|
Brendan Kennelly',Patrick Kavanagh’, in Ariel (July 1970), pp.7-28. There are certain poets of whom it can be said that they have a unique personal vision - Blake and Yeats for example and one knows immediately what is meant. They have a new, inimitable, disturbing way of looking at life and, at their best, they communicate this vision successfully. In twentieth-century Ireland, one poet (apart from Yeats) possesses such a vision - Patrick Kavanagh - who, for some unaccountable reason, is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued poets of our time. It is with Blake and Yeats that Kavanagh must be compared, for he is a visionary poet and towards the end of his life he claimed that he had achieved a truly comic vision:
Comedy then, meant for Kavanagh something very definite and profound, but sometimes what is perfectly clear to a poet is confused to a critic because the poet lives poetry and his discoveries are inevitable and organic. They are one with the beat of his blood. It is the purpose of this essay to clarify what Kavanagh meant by the comic vision; to show how comedy appears in his poetry; and in so doing to trace his development. Fewer modern poets have undergone such a deep, dynamic development as Kavanagh. The trouble with Thomas Hardy, for example, is that his poetry, at the deepest level, the level of visionary intensity, does not develop. What we get from {159} him is a series of sincere repetitions of a few basic perceptions. At the end of Hardy’s career, he is saying, in more or less the same way, exactly what he was saying at the beginning, and his greatness is that he manages to move us by his repetition. It is his sincerity which prevents his repetition from becoming platitude; but as we witness Hardy’s integrity, we also see his shortcomings, chief of which is that his vision does not undergo any vital development or change. So there is little or no growth in his poetry. There is instead a kind of intrepid stasis that commands attention. R. S. Thomas, the Welsh poet, is another who is stuck in this peculiar rut of static honesty. He seems to be writing the same poem always. After reading his poems, I feel as if I had listened to somebody with whom a perception has become an obsession and who is so convinced of its importance he has to repeat it ad infinitum. A poet’s perception has a quality of brutal stamina that will not permit him to remain at rest with one statement. He must tell it to all the world all the time. However, with Hardy and Thomas, what is told doesn’t change very much. In the case of Kavanagh, it changes a great deal. His was one of the most moving, coherent, and profound visions in modern poetry. II The poems in Kavanagh’s early work, Ploughman and Other Poems, are beautifully simple. Yet they contain certain elements which endure into his later work, though in a transfigured way. In the introduction to his Collected Poems, Kavanagh tells us that, for him, poetry is 'a mystical thing, and a dangerous thing’ (Collected Poems, 1964, p.xv.) It is mystical because it is concerned with man’s dialogue with God, the foundation-stone of all Kavanagh’s work, the source of his humour and sanity:
Belief in that gay, imaginative, unfeared, creative God vitalizes Kavanagh’s early work. It is this spirit of positive belief that makes such simple lyrics as. “To A Blackbird” so authentic and buoyant:
In that poem is, in genetic form, another vital aspect of the comic vision achieved by Kavanagh towards the end of his life: his separateness, his detachment, the sense that he can participate but never belong. Kavanagh was to speak many years later of the poet’s 'kink of rectitude’, that blessing and burden of integrity that makes a lot of people hate the poet. Blake had this 'kink of rectitude’. [4] He had a disturbing habit of slamming whatever he believed to be hypocritical, phoney, and mediocre. Kavanagh had this quality in terrifying abundance and his newspaper, Kavanagh’s Weekly, which was totally honest and therefore short-lived, is immortal for its moral probity, humour, and outspokenness. These qualities spring from his detachment which in turn originates in his belief in a gay, imaginative God, which is also the source of his later philosophy of 'not-caring’. [5] Kavanagh quite rightly saw that the sense of importance a number of people suffer from is a form of insanity - they invest the trivial things to which they are committed with what is in fact a ludicrous sense that it all matters a great deal. Co-existing with the sense of man’s insignificance, however, is the sense of his grandeur - something that Kavanagh never lost though 'malignant Dublin’ [6] disillusioned him considerably, at least for a time:
This is another aspect of his vision which needs to be stressed: the significance of the casual and the apparently insignificant. In this attitude is the refusal to be deceived by anything, the determination to accept himself, and by so doing, to forget himself:
In the best of his early poems Kavanagh looks into himself, desiring this detachment, the key to not-caring about the 'important’. He is trying, in the poetic sense, to keep his soul pure. He looks out from himself at the natural beauty of Monaghan and sees the black hills that do not care, that are 'incurious’. A certain kind of curiosity not only killed the cat and turned Lot’s wife into salt - it could also mar the detachment of the poet, and meddle with the happiness that comes from observation and expression:
Kavanagh said once that a poet’s journey is the way 'from simplicity back to simplicity’. [10] The simplicity of Kavanagh’s “Shancoduff” is the simplicity of Blake’s “London”, the simplicity that stems from a totally coherent and lucid vision. In an essay called “Pietism and Poetry”, Kavanagh says that 'The odd thing about the best modern poets is their utter simplicity’. [11] I would further add that only the man who sees completely can be completely simple. Kavanagh knew this in {163} his heart, and it can be said of him that he is the only great modern poet who never wrote an obscure poem. He recognized that, in most cases, obscurity is simply a failure of the poet’s imagination, the sanctuary of the inadequate. (In a couple of cases, such as Wallace Stevens and some of Yeats, it is a measure of the depth of their enquiry.) This simplicity, present from the beginning in Kavanagh’s work, is characteristic of his achieved comic vision. He saw that his simplicity was a gift from the gay, imaginative God; that it was the most difficult thing in the world to achieve; and that if sophistication has any meaning at all (and no word in the English language is more abused or misunderstood) it means that the poet has the courage to be utterly himself, his best self, and that nothing else will do. In “Shancoduff”, Kavanagh is simple in this sense. He obviously thought a great deal about the nature of simplicity and came up with a few sentences that should be stamped on the brow of every modern poet and critic:
Because Kavanagh passionately believed in his own conception of simplicity, he was impatient, both in his own work and in the work of others, with whatever violated that conception. A poet’s critical judgements are always, at bottom, necessary justifications of his own most dearly held aesthetic. Yeats’s dismissal of Wilfred Owen is a daft assessment of Owen but an acute justification of Yeats. Blake’s contempt for verse with a single meaning is essentially an assertion of the symbolic and therefore an attack on the literal. And this is fair: a poet can’t be expected to advocate principles and ideas which he doesn’t intend to follow. At the same time, in the {164} interests of objective fair play, poetry should frequently be saved from the judgements of the poet who created it. Passionate belief is certainly the source of whatever achievement lies in the future; it is also the reason why poets are sometimes compelled to distort their accomplishments in the past. Because of his beliefs, Kavanagh was guilty of this distortion in his evaluation of The Great Hunger. He somehow failed to see that this splendid though rather uneven work was a vital stage in his journey toward the comic vision. Kavanagh had to write The Great Hunger, and in his own time, he had to dismiss it. At this point, we may say that what is confused to the poet is clear to the critic, and from an objective standpoint, this is right. The Great Hunger is a necessary realistic outburst from an essentially transcendental imagination; it is a furious episode in a story that is fundamentally passive, reposed and serene; it is an angry protest from one who really believes in calm statement; it is a fierce hysterical digression in the journey from simplicity to simplicity. Kavanagh dismissed it and from his own viewpoint he was right to do so. But he was also wrong. The Great Hunger has a proud place in the larger story. Since it is the purpose of this essay to show the unity of Kavanagh’s vision, The Great Hunger must be treated as a necessary part of that unity. III
The Great Hunger is about a man who can trust nothing: not the gay imaginative God, nor life itself, nor men, nor women, nor his own heart and soul. Patrick Maguire is married to his fields and animals instead of to a woman. Dominated by his mother, servile to his Church, committed to his meadows, his life is a sad farce of slavish work, furtive masturbation, crude pretence, increasing mindlessness, decreasing manhood and the drab inevitable advance towards old age. The bitter irony of his existence is that he is devoted to a shocking self-deception that began in boyhood and can end only with his death. In portraying the appalling life of this central, solitary figure, Kavanagh presents the two major tensions of the poem. There is first, the tension between Christianity and a fertile, pagan or completely natural world.
The second tension re-enforces the first. It is between the increasing impotence of Maguire’s physical and spiritual being, and the irrepressible rebel bloom of the fields and meadows. The inanimate world is sure of an annual re-birth; Spring’s promise is eternal. Nothing but winter faces Maguire:
What Kavanagh insists on most of all in this poem is the appalling normality of Maguire’s fate. Underlying the two {167} tensions mentioned is the theme to which Kavanagh returns again and again, both by direct statement and by implication. This is Maguire’s devouring sexual frustration, the agony he suffers from the 'impotent worm on his thigh’. [16] Maguire is a tragic figure. He is a man who, sentenced to a horribly lingering death, is compelled to watch the natural world reproduce itself with spendthrift fertility while he shrivels into barren anonymity:
The final picture of Maguire emphasizes his sheer emptiness. It is a frightening portrait of a man and his world utterly devoid of hope; and Kavanagh explicitly states that this is not simply a personal tragedy. The darkness and guilt touch everybody on the land:
The Great Hunger is one of the most striking and memorable long poems of this century, and yet its creator totally rejected it on at least two separate occasions. In his Self-Portrait, Kavanagh said that 'There are some queer and terrible things in The Great Hunger, but it lacks the nobility and repose of poetry’. [19] And in the introduction to his Collected Poems, he is even more emphatic in his rejection of the poem:
The most important point here, and one extremely relevant to my argument, is that 'Tragedy is underdeveloped Comedy’. If this is not a totally unique way of seeing tragedy, it is certainly a unique way of putting it. But we must remember that Kavanagh wrote the introduction to his poems in 1964 and that The Great Hunger was written in 1942. In the twenty-two years that intervened, Kavanagh’s comic vision developed to its full maturity. Personal suffering and physical illness played a vital part in that development. He was now living in Dublin where he had to endure 'the daily spite’ of that 'unmannerly town’ [21] and, of course, give his share in return. This Kavanagh could do extremely well. The next stage in his development shows him exploring the two strains that arise inevitably out of the early poems and The Great Hunger the satirical and mystical strains that form the essence of A Soul For Sale. It is quite natural that the poet who wrote The Great Hunger should become a satirist; and the mystical strain in Kavanagh is present from beginning to end. {169} IV
For Kavanagh, at this stage, the rewards of this liberty are two-fold. First of all, his sense of wonder deepens, and his expression of it - in “Advent” - becomes more assured:
The second reward for the liberated, independent imagination is a kind of savagery which is inextricably involved with the deepened sense of wonder. Both elements are present to some extent in the well-known lyric of accusation, “Stony Grey Soil” but they appear in a far more vital way in that very powerful poem, “A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue”. Moore is Ireland’s so-called National Poet, but in comparison with Kavanagh, he is a poor pop-singer, a facile gaudy entertainer. In one savage line, Kavanagh endows Moore with an immortality of shame: 'The cowardice of Ireland is in his Statue.’ [25] But, towards the end of the poem, there is a note of hope. Salvation lies in expressed wonder:
At the end of A Soul for Sale Kavanagh is faced with a choice: satire or celebration? Living in an essentially unsympathetic society, he is understandably attracted towards satire. His natural inclinations as a poet, however, draw him towards celebration. It is not an easy choice, but ultimately a choice will have to be made. Although his evolving comic vision tells him that satire is not enough, before he can consciously formulate its inadequacy, he must exhaust its potential. As a satirist, Kavanagh came to the conclusion that satire was simply 'unfruitful prayer’ [27] to the gay, imaginative god of comedy. V
Kavanagh hits at the sentimental self-congratulation typical of the provincial Dublin mentality that James Joyce had parodied with such wicked accuracy. Kavanagh is no less savage in “The Defeated”:
Kavanagh satirizes sentimentality not only because it is fear of real feeling, but also because it would divert the poet from his true responsibility:
The same dishonesty and unreality come under fire in the “Adventures in the Bohemian jungle”, in which the Countryman, Kavanagh’s moral voice, gradually comes to recognize the rottenness and sheer deadness of the world in which he finds himself. In the end, he sounds like a rural Faustus brought face-to-face with the hell of hypocritical mediocrity:
Other strong satires are “Irish Stew”, “The Christmas Mummers” and “Tale of Two Cities”. In “Who Killed James Joyce” he satirizes the magnates of the Joyce industry. This parody of “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, with its giddy little metre, is a successful demolition of all those pompous, solemn academics whose idea of happiness is the discovery of some trivial allusion in Ulysses or Finnegans Wake: {173}
It becomes increasingly clear that Kavanagh is not really at home in satire. In a magnificent poem called “Prelude” he shows his competence as a satirist and then proceeds to declare his sense of its inadequacy:
Ultimately, satire is for Kavanagh 'a desert that yields NO’. [35] In a later poem, “Living in the Country”, he repeats his rejection of satire and informs us of his deeper intention:
The choice is finally made. Satire falls away because it is not an enduring part of the comic vision. It is at best a necessary {174} digression. I return to the introduction to the Collected Poems:
Kavanagh has almost completed the journey from simplicity to simplicity. The angry protest of The Great Hunger is over; the sword of satire is blunted in his hand. He has achieved an ideal of vigilant passivity, a belief in poetry as a mystical dangerous thing, a resolution to he at once humorous and humane. He sees the privilege and responsibilities of observation, has a profound understanding of the nature of love, and recognizes one of the most fascinating and complex subjects for poetry: poetry and the poet. Out of his life, his digressions, failures, sufferings, disappointments and triumphs, he has hammered a superbly lucid and rarefied poetry that is the pure product of the comic vision. I shall now examine these poems. VI
Kavanagh said: 'In that little thing I had become airborne and more; I had achieved weightlessness ... poetry has to do with the reality of the spirit, of faith and hope and sometimes even charity. It is a point of view . A poet is an original who inspires millions of copies.’ [42] There are times when Kavanagh writes as if he were somebody else imitating Kavanagh’s originality, as though he were indulging in a frivolous parody of his own vision. So when we read lines like:
We seem to be listening to a bad imitation of some of Kavanagh’s favourite themes: the 'human-eternal puzzle’; the startling significance and beauty inherent in casual things; the sense of his own dignity and littleness in the face of 'the great perpetual’. But the rhymes are forced, the metre giddy, the diction sloppy, the rhythm ragged. In his attempt to become 'airborne’ and to achieve 'weightlessness’ he has managed at best a rather frivolous lightness before flopping on all fours to the ground.. And this happens on several occasions in the later poems. At the same time it is well to recognize that these {176} failures are the failures of a great ambition, of a poet who in many other cases has achieved the 'pure flame’. In his famous Canal sonnets for example we find that passionate, pure, weightless expression:
And so we come to the full flowering of the comic vision. At the very centre of it is that ideal of disinterest which Kavanagh expresses with perfect lucidity and authority in “Intimate Parnassus”. This might be considered as Kavanagh’s Defence of Poetry, a brilliantly compressed statement of poetic belief. Briefly, the poet is god-like in his detachment and is, in the deepest sense, indestructible:
Looking at suffering and strife, he must remain detached. Seeing men and women going about their daily business, he must be 'sympathetic’. [46] He must:
In that state of passive, steady observation the poet discovers a strong sufficiency. Here too, he appreciates the nature of love {177} and survival because, for the man who has a 'main purpose, and lives up to it, all things fall into sane perspective and acquire an individual meaning. In such a state, for example, the phenomenon of evil is not seen as hideous or terrifying, it is simply 'sad’; while, at the same time, seen from this divine vantage-point, it retains the capacity to be totally transfigured in the pure flame of comedy:
Evil does not subdue or even arrest the comic poet because his is the superb sanity of knowing what really matters. And because he knows, he wishes only the best for struggling humanity:
Here too is a new sufficiency, the happy sufficiency found in restrained serene expression:
and
Now we must ask, for the comic poet, what precisely is love and what does it do? In “The Hospital” Kavanagh tells us with all the insight of the poet-saint: {178}
'Love’s mystery’ is all around us and the poet must celebrate it. Out of that sufficiency, born of love-observation, comes the only style that matters, the style of praise:
It is not at all that Kavanagh writes about the mind of God. This is the focus of the comic vision. The attempt to understand God’s mind, if rewarded with belief, is the truest source of comedy: it leads to detachment, and therefore to sanity, and therefore to the rare ability to see things as they are. That is why Kavanagh said that when he saw somebody 'important’ or 'major’ he was 'always in danger of bursting out laughing’. [54] To begin with, he finds God in woman:
and again in “Miss Universe”, in 'the sensual throb/Of the explosive body, the tumultuous thighs!’, [56] he finds evidence of God’s sufficiency. {179}
God and the idea of God dominate Kavanagh’s poetry. I have heard some people say that Kavanagh as a man was at times extremely arrogant. This may be, for there is a poetic humility which manifests itself as social arrogance. In any case, what people call arrogance in a poet is usually a completely natural expression of his conviction. Some people like a poet to be tentative and uncertain; this is their idea of how a fine sensibility shows itself. But most poets with a conviction are neither hesitant nor uncertain. Kavanagh never was (not that it matters whether he was or not) and he was one of the most sensitive men I have known. He brooded constantly on God and in “Having Confessed” he expresses his own conception of humility, another aspect of his comic vision:
In other words, Kavanagh submits himself completely to the God who 'refuses to, take failure for an answer’.[59] At the deepest level of vision, Kavanagh himself refuses to take failure for an answer. And yet, paradoxically, Kavanagh did have a sense of failure, but true to character, he celebrated even that in his own inimitable way. “If Ever You Go to Dublin Town” is a triumphant celebration of failure. In fact, it is not failure in any accepted sense of the word. It is, more {180} accurately, a sense of not having fully accomplished what it was in him to do. But when one remembers what Kavanagh tried to do (and to a great extent actually did) one recognizes the great dignity of this sense of 'failure’:
But there are plain, technical reasons for this sense of 'failure’. In a poem published in Arena (an excellent Dublin periodical now gone from the scene), not included in his Collected Poems, Kavanagh is quite explicit about his dilemma. The poem is called “A Personal Problem”, and it deals with something certainly not confined to Kavanagh but which is relevant to all modern Irish poetry since Yeats, and indeed to poetry throughout the world now. It is the dilemma of a poet who finds himself without a mythology. In the end, the internal world of the self needs the structure of myth to sustain it in poetry. Kavanagh never bothered to create a mythology. Indeed, the very purity of his comic vision means that the number of poems he wrote is fairly limited. He wrote about a dozen great poems. Yeats, on the other hand, sustained by a mythology gleaned from countless sources, wrote great {181} poems in abundance. Like the body, the imagination occasionally flags; myth is a revivifying food. Kavanagh states this need in an excellent poem:
There is an astonishing similarity between this poem and Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”. They are both triumphant expressions of the sense of failure: for Yeats, because he cannot find a theme; for Kavanagh, because he lacks a classical discipline and needs to be revived by a power not his own. But just as evil can fuel the fires of comedy, so can failure. The wonderful thing is that a sensitive reader coming from a study of Kavanagh’s poems realizes that here is one of the greatest modern poets whose comic vision brought him through tragedy and suffering, whose passionate sincerity revealed itself in an insatiable hunger for reality, who could say:
Notes 1. “Signposts”, Collected Pruse (London: MacGibbon & Kee 1967), p.25.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||