Patrick Kavanagh


what appears to be a rhetorical question: ‘Which/ Was most important?’ If anyone was asked what mattered more, a local scrap over a patch of land, or a World War, you would imagine the answer would unanimously be the latter, and the speaker seems to agree: ‘I inclined/ To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin’. Just as we may feel relief that the speaker agrees with us, he inserts the conjunction – ‘Till’ – and alludes to one of the greatest poets of all time: ‘Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.’ Homer (eighth century BCE) was an Ancient Greek poet who composed the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad covers the events of the ten-year Trojan war. Homer’s ghost tells the speaker that: ‘I made the Iliad from such/ A local row.’ While this seems like an audacious statement, it is true that the Iliad began with the rather mundane occurrence of one man ‘stealing ’ another’s wife (or property, as she would have been considered back then).


‘Gods make their own importance.’ This can be interpreted as Homer’s ghost saying that both he and Kavanagh are gods, in the sense that they both have control over their creations. This line is also an allusion to the fact that Homer’s epic poems are as much about Greek gods and demi-gods such as Zeus, Achilles and Poseidon, as they are about humans. We can interpret this line to mean that a writer must write about what is important to them, and not necessarily about topical subjects. Although the Second World War was on the  over the land.


As a young aspiring poet, Kavanagh experimented with writing about subjects that did not really interest him, but which he thought poets typically wrote about. As he got older, he found his own authentic voice, one rooted in the singular world which he grew up in.


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL





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