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Thursday
Have you ever had a poem that first entranced and then, when you looked at it closer, disappointed you? What are we do with powerful images that are morally dubious? I have in mind Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road,” also a popular song. It swept me away when I encountered it on our April trip to Ireland but now really bothers me, in part because the song itself is hypnotic.
“On Raglan Road” is about an aging poet who falls in love with a young woman and then vents his fury when she drops him. Why did he waste his poetic genius on “a creature made of clay,” he wonders.
The poem is based on real people. Kavanagh, when 40, met a 22-year-old medical student, Hilda Moriarty. While she admired his poetry, she didn’t return his romantic feelings and, a year later, married someone younger. Kavanagh used the poem to strike back. Here it is:
On Raglan Road
By Patrick Kavanagh
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
The signs for new love are not propitious and the poet even senses he may even “one day rue” falling for the “snare” of “her dark hair.” Nevertheless, he decides to take the plunge anyway, grandly telling himself that, if grief comes, then let it come. He appears to us less grand by the end of the poem.
When Kavanagh writes, “I said, let grief be a fallen leaf,” I thought of Archibald MacLeish’s line in “Ars Poetica” about how grief can be captured by “an empty doorway and a maple leaf.” As Kavanagh sees it, the risk is worth it because his love feels like the dawning of a new day.
Unfortunately for him, the path they take trippingly is at the edge of a deep ravine where can be seen the “worth of passion’s pledge.” In other words, the ravine is filled with the bodies of people who have discovered, after having had passion pledged to them, that the pledge was worthless. Whether Moriarty ever pledged her love to Kavanagh is up for debate—she says not—but he feels betrayed.
In their brief relationship, he says, he gave her inestimable “gifts of mind” and “poems to say.” Once it was over, however, she made a point of walking the other way whenever she saw him (“on a street where old ghosts meet”), leaving him to his bitter reflections. Or so goes the story in the poem.
Rejection by a love object is an ancient story, one which many poets have voiced. I think, for instance, of Shakespeare’s sonnet 147, which concludes, “For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,/ Who art as Black as hell, as dark as night.” If “Raglan Road” bothers me more than Shakespeare’s dark lady sonnets, it may be on account of Kavanagh’s sleazy innuendo. A Substack essay (author unknown) helps me piece this together.
The essay points out that, by noting that the Queen of Hearts is making tarts, he is hinting that she is a loose woman. This implication is reenforced by the reference to Dublin’s Grafton Street, which apparently had a reputation as a street for female sex-workers. It’s not enough for Kavanagh to express his disappointment; he must slime the woman as well.
It’s worth noting that the tarts allusion was originally even more sexually suggestive, accusing Moriarty of fake or “synthetic” sighs and describing her eyes as “fish-dim.” Before being changed, the line read, “Synthetic sighs and fish-dim eyes, and all death’s loud display.”
Meanwhile the mention in the rewritten line to the poet “not making hay” means, for farmer poet Kavanagh, not doing productive work—which in his case is writing poems. In other words, this siren has seduced him away from his calling and, to add insult to injury, has not properly appreciated the gifts he has bestowed upon her.
The Substack essay helpfully annotates the image of an angel losing his wings. The book of Genesis speaks of the “immortal and spiritual sons of God” becoming mortal men after they took to wife corporeal women:
[T]he sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years (Genesis 6:3-4, King James version).
In short, Kavanagh sees himself as a higher order angel while Moriarty is a mere creature made of clay. Rather than making heavenly music with him, she has clipped his wings. And done it at the dawning of his love, no less.
Now, I agree with Kavanagh that poetry is a heavenly gift, and it’s certainly the case that idealized muses have led to some great poems. One thinks of Fanny Braun for Keats and Maud Gonne for Yeats, with the latter telling the poet that he should be happy she has rejected him because
you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.
Kavanagh’s heartbreak has led to a potentially great poem in this instance. It’s just that I find distasteful his sense of entitlement and his need to smear Hilda Moriarty to make himself feel better. It reduces a grand love into something petty.
Of course, poets are human like the rest of us. It’s just that the best poems about rejected love manage to transcend our smallness. As Gonne points out, poets can use their pain to achieve further insight. In the Shakespeare sonnet I referenced above, for instance, the Bard is exploring and even mocking his own blindness; he’s aware that his furious outburst is as much directed at himself as at the woman and he senses it may even be overdone. Indeed, in other poems to the same lady he acknowledges that he lives in denial (e.g., “When my love tells me she is made of truth,/ I do believe her, though I know she lies”).
I see none of this higher-level processing at work in Kavanagh’s poem. Just hurt feelings and naked resentment.
But I’m open to readers changing my mind.