Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Monday – St. Patrick’s Day
For St. Patrick’s Day, here’s Patrick Kavanagh’s “The One,” about simple flowers blooming in a cut-away bog (where peat has been cut) in rural County Monaghan. Kavanagh grew up there, and although he was anxious to escape—which he did—the memory of the flowers returned to him years later.
I first was introduced to Kavanagh’s poetry when I came across a collection of his poems in a used Dublin bookstore. I became fixated on his lyrics, reading them obsessively as we traveled to Belfast and Magherafelt in search of Julia’s family roots.
Although Kavanagh for the most part isn’t that sentimental a poet, this poem seems an exception. It’s Wordsworthian in the way that it focuses on anonymous flowers in a humble setting. One thinks of “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways,” where Wordsworth compares a woman he has met to “a violet by a mossy stone/ Half hidden from the eye!”
In any event, reading “The One” seems a good way to celebrate Ireland’s national holiday.
The One
By Patrick Kavanagh
Green, blue, yellow and red –
God is down in the swamps and marshes
Sensational as April and almost incred-
ible the flowering of our catharsis.
A humble scene in a backward place
Where no one important ever looked
The raving flowers looked up in the face
Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has balked
The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet,
A violent wild iris – but mostly anonymous performers
Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet
Prepared to inform the local farmers
That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God
Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog.
