SOURCE: “Bound to the Soil: Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger,” in Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo American Letters, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1982, pp. 279–89.

Fled are those times when, in harmonious strains,
The rustic poet praised his native plains.

In 1939 Patrick Kavanagh, aged 35, gave up farming in his native village Inniskeen, County Monaghan, to start a literary career in Dublin. He made his move from the country to the capital at a turning-point in Irish literature. In the early decades of the century the Literary Renaissance, headed by Yeats and Synge, had given a strong impetus to the cause of Irish independence, but by the 1930s a civil war and years of political unrest had impaired the vision of Ireland as a proud peasant-nation nurtured by a heroic past and moving towards a glorious future. Nevertheless, although for many young writers nationalism had lost its imaginative impact, received literary conventions were still largely dominated by the models and images of the Celtic Twilight.¹ In Self Portrait, an autobiographical sketch written for Telefis Eireann in 1962, Kavanagh describes the Dublin literary scene of those days:

When I came to Dublin the Irish Literary affair was still booming. It was the notion that Dublin was a literary metropolis and Ireland, as invented and patented by Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge, a spiritual entity. It was full of writers and poets … The big thing besides being Irish was peasant quality. They were all trying to be peasants.²

He soon found himself in the front ranks of the reaction against the ideas of the Literary Renaissance. His main target was the shallow conception of Irish country-life that characterized much contemporary art and literature. To convey his contempt for the exploitation of the myth of Mother Ireland, he invented the word “buckleppin'” a term well-defined by Darcy O'Brien, the writer of a short monograph on Kavanagh:

The bucklep or the bucklepper may be found in many areas of Irish life but is especially notable in literature and may take many forms: a gratuitous reference to Cuchulain, an affected quaintness of phrasing, a pious nod toward 1916 and all that, stage-Irish characterization, the cliché mixture of melancholy and sentimentality, false bravado such as showy contempt for the Church, or the reverse, false piety.³

In 1942 Kavanagh published what would become his most effective and most enduring statement against buckleppin', the long narrative poem The Great Hunger. In 755 lines it describes the life of Patrick Maguire, a peasant-farmer in a small village closely resembling Patrick Kavanagh's native ground in County Monaghan. The picture of rural life conveyed by the poem is entirely black and Maguire and his neighbours are characters in a rural version of The Waste Land. Life is ground out of them by the weary rounds of farmwork and traditional customs that have become completely meaningless. They lack the strength and the courage to challenge their fate and are condemned to appalling living deaths. Maguire, in his rare moments of insight, tries to fight against the deadening routine of rural life, but he always loses:

… however he tried always the same melody crept up from the background,
The dragging step of a ploughman going home through the guttery.
… He dare not rise to pluck the fantasies
From the fruited Tree of Life. He bowed his head
And saw a wet weed twined about his toe.

(IV. 48–55)⁴

At such moments the reader is compelled to feel compassion for him, but this feeling is always immediately counteracted by the irony with which the narrator continues his story. The passage quoted above which shows Maguire humiliated by defeat is followed by a description of the nightly assemblies at the crossroads just outside the village, where he and the other local sages discuss matters of importance. This time the narrator's comment is devastating: “It means nothing, / Not a damn thing”. (V. 7–8) Although Maguire's life-story is presented as a tragedy, his suffering never lifts him to the level of a tragic hero. He and his fellow-peasants lack the dignity of the characters in classical drama whose heroic struggles against forces greater than themselves compel admiration. All we can feel for them is contemptuous pity.

Several critics have interpreted the poem as a direct attack on the conditions of Irish country-life in the first half of the twentieth century. They argue that Kavanagh wrote the poem to revenge himself on the suffocating way of life from which he barely managed to escape, and regard the extreme violence in some of its passages as a flaw caused by a too close identification of the poet with his main character, whose fate he might have shared if he had not left the country. This biographical reading is usually based on the autobiographical elements that can be pointed out in the poem. I have already said that Maguire's village, Donaghmoyne, closely resembles Kavanagh's Inniskeen; moreover, the family-structure in the poem largely corresponds with the one in Tarry Flynn, an allegedly autobiographical novel by Kavanagh. The domineering mother and the unmarried sister who create obstacles on the son's road to independence appear in both works.

Kavanagh always took personal experience as the starting-point for his poetry, however, and his relationship with the country was much more complex than the black picture in The Great Hunger suggests. He frequently expressed his love for the land and its occupants in poetry as well as prose both before and after he moved to the city. He never completely broke the ties with his native place and, towards the end of his life, regretted ever having left it. Like the poet-hero in Tarry Flynn, Kavanagh could take the difficult decision to leave his fields only because he realized that they would remain predominant in his imagination and form the main source of material for his poetry. Tarry's uncle had to use this argument to persuade Tarry to try his luck in the city:

He told him how much he loved this district and the uncle said: “Haven't you it in your mind, the best place for it? If it's as beautiful as you imagine you can take it with you”.⁵

The Great Hunger must be approached as an antipastoral in the tradition of Crabbe's The Village, an attack on the misrepresentation of rural life in contemporary literature rather than on actual conditions. In the incantatory first section of the poem the narrator sets out to give an unadorned, realistic picture of country-life:

Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house,
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant's left hand wrote
                    on the page.

(I. 89–90)

He will curb his imagination in order to tell the true story of Patrick Maguire's life without the embellishment a poetic mind is liable to give to its observations, but at times he is so impressed by the squalor that he fails to maintain his detachment and vents his anger or contempt. It is wrong, however, to equate the narrator with the poet. Kavanagh was well aware of the many aspects of rural life, but in the poem he deliberately emphasizes only the sordid elements to counterbalance the established pastoral mode. The way the narrator reacts to what he observes contributes to this.

The poem's title is the first sneer at the myth of Mother Ireland with its happy peasant society. The Literary Renaissance based its vision of the past on Ireland's remote Celtic ancestry. “The Great Hunger” reminds us of a period in the not-so-distant past which was a formative influence on the Irish national character of far greater importance. During the famine-years in the middle of the nineteenth century the population, through forced emigration and starvation, was reduced from eight million to something over six. This traumatic event, in itself a bitter antidote to any subsequent pastoral mythologizing, laid the foundation for the peasant society of the latter part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

Another comment on the Celtic Twilight tradition is implicit in the poem's structure. The Great Hunger is presented to the reader as a play. In the beginning the narrator announces: “We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain” (I. 14). Towards the end of the poem another reference to the theatre is made: “Applause, applause, / The curtain falls” (XIV. 23–4). Kavanagh probably chose this presentation to set off his peasant-characters against the “stage-Irish peasants” of Synge and his followers who created a whole generation of happily unconcerned cliché Paddies.

In section XIII, the last but one, the superficiality of the city-dweller's conception of rural life is attacked very explicitly:

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.

(XIII. 1–10)

It is not only the quality of the verse which makes this romantic picture look ridiculous. What has preceded is a flat denial of precisely those qualities of peasant-life enumerated in these lines. Patrick Maguire is shown to be the slave of his fields. He spends most of his days grubbing about in the mud to provide himself and his family with enough potatoes to live through the winter. Nor does he have any spiritual freedom; he fails to shake off the authority of his tyrannical old mother and slavishly follows the dictates of a strict Catholic Church. As for his love-life: he is a sexually frustrated old bachelor to whom even the thought of “fresh women” is a terrible sin.

His sexual inhibition forms the groundwork of the poem. Kavanagh based his rendering of country-life on a remarkable sociological phenomenon that originated in the years of the Great Famine. The increased agitation for landreform among the Irish peasantry during and after the Famine forced the English administration to take the land-problem more firmly in hand. Central issues were the excessive rents and the uncertainty of tenure which made investments hazardous and the adaptation of improved agricultural techniques virtually impossible. The land acts of the later nineteenth century gradually turned the peasant from a tenant into a small landowner. Although this economic change in the long run bettered his living conditions, it made his society much more rigid. One of the most striking consequences was a sharp decrease in the number of marriages and a rise of the average age at marriage. Whereas before the Famine the rented lands were usually divided to provide new holdings when children married, it now became important to keep the property intact. Sons had to wait until the death of their parents before they could found their own families, while for daughters the chances to get married were determined by the size of their dowry in land or cattle. Since the Catholic Church strictly forbade premarital sex, the small chances to get married led to a repressive morality in this sphere of life. In Kavanagh's day this situation remained largely unchanged. An economic historian observes about marriage in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century that “In no other country whose statistics are available is the average age at marriage so high; in none is there so large a proportion of life-long bachelors and spinsters” and “the farmer, single on the average until he is 38, is the Irishman latest to marry; and of farmers between 65 and 74 one in four is still a bachelor”.⁶

Patrick Maguire belongs to this last category. The poem's opening-picture shows him working in the fields on a bleak day in October. He is 65 and still a bachelor, although he had promised marriage to himself “before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe'en” (I. 13). The year is nearing its end; the natural cycle is almost completed and Maguire and his men are gathering the potatoes that have to sustain them during the winter. Everything in nature converges towards death. So does the life of Maguire, but whereas the natural world will be regenerated the following spring, the winter he faces will be eternal. As the poem develops, the contrast between the fertility of nature and the barrenness of the man who cultivates the land becomes one of its basic tensions:

He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ's Name.

(I. 60–1)

His bachelorhood becomes the symbol of the frustration of his physical and spiritual being, and, in a wider context, of the stasis of the particular way of life he represents. In his youth he prided himself upon his wordly wisdom which kept him “free from the world's halter” (I. 25). Although he “pretended to his soul” (I. 30), that matrimonial duties would interfere with the demands of his fields, his fear of being trapped in marriage springs from his distorted ideas about sex which prevent him from establishing normal relationships with women:

Once one day in June when he was walking
Among his cattle in the Yellow Meadow
He met a girl carrying a basket—
And he was then a young and heated fellow
Too earnest, too earnest! He rushed beyond the thing
To the unreal. And he saw Sin
Written in letters larger than John Bunyan dreamt of.
For the strangled impulse there is no redemption.

(IV. 31–8)

His obsession with sin makes him shrink back from the promptings of his instinct and he clings for guidance to the traditional values of his society: religion and land. The first is represented in the poem by the village-priest who offers him a ready-made prescript of right and wrong with which he can force his nature into the mould designed by his society: “the certain standard measured and known / By which man might re-make his soul” (VII. 26–7). The agony that results from this distortion is given the aura of a holy sacrifice:

And Patrick Maguire
From his purgatory fire
Called the gods of the Christian to prove
That this twisted skein
Was the necessary pain
And not the rope that was strangling true love.

(VIII. 23–8)

Closely allied to the village-priest is the mother, who represents the land, basis of the material values of the peasant-society. She is a sad symbol of distorted life, with “a venomous drawl / And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette” (III. 7–8), and praises the man who makes “a field his bride” (I. 57). Maguire follows her words almost literally. His commitment to the land gradually consumes all other passions and the relationship with his fields assumes an erotic dimension:

Lost in the passion that never needs a wife—
The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.

(I. 33–4)

                                                            He saw his cattle
And stroked their flanks in lieu of wife to handle.

(IV. 41–2)

The connection between mother Maguire and her son is an ironic reversal of the relationship between Mother Ireland and her native sons. While in the mythical conception of the Celtic Twilight the mother-country is the unifying, nurturing element of Irish society, the mother-son relation in the poem is one of entanglement and frustration. The metaphor Stephen Dedalus invented for Ireland, “the old sow that eats her farrow”, is well suited to mother Maguire. Patrick Maguire

                                                                                          is tied
To a mother's womb by the wind-toughened navel-cord
Like a goat tethered to the stump of a tree—
He circles around and around wondering why it should be.
No crash.
No drama.
That was how his life happened.

(XIII. 47–53)

His irreproachable way of life earns him the regard of his neighbours, and as time passes he becomes a symbol of success and respectability in the small rural community. Underneath this social prestige, however, he suffers from a devouring sexual frustration. His sexual desire has turned into a physical nuisance that has to be suppressed by furtive masturbation until the sterility of old age frees him from it:

So Maguire got tired
Of the no-target gun fired
And 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.

(II. 27–32)

He fails to perceive that the authorities he has chosen offer nothing but lifeless ideals, “stones too sharp to sit on … frozen idols of a speechless muse” (VI. 20–21). When, towards the end of his life, he becomes dimly aware of the barrenness and futility of his existence, it is too late to change its course:

He looks towards his house and haggard. “O God if I had been wiser!'
But now a crumpled leave from the whitethorn bushes
Darts like a frightened robin, and the fence
Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,
And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar.

(I. 74–8)

Patrick Maguire is no solitary exception. Brendan Kennelly rightly argues that what Kavanagh insists on most of all is “the appalling normality” of his fate.⁷ The people who surround him are victims of the same lie and live similar lives of quiet desperation:

Life dried in the veins of these women and men:
The grey and grief and unlove,
The bones in the backs of their hands,
And the chapel pressing its low ceiling over them.

(IX. 24–7)

His sexual frustration is not the peculiar defect of an individual character, but is shared by the whole community. They inhabit “a metaphysical land / Where flesh [is] a thought more spiritual than music among the stars” (VII. 19–21). Their intellectual centre is formed by the crooked old men who meet at the crossroads in the evening, where they “[nod] out words as wise / As the rumination of cows after milking” (V. 2–3). It is a bitter irony that the highest authority among them is a pig-gelder.

The Great Hunger has a strong pictorial character. The sense most acutely activated by the poetry is sight. Tone, rhythm, and other poetic devices help to strengthen the poetry's visual impact. Some paragraphs have long, flowing free verse lines, others have rhyming couplets or are written in downright prose. Assonance and alliteration are frequently used to underline striking images, as in:

The horse lifts its head and cranes
Through the whins and stones
To lip late passion in the crawling clover.

(I. 80–2; my italics)

The first instance of alliteration effectively expresses the horse's slow, searching movements, while the sound of the second stresses the pertinacious growth of vegetable nature even on this poor soil. The animal that manages to find life even among bare rocks and stones is sharply contrasted to the sterility of the nearby peasants. Another sound-effect frequently used is repetition. In the following passage it adequately conveys the slow swinging movement of a person sitting on the crossbeam of a gate with dangling legs in a dreamy, careless mood:

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.

(VIII. 1–8)

The dramatic presentation reinforces the idea that one is watching a performance rather than reading a printed text. More than once the narrator directly addresses the reader to point out some detail or ask him to have a good look at a particular scene: “Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit / Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time” (I. 58–9).

The story of Patrick Maguire's life is not told chronologically. The narrator depicts him in various situations and in various stages of his life. These pictures might be described as tableaux vivants which can be given titles such as The Peasant At Home, The Tavern, The Fields, Church-going, Death. Each of them contributes some elements to the total portrait of the main character and his environment that gradually emerges. The structural device by which they are connected is the circle, an image which functions at three different levels. In the first place, it operates as the framework of the narrative structure. In the first section Maguire is working in the fields; the poem's final picture returns to the evening of the same day and shows him at home, at rest after a hard day's work. In the meantime we have compassed his entire life, up to and including his death. Then there is the cyclic movement of nature, of which we are reminded by references to the seasons and the constant mentioning of the names of the months. The tension between the fertility of the natural world and the barrenness of the peasants has already been pointed out. This opposition is reinforced at a symbolic level by the contrast between the natural cycle of birth, growth, decay, rebirth, and the linear development of human life. Patrick Maguire's life is measured out in the long straight lines of drills and furrows: “Maguire watches the drills flattened out … The drills slipped by and the days slipped by / And he trembled his head away” (I. 22–5). Finally, the circle is used as a metaphor of the restrictiveness of rural life. The peasants are trapped in a wearisome cycle of farmwork, dictated to them by the succession of the seasons. The image appears in this way in the lines quoted at the top of p. 286. Another example is:

He would have changed the circle if he could,
The circle that was the grass track where he ran.
Twenty times a day he ran round the field
And still there was no winning-post where the runner is cheered home

(IV. 43–6),

and related to this:

He gave himself another year,
Something was bound to happen before then—
The circle would break down
And he would curve the new one to his own will.

(IX. 1–4)

At the end of the poem all pictures fall together in a magnificent set-piece, a “still” which is a final summing up of the whole poem:

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.

As has been said before, The Great Hunger stresses only one side of rural life. At the outset the narrator wondered: “Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods? / Or why do we stand here shivering?” (I. 8–9). The answer to this question seems to be twosided. For the peasants described in the poem it is “No”. Unquestioningly but without conviction they follow the traditional patterns of their society and fail to see meaning in the apparently insignificant things of their everyday life. They sometimes have intimations of a higher truth, but lack the imaginative power and the spiritual daring to respond to them. It all depends on the observer, however. Kavanagh once wrote about the quality of beauty in art and nature:

It is what happens to you when you look at something. And looking at a cabbage can be a more thrilling experience than looking at a rose.⁸

The poem's very existence proves that for those who can see the wet clods possess a sombre but powerful poetry.

Notes

1. In this article the terms Literary Renaissance and Celtic Twilight will be regarded as synonymous.

2. Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Pruse, London, 1967, pp. 14–19.

3. Patrick Kavanagh, London, 1975, p. 64.

4. Collected Poems, London, 1964. All subsequent references following quotations from The Great Hunger will be to the same edition.

5. Tarry Flynn, London, 1948; rpt. 1968, p. 253.

6. K. H. Connell, “Peasant Marriage in Ireland”, Econ. Hist. Review, XIV, 3, 1962; quoted by Alan Warner in Clay is the Word, Dublin, 1973.

7. “Patrick Kavanagh”, Ariel, I, 3, July 1970, 14.

8. Peter Kavanagh, Sacred Keeper: A Biography of Patrick Kavanagh, Kildare, 1979, p. 44.