SOURCE: “Religious Themes in the Work of Patrick Kavanagh: Hints of a Celtic Tradition,” in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 82, No. 327, Autumn, 1993, pp. 257–64.

INTRODUCTION: AWARENESS OF ANCIENT ROOTS

Patrick Kavanagh was aware that the remnants of an ancient culture lurked in the landscape of south-east Ulster. ‘The ghost of a culture’ he says wistfully, ‘haunted the snub-nosed hills’. The drumlins of south Monaghan were his Alps; they provided him with prehistoric vision. From their summits he saw ‘gaps of ancient Ireland sweeping in again with all its unbaptised beauty’. ‘From the tops of the little hills there spread a view right back to the days of St. Patrick and the druids. Slieve Gullion to the north fifteen miles distant, to the west the bewitched hills and forths of Dunamoyne’. (The Green Fool). This was a country rich in a medley of legends: of Fionn and Cuchulainn as well as of Patrick, Brigid and Daeg, the maker of bells. ‘Unbaptised beauty’ hinted of an original world of Eden—the unspoilt wonderland that lurked in stones and hedges: ‘The smell from ditches that were not Christian’. (“Why Sorrow?”)¹

Religion, pagan as well as Christian, fascinated Kavanagh. He was acutely aware that the brand of Christianity introduced into Ireland by Cardinal Cullen after the synod of Thurles in 1850 was not indigenous to this country. On several occasions he complained that ‘the arrival of continental Catholicism’ had ‘finally disposed of the druidic culture’ and had turned catholicism into a religion of ‘voteens’. To be a ‘voteen’ was to be excessively preoccupied with novenas, church-devotions and spurious pieties. Religion became more and more distanced from everyday life. Part of Kavanagh's genius was that he distilled for himself an essence of Christianity despite the local brand available. Mystical insight undoubtedly assisted him in getting to the heart of his faith.

MYSTICAL LONGING: YEARNING FOR THE WONDERFUL

The quest for unspoilt beauty is an early motif in Kavanagh's work. He longs for the wonder of Eden, for the ‘Garden of the Golden Apples’ to appease his spiritual hunger. Transported by mystical imagination he is caught up in wonder and longing by a neighbour's rubbish dump where ‘old boots’ and rusty-holed buckets become agents in an unfolding drama.

It was the garden of the golden apples
A long garden between a railway and a road …

(“The Long Garden”)²

The magic strip of waste land teaches Kavanagh something about God. The pain of ‘wishing for a fruit that never grew’ is intensified by tantalizing hints of ‘pubs where life can drink its fill’. Further contemplation of his wonderland affords occasional glimpses of ‘evening sunlight miracles’ and ultimate fulfilment ‘when … The New Moon by its little finger swung from the telegraph wires’. In this mystical moment Kavanagh ‘knew how God had happened / And what the blackbird in the whitethorn sang’. Along with Julian of Norwich, Kavanagh implicitly hears God's words: ‘I am He who makes you to love, I am He who makes you to long, I am He the true fulfilling of all true desires’.³

Where Kavanagh triumphs best spiritually is by arriving ultimately at the realization that ‘the heavenly place’ is ‘under all our noses’ (“Auditors In”). To achieve this he must dig deeply into his own inland spiritual territory, when the sour soil of hurt and betrayal threatens to overwhelm him. Thus he reaches an ultimate reconciliation with ‘the now’, and with the incredible poetic richness of ‘loving to the heart of any ordinary thing’. (“Moment On the Canal”).

THE JUXTAPOSITION OF OPPOSITES

In spite of his longing for the perfect, Kavanagh has a prophetic genius for juxtaposing seeming opposites, the banal with the spiritual. Flushed with a sense of divine presence: ‘the Holy Ghost is on the fields’ and elated with an awareness of God's message in the flowers and weeds, his anti-hero Tarry Flynn is arrested by his mother's mundane request to pare her corn:

“There's a curse of God corn on that wee toe and it's starting to bother me again. I think we'll have a slash of rain. Get the razor blade and pare it for me”. He held the foot between his legs like a blacksmith shoeing a horse. “Easy now” she cried, “and don't draw blood”. After a while she quietly asked “What was that you said about the Holy something?”

(Tarry Flynn).

Kavanagh believed that no human act however lowly was outside God's reach. God was as present in the paring of a corn as in the beauty of a landscape. The book of Kells provides similar outrageous juxtapositions of cats, mice, otters and angels strategically and deliberately placed in the sacred text at moments of profoundest import.⁴ One of the poet's most successful juxtapositions of opposites occurs in “The Long Garden”:

In the sow's rooting where the hen scratches
We dipped our fingers in the pockets of God.(5)

Such exquisite moments in Kavanagh are woven from the textures of country life. Further ‘pockets of God’ lie hidden in the ‘ordinary plenty’ of ‘decent men / Who barrow dung in gardens under trees’ (“Advent”). Similarly during a pilgrimage to Knock, attended as reporter, Kavanagh notices that the attention of pilgrims becomes divided between a field of oats ‘that's a great crop, that bit of oats of Mickey's’ and the Litany: ‘Star of the Sea …’ ‘Queen of Peace. …’ The poet mischievously makes a strong plea for ‘the things of earth’ believing that they risk insufficient respect in such a devotional ambience.⁶

Kavanagh propounded a simple earthy theology of Incarnation. His personal life embodied something of his poetic blend of opposites. His behaviour was rude, vulgar and insulting yet at the same time his poetry was the fruit of the rarest poetic sensibility. God seems at ease amid extraordinary contradictions.

GOD PRESENT IN THE LOCAL

To highlight further Kavanagh's sense of Incarnation he fixes his Bethlehem firmly in his own parish, with the star of David situated a field away ‘over Cassidy's hanging hill’. ‘Three whin bushes rode across the horizon’: these constitute the coming of the Magi, Inniskeen-style. Easter arrives with unexpected brilliance in the dark sterility of Paddy Maguire's ploughed field. The ploughing of the earth, the sowing of seed with ‘an east wind blowing from Dundalk:’ all are pervious to Divine intervention. Spectres of destruction and oppression yield to budding trees ‘And Christ will be the green leaves that will come / At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb’. (The Great Hunger)

Thus Kavanagh incorporates the essential mysteries of his faith within the parameters of his own townland. These mysteries have takes on ‘a local habitation and a name’. They are no longer remote incidents of long ago but contemporary happenings occurring now in Inniskeen. A neighbour hurrying to Mass on Christmas morning says:

I can't delay now Jem
Lest I be late for Bethlehem.

(“Christmas Eve Remembered”)

For the pilgrims to Lough Derg faith was so vibrant that ‘Christ was (only) lately dead’. Moreover

The Apostles' Creed
Was a fireside poem,
The talk of the town.

Experiencing faith as a ‘fireside poem’ evokes a religion of the same nearness and familiarity present in our ancient Irish prayers: a prayer while rising, while lighting the fire, while milking, churning, baking and on first seeing the new moon.⁷

THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE POET

Kavanagh's notion of the poet as priest and theologian has overtones of celtic origin. One of the initial images of himself that he discloses is that of an enclosed monk:

I am like a monk
In a grey cell
Copying out my soul's
Queer miracle.

(“Poet”)

Some of his neighbours avoided him; they called him a bard and feared the power of his tongue. Others treated him as a fool and idiot, laughing when they discovered that he withdrew each evening to his poorly furnished attic-room to read and practise his skill at poetry:

That in the end
I may find
Things not sold for a penny
In the slums of mind.

(“Ascetic”)

Analogous with the harrowing of earth for spring sowing, the poet feels he is driving his horses ‘through the mist where Genesis begins’. His poems, like the grain, incubate in darkness. Poet and farmer are complementary in their task of providing for the people's needs. By renouncing farming in the end, Kavanagh becomes singleminded in his role as ‘the conscience of the people’. It is no longer enough to recapture a mood or to court woodlands and hedges in verse; the mature poet has a god-like function

The role is that of prophet and saviour. To smelt in
passion
The commonplaces of life. To take over the function of a god in a new fashion.

(“After Forty Years of Age”)

There is something at times arrogant and druid-like in Kavanagh's poetic high-priesthood as there is also with Joyce's literary vocation. Both see themselves involved in a work of inner transmutation—a smelting of living substance in ‘the smithy of the soul’. It is not surprising to hear Kavanagh proclaim in his Self-Portrait that ‘poetry has to do with the reality of spirit … A poet is a theologian’. Poets were ‘the true legislators’ of the people and in poetry they dabbled in ‘a mystical thing and a dangerous thing’. Kavanagh's ‘poetry of everyday’ is at home with weaving spells, spilling magic ‘at every turn of the living road’ and conjuring things into life through the incantatory art of naming. Furthermore, he never despaired of finding a patron, (a rich woman preferably) ‘to keep him in the decency and comfort which are a necessity to the poet’ (Self-Portrait). Such sentiments bring us back to the tradition of the celtic fili of old.

A DANCE OF LIFE

Kavanagh's spirituality presents itself as intensely life-affirming—God is part and parcel of creation in all its aspects. In Spring, nature awakens to the intensity of giving birth, echoed in the Song of Songs ‘winter is past / the rains are over and gone …’ Kavanagh gives his own particularly Christian twist to the sacred Earth-myth:

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

(“April”)

The poet's sense of celebration is intoxicating. He speaks of poetry as having within it ‘the cry of things young and elemental’. He celebrates the munificent god who lavishes the earth with life and prays for the faith to enjoy it to the full:

O give me faith
That I may be
Alive when April's
Ecstasy
Dances in every
White-thorn tree.

(“A Prayer for Faith”)

He is spiritually attuned to primal energies, to ‘the moonlight that stays forever in a tree’ as much as to the lush growth of weeds: ‘dandelions growing on headlands / showing their unlived hearts to everyone’. Contemplating the shapes and textures of potato-blossoms while spraying, he envisions himself caught up in a dance of life:

The flocks of green potato-stalks
Were blossoms spread for sudden flight
The Kerr's Pinks in a frivelled blue,
The Arran Banners wearing white

(“Spraying the Potatoes”)

The energy of Divine-Life, the celtic idea of neart pulsing through all things has a particularly magnetic quality for the poet. This energy fills with redemptive healing the ‘leafy-with-loves banks’ of the Grand Canal, and clothes the ‘bogs and marshes’ in a riot of colour: ‘Green, blue, yellow and red. …’

PATRICK KAVANAGH'S GOD

Who then is Kavanagh's God? One of his earliest revelations shows the poet as ‘a childhood seer’ contemplating Christ in a primrose. He ‘looked at Christ transfigured without fear …’ (“Primrose”). His vision of the Trinity in The Great Hunger is extraordinary from both an artistic and theological standpoint. Thoroughly Celtic in overtone, Kavanagh's Trinity is presented in the living tree, a symbol of Fatherhood and in ‘the rising sap’, dynamism of the Spirit. A crucified Son is implied yet images of glory abound. A shaft of sun ‘comes through a gap’, bringing with it the promise of green leaves and Easter joy. Such insight had to originate from within the poet's own psyche and spirit. The renewal of resurrection-theology heralded by the Second Vatican Council was still twenty-five years away.

Emerging in the 1950s from failure, humiliation and serious illness, the poet discovers that he has undergone a complete spiritual transformation. He proclaims to have learned something new about God, not ‘the abstract God’ but Someone ‘who caresses the daily and nightly earth’. Kavanagh's God is patient, refusing ‘to take failure for an answer till again and again is worn’. This is the God of unlimited generosity. We are reminded again of Julian's God: ‘We have our being from him, where the foundation of motherhood begins, with all the sweet protection of love which endlessly follows’.⁸ Kavanagh prophetically recognized the feminine face of God.

He continued to celebrate God in richer, more confident images—a God who is colourful, healing, mysterious with a deep impulse for goodness, a motherhood of Divine love. His most stunning and magnificent portrait must surely come from his poem ‘The One’. Here God has all the properties of a Celtic Rí: comely, true, generous.⁹ The pulse of the land's fertility witnesses to the King's successful reign. God, clothed in raiment, ‘sensational as April and almost incredible’ is ‘breathing his love by a cut-away bog’.

A humble scene in a backward place
Where noone important ever looked
The raving flowers looked up in the face
Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that baulked
The profoundest of mortals.

Immanence and transcendence are exquisitely held in balance. God is at home with his people, ‘down in the bogs and marshes’ yet, He is also the Inscrutable One—‘the Mind that has baulked the profoundest of mortals’. Kavanagh loves the fact that God chooses the lowly—he envisages Him in his own bog—in Mucker, a place of pigs. Nowhere is too lowly for Christ to be born.

One senses all through Kavanagh's work a belief in life and in a divine energy that surges through the universe. Kavanagh believes in the here and now, the clay, the earth, water, the townland, the parish. ‘I have lived in important places” he unashamedly confesses. And he had. He had immortalized himself and his parish and successfully demonstrated that the poet's true vocation is to help ‘renew the face of the earth’, to spill magic as he passes.

But hope! the poet comes again to build
A new city high above lust and logic,
The trucks of language overflow and magic
At every turn of the living road is spilled

(“A Wreath for Tom Moore's Statue”)

Notes

1. Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems, ed. Peter Kavanagh, Newbridge, Ireland: The Goldsmith Press, 1984. Unless otherwise stated all quotations are taken from this edition.

2. Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, London: Martin Brian and O'Keeffe, 1972(1964), p. 74.

3. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A. and James Walsh, S. J., Julian of Norwich: Showings, London: SPCK, 1978, p.296.

4. A point developed further by Dr. Jennifer O'Reilly in a paper entitled ‘The Book of Kells: The Monastic Reading of Scripture’, given at a Conference of Celtic Spirituality, All Hallows, Dublin, July 29th, 1992.

5. Collected Poems, p. 74.

6. The Standard, May 8th, 1942.

7. An tAthair Diarmuid O'Laoghaire, ár bPaidreacha Dúchais, Baile Atha Cliath: FAS, 1975.

8. Julian of Norwich: Showings, p. 295.

9. Some of the celtic themes mentioned here were developed in greater detail by Seán Ó Duinn, OSB, during his conferences on celtic Spirituality at All Hallows, July 1992.