Who owns them hungry hills
That the water-hen and snipe have forsaken?
A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor.

The poet who owned the hills was Patrick Kavanagh, and he was poor enough. His ‘black hills’ yielded him little in crops or cash, but from the seed sown there he reaped later a harvest of poetry.

Kavanagh's Collected Poems¹ span a wide range of poetic achievement and development. He begins in something of a Georgian pastoral style. His ‘Ploughman’ reveals a lyrical gift and a felicity of phrase:

I turn the lea-green down
Gaily now,
And paint the meadow brown
With my plough.
I dream with silvery gull
And brazen crow.
A thing that is beautiful
I may know. …

‘A. E.’ printed this poem (there are two more verses) in the Irish Statesman. But Kavanagh was already aware that this was not quite the whole truth about country life in Co. Monaghan. ‘I could not help smiling when I thought of the origin of my ploughman ecstasy. A kicking mare in a rusty old plough tilling a rood of land for turnips.’²

He soon developed a more powerful and individual voice of his own. It finds full expression in ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942), his longest poem and his most sustained and penetrating picture of rural life in Ireland. It is not about the Irish famine, often called the Great Hunger, but about the peasant's hunger for life and love, frustrated by his hunger for the land. Patrick Maguire, the central figure of the poem, remains unmarried at the age of sixty-five, tied to his old mother and his little fields, ‘a man who made a field his bride’. The poem has been described as ‘probably the best poem written in Ireland since Goldsmith gave us “The Deserted Village”’.³ Both poems might be said to lament the decay of rural life, but they have little else in common. Goldsmith, like most eighteenth-century poets, wrote in the shadow of the pastoral myth that has haunted European literature since the time of the Greeks. A dream of pastoral innocence and contentment, supported by recollections of the golden age and the Garden of Eden, coloured all descriptions of rural life. It is strongly present in Thomson's ‘Seasons’, the most influential pastoral poem of the age:

The happiest he! who far from public rage
Deep in the vale, with a choice few retired,
Drinks the pure pleasure of the rural life.

We find the same attitude in Goldsmith, with his idyllic picture of ‘Sweet Auburn’,

Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed:
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease …

With a few exceptions, notably George Crabbe, whose dark picture in ‘The Village’ is deliberately aimed at correcting Goldsmith's rose-tinted view, English poets continued to romanticize rural life, helped in the nineteenth century by Wordsworthian notions of the simple dignity of shepherds and dalesmen. Although Kavanagh himself began in a Georgian pastoral tradition, he supplies in ‘The Great Hunger’ an ironic antidote to nostalgic dreams of Irish peasant life:

The world looks on
And talks of the peasant:
The peasant has no worries;
In his little lyrical fields
He ploughs and sows;
He eats fresh food,
He loves fresh women,
He is his own master
As it was in the Beginning
The simpleness of peasant life.
The birds that sing for him are eternal choirs,
Everywhere he walks there are flowers …
The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields:—
The travellers touch the roots of the grass and feel renewed
When they grasp the steering wheels again …

The poem opens with a sombre etching of the monotonous toil of the potato-gatherers:

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanized scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill—Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
Of Death?

The poem is not merely a drab documentary of the potato fields. Although Maguire is firmly pinned to earth, his feet in the clay and dung, yet there are times when he laughs and sees the sunlight and has glimpses of joy and eternity. He also has ordinary comforts and compensations: gossip and cards, and a bob each way on the Derby. He goes to Mass on Sundays and attains the dignity of holding the collecting box at the chapel door. And yet he remains a pathetic figure. The worst thing about his life is not the fourteen-hour day that he works for years, but the mixture of narrow morality and caution that keeps him away from the girls until it is too late:

Who bent the coin of my destiny
That it stuck in the slot?

There is nothing for him to look forward to except death, when he ‘will hardly remember that life happened to him’:

Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified:
The graveyard in which he will lie will just be a deep-drilled potato-field
Where the seed gets no chance to come through
To the fun of the sun.
The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.
Silence, silence. The story is done.

Kavanagh now thinks that ‘The Great Hunger’ is not poetry. ‘There are some queer and terrible things in “The Great Hunger”, but it lacks the nobility and repose of poetry.’⁴ Kavanagh is a penetrating critic of his own work. We may admit that the absence of repose is a weakness: there is a raw edge, a certain stridency that sometimes grates on the ear, but this by no means destroys the power of the poem. Taken as a whole it is profoundly moving. Although there are occasional lapses, when the vitality of rhythm and language seems to flag a little, for the most part the writing is taut and resonant, and combines a colloquial ease with flashes of vivid imagery. Kavanagh catches brilliantly the turns and tones of country talk and reflection. There is the card game, for example, or this picture of Maguire at Mass:

Maguire knelt beside a pillar where he could spit
Without being seen. He turned an old prayer round:
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph pray for us
Now and at the hour of our death …
Wonder should I cross-plough that turnip-ground?’
The tension broke. The congregation lifted its head
As one man and coughed in unison.
Five hundred hearts were hungry for life—
Who lives in Christ shall never die the death.
And the candle-lit Altar and the flowers
And the pregnant Tabernacle lifted a moment to Prophecy
Out of the clayey hours.
Maguire sprinkled his face with holy water
As the congregation stood up for the Last Gospel.
He rubbed the dust off his knees with his palm, and then
Coughed the prayer phlegm up from his throat and sighed:
          Amen.

There is a fine control of pause and flow in the verse here. Line 5 suggests the quick snatch of mundane thought. After the short statement, ‘The tension broke’ the verse flows easily towards the climax in ‘Out of the clayey hours’. The movement changes again with the relaxation of the next line. It could hardly be said that this stanza is lacking in repose; and there is a delicate play of irony in the balance between the clay and the prophecy in Maguire's mind and heart.

Kavanagh has no illusions about country life; he knows it too well. But he has a deep attachment to country things and places. Although to some extent he turned his back on his home acres, the deep roots of affection remained. At times he resented the ignorance and barbarity that stifled his youth:

You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!

But in the love-hate relationship with the ‘stony grey soil’ it is love that wins:

                                                            They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world. …
Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.
But now I am back in her briary arms
The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies
On bleached potato-stalks—
What age am I?
I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

This is an unusually dramatic and emphatic statement of the ties that bound him, but his poetry everywhere reveals the mark of his early years in the country. Scenes and moments from his boyhood constantly return to him. In the streets of Dublin or London he remembers his country tasks:

I recover now the time I drove
Cart-loads of dung to an outlying farm …
The steam rising from the load is still
Warm enough to thaw my frosty fingers
In Donnybrook in Dublin ten years later.

In another poem he recalls how he used to spray the potatoes in July:

And poet lost to potato-fields,
Remembering the lime and copper smell
Of the spraying barrels he is not lost …

It is a remarkable thing that after all the years that have passed since Wordsworth made nature-worship fashionable, after all the clichés about the ‘beauties of nature’ and the ‘good earth’, a contemporary poet can still write of rural life with freshness and vitality, without Georgian sentimentality or triteness. But, if we except some of the earlier poetry, Kavanagh does just this. Part of his strength lies in the fact that his vision of country things is never divorced from common reality. His feet are firmly planted in the clay and dung, and yet, in the midst of the commonplace, he perceives those ‘bright shoots of everlastingness’ that Vaughan knew. Beauty and wonder grow alongside the trivial and the sordid:

In the sow's rootings where the hen scratches
We dipped our fingers in the pockets of God.

‘God is in the bits and pieces of everyday’ he says, in ‘The Great Hunger’. For Kavanagh even the weeds of the field are beautiful. He looks at them not as a farmer but as a poet. ‘The purpose of the poet is to give people an enthusiasm for life, to draw their attention to the wonder of the fields, of the weeds.’⁵ Crabbe, although he had a strong feeling for the East Anglian landscape of his boyhood, disapproved of the weeds that grew profusely round his village:

Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye:
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf;
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade.(6)

Perhaps Crabbe was conditioned by the outlook of the eighteenth-century landscape-gardener, though a note of admiration creeps in by the back-door in his references to ‘the blue bugloss’ and the ‘silky leaf’ of the mallow.

Kavanagh frankly abandons himself to the beauty and wonder of the weeds. He is speaking of himself when he writes of Terry Flynn's response:

The three big nettles that grew in the ring of boulders upon which last year's pikes of hay had stood were rich with the beauty of what is richly alive. The dust of last year's hay and straw was so lovely it could almost make him want to prostrate himself upon it. Stones, clay, grass, the sunlight coming through the privet hedge. Why did he love such common things?⁷

The secret of his vision is love; he loves the fields and the weeds:

Standing on the side of a hill in Monaghan, an indifferent landscape of crooked lanes and little humpy hills covered with whins, I found love, the kind of love that purifies, a sort of Divine love. Yes—

                                                            The fields that heal the humble …(8)

But the outflow of his love is not only towards the fields. In the streets of Dublin, or in a garage in Monaghan town, he can still praise the commonplace. In ‘The Hospital’ he records how he fell in love with the ward of a chest hospital:

                                        nothing whatever is by love debarred
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.

He had indeed some reason to love this hospital. He survived there the removal of a lung which had contracted cancer. He was, as it were, born again into the common world of human experience. Only at this point, he thinks, did he really become a poet. His love and praise were poured out on the canal bank walk and seat: ‘Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal Pouring redemption for me …’

In the poems contained in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling there is a joyful surprise that ‘an unthrifty Man turned of fifty’, without wife or child, is able to count his blessings and that he can still walk on ‘eternal lanes of joy’. There is a note of prayer and praise throughout the poems of this period:

                                                  Now I am sure
Of something. Something will be mine wherever I am.
I want to throw myself on the public street without caring
For anything but the prayering that the earth offers.

Kavanagh is not only a poet of the potato fields. He also belongs to Dublin. He knows, and deplores, all the excitements and squalors of the Bohemian jungle.

For some years now his poetry has been difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. There is all the more reason to welcome the publication of his Collected Poems. Kavanagh certainly belongs to a world of his own and his voice is a markedly individual one:

If ever you go to Dublin town
In a hundred years or so
Inquire for me in Baggot Street
And what I was like to know.
O he was a queer one
Fol dol the di do,
He was a queer one
I tell you.
He knew that posterity has no use
For anything but the soul,
The lines that speak the passionate heart,
The spirit that lives alone.
O he was a lone one
Fol dol the di do,
Yet he lived happily
I tell you.

Notes

1. MacGibbon and Kee, 1964.

2. The Green Fool, p. 288.

3. The Leader, 11 Oct., 1952.

4. Self-Portrait.

5. Kavanagh's Weekly, No. 13.

6. ‘The Village’.

7. Terry Flynn, p. 173 (Four Square ed.).

8. X, vol. 2, No. 2, Aug. 1961.