move to publish Lough Derg? He clearly intended to do so for he had it professionally typed and sent it to Frank O’Connor for his advice. O’Connor returned the typescript with a number of passages marked, but, without his accompanying letter, the significance of these marks, whether they indicate approval or disapproval, and also O’Connor’s general response, is unknown. Did he advise against publishing it because it was not good enough or at any rate not good enough to justify the outcry such a less than wholeheartedly admiring account of the pilgrimage would elicit? Or did he merely mark passages that needed some revision and reworking?
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 30
