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Tag Archives: Ireland

“Innocence” by Patrick Kavanaugh

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “Innocence” by Patrick Kavanaugh

Tags

Aging, Dublin, Experience, innocence, Ireland, Irish Poetry, Monaghan, Mortality, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Kavanaugh, Poem, poetry, Regret, Selected Poems, William Butler Yeats

Patrick Kavanaugh

They laughed at one I loved —
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love’s doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms
The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies
On bleached potato-stalks—
What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

__________

“Innocence” by Patrick Kavanagh, which you’ll find in his Selected Poems.

If you ever hoof it to the village of Inniskeen in County Monaghan, Ireland, you’ll find Patrick Kavanagh’s grave among the pale wooden crosses in the village cemetery. According to pilgrims who’ve made the trek, some of the locals will still reminisce about the native son (Kavanagh died in Dublin in 1967). As one resident told a recent visitor: “I knew Paddy. His mother couldn’t read and his father was a cobbler. Paddy was not a good farmer… he paid no heed to his fields.”

Not surprisingly. His mind was on — or perhaps already in — the city. Like many poets of the day, from Yeats to Wilde to Goldsmith, Kavanagh migrated to Dublin, walking the fifty-mile journey for the first time in 1931, at the age of twenty-seven. He would be internationally known within the decade, largely due to his poems about common life “On Raglan Road” and “The Great Hunger”.

It’s clear he scorned the grubby, provincial life of his boyhood, with its emotional and material deprivation, its spiritual nullity. In his poem “Stony Grey Soil”, he levels a series of accusations against the stubborn soil of Monaghan: “the laugh from my love you thieved”, “you fed me on swinish food”, “you flung a ditch on my vision”. (There’s that “ditch” accusation he’s looking to rescind in “Innocence”.)

I’ll let Christian Wiman explain the rest of the poem and its relation to spiritual innocence, in his recent lecture “When You Consider the Radiance: Poetry for Preachers and Prophets”. It’s where I first heard of the poem, and I recommend watching the whole thing. Wiman’s reading of “Innocence” is set to start below.

Read on:

  • “On a Return from Egypt” by Keith Douglas
  • What Kipling’s “Recessional” can teach us about American foreign policy
  • “Instead of an Epilogue” by Kingsley Amis

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The Man Who Cried ‘I’

06 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History, Psychology, Religion

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Albert Camus, Augustine, Biography, Camus, Carthage, Catholicism, Christianity, existentialism, Fiction, history, How the Irish Saved Civilization, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Ireland, memoir, modern biography, modernism, nonfiction, Samuel Beckett, St. Augustine, Thomas Cahill, Writing

St. Augustine

“‘To Carthage I came,’ recalled Augustine later, ‘where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. As yet I loved no one, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated need, I hated myself for not being needy. I pursued whoever—whatever might be lovable, in love with love. Safety I hated—and any course without danger. For within me was a famine.’…

When in the classical period we reach the first works to be designated as autobiographies, we can only be confounded by their impersonal tone…

Then we reach Augustine, who tells us everything–his jealousies in infancy, his thieving as a boy, his stormy relationship with his over-bearing mother (the ever-certain Monica), his years of philandering, his breakdowns, his shameful love for an unnamed peasant woman, whom he finally sends away. His self-loathing is as modern as that of a character in Camus or Beckett—and as concrete: ‘I carried inside of me a cut and a bleeding soul, and how to get rid of it I just didn’t know. I sought every pleasure–the countryside, sports, fooling around, the peace of a garden, friends and good company, sex, reading. My soul floundered in the void—and came back upon me. For where could my heart flee from my heart? Where could I escape from myself?’

No one had ever talked this way before. If we page quickly through world literature from its beginnings to the advent of Augustine, we realize that with Augustine human consciousness takes a quantum leap forward—and becomes self-consciousness. Here for the first time is a man consistently observing himself not as Man but as this singular man—Augustine. From this point on, true autobiography becomes possible, and so does its near relative, subjective and autobiographical fiction. Fiction had always been there, in the form of storytelling. But now for the first time there glimmers the possibility of psychological fiction: the subjective story, the story of a soul. Though the cry of Augustine—the Man Who Cried ‘I’—will seldom be heard again in full force until the early modern period, he is the father not only of the autobiography but of the modern novel. He is also a distinguished forebear of the modern science of psychology.”

__________

From part one of Thomas Cahill’s very accessible and illuminating How the Irish Saved Civilization.

Saint Augustine

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“Ever So Many Hundred Years Hence” by Mark Strand

12 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 7 Comments

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Ever So Many Hundred Years Hence, Inch Beach, Ireland, Mark Strand

Ireland - Inch Beach

Down the milky corridors of fog, starless scenery, the
rubble  of  ocean’s  breath, that  lone figure  strolling,
gathering about him without  shame  a small flood of
damages,  concessions to  a  frailty  that was his long
before he knew what he must do or what he must be,
and now, with his hand outstretched as if to greet the
future,  he  comes  close  and  pours  out  to  me  the
subtlety of  his  meaning, and  I see him, my long-lost
uncle, great  and  golden  in  the sudden sunlight, who
predicted that  he would  reach over  the years and be
with me and that I would be waiting.

__________

“Almost Invisible”by Mark Strand.

The photograph was taken at Inch Beach, on the Dingle Peninsula in southern Ireland. There, the water sometimes washes back for a mile during afternoon low tide.

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