Clay is the word and clay is the man. Divine energy empowered Patrick Kavanagh to write mystical poetry. His genius was in an earthen vessel and we do not like being clay pots, writes Brendan Ó Cathaoir.
Kavanagh deflates the conceit of self-importance: "Nobody is important," he asserted. "We get to our destiny in the end." Paradoxically, he wrote also: "Let them see you're a living man,/ Whose comic spirit is untamed."
In his new book, No Earthly Estate: God and Patrick Kavanagh: An Anthology (Columba Press, €20), Tom Stack has collected Kavanagh's most beautiful poetry and illumined it with scholarly comment. He notes that references to Christian faith appear in more than half the poet's work.
Despite Kavanagh's ambiguous public reputation", Father Stack remembers him as a person of "uncommon courtesy" and intriguing conversation. Anthony Cronin recognised in Kavanagh not the uncouth peasant pilloried by mediocrity, but "a deeply serious man with an intellect which was humorous and agile, as well as being profound and apparently incorruptible". His difficult manner was, however, exacerbated by a gradual slide into alcoholism from the mid-1950s.
Kavanagh was a brilliant if acerbic poet-farmer from Monaghan, who had something of the prophet about him. Stack goes to considerable length in his introduction to show that Kavanagh was not a theologian. But as the Evagrius Ponticus, a 4th-century mystic, said: if you truly pray you are a theologian. And as Ruth Burrows writes in Living in Mystery, the essence of prayer is allowing God to work in us.
"Anti-life heresy"
In his poem The Great Hunger, Kavanagh confronts the bleak spiritual landscape of the 1930s and 1940s. He excoriates the materialism and repression which lay behind a facade of piety and conformity. He was convinced that "somewhere in the 19th century" - after the Famine - Ireland became infected with an "anti-life heresy" disseminated by Maynooth-trained priests.
He regarded the parish as the world in microcosm and would be delighted to see Tarry Flynn included in Michael Larkin's Mullinahone anthology.
The poet prays in lines such as:
. . . And then I came to the haggard gate
And I knew as I entered that I had come
Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.
Stack observes that, in spite of the Irish people distancing themselves from their roots in an era of waning religious sensibility, Kavanagh's genius "continues to mine the deepest seams of our culture". The poet is never an apologist for Christian faith, but his personal dialogue with God and the sacred reappropriates for us perennial truths.
As Seamus Heaney has remarked, it is when Kavanagh's ethereal voice incarnates itself in the imagery of the actual world that "its message of transcendence becomes credible". For instance, the linking of pastoral images with the birth of Christ connects his native Inniskeen to Bethlehem, and the nativity with contemporary life. He had a gift for investing the natural world with spiritual significance: ". . . Christ comes with a January flower."
Comic vision
Kavanagh's comic vision, Stack comments, emerges in the totality of his writing. Its instruments are irony and paradox; its goal simplicity. He suggests that one clue to its deeply Christian significance may be elicted from the title of Dante's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. Dante, who believed "Love moves the sun and the stars", hoped justice would triumph over greed some day. In the cosmic consciousness of Teilhard de Chardin, "a universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love".
Comedy, Stack reminds us, has been described as "the narrow escape into faith". The comic figure "is not clothed in the unearthly magnificence of tragic heroism, but in the awkward innocence of essential humanity". For the person who retains what Kavanagh calls "a main purpose", all things acquire an imperishable meaning. "In life's contest the comic personality may suffer defeat but not destruction." Evil is perceived as sad, rather than terrifying.
Kavanagh sees the devil is an ass:
I met the Devil too,
And the adjectives by which I
would describe him are these:
Solemn,
Boring,
Conservative . . .
He was serious about un
serious things;
You had to be careful about his
inferiority complex
For he was conscious of being
uncreative.
The comic vision, not to to be confused with the merely funny, cleaves to hopefulness, come what may. Kavanagh insists that "laughter is the most poetic thing in life, that is the right kind of loving laughter". Pearse, incidentally, regarded laughter as the crowning grace of heroes.
Life should not be taken too seriously. "All true poems laugh inwardly out of grief-stricken intensity," Kavanagh declares, even as he invites us to "come dance with Kitty Stobling". Leon Bloy maintained the only real sadness is not to become a saint.
Father Stack concludes that Kavanagh's spiritual odyssey reached a blessed detachment. The poet's secret, Kavanagh confides, is that he doesn't care: "he forgets himself". Overcoming self-concern leads to the prayer of praise.
Stack explains: "Praise takes one out of oneself and into enjoyment of God and a sharing of his will for the world. . .It is not something that is won by personal achievement or any work of one's own. The gift of praise unfolds the all-sufficiency of God and the gifts which he bestows."
Final vindication
For the believer the final vindication of life's struggle is to be found in the death and resurrection of Christ. This is the source of Christian laughter, the laughter of unquenchable hope.
Kavanagh wrote two requiem poems for his mother, who died in November 1945:
. . . O you are not lying in the
wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now
and we
Are piling up the ricks against
the moonlight
And you smile up at us -
eternally.
Kavanagh's poetic mind knew how to distil truth from fact. The God he discovered was an "imaginative God, who made the fields and the trees and the flowers, a God not terribly to be feared".