[In the following essay, Thornton delves into Kavanagh's attitude toward “peasants” and their work, religion in the lives of Irish farmers, and the feminine imagery evident in the work.]

For the most important poem by the poet long described as the best in Ireland since Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger has received surprisingly little critical attention, and much of that mere encomium rather than analysis.¹ While I have a more modest view of the poem than the critic who calls it “one of the most striking and memorable long poems of this century,”² or the pseudo-libeler who said it was “probably the best poem written in Ireland since Goldsmith gave us “The Deserted Village,”³ I do have sufficient respect for The Great Hunger to believe that it repays scrutiny. My first estimate of the poem was admittedly lower, mainly because of a vacillation, even contradictoriness, of tone I felt in it, especially toward the peasants and their milieu. And there are passages that still seem uneven or awkward, but I now feel that Kavanagh is in control of the poem's tone, and that what appeared to be vacillation is better understood as an intentional, even necessary, ambiguity toward Patrick Maguire and his situation, an ambiguity mirroring a thematic complexity.

The issue of Kavanagh's attitude toward the peasant is recurrent in his poetry, and we should, before attacking it here, note some factors that make it complex. The first is that when Kavanagh writes about the peasant he is writing about himself, trying to understand the assets and liabilities in his own familial and geographic roots. And this problem is made more difficult for the reader because Kavanagh does not aim at any Flaubertian distancing from his artistic creation. In this regard more like D. H. Lawrence than James Joyce, Kavanagh approaches the problem of authorial presence in the work not by distancing and “objectivity,” but by impelling himself with deific energy into the various parts of his creation. Kavanagh's attitude toward the peasant is further complicated by a more external consideration—the use that had been made of the peasant by certain writers of the literary renaissance, Yeats primary among them. Kavanagh's attempts to think clearly about the peasant were impeded by his resentment of the sentimentality verging upon abuse that was lavished upon him by the literary mentality. Kavanagh's natural reaction to this was to insist that Yeats's idea of noble beggars transmitting a popular culture, blithely ignored the effects of poverty and labor upon the bodies and minds of the peasants. But in spite of knowing this and having felt some of these effects himself, Kavanagh could not deny that the peasant's life did give him some potential advantages over those who lived purely in unanchored mind.

If we look closely at The Great Hunger, we will find in it a rather surprising subtlety of tone and of thought, and we will see a striking kinship between Kavanagh and other Irish writers in his dramatization of their perennial theme of the relation between imagination and reality. I say a surprising thematic and tonal subtlety because Patrick Kavanagh is not regarded as a subtle writer. His strong points are trenchant satire and lyric intensity, not subtlety or complexity. In The Great Hunger I see all of these qualities; nor is the subtlety purchased at the price of intensity. Darcy O'Brien says that this poem “has the power of a natural force, of a flood or a drought.”⁴ I agree that the poem gains much of its effect from its emotional energy, and that this derives in large part from Kavanagh's disdain, even anger. But the anger here, however personal its roots, is controlled—the anger not of a person, but of a poet—and its energy is quite precisely directed, much more than O'Brien's metaphor from nature would suggest.⁵ In order to say what the object of Kavanagh's animus is, and to justify my claim that the ambiguous tone reflects thematic complexity, I shall look at three aspects of the poem: the precise attitude it takes toward Patrick Maguire, his fellow peasants, and their work; what the poem says about the role of religion in the lives of the peasants; and the function of the feminine figures and imagery that run through the poem.

The severe attitude some critics have taken toward Maguire is largely a response to an undeniably negative note in Kavanagh's tone. At times Kavanagh talks as if the peasant is not fully human, describes him in metaphors either bestial or mechanical. In the second line of the poem he describes the potato gatherers as moving like mechanized scarecrows along a hill, and later he depicts an “ignorant peasant deep in dung,” and asks, “Why should men be asked to believe in a soul / That is only the mark of a hoof in guttery gaps?”⁶ Equally pessimistic is his saying of Maguire, “Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit / Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time” (p. 35); nor can Maguire's labor seem meaningful when Kavanagh says that he “returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage / To the fields once again / Where eunuchs can be men / And life is more lousy than savage” (p. 37).

In other passages describing Maguire, Kavanagh's tone is not directly denunciatory, but it remains ambiguous, as when he says,

He saw the sunlight and begrudged no man
His share of what the miserly soil and soul
Gives in a season to a ploughman.
And he cried for his own loss late one night on the pillow
And yet thanked the God who had arranged these things.
Was he then a saint?
A Matt Talbot of Monaghan?

(p. 49)

At other points in the poem, Maguire's glimmers of self-awareness and regret for what he is permitting his life to become do seem true objects of Kavanagh's sympathy, but in this passage the attitude is less clear-cut, and Kavanagh may be assuming a stance toward Maguire that is dramatic and not his own.⁷

Kavanagh certainly assumes such a stance in section XIII, perhaps the most crucial part of the poem for its tone toward the peasant and his labor. This section consists of four stanzas. In spite of the disclaimer of irony, the first two stanzas are compounded of it. The irony and disdain are directed, however, not at the peasant, but at the sentimentalization of him committed by the traveller and those he speaks for. These lines, then, are in part Kavanagh's bitter retort to the sentimental elevation of the peasant he found in Yeats and in those students of Irish culture who conscendingly see in the peasant a vestige of man's primordial relation to the soil—something they themselves would never engage in, but which they are happy to condemn others to.⁸ What makes this issue more complex, however, is that elsewhere in the poem Kavanagh himself seems to espouse the idea that the peasant's world offers access to God, and seems to share the hope that he can be brought up from the subsoil to an existence of conscious joy.

In the third and fourth stanzas of section XIII a different tone emerges, a tone rather dark and pessimistic, but containing a note of concern and sympathy which is an undertone in other passages in the poem. And further complicating the picture is another passage, one that counters the image of these men as mechanical or bestial or their work as degrading. Describing Maguire plowing in his field, Kavanagh breaks off to say,

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.

(p. 38)

There is then an ambiguity in Kavanagh's attitude toward Maguire's situation, an ambiguity recognized by Alan Warner when he acknowledges that Maguire is “typical of many men who lead lives of quiet desperation,” but then counters that Maguire “is not insignificant or contemptible, and Kavanagh does not despise him, nor does he condescend toward him.”⁹ And a similar ambiguity can be found toward other elements of the poem—toward the society of the peasants and toward their religion. This tone can best be understood when we see both Maguire and his milieu in terms of potentialities they do not fulfill. What arouses the poet's anger is not his belief that Maguire is worthless or that his work is inherently dehumanizing. Rather it is the failure of these two—of man and milieu—to manifest the potentialities they jointly contain. The peasant does have access to modes of beauty and to opportunities for engagement with the world which the traveller lacks, but he is constrained by his own weaknesses and fears, and by the false challenges proffered by his world, to remain a rudimentary human being. And while we can validly talk of potentialities within the milieu as well as within the man, the blame for the failure must lie primarily with the man. The essence of Maguire's failure is not poverty or labor, but the confused and intimidated imagination. Kavanagh, though, is aware of this and knows that the ultimate insult paid the peasant by the traveller is his condescending adulation of the primitive state the peasant is often content to accept for himself. And while Kavanagh's attitude toward the peasant is sometimes tinged with his own fear at how thin the line that separates Patrick Maguire from Patrick Kavanagh, his underlying attitude is sympathy, growing out of his awareness of how hard it is to cultivate the light of imagination in a world of clay.

Ironically, what should be one of Maguire's greatest allies and supports in coming to fulness of being—his religion—is in fact one of his subtlest and firmest entrappers. For Patrick Maguire, as for the more articulate Stephen Dedalus, institutionalized religion—specifically the Roman Catholic Church—is an antagonist, though Maguire does not recognize this. The charges Kavanagh levels against the Church in this poem are three. First, as several passages explicitly testify, the Church fears and represses vitality in many forms, but especially sexual vitality.¹⁰ The effect is that while Maguire lives in a world of natural fecundity (presumably God-ordained), he is intimidated by the young women around him, and the result is his cowardly failure to pursue courtship of them, and his masturbation. Maguire engages in the fecundity around him only on the level of his crops, not on that of the women he is attracted to, much less on the level of joy and imagination they might together bring into being. When troubled by the purgatorial fire of passion, Maguire like a good Catholic calls on

… the gods of the Christian to prove
That this twisted skein
Was the necessary pain
And not the rope that was strangling true love.

(p. 43)

The last two lines of this passage suggest a second way Maguire's religion prevents his imaginative engagement in this world, namely by emphasis upon the next, and advice to accept this world as a realm of “necessary pain.” It is not simply that Maguire is encouraged to see in the afterlife recompense for the specific pains and ills of this one; rather, his vague dwelling on the world to come serves as perfect rationalization and encouragement to his unwillingness to grapple with this world. The sense that there is another opportunity in the next life is one of the main enticements to Maguire's disastrous procrastination, his inclination to “give himself another year” before coming to grips with life.

Finally, the poem shows that the peasants' religion distorts their imagination by making them unrealistically idealistic and romantic, by suggesting a discontinuity between reality and imagination and causing Maguire “to rush beyond the thing / To the unreal” (p. 39). This comes through most clearly in a passage describing Maguire's response to some children picking flowers:

They were picking up life's truth singly. But he dreamt
          of Absolute envased bouquet—
All or nothing. And it was nothing. For God is not all
In one place, complete
Till Hope comes in and takes it on his shoulder—
O Christ, that is what you have done for us:
In a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.
He read the symbol too sharply and turned
From the five simple doors of sense
To the door whose combination lock has puzzled
Philosopher and priest and common dunce.
Men build their heavens as they build their circles
Of friends. God is in the bits and pieces of Everyday—
A kiss here and a laugh again, and sometimes tears,
A pearl necklace round the neck of poverty.
He sat on the railway slope and watched the evening,
Too beautifully perfect to use,
And his three wishes were three stones too sharp to sit on,
To hard to carve. Three frozen idols of a speechless muse.

(pp. 41–2)

Maguire's Roman Catholicism, this passage charges, leads him to disdain the tangible immediate joys of life—joys which should be pathways to God's presence—in favor of looking always for something absolute and complete, something not within the range of mankind. That the entire blame for this tendency in Maguire can be laid to the Church is doubtful; he may well be infected with deep temperamental fear and lack of faith in life. But the Church does nothing to rectify this, and Kavanagh leaves little doubt that the overall effect of Maguire's religion is to suppress rather than to support his imaginative engagement with life.

But while the poem does disdain the effects of institutionalized religion, it does not disparage religious realities. We see this in the role attributed to Christ in the passage just quoted, and in the passage cited earlier that speaks of the opportunity to see God in a tree, the Holy Spirit in the rising sap, Christ in the green leaves—the idea that the fertility of nature contains, for those who can sense and cultivate them, spiritual realities. The peasants have access through the tangibilities of their world to the realities religion is founded upon, but which institutionalized religion has obscured and distorted. Here again Kavanagh's animus is directed not at the peasant nor at religious realities, but at how the peasant permits his church to deprive him of a vision of life.

Maguire's society too is more a liability than an asset. The farmers' interest in one another is tinted with “the sharpened interest of rivalry” (p. 38), and whatever venturesomeness or daring they feel is trivially shunted off into their petty gambling, after which

… they go home with dragging feet
And their voices rumble like laden carts.
And they are happy as the dead or sleeping …
I should have led that ace of hearts.

(p. 50)

This last line suggests the trivial level to which their society has led their daring and their regret.

One of the more subtle and implicit means by which Kavanagh presents the complex relationship between Maguire's imagination and the potentialities of his milieu is the female figures and the feminine imagery that run through the poem. The most obvious examples of these are Maguire's mother and sister, and the girls of the village. The mother, a widow, is presented as demanding and antagonistic, even witch-like:

She had a venomous drawl
And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette.
Two black cats peeped between the banisters
And gloated over the bacon-fizzling pan.

(p. 37)

And later in the poem we are told more directly of her effect on her son:

His mother's voice grew thinner like a rust-worn knife
But it cut venomously as it thinned,
It cut him up the middle till he became more woman than man,
And it cut through to his mind before the end.

(p. 47)

Maguire's unmarried sister is cut from the same fabric as the mother and moves easily into her role when the mother dies. Described first as a sow, she becomes bitter, vituperative, spits poison at the children who wish to sell raffle tickets, and criticizes Maguire for whatever charity he would show (p. 49). And in one striking image she is described in terms that, as we shall see, suggest how femininity works in the poem, for we are told she had

One leg in hell and the other in heaven
And between the purgatory of middle-aged virginity—
She prayed for release to heaven or hell.

(p. 47)

The girls of the village are presented as a challenge and a temptation, but because of Maguire's inability to come to terms with this temptation, they become to him a reproach and a reminder of his cowardice, something expressed in his repeated masturbation (p. 37). But in addition to the female personages in the poem, Kavanagh several times uses images of femininity that extend this dimension of the poem to incorporate the land and the whole of nature. He speaks, for example, of the mother's praising the man who had made a field his bride, and in describing the plowing, Kavanagh says, “The twisting sod rolls over on her back— / The Virgin screams before the irresistable sock” (p. 38). And in an intriguing passage, Kavanagh tells us that poetry within Maguire is expended on pulling weeds, and then he characterizes Maguire's inner self as follows: “Nobody will ever read the wild, scrawling mad woman's signature, / The hysteria and the boredom of the enclosed nun of his thought” (p. 45). Maguire's own unrevealed, unexpressed inner self is characterized as feminine, as virgin.

Among the most striking and thematically important images of femininity in the poem, partly because of their prominent positions, are those opening and closing the work. At the beginning Kavanagh asks, “Which of these men / Loved the light and the queen / Too long virgin?” The final lines tell us

He stands in the doorway of his house
A ragged sculpture of the wind,
October creaks the rotted mattress,
The bedposts fall. No hope. No lust.
The hungry fiend
Screams the apocalypse of clay
In every corner of this land.

(p. 55)

To appreciate the implications of the poem's feminine figures and images, we must realize that these two—virgin queen and hungry fiend—are two faces, or phases, of the same entity, something that Kavanagh hints to us by bringing the poem's ending back to its October beginning, and by the repetition of the image of the clay. Here as in Eliot's “Little Gidding” we return to the place where we began, though the theme here is not unique human knowledge, but sheer mechanical or bestial circularity. The difference in the opening and closing scenes is that the virgin queen has become the hungry fiend. The virgin queen represents the potentialities implicit in Maguire's situation, potentialities wishing to be realized; the hungry fiend represents what the virgin queen becomes if she cannot find a mate worthy of herself. In her disappointment, her bitterness, she becomes a virago, a crone, menacing and threatening to devour the person who has proved unworthy of her. In this sense, then, all the female figures in the poem, and the land they are associated with imagistically, represent the potential that Maguire is supposed to act upon.

Fully to understand this strand of the poem would probably require an exploration of the archetypes of the mother and the anima, and of St. Paul's idea that the whole of creation groans in travail and hope of deliverance (Romans 8:22). But without so great an excursion, we can understand how the feminine figures and images in the poem work if we grasp two things: first, we must see that these women represent a potentiality and a challenge that needs and wishes to be acted upon; second, they do not themselves understand the full nature of the potentiality they bear—that will be revealed to them and to the man they challenge only after he has engaged them and they are both transformed by that act. Rather than omniscient goddesses trying subtly and appropriately to lead the hero to fulfillment (as, perhaps, Venus to Aeneas), these women appear as demanding, threatening, destructive—somewhat like the loathly hag who must be embraced before her true nature will reveal itself. But apparently these women understand so little the potentiality they bear that they would be content to have Maguire immerse himself in the labor of the farm, to have him take his field as his bride. The mother's praise of the man who does this seems not to realize that such a life is woefully incomplete, gives no play to the imagination. Not that physical fecundity is per se bad; it is rather good, as God's creation is good, but it becomes destructive of man's unique spirit if treated simply as an end in itself. Such fecundity must always be seen in two lights—as an appropriate fulfillment of physical nature, but also as a pattern, a paradigm, of the other mode of fecundity—imaginative fecundity—unique to man.

We may understand more fully how Kavanagh is using the feminine imagery in this poem by noting other similar uses in other works. I have already mentioned the loathly hag, a figure common in folklore.¹¹ But there are other examples closer to Kavanagh and to county Monaghan. Consider for example Queen Eevul of Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, who berates all Irish men, priests included, for their unwillingness to accept what the women offer, for their failure to, in her phrase, “Give us the world the Lord intended.”¹² Another such character, to move from the mythic to the realistic, is Pegeen Mike in Synge's Playboy of the Western World, who, through her challenge and her allure, truly is an agent in Christy's transformation, but who fails to realize the change that has been wrought and who abandons Christy only to learn that she has betrayed herself in doing so. Still another who offers a challenge she does not fully understand is Molly Bloom, who for years has been Leopold's Calypso, but who is capable, even desirous, of being his Penelope, if Bloom can come to see that in her. And lest we think that all such female characters are destructive or their stories end badly, we should remember that one successful example of this archetype—strikingly complementary to Kavanagh's queen become crone—is Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan, who begins as an old woman, but is transformed by the commitment of her followers into a young girl with the walk of a queen. This is the transformation suggested by Kavanagh himself when in the closing lines of “April” he says,

The old cranky spinster is dead
Who fed us cold flesh.
And in the green meadows
The maiden of Spring is with child
By the Holy Ghost.

(p. 18)

This suggests the opportunity held out to Maguire by the feminine elements of the world around him, though neither he nor they realize this.

Kavanagh's invective in this poem, then, is directed not against Maguire himself, nor against the land, nor against religion per se, nor even against the mother and the sister. Rather, it is directed at the mutual failure of all these to realize the potential within them, and the ambiguity of tone in the poem arises from this. Maguire is not despised by Kavanagh, because he does have the potential to be vital and vivid. He does not reify this potential and so he is lost, but Kavanagh suggests to us what Maquire should have done, and that is the heart, the “center of control and judgment,” of the poem. Maguire should challenge and complement nature through the word, the imagination, but his religion deters rather than aids him, as does his society. Maguire then fails, and the unfulfilled virgin queen of the opening lines becomes the hungry fiend of the closing ones. The theme is a disjunction between nature and imagination, between clay and word, which can only be put right or joined when man has the imagination and the courage to act on the God-given capacities in himself and in his milieu. The peasant has within him the capacity to do this, and he sometimes glimpses what he might have done, but he does not act, and so we have again an ending not with a bang but a whimper, in “the weak, washy way of true tragedy” (p. 53).

Notes

1. The main critical comments on The Great Hunger are the following: Brendan Kennelly, “Patrick Kavanagh,” ARIEL, I iii (July 1970), 7–28, esp. 12–16; Alan Warner, Clay is the Word (Dublin, 1973), esp. pp. 51–61; Seamus Heaney, “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh: From Monaghan to the Grand Canal,” in Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey, ed. Douglas Dunn (Chester Springs, PA.; 1975), pp. 105–117, esp. pp. 111–114; Darcy O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh (Lewisburg, Pa. 1975), esp. pp. 20–6; and Daniel J. Casey, “Kavanagh's Calculations and Miscalculations,” Colby Library Quarterly, XII, ii (June 1976), 65–82, esp. 71–3.

2. Brendan Kennelly, op. cit., p. 15.

3. This suspiciously high opinion of the poem was expressed in the 1952 Leader article which Kavanagh regarded as libelous. See Collected Pruse (London, 1967), p. 169. Kavanagh himself disavowed The Great Hunger as lacking the nobility and repose of poetry (Collected Pruse, p. 21; see also the “Author's Note” prefactory to the Collected Poems). To do justice to the motives behind the disavowal would lead us into complex problems of Kavanagh's personality, especially into the question he wrestled with all his life of whether the poet's proper stance toward life is energetic engagement or tranquil dispassion.

4. O'Brien, op. cit., p. 21.

5. Another typical evaluation is that of Michael Allen, who says that “despite the ‘parochial’ virtues of The Great Hunger, freshness, clarity, authenticity and compassion, it lacks a formal center of control and judgment,” in “Provincialism and Recent Irish Poetry: The Importance of Patrick Kavanagh,” in D. Dunn, Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey (1975), p. 29. I hope to show that the poem does indeed have a “center of control and judgment.”

6. Page references are to the Collected Poems (London, 1964). Comparison has been made with the text in The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh (New York, 1972) and some errors in the Collected Poems text silently corrected. The lines quoted here are from section IX, p. 44, of the poem.

7. I remain puzzled about the tone of the reference to Matt Talbot. Talbot (1856–1925) was a Dublin working man who was addicted to drink, but who at about age twenty-eight took an abstinence pledge and never drank again. He assiduously cultivated the holy life and at his death he was discovered to have chains wound around his body. He was declared Venerable on October 3, 1975, and a proposal for his beatification and sanctification is being carried forward. Mary Purcell reflects one view of Talbot when she says of his original burial place, “No grave in Glasnevin has had so many visitors; no other tomb in that place of noble monuments attracts such attention; to that hallowed spot come many who, as they pause and reflect on Matt Talbot, are deeply moved” Matt Talbot and His Times (Westminister, Maryland, 1955), pp. 252–3; Talbot's remains have since been moved to Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Sean McDermott Street. But not everyone shares Purcell's feeling; Sean O'Casey several times castigates “Mutt” Talbot for his misplaced piety and his failure to cooperate with his fellow workers in their struggles with their employers. However inviting to irony Talbot may seem, I am not convinced the reference here is ironic. The only other mention of Talbot I have found in Kavanagh's writing is a non-commital passage in Collected Pruse, p. 158.

8. Behind the opening lines of the second stanza we can hear the famous lines of Yeats's “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” Stanza VI.

9. Warner, op, cit., p. 60.

10. Alan Warner quotes a relevant passage from Kavanagh's Weekly: “I am strongly of the opinion that part of the reasons for the present conditions in rural parts comes from a moral—so-called—code that makes love and life impossible. If the impulse for life was properly strong it would burst these so-called moral walls as it has done in the past and wherever society is healthy” (Clay is the Word, p. 52; Warner cites Kavanagh's Weekly, no. 9, June 7, 1952, p. 4).

11. John Rees Moore suggests something similar when he describes the “dramatis personae of this tragedy” as “the ‘terrible mother’ of folk-lore and the enchanted prince,” and when he says “the son never rebels; there is no queen he loves” [“Now Yeats Has Gone: Three Irish Poets,” Hollins Critic, III, ii (April 1966), 8–9].

12. The Midnight Court, trans. by Frank O'Connor (London, Dublin, 1945), p. 44.