of our countryside, is wonderfully described as ‘dreeping’ in the rain, while in ‘The Great Hunger’ trees sensuously ‘sough’ in the breeze, and we can practically feel the icy breeze when the ‘sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff’. This sensuous  that he knew how they behaved and sounded in different types of weather. A farmer also knows the calls, sounds and behaviours of different birds and animals, and so in ‘A Christmas Childhood’ waterhens ‘screeched in the bog’ and in ‘The Great Hunger’: ‘The horse lifts its head and cranes/ Through the whins and stones/ To lip late passion in the crawling clover.’ Farmers also observe every blade of grass and leaf, and we see this in ‘The Great Hunger’ where ‘a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes/ Darts like a frightened robin’.


In Dublin, Kavanagh gravitated to unspoiled, almost rural, areas of the city, such as the Grand Canal near Baggot Street: ‘Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal’ (‘Canal Bank Walk’). In ‘On Raglan Road’ he memorably compares a beautiful woman’s dark hair to . It is clear that, even in the heart of the city, nature was sought out and astutely observed by Kavanagh: ‘A swan goes by head low with many apologies’ (‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’).


In many ways, Kavanagh came full circle in his lifetime, returning to the natural world during a time of great vulnerability in his life, when he had his left lung removed and  and redeemed by nature itself: ‘O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web/ Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech ’ (‘Canal Bank Walk’). Perhaps his alter- ego, Patrick Maguire, best expresses the hold nature had on Patrick Kavanagh in ‘The Great Hunger’: Kavanagh may have escaped his farming life, but his love for nature endured, and this is seen in every 


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL 301


Patrick Kavanagh


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