[In the following essay, Grennan demonstrates that many of Kavanagh's poems can be understood as lying within the poet's idiosyncratic version of the Christian pastoral and points out many associations.]

Only they who fly home to God have flown at all

Patrick Kavanagh often described his work and his life in the image of a journey: “All we learn from experience is the way from simplicity back to simplicity.”¹ It is a traditional image, at root that of an Eden lost and a journey through the infernal places of the world to a recovered innocence, a paradise regained which is like and unlike the original, its innocence more aware, radical, profound, its simplicity “the ultimate sophistication.”² Although, therefore, he bemoaned the lack of a sustaining myth (“A myth is necessary, for a myth is a sort of self-contained world in which one can live,” Pruse, 268), his own poetic identity is a product, casual as well as deliberate, of the most accessible of Western myths, that of the pastoral. The early poems represent an experience of pastoral innocence; the later reflect upon this and repossess it in a new mode. To look at Kavanagh's poetry through the pastoral lens permits the design of that work to emerge in a rich, consistent light.

In one of his first engagements with the pastoral convention, Kavanagh is the Adam-poet. Unlike many earlier practitioners in the convention he is not the poet-shepherd, but the poet-ploughman, his version of the convention mediated through Wordsworth, John Clare, and Francis Ledwidge.³ In his novel, Tarry Flynn, speaking of this time, he states: “He did not love nature's works, but he was in love with them—and he wished he wasn't, for these things always made him sad, reminding him of something far and forgotten in the land of Childhood before the Fall of Man.”⁴ Many of the poems in Ploughman and Other Poems (1936) give expression to this garden existence in terms at once or by turns natural, mystical, and religious. It is an experience of “quiet ecstasy / Like a prayer,” of “Joy that is timeless!”⁵ Timelessness and other traditional aspects of the pastoral world are the dominant features of this experience. “Rapt to starriness” he finds himself in “a timeless world. It was an Eden time and Eve not violated. Men were not subject to death. I was happy.”⁶ The idiom of this experience is that of Christian pastoral at its most intense. The poet is a neighbour “to Seraphim” (“A Star,” Collected Poems; [hereafter referred to as C.P.], 8) and the light of May might be “Adam's God / As Adam saw before the apple-bite” (“After May,” C.P., 14). In the poems of this period a visionary pastoral world emerges under the poet's awakened, ecstatic scrutiny from the bare facts of the ordinary world. The act of ploughing itself becomes a sacred function, “For you are driving your horses through / The mist where Genesis begins” (“To the Man After the Harrow,” C.P., 27). The poet's condition is that of instant translator, transforming, as the pastoral convention invariably does, the dull metals of the world into the gold of visionary joy.

The Great Hunger (1942) represents an advance in Kavanagh's pastoral journey. The visionary gleam remains, but it is intermittent now, lost in the grey shades of clay that compose the poem's dominant subject. It might be called “tragic pastoral.” The soured life of Patrick Maguire has glimmers of ecstasy that draw upon traditional pastoral for their expression:

Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap
These men know God the Father in a tree:
The Holy Spirit is the rising sap,
And Christ will be the green leaves that will come
At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb

(C.P.., 38)

Such lights, however, succumb to the quenching sterility of Maguire's life. They provide us with the poet's awareness of the possibilities inherent in this world, but they cannot redeem the hero from his fate. For the most part The Great Hunger portrays the inexorable actuality of earth, an “apocalypse of clay” that slams shut in sterility and dread the gates of a pastoral Eden.

Kavanagh's own exile from Eden dated from his settling in Dublin in 1939: “Round about the late nineteen-thirties … foolishly enough … I chose to leave my native fields” (Self Portrait; [hereafter referred to as S-P], 10). The idiom in which he repeatedly remembers this event highlights its essentially pastoral nature. Tarry Flynn ends with “the beauty of what we love … the pain of roots dragging up” (188). His early autobiography, The Green Fool, insists on the same archetypal pattern, the loss of innocence contingent upon the poet's migration to Dublin: “I have always regretted going to Dublin. I had lost something I could never regain from books” (231). For in the world of Dublin all is changed: “here in this nondescript land / Everything is secondhand” (“Adventures in the Bohemian Jungle,” C.P., 108). Essentially it meant that he had turned from innocence to experience, from the sight of “the Burning Bush / Where God appeared” (“Temptation in Harvest,” C.P., 68) and all the other blessed phenomena of the pastoral world to a world fallen from that primary grace.

What he found in this world turned Kavanagh into a satirist, and it is as a satirist that he inhabits the second stage of his own pastoral design. In such poems as “The Paddiad,” “The Wake of the Books,” “The Defeated,” “Adventures in the Bohemian Jungle,” and “The Christmas Mummers,” Kavanagh exorcises his anger at the moral deficiencies and defects of decency and humanity in the world of experience. It is important to realize, however, that the role of satirist belongs to the traditional pastoral design, being conventionally a posture adopted by the poet (one thinks of Spenser's Shepherds Calendar and Milton's Lycidas) when the visionary possibilities of his original landscape break upon the stony realities of the world.

In contrast to the Edenic garden of innocence which informs the earlier lyrics, the world comes through in these poems as a kind of hell of the spirit. The journey of the poet is into “the very city of Hate” (“The Road to Hate,” C.P., 89) at the heart of which stands “the devil Mediocrity” (“The Paddiad,” C.P., 90). This world is a “jungle,” where “the lions of frustration roar” (“Jungle,” C.P., 96). Its inhabitants are “the defeated,” and the poem of this title ends with the poet's anguished response to the perverted values of this world:

O God, I cried, these treats are not the treats
That Heaven offers in the Golden Cup.
And I heard the demon's terrifying yell:
There is no place as perfect as our hell.

(C.P., 99)

The poet perceives his life in Dublin, at least for the purposes of his poetry, as the demonic antithesis to the ecstatic Edenic experience of his earlier life. Such a demonic netherworld is a necessary part of the full pastoral journey, as this was understood by the Renaissance poets, by Blake, even by Yeats.⁷ It is a land of damned sterility, exact counterweight to the almost mystical fertility of the early pastoral landscape. That Kavanagh himself understands his life in such terms may be seen in the allegorical outline of his poem “The Road to Hate”:

For I know a man who went down the hill into the hollow
And entered the very city of Hate
And God visited him every day out of pity
Till in the end he became a most noble saint.

(C.P., 89)

For Kavanagh's career to fit the outlines of the pastoral design exactly there must be a return of some sort to his original condition. Such a return is always more complex than a simple circling, however. In Kavanagh's case it falls into two distinct stages, each of them producing fine poems. Both sets of poems deal with recovery. The first group of poems is written before 1955, the second thereafter. In the first group the poet is possessed by a memorial excitement that rouses his imagination to recapture the likeness of an earlier self and its context:

And poet lost to potato-fields,
Remembering the lime and copper smell
Of the spraying barrels he is not lost
Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.

(“Spraying the Potatoes,” C.P., 78)⁸

This is an endangered possession, however. Like Wordsworth's memorial revelations, like all nostalgia, it is dependent upon things outside the self for its tenuous, threatened existence. With its Wordsworthian connections, this danger is clearest in “Primrose.” The poet begins in memory: “Upon a bank I sat, a child made seer / Of one small primrose flowering in my mind” (C.P., 75). It ends with his admission of the loss of this earlier pristine visionary power: “The years that pass / Like tired soldiers nevermore have given / Moments to see wonders in the grass.” The Edenic aspect of it all becomes explicit in “A Christmas Childhood” (C.P., 71–72). There he recalls “the gay / Garden that was childhood's,” and his fall from this blessed condition: “O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me / To eat the knowledge that grew in clay / And death the germ within it!”

In most of these poems it is the loss of his visionary past that preoccupies the poet. In “Innocence” he remembers this loss: “Ashamed of what I loved / I flung her from me and called her a ditch / Although she was smiling at me with violets” (C.P., 127). The tenuous nature of his imaginative recovery of this time is visible in the concluding stanzas of this poem:

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.

The most striking thing about such lines is the vulnerability of this repossession, with all its Edenic overtones of agelessness and exclusion. The poet closes his eyes to time, revives his childhood ecstasy, and voluntarily accepts its limits. He is an Adam gone back to the garden, opting out of the experience (women, cities) which his exile from it made possible.

The limits of such a condition of loss and memorial re-evocation are everywhere visible in this earlier group of poems. Again and again he returns to his denial of his Edenic past, trying to grope lyrically beyond it. “On looking into E. V. Rieu’s Homer,” for example, he remembers

The intensity that radiated from
The Far Field Rock—you afterwards denied—
Was the half-god seeing his half-brothers
Joking on the fabulous mountain-side.

(C.P., 134)

In “On Reading a Book on Common Wildflowers” he again confronts loss and the tenuous repossession of what was lost:

Let me not moralize or have remorse, for these names
Purify a corner of my mind;
I jump over them and rub them with my hands,
And a free moment appears brand new and spacious
Where I may live beyond the reach of desire.

(C.P., 137)

Here, as in all these poems, the poet's imagination is under siege. It is only “a corner of my mind” that is purified, and that only for “a free moment.” Most of all the condition aspired to is one of necessary surrender of something vital to himself: he must live here “beyond the reach of desire.”

It is clear that such poems do not complete Kavanagh's journey. They are a going back to “simplicity,” as he says himself, but in truth the journey can only be completed by a more radical movement forward, into an acceptance of, a surrender to his own present. In the above poems he expresses loss of vision. But in their Wordsworthian echoes and borrowings, they provide a ready-made frame that drains off the originality from Kavanagh's own profound sense of the experience, his own unique sense of present identity.

The essential confrontation with the present needed to complete properly his pastoral journey occurs in the poems Kavanagh wrote after 1955. It is from this date, in fact, that he himself marks his real “birth” as a poet. The event occurred in Dublin, not long after an operation that in removing one lung cured him of a cancer that might have killed him. “As a poet,” he says, “I was born in or about nineteen-fifty-five, the place of my birth being the banks of the Grand Canal” (S-P, 27–28). The earlier poems had represented a paradise returned to but not regained. The products of an intensely creative nostalgia, they can hold the past only in imagination, sweet counterpoints to an unpleasant present reality. As he says in “Kerr's Ass,”

          In Ealing Broadway, London Town
I name their several names
Until a world comes to life—
Morning, the silent bog,
And the God of imagination waking
In a Mucker fog.

(C.P., 135)

Such a return to a world of prelapsarian innocence is essentially a negative one, existing only by virtue of what it excludes.

In the poems after 1955, however, Kavanagh is imaginatively impelled towards an ever larger inclusiveness. In these poems he transforms the image of a journey back in imagination to a lost Eden into a condition of simple being. It is a condition not of movement but of stillness he celebrates; not imaginative, imperilled return but the perfect safety of an intensely realized presence. The moment of critical change is a moment of conversion. Fittingly it carries the baptismal blessing of water “Always virginal, / Always original, / It washes out Original sin” (“Is,” C.P., 154): “I sat on the bank of the Grand Canal in the summer of 1955 and let the water lap idly on the shores of my mind. My purpose in life was to have no purpose” (“Author's Note,” C.P., xiv). From this inner conversion, this discovery of what Milton called “the Paradise within,” flow those fine and final poems that represent Kavanagh's paradise regained. These poems with the experience they incorporate, complete the pastoral design of his work. The design is not, as he himself implied it was, a circle (“Curious this, how I had started off with the right simplicity … and came back to where I started” [S-P, 28]), but the more complexly truthful spiral. From this fresh perspective, as he says in a slightly earlier poem, “the main purpose / … is to be / Passive, observing with a steady eye” (“Intimate Parnassus,” C.P., 146). Such “wise passivity” is a state in which “God must be allowed to surprise us” (“Having Confessed,” C.P., 149). It is an “anonymous humility,” a state of pure being, a radical and practical innocence beyond rather than before experience. It is a state inclusive of all things—neither transcendental as his earliest visionary condition was, nor exclusive and vulnerable as his memorial evocations of his lost Eden were. Here he regains paradise in the present, beyond vulnerability because in a condition of complete surrender. This is his redemption: “Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal / Pouring redemption for me” (“Canal Bank Walk,” C.P., 150).

Absolute belonging in the present is one of the most important features of the last stage for Kavanagh's poetic identity. It takes him beyond nostalgia, ambition, and envy and allows him to “wallow in the habitual, the banal, / Grow with nature again as before I grew.” In “Canal Bank Walk” the poet's visionary intensity finds expression in a language at once tough and lyrical, its diction rising and falling with the pulse of present existence in the real world:

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.

(C.P., 150)

In this final pastoral state, being itself becomes the poet's unselfconscious prayer, a condition that takes him beyond the mystical raptures of the earlier poems (where innocence can be a kind of lit vacancy) and beyond the sensual nostalgia of the middle group, where prayer is memorial posture present in the imagination by virtue of its very absence in actuality.

Kavanagh's final pastoral recovery converts the world to its desire because it surrenders to what is beyond the self, the ego. It is the world itself that now glows with an air of acknowledged mystery: “Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges— / And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy / And other far-flung towns mythologies” (“Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal,” C.P., 150). In the pastoral achievement of self-possession the poet finds inclusiveness to be the governing principle, rather than that exclusiveness by which he could possess his lost Eden. Now all things have power to throb with the energies of being: “nothing whatever is by love debarred, / The common and banal her heat can know” (“The Hospital,” C.P., 153).

The truth of the spiralling pastoral journey is love—not a love that leaps through things to their mystical essence, not a nostalgic love for what is lost, but a love that is in and can transform all things, a love it is simply the poet's business to record. He is home at last:

This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a sun-trap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love's mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

(“The Hospital”)

The poet is a newly-awakened Adam, the familiar of sickness, mortality, civilization, and simple pleasure. He is the namer of these things (“I simply choose to name,” [“My Powers,” Complete Poems, 298]), the player in a game with time, the unsentimental, uninnocent recorder of “love's mystery.” The poem answers no questions. It records a state of fulness of being that is, in traditional terms, the meaning of the true pastoral return, a return that is no outward journey but a voyage to the paradise within of the truly liberated imagination. Its meaning lies in self-possession, in Keats's phrase, “soul-making.”

This awakened Adam is going nowhere, for “To look on is enough / In the business of love” (“Is,” C.P., 154). It is a state of ordinary mortal things brought to the level of “An enduring story,” and including “things above the temporal law.” Time and eternity meet here, in a manner quite distinct from the fresh-eyed mysticism of the early poems. An important element in this condition is its generosity, its perpetual blessing, its inclusiveness. The world, especially the world of nature, is charged with this novel energy, an energy at once powerful and lighthearted. The poet is absorbed by the landscape and a voice of knowledge that flows from beyond himself: “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God / Was breathing His love by a cutaway bog” (“The One,” C.P., 159).

The poem “October” (C.P., 159) makes the particular inwardness of this state very clear. The season of “leafy yellowness” creates “A world that was and now is poised above time.” But in spite of the temptation to nostalgia the season induces—for breeze, temperature, and “patterns of movement” are “the same / As broke my heart for youth passing”—the poet can possess himself in a different kind of peace, a certainty that “Something will be mine wherever I am.” In spite of the debts to memory that still stir him, he is essentially independent of time and space, becoming one himself with the season. True freedom is the fruit of this energetic surrender. “It is October over all my life,” he says, the line implying not self-pity but liberated acceptance. This condition of oneness, an integral atoneness with mutability, is the final component of the pastoral design. This design extends from the early seeing of eternity in ordinary things to this actual being at one with transience itself, not needing “to puzzle out Eternity.” As a condition of pastoral fullness it resembles the experience Keats enacts in the “Ode to Autumn.”

The final posture of this condition of liberty is that of praise, a purely natural response to the poet's feeling of being at one with the world: “So be reposed and praise, praise, praise / The way it happened and the way it is” (“Question to Life,” C.P., 164). Here is the repose of being after the anxieties of desire. It leaves “Nothing more to be done in that particular / Direction, nothing now but prayer—” (“Living in the Country: II,” C.P., 169). At this point the pastoral frame closes. Having declared closure, logically silence must follow. His latest work suggests, however, that he was denying, to no poetic avail, this silence. His poetic identity has run its course. He had composed it in, of all places, the garden of traditional pastoral, a genre richer and more various than is usually assumed. To this genre, by reason of the frame it composes in bringing his life and his work together, his poetry, in terms of its design, belongs.

That the bulk of Kavanagh's work may be understood within the design of his own idiosyncratic version of the pastoral seems confirmed by the presence in it of a detail that often makes its appearance in traditional Christian pastoral. This is the poet's identification or connection of himself with Christ. The poet as priest and Christ figure is a conventional part of Christian pastoral and this Kavanagh has translated into his own terms. Significantly, as with traditional examples of the genre, the identification often occurs in the context of satire.⁹

The connections between poet and Christ appear early in Kavanagh's work. In “Ascetic” he prays “That I may break / With these hands / The bread of wisdom that grows / In the other lands” (“Ascetic,” C.P., 5). He strikes another priestly pose in “A Star,” waiting “On the world's rim / Stretching out hands / To Seraphim” (C.P., 8). In “Worship” the Christological associations are stretched to almost blasphemous limits:

Open your tabernacles I too am flame
Ablaze on the hills of Being. Let the dead
Chant the low prayer beneath a candles shrine,
O cut for me life's bread, for me pour wine.

(C.P., 12)

The poet has become a rival to Christ, and whether the poem is one of sexual entreaty or not does not alter the matter. In “Lough Derg” he makes Christ a spirit very like the one he would claim for himself as a poet. For Christ hears, he says, “in the voices of the meanly poor / Homeric utterances, poetry sweeping through” (Complete Poems, 121).

In his prose Kavanagh is even more overt about the associations between Christ and the poet. “In every poet,” he states in an essay on “The Irish Tradition,” “there is something of Christ writing the sins of the people in the dust” (Pruse, 234). Elsewhere he is equally explicit: “the great poet equally with Christ offers life more abundantly.”¹⁰ In the well known libel action trial Kavanagh exploits again this association: “If really told the truth,” he says, “they would take me up on a high hill and crucify me” (Pruse, 214).

It is in the mask of victim that the most extended connection with Christ appears in Kavanagh's work and forms an important part of his poetic identity. In the “Author's Note” to the Collected Poems, for example, he says “poetry made me a sort of outcast … I do not believe in sacrifice and yet it seems I was sacrificed” (xiii). The hero of Tarry Flynn is described as having “to carry a cross. He did not want to carry a cross. He wanted to be ordinary” (68). Real life, with its ceaseless search for patronage, its round of insults, its climactic court case in which the poet was pitted against the forces of mediocrity and what he called evil gave fiber to Kavanagh's Christological associations. “I believe you can only die when you have done whatever you came into the world to do,” he once said (November Haggard, 47), and on another occasion he compared his indecision about going to Dublin to that of “Christ in Gethsemane” (“Temptation in Harvest,” C.P., 67).

Although he repeatedly insists that “no messianic impulse” (S-P, 10) drove him to Dublin, his work on confronting the social and cultural realities of that city is full of Messianic overtones. He describes himself in the 1940's as “a mad messiah without a mission or a true impulse.”¹¹ Later (“Author's Note” to C.P., xiv) he described the time of his anger as one of “messianic compulsion.” Certainly many of the poems which he wrote between the 1940s and 1955 vibrate with some of this messianic fervour. In them he is urgent to flagellate the wickedness he saw around him, a wickedness that, apart from his deep personal hatred for it, also made him, he thought, its special victim.

“A Wreath for Tom Moore's Statue” offers one of the first views of this messianic identification (C.P., 85). Moore is associated with the vices of mediocrity and complacent middleclass vulgarity. Moore's antithesis, the poet (presumably a version of Kavanagh himself) appears in apocalyptic imagery like a triumphant Christ: “But hope! the poet comes again to build / A new city high above lust and logic.” This poem provides an important glimpse of what was to become a full-blown satirical eschatology in the trenchant poems that appeared in the late '40s and early '50s. Kavanagh becomes the scourging, ministering poet, as well as victim and scapegoat of that which he satirizes. In “The Paddiad” (C.P., 90–95), Mediocrity is a devil, the patron of bad art. Kavanagh himself, a none too modest conglomerate with Yeats, Joyce, and O'Casey, is Conscience to this world. At the end of the poem, in spite of much abuse, Conscience is still alive, “Ready again to die of hunger, / Condemnatory and uncivil.” The implicit martyrdom underlines the Christ associations as well as narrows the conglomerate figure to the solitary person of Kavanagh himself.

Further Christological references rise to the surface in these poems. In “The Defeated” the voice of pretentious cultural mediocrity advises the poet to “Leave Christ and Chirst-like problems and you'll be / The synthesis of Gaelic poetry” (C.P., 98). The poet's horror finds expression in an outburst of disappointment reminiscent of Christ in Gethsemane: “O God, I cried, these treats are not the treats / That Heaven offers in the Golden Cup.” In “Adventures in the Bohemian Jungle” (C.P., 101–08) the poet is an innocent conscience at large in the literary-cultural Vanity Fair of Dublin. The implicit identification made here is between the poet-truth-teller and the Christ who angrily drove the money-changers from the temple.

The opposition in all these satires is invariably the devil or some version of the devilish. Such almost allegorical oppositions make for many Christological associations in Kavanagh's frequently expressed assumptions about the nature of the poet's mission. For him the status and eternal function of poetry is as “a profound and holy / Faith that cries the inner history / Of the failure of Man's mission” (“Auditors In,” C.P., 123). By the end of a poem called “The Hero,” however, he finds that “The sword of a satire in his hand became blunted, / And for the insincere city / He felt a profound pity” (C.P., 142).

In such later poems, then, it is apparent that Kavanagh moves beyond the need for satire and the instinct to associate himself with Christ. It is significant, too, that such poems are more or less contemporary with his “conversion.” He seems, in some sad possession of his own soul, to be able to move beyond “the role … of prophet and saviour” and to be able to resist the temptation “to take over the functions of a god in a new fashion” (“After Forty Years of Age,” (C.P., 148). In this condition, he comes cleareyed on the conclusion that “satire is unfruitful prayer” (“Prelude,” C.P., 132). By incorporating his association with Christ and therefore leaving it, as explicit persona, behind him, he discovers the totality of his own being. it is a kind of peace, a kind of completeness, and he pointedly couches it in the image of a journey. By this means he turns us back into the framework of his pastoral design, in which this final stage is that of his paradise regained, in truth the possession of his own soul:

And you must go inland and be
Lost in compassion's ecstasy,
Where suffering soars in summer air—
The millstone has become a star.

(“Prelude”)

If there is an implicit association between Christ and this accepted self, it is with the Christ who abandoned the world and retreated into the desert (the site of Milton's Paradise Regained). Kavanagh leaves behind him “That Promised Land you thought to find” and his final truth is simply “Ignore Power's schismatic sect, / Lovers alone lovers protect” (“Prelude,” C.P., 133). After his conversion, then, Kavanagh, without abandoning the Christian matrix which animates his poetic vision and sensibility, can jettison the explicitly Christian personae that had carried him to the final stage of his pastoral journey, and so come into the full possession of himself. As he puts it in “Auditors In” (a poem, being written in 1951, that anticipates the final stage), he comes “accidentally upon / My self at the end of a tortuous road” (C.P., 126).

In summary, then, the pastoral convention with a number of its traditional variants supplies a coherent frame for the poetic identity Kavanagh's work composes. It does not, of course, account for the poetry, but it does provide a way of organizing it critically. It offers a way into the poetry in terms of the poetry itself, rendering it in certain ways independent of its time and place. At the same time it allows us to see that the value of this myth, this conventional design, consists in the particular life Kavanagh gave to it, filling the traditional literary outline with the matter of his own time and place, his own self. In this way he extends the form, substantiating in an unlikely context the enduring validity of this particular mode. He proves, I would argue, that the genre is not merely a literary imposition designed for the convenience of critics, but is a fundamental shaping mode through which the material of a poet's identity comes to coherence, even when on the surface that material seems as inchoate as that often provided by Kavanagh. The pastoral impulse and design, therefore, reveal a human response solidified into a literary form, and enable us to look at Kavanagh's work with a fresh eye.

Notes

1. Collected Pruse (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967), p. 278. Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in the text.

2. Self Portrait (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1964), p. 8. Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in the text as S-P. John Jordan, “Mr. Kavanagh's Progress,” Studies, 49 (1960), 304, notes this pattern, calling it one of “departure, disillusion and bewilderment, enrichment and return.” Early as it is, this article remains one of the most perceptive treatments of Kavanagh's work and its shaping choices. In spite of his being recognized as one of the most important poets since Yeats, Kavanagh has attracted scant critical attention in or outside Ireland. See Seamus Heaney, “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh: From Monaghan to the Grand Canal,” in Two Decades of Irish Writing, ed. Douglas Dunn (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1975), pp. 105–11, rpt. in Preoccupations (London: Faber & Faber, 1980); D'Arcy O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh (Cranbury, New Jersey: Brucknell Univ. Press [Irish Writers Series], 1975); Alan Warner, Clay Is the Word: Patrick Kavanagh, 1904–1967 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974). A recent essay by Terence Brown (“After the Revival: The Problem of Adequacy & Genre,” Genre 12, No. 4, Winter, 1979, 565–89) offers among other things an excellent summary of the religious and social content of Kavanagh's longer works in verse—Lough Derg, Why Sorrow?, and The Great Hunger—and glances briefly at the later lyrics. Brown discusses Kavanagh's movement from poetry of social motive and occasion to pure lyrical engagements with the quotidian self and its will to praise, “from society to the intimate histories of self” (p. 588). My own essay is an attempt to identify the pattern that emerges from such content. Where Brown gives a historical outer reading of the poetry, my aim is to provide a formal, inner reading. The two are, I hope, complementary.

3. November Haggard: Uncollected Prose and Verse (New York: Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, 1971), p. 34. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

4. (1949; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 134. Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in the text.

5. “Ploughman,” in Collected Poems (1964; rpt. London: Martin Brian and O'Keefe, 1972), p. 3. Most of the other poems referred to in the course of this essay are from this collection, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as C.P.

6. The Green Fool (London, 1938; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1975), p. 194.

7. It is not my argument that Kavanagh was conscious of these associations. But his work may be read according to the lineaments of this design, a design that may be a deep unconscious part of Western man's way of perceiving and understanding his experience. The poets give this perception its most vivid form.

8. This poem and “Intimate Parnassus” pre-date 1955, suggesting that the movement to this stage of Kavanagh's pastoral journey was anticipated by his imagination before the “re-birth.” For dating, as well as for poems not in C.P., see The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, ed. Peter Kavanagh (New York: The Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, 1972), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Complete Poems.

9. Spenser's Shepherds Calendar and Milton's Lycidas come to mind.

10. “Diary,” Envoy 4, No. 13 (1950), p. 89.

11. In his posthumously published autobiographical novel, By Night Unstarred (Dublin: Goldsmith Press, 1977), p. 18.