IT Emergency Lesson 2: Favourite Poet

The poet that I chose is Patrick Kavanagh. He is intriguing as he is regarded as one of the foremost poets in the 20th century, and his best known works include the novel Tarry Flynn and the poem On Raglan Road. His work can best be categorised as detailed accounts of rural Irish life and religion in Ireland. Kavanagh began writing verses at a young age and he began submitting poems to local and national newspapers. He became increasingly dissatisfied with life as a small farmer, and in 1938 he left Inniskeen for London and remained there for about five months. In 1939 he finally settled in Dublin. That was Kavanagh's early life. By the early 1940s his poems were beginning to attract attention of the literacy circle. He also played goalkeeper for the Inniskeen Gaelic football team. Kavanagh worked as a journalist when he was in Dublin, writing a gossip column in the then Irish Press from 1942 to 1944 and acted as film critic for that same publication from 1945 to 1949. His novel, ’Tarry Flynn', was banned in Ireland, but was made into a play in 1966. In 1954, two major events changed Kavanagh's life: firstly, he embarked on a libel action and ended up being defeated; Kavanagh was diagnosed with lung cancer and had one of his lungs removed. While Kavanagh was recovering, it was then he appreciated nature and took inspiration from it and used it to write much of his later poetry.
He gave lectures at University College Dublin and in the United States,and he published his own journal "Kavanagh Weekly, A Journal of Literature and Politics" and had thirteen editions on it. Kavanagh fell ill at the opening performance of "Tarry Flynn" at the Abbey Theatre and he died later that week in a Dublin nursing home on 30 November 1967.

Three poems Kavanagh wrote were: Advent, Canal Bank Walk and Epic.

Advent:

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
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.

Canal Bank Walk:

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

Epic:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel—
"Here is the march along these iron stones"
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Til Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
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Source of information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Kavanagh
Source of poems: http://http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/patrick_kavanagh/apoems