late middle age. He poignantly asks: ‘Who was it promised marriage to himself/ Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe’en?’ This tells us that Maguire always intended to marry, but kept putting it off, and now he is coming to the tragic realisation that it is too late. We, the readers, are invited into the poem with the inclusive pronoun ‘we’. ‘We’ are invited to bear witness to this man’s suffering: ‘We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain’.


STANZA 1 (LINES 18–42)


The rustic images in this poem are sometimes ugly. For example the ‘dog lying on a torn jacket’, the ‘horse ... trailing/ A rusty plough’, and the comical sight of ‘Three heads hanging between wide-apart/ Legs’. This image also reminds us of the back-breaking toll of the labourers, painfully bent double as they do their work. This is Kavanagh’s way of undoing the romantic notion of the Irish peasant, content with his frugal lot. As  decades, he realises how quickly his life has elapsed: ‘The drills slipped by and the days slipped by’.


Maguire once thought that it was a kind of freedom he was gaining when he ‘ran free from the world’s halter’. In fact, he ‘thought himself wiser than any man in the townland’. By using the verb ‘pretend ed’, the poet helps us to realise that the life Maguire has now is not the one he truly wanted: ‘pretended to his soul/ That children  bring/ The seed of an acre away’. He was so caught up in his farm that he was ‘Lost in the passion that never needs a wife’. Kavanagh uses a double entendre to hint at Maguire’s sexual frustration: ‘The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.’ There are further hints of this in the closing image of this stanza: ‘Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins./ What is he looking for there?/ He thinks it is a 


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL


267


Patrick Kavanagh


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