The subject of the poem, Patrick Maguire, has lived with his mother until her death at the age of 91. Where the potato-gatherers like mechanized scarecrows moveĪlong the side-fall of the hill – Maguire and his In 1939, he returned to Ireland, not to rustic Monaghan but to urban Dublin, and in 1942 published his most celebrated work, the epic poem “The Great Hunger”: (In time to come, Kavanagh would bad mouth The Green Fool, as “a stage-Irish lie.”)
Let grief be a fallen leaf full#
The following year, he moved to London, where he was commissioned to write his autobiography, a memoir of an idyllic childhood, full of beautiful, charming characters and innocent humor.
Let grief be a fallen leaf code#
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight,Īnd there’s the half-talk code of mysteriesĪnd the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Macmillan published his first collection, Ploughman and Other Poems, in 1936, while he was still working “the stony grey soil” of the farm. After Russell published some poems in 19, Kavanagh walked 50 miles to Dublin to visit him personally, and Russell became his literary patron. In 1929 he submitted a few to the Irish Statesman, a Dublin literary periodical edited by George Russell, who rejected them but encouraged him to keep writing.
Inexplicably, as a teenager he began to write poems. Photo Courtesy: UCD Archives.īehan was a Dubliner, born and bred, but Kavanagh was born in the back of beyond – on a small farm in the townland of Mucker, the parish of Inniskeen, in Co. The former dreamed of “athletic youths, sturdy children and happy maidens, living the life that God desires that men should live.” The latter issued a ban on tampons, expressing concern that they “could harmfully stimulate young girls at an impressionable age.”Īt the time, Seán Ó Faoláin called his homeland, “unimaginative, commonplace and circumscribed… a dreary Eden.” Seán’s good friend, the writer Honor Tracy, described it as “a sparsely populated land where only the pious and the unhinged assemble in any numbers.”Īgainst that damp, dismal theocracy, “that Green density of gombeen men, crawling hack, bogus patriot and pietistic profiteer” there were, of course, rebels, preeminently Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Ireland, from 1932 until 1973, was ruled by the eminently austere statesman Eamon de Valera, in cahoots with John Charles McQuaid, the outstandingly chaste Archbishop of Dublin. Sean Kelly remembers one of Ireland’s most significant and revered poets.
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