Sister Una Agnew SSL, author of The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh: A Buttonhole in Heaven (1998) explores the mystical vision of Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry.
Patrick Kavanagh was born on 21 October 1904 in the townland of Mucker, in the parish of Inniskeen, Co Monaghan. He imbibed the rural religious ethos of his time. This was largely a conventional brand of Irish Catholicism, in which religious practice consisted of regular Mass attendance, yearly reception of the sacraments and the family Rosary.
At the local two-teacher national school at Kednaminsha, his teachers, Miss Julia Cassidy and Miss Brigid Agnew (alias Miss Moore) looked after his formal education: a solid diet of the three Rs, with a smattering of history and geography. A rigorous catechesis, including memorising the Reilly Catechism, was the order of the day in all schools in the diocese of Clogher at this time. Bible history was learned from a drab, schoolbook edition and some hymns were thrown in as optional extras. Hail Queen of Heaven, Patrick’s favourite hymn, was sung at the close of each school day. Pupils were automatically prepared for the sacraments of penance, eucharist and confirmation.
In the Kavanagh home, the monthly Messenger of the Sacred Heart furnished the only regular reading-material, apart from schoolbooks and the newspaper. Added to this, was a supplement of folk religion, accruing from annual visits to St Brigid’s shrine at Faughart, and to Our Lady’s shrine at Ladywell outside Dundalk. If serious illness occurred, a cure was sought from the silenced priest, Fr Pat McConnon, a colourful character in the neighbourhood.
James and Brigid Kavanagh were typical God-fearing parents who demanded high moral standards from their children. Patrick was a regular church-goer and Mass-server to boot. He also made the “nine Fridays”, if only to be guaranteed “eternal salvation”, and then set free “to make hay” according to his romantic desires!
He was curious about those who made the annual three-day penitential pilgrimage to Lough Derg. He went there in 1942, though not with the purest of intentions. He knew that the writer, William Carleton, got mileage from the pilgrimage for his writing, and he was hoping to do the same. However, when he went, he was unexpectedly touched by the faith of the pilgrims and withheld his poem about it from publication. Peter, his brother, published it posthumously in 1972.
Kavanagh undoubtedly probed his religion and questioned its moral teachings more than the average church-goer of his time. As a pubescent youth, he was troubled by religious’ scruples. His mother’s exhortation to “go to Mass and confess your sins and you’ll have all the luck…” he knew to be salutary but semi-heretical. Perversely but quite orthodox, he opted for the bounty of a gratuitous God over One of sterner judgement: “I who have not sown, I too, by God’s grace may come to harvest. ..”
Kavanagh knew that God’s grace surpassed human effort. Prayer for him was more readily experienced while walking alone among the hills or contemplating the energy of God in a luxuriant field of turnips! Despite his seeming religious indifference, he was continuously nourished by miracles of God’s presence in the world around him. For him, the “things of earth” sang to God as lustily as litanies. He recalls an over-used, but undervalued church prayer: “O God, who did so love the world…” He felt he alone appreciated its true implications.
His strong visionary sense, quasi-mystical at times, was a gift that isolated him from his neighbours and left him semi-reluctant to accept his lot as a poet. Tabernacles of beauty opened their doors to him in the little weeds and flowers where he found pockets of God and traces of the Divine in the guttery gaps of Inniskeen. He found sermons preached by stones and ditches more compelling than those normally heard from pulpits. Kavanagh’s devotion to nature was not pantheistic, but a genuine veneration of the Immanent God, present in the world around him. God was in nature but nature was not God! This spirituality of earth is as ancient as Irish Christian culture itself.
He was inspired by the preaching of Fr Maguire, the learned parish priest whose “silver-voiced sermons” earned him the nickname “Salamanca Barney”. Once Rector of Salamanca University in Spain, this priest’s dramatic sense and polished oratory added a touch of colour to the drab, humdrum routine of country-life. Kavanagh was attracted to the figure of the priest in society. He identified with his apartness and sense of mission. Perhaps he had some notion that the poet exercised a kind of priesthood for the people: indeed his Self-Portrait (1962) proclaims openly that “the poet is a theologian.”
His keen understanding of the mystery of the Incarnation is evident in the many poems he wrote about Christmas: the feastday of the Word made Flesh. Nurtured from an early age on the principal tenets of his faith, though not imprisoned by them, he traces in his writing imprints of an all-pervasive enfleshed God, in the ordinary details of life: in cow-tracks, bogholes, old stables. Everything is transformed with Christ’s coming on earth. He sees miracles of God’s handiwork in puddles, gorse bushes, dandelions, daisies… and every blooming thing!
It could be said that during his early years as a poet, Patrick Kavanagh progressed from being a pious writer to something of a Christian nature mystic. His poem Primrose (1939), shows the development of an already awakened spiritual consciousness. Its gradual evolution is demonstrated in his meditative encounter with this simple, open-faced flower. “Upon a bank I sat, a child made seer/ Of one small primrose flowering in my mind.” Every detail pertaining to this one page of Truth is recorded and appraised. Theological insight leaps to the poet as seer:
I looked at Christ transfigured without fear,
The light was very beautiful and kind,
And where the Holy Ghost in flame had signed
I read it through the lenses of a tear.
Is Kavanagh grappling at this time, with a fearsome God, while desperately searching for a more approachable Soul-Friend? Does God, present in this common flower, confirm his belief in a vulnerable, non-threatening God, open to the world, suffering in the shadow of a tree yet wonderfully lighting the way to heaven. The Holy Ghost’s signature in flame, assures him that God is the authentic author and protector of this delicate revelation of created beauty.
A Christmas Childhood develops this Incarnation spirituality to an even greater degree. The poet believes that Christ’s birth is both a personal and universal event. Christ is born in Mucker, under the star that locates itself over Cassidy’s hanging hill. The whole Infancy Narrative, with its exciting procession of music, angels and Magi is now Inniskeen-based! Every detail of the winter landscape takes on the contours of Christianity with Mass-going feet imprinting themselves indelibly on pot-holed lanes. Kavanagh’s Incarnation theology christens the universe as thoroughly as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who delights that Mary’s Son makes, O marvellous, new Nazareths in us. Kavanagh, on the other hand, is intent on christening a locality, his own backyard with its own Holy Family of Mucker in attendance and the iridescent white-rose of a child’s prayer for liturgy.
Later on, Kavanagh more realistically welcomed a more life-embracing God who caresses the daily and nightly earth and was not deterred by failure. By this stage, he had battled with the demons of life and at the end of a tortuous road, had come to a state of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. His new surrender to life was not unlike that of Julian of Norwich who knew, despite difficulties, that ultimately All will be well!
Kavanagh’s spirituality was given the stamp of integrity and a further deepening of its Incarnational character by his belief that all human experience, whatever be its dress, is the essential bedrock of spirituality. When he tilled the land as a learner farmer, God spoke to him there in the seeding of furrows. Indeed the clay itself became a powerful metaphor for his life, harrowed yet fruitful. In brighter moments, when the sun comes through a gap, a Trinitarian Sun enfolds this small, fallible farming community in a moment of illumination.
In the poverty of the war-years in Dublin, God was ministering to a poet’s needs among the women in a coffee shop; and later, while recovering from lung-cancer, the “leafy-with-love-banks” of the Grand Canal poured redemptive healing for him. Kavanagh harvests each experience, and imbues it with eternal significance. While Heaven might be elusive in early, stolen moments in a bluebell wood, later it was present in the light… staring through the leafy yellowness of an October street, or ubiquitously present as the placeless heaven that’s under all our noses! For whatever way life happened, he was grateful. The hallmark of a mature spirituality is gratitude, self-forgiveness and self-surrender. Kavanagh gives thanks to life:
So be reposed and praise, praise, praise
The way it happened and the way it was.
(Question to Life).
Article Credits
This article first appeared in Word ( October2004), a Divine Word Missionary Publication.
