Patrick Kavanagh: realistic diction about realistic subjects

• March

• There’s a wind blowing
• Cold through the corridors,
• A ghost-wind,
• The flapping of defeated wings,
• A hell-fantasy
• From meadows damned
• To eternal April

• And listening, listening
• To the wind
• I hear
• The throat-rattle of dying men,
• From whose ears oozes
• Foamy blood,
• Throttled in a brothel.

• I see brightly
• In the wind vacancies
• Saint Thomas Aquinas
• And 
• Poetry blossoms
• Excitingly
• As the first flower of truth.

• April Dusk

• April dusk
• It is tragic to be a poet now
• And not a lover
• Paradised under the mutest bough.

• I look through my window and see
• The ghost of life flitting bat-winged.
• O I am as old as a sage can even be,
• O I am as lonely as the first fool kinged.

• The horse in his stall turns away
• From the hay-filled manger, dreaming of grass
• Soft and cool in hollows. Does he neigh
• Jealousy-words for John MacGuigan’s ass
• That never was civilised in stall or trace.

• An unmusical ploughboy whistles down the lane
• Not worried at all about the fate of Europe.
• While I sit here feeling the subtle pain
• Of one whose Tree of God has been uprooted. 

• Wet Evening in April

• The birds sang in the wet trees 
• And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now 
• And I was dead and someone else was listening to them. 
• But I was glad I had recorded for him 
• The melancholy. 

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) was an Irish poet who developed his talent under the mentorship of fellow Irish poet AE (George William Russell). Eschewing the sentimental and highly stylized approach to writing about rural life in Ireland which was popular at the time, Kavanagh wrote instead in a realistic diction about realistic subjects. His work later influenced Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who shared an affinity with Kavanagh for writing about the local and parochial to reveal the universal and timeless.