[In the excerpt below, Fahey points out what he considers to be exemplary passages in both Kavanagh's short verse and long poem The Great Hunger.]

“Irishness is a form of anti-art. A way of posing as a poet without actually being one.” The complaint is Patrick Kavanagh's. And remembering such crocks full of Irishry as James Stephens, the coy skull-cappery of O'Casey, and Lady Augusta, Gregorian chanteuse, one could not but be wary of encountering, on a trip to Ireland,

Paddy of the Celtic Mist,
Paddy Connemara West,
Chestertonian Paddy Frog
Croaking nightly in the bog.
All the Paddies having fun
Since Yeats handed in his gun.

The cautionary attitude proved unnecessary on my trip to Ireland this summer. Though he has not perhaps given up his post as Patron of Irish Letters, “the devil mediocrity” reigns more securely in the fetor of New York's smog-filled air than in Dublin, where frequent showers dampen poseur and poetaster. Dubin's literary atmosphere is still characterized by the astringent tone of Kavanagh's talk on Telefis Eireann a year or so ago; he is still hitting out a variety of targets—“the bohemian jungle which lies on the perimeter of commerce”; its “phallic tower …, The Theatre”; the Catholic Cultural League; the Joyce industry; Soviet poets who rebel / Against what is dead”; American writing, preoccupied with sex; Dublin conversation—“tiresome drivel between journalists and civil servants”; Italian films; and the “peasant quality” for which his own poetry had been celebrated in earlier days.

As a matter of fact, it is against the dishonesty of dramatic misrepresentation of himself in his earlier work that Kavanagh, enjoying a middle-aged recrudesence, rages most bitterly. (He should be better known in America, where theatrical self-revelation—giving the Lowell-down on oneself—is perhaps the commonest current posture among versifiers.) He condemns his own “dreadful stage-Irish, so-called autobiography, The Green Fool.” And unlike most poets, who simply forget their early poetic mistakes, allowing them to disappear quietly from later collected editions, Kavanagh examines his own work publicly, calling attention in his little Self Portrait to “everything that was loud, journalistic and untrue.” Such as:

My soul was an old horse
Offered for sale in twenty fairs.

The lines he quotes are from his “Pegasus,” not so bad a poem as he makes it out to be, though not a very good one. “Another dreadful job about Mother Ireland,” from A Soul For Sale (1947), is dreadful enough, as is most of the verse in that volume. Indeed, As Kavanagh recognizes, his weakest work is that of his mid-career. He says in Self Portrait, “I had started off with the right simplicity, indifferent to crude reason and then ploughed my way through complexities and anger, hatred and ill-will … and came back to where I started.” Not quite to where he started. But much of the early work does have “the right simplicity.”

“Shancoduff,” for example, which dates to 1934, begins with it:

My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.

And if the “sleety winds” of the poem “fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff” a bit too prettily, the cattle-drovers who shelter there are right. They

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

“To The Man After The Harrow,” which is even earlier, sounds like Hardy especially the good lines with which it ends:

For you are driving your horses through
The mist where Genesis begins.

And “Plough Horses,” though it lacks the monumentality of Edwin Muir's lumbering “Horses,” precisely because it tries too hard for that quality, begins well:

Their glossy flanks and manes outshone
The flying splinters of the sun

It is, on the whole, a fine little poem.

Other early verses available again in Collected Poems (1964), have, like “Ploughman,” good things in them, too.

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

However, this one goes all exclamatory before it finishes, with an artificial pumped-up ecstasy that suggests the readiness of the poet to succumb to a convenient role. He did succumb, playing the ploughboy poet, a kind of imitation Irish Burns, with real dung between his toes and trumped-up passion in his heart, which is the reason for the failure of The Green Fool and most of the verse in A Soul For Sale. But there is real passion in his heart as well, which accounts for the “anger, hatred and ill-will” that he lets loose upon all and sundry, himself among others. It may also account for the fact that The Great Hunger is, as Kavanagh says, “not poetry.”

A long poem in fourteen sections, The Great Hunger explores the frustrations of the peasant.

In that country, in that metaphysical land
Where flesh was a thought more spiritual than music
Among the stars—out of reach of the peasants hand.

Filled with rage and pain, the poem, says Kavanagh, “lacks the nobility and repose of poetry.” But there are, as he also recognizes, “some queer and terrible things in it.” Some beautiful things, too, though the beauty is not the travelogue beauty of lush green Ireland, with picturesque cottagers in the foreground, nor even that of “a gray place on a hill,” with an imagined man—“a man who does not exist”—as ideal audience.

The wind leans from Brady's, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donahmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.

It is a beauty perceived, unusually, by the peasant, with his “mud-gloved fingers” and “clay wattled moustache,” whose “dream changes again like the mud-swung wind,” as he sits “in the railway slope and [watches] the evening Too beautifully perfect to use.”

However, beauty is not the principal ingredient of this poem of a “life more busy than savage,” the life of Pat Maguire.

Watch him [says Kavanagh], watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit
Is a wet sack flapping against the knees of time.

Watching him, we see the changing seasons of his life in their monotonously demanding variety; his neighbors at their work and in the

Evening at the crossroads—
Heavy heads nodding out words as wise
As the rumination of cows after milking;

his mother, who “stayed too long” and when she died, at ninety-one,

The knucklebones were cutting the skin
          of her son's backside
And he was sixty-five.

We see his dreams of young love, unrealized, turn to sour lust and dry into impotency. We hear his bitter, frustrated sister spitting poison at the neighbor children or grunting as she turns over in bed—“the sound of a sow taking up a new position.”

We come to realize the terrible bitterness of Maguire's cry—

O Christ! I am locked in a stable with pigs
                                        and cows forever.

For the stable, in an ironic cancellation of Bethlehem's meaning, supports a larger, freer life than Maguire can discover. The farm animals, even the very potatoes that he grows, divide, enlarge, grow, escape from the containing matrix. But for him there is “no escape, no escape.”

… the peasant in his little acre is tied
To a mother's womb by the wind-toughened naval-cord
Like a goat tethered to the stump of a tree—
He circles around and around wondering
                                                            why it should be.

The result is—

No crash,
No drama.
That was how his life happened.
No mad hooves galloping in the sky,
But the weak, washy way of true tragedy—
A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.

To say this is not “true tragedy” but a terrible pathos is not to quarrel academically about the nature of tragedy but to recognize the limits of Kavanagh's vision. We see the peasant's life from within, with marvelous clarity of definition. He is a peasant, bound to the earth and fenced by the rounds of the seasons. But these relatively flexible, universal boundaries are fixed by his Irishness. He is Pat Maguire, potato farmer, pietistically filial, puritanically chaste. The irony of “O Christ! I am locked in a stable …” deepens the pathos of his plight but cannot free his imagination from “twenty centuries of stony sleep” for the crash and drama of Bethlehem.

Very well then, he is not Yeats. But why should he be? Yeats' peasants are more lunar than Irish. And is it not a good thing to see life from a particular point of view? Limits define as well as confine. To be sure. And I have already suggested that Kavanagh's limits, enlarged by irony and deepened by the universal aspects of nature incorporated in his poem, are not narrow. He is even capable of skillfully reinforcing his irony by shifting his point of view, juxtaposing to the realistic vision of the peasant the sentimental view of the tourist:

The world looks on
And talks of the peasant:
The peasant has no worries;
In his little lyrical fields
He plans 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.

However, the wit of “his little lyrical fields” and the ironic balance of “He eats fresh food, / He loves fresh women” is not sustained. The concluding lines, stretched between Biblical simplicity and ironic enlargement, fall flat. As a matter of fact, one of the principal flaws in the poem is its constant tendency to slip from the assurance of wit and image into the platitude of statement. Thus we have the vividness of

Like the afterbirth of a cow stretched on a branch in the wind
Life dried in the veins of these women and men,

and the triteness of comment—“Sometimes they did laugh and see the sunlight, / A narrow slice of divine instruction.” Or we have the bright lyric presentation of Maguire

Sitting on a wooden gate,
Sitting on a wooden gate,
Sitting on a wooden gate
He didn't care a damn
Said whatever came into his head,
Said whatever came into his head,
Said whatever came into his head
And inconsequently sang

and the lapse back into remarks about the “twisted skein of” life, the “necessary pain,” and the “rope that was strangling true love.” These lapses are serious flaws, reminding one of Burns at his worst, for platitude debases the peasant through whose eyes we are elsewhere required to see freshly.

Nonetheless, there is much to admire in The Great Hunger. Kavanagh's metrical flexibility enables him to move easily through a variety of moods, yet always within the somewhat clumsy ambience of peasant life, as though sorrow were registered through the droop of muscles knotted with toil and joy leaped in mud-clogged brogans. Hence in the following duple measure lyric—

O he loved his mother
Above all others.
O he loved his ploughs
And he loved his cows
And his happiest dream
Was to clean his arse
With perennial grass
On the bank of some summer stream

—the slight pause required by the first two feminine rhymes; the substitution of aquatrain rhyming cddc for the opening couplets; and the use of initial repetition in lines 1 and 3, and 4 and 5 give an ungainly hitch that is in keeping with ploughs and cows and the peasant's happiest dream to the lyrical rush of the verse toward the trimeter conclusion.

Realistic description, in the following long lines, happily lacks the bright varnish of sociological “objectivity” that such details as the torn jacket and the hanging heads at first, perhaps, suggest.

A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart.
A horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing
A rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart
Legs. October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.

Frequent substitution, manipulation of the caesura, the run-over second and third lines, and feminine endings register the weary ploughman's slackness that the repetition of particulars—“a dog lying,” “a horse moving,” “a rusty plough”—reaches in those unbodied legs that hang over the last line.

Kavanagh's eye is keen for detail. He catches the peasant at Mass:

Maguire knelt beside a pillar where he could spit
Without being seen. He turned an old prayer round.

And his ear for peasant dialogue is near perfect:

“Drive slower with the foal-mare, Joe.”
Joe, a young man of imagined wives,
Smiles to himself and answers like a slave:
“You needn't fear or fret.
I'm taking her as easy, as easy as …
Easy there Fanny, easy, pet.”

As a matter of fact, if The Great Hunger is “not poetry,” it comes about as close to it as any long poem written in, or out of, Ireland since World War II that I can think of. Its faults come from sometimes confusing passion and compassion. In the little pamphlet-sized Self Portrait Kavanagh says, “It took me many years to learn or relearn not to care. … Not caring is really a sense of values and feeling of confidence.” The new feeling is manifest in the volume called Come Dance With Kitty Stobling (1960). In fact, Kavanagh dates his new birth as a poet to a warm summer day in 1955; as he lay on the banks of the canal between Baggot and Leeson Street bridges, Dublin, he wrote:

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 sonnet from which the lines come is his “new dress woven / From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.”

Not everything in the 1960 volume is as good as this poem. In fact, Kitty Stobling is a pretty mixed bag, with some very early verse included, perhaps by way of showing the origins to which Kavanagh here thinks of himself as returning. But the savage “Paddiad” is also included in this volume. And neither that satiric poem nor the much weaker “House Party” or “The Hero” suggest, unfortunately, that Kavanagh has completely relearned “not to care.” Indeed, this same satiric stream, polluted with some of the peculiarities of his friend Betjeman, also appears in The Collected Poems, published in 1964. And while this verse might well be described as wallowing “in the habitual, the banal,” it seems too close to Betjeman to be described as “new dress” and too parti pris to be careless. However, side by side with such mannered simplisms as “The Gambler: A Ballet” and “News Item” one still finds the fine plainness of:

I am here in a garage in Monaghan.
It is June and the weather is warm,
Just a little bit cloudy. There's the sun again
Lifting to importance my sixteen acre farm.

Out there is “The Hospital,” in which Kavanagh, discerning, like Keats, the “inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard,” tells us, “a year ago I fell in love with the function ward / Of a chest hospital.” Perceiving the stark beauty of the functional, he is, however, not limited by a programmatic conception of a bleakly functional nature. He is aware that “Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges.” And if he simply sings

The lilacs by the gate
The summer sun again
The swallows in and out
Of the garage where I am

he recognizes that

This is not longevity
But infinity.

Of Ireland, though lacking “Irishness,” Kavanagh may have a small “farm” and the weather of his work may be as uncertain as the Dublin sky. But from moment to moment one can say, “There's the sun again.” Despite the necessity of carrying an umbrella, my summer in Dublin was fine, for I discovered Patrick Kavanagh.

If ever you go to Dublin town
In a hundred years or so
Inquire (him) in Baggot Street
And what (he) was like to know.
O he was a queer one
Fod dol the di do
He was a queer one
I tell you.