prayer or supplication: ‘A swan goes by head low with many apologies.’ the ‘Fantastic light’ as it ‘looks through the eyes of bridges’. This description of the play of light both on human-made structures and on the water itself helps immerse us in this place.


Kavanagh uses exclamation to convey the surprise you get when you suddenly spot a boat upon the canal: ‘And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy/ And other far-   of this phrase. The ‘mythologies’ the barge brings may be stories and gossip from other places.


The poet concludes with his desire to be commemorated just as Mrs Dermot O’Brien was: ‘O commemorate me with no hero-courageous/ Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.’ Kavanagh’s wishes were followed, although his commemorative bench also includes a life-size bronze statue of him sitting on it, eternally gazing out upon his beloved canal.


  ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (1939)  as to how Yeats wished to be commemorated: ‘Under bare Ben Bulben’s head/ In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid ... On limestone quarried near the spot/ By his command these words are cut:/ Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death./ Horseman, pass by!’ In Kavanagh’s biography by Antionette Quinn, Kavanagh is quoted as saying: ‘I have always had reservations about Yeats. The fact he wasn’t Irish and never wrote a line that an ordinary Irish person would read is not against him. No true poet ever wrote for the ordinary man or woman’. When asked to explain his hostile attitude towards Yeats, he answered ‘Spite’. It is hard not to wonder whether ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’ is a sly dig at Kavanagh’s fellow poet, so different in background  be interpreted as ‘hero-courageous’, despite Yeats’ claim that this was to be a simple commemoration.


 VERSE 2025


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