patrick kavanagh's space beyond time

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Patrick Kavanagh's Space beyond TimeAuthor(s): Barry PopowichSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 31-38Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25512870 .

Accessed: 18/06/2014 06:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and Canadian Association of Irish Studies are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.81 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 06:06:15 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cjis

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25512870?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Patrick Kavanagh's Space Beyond Time.

BARRY POPOWICH

I cannot die

Unless I walk outside of these whitetorn hedges.

Patrick Kavanagh's place remains one of Irish literature's contentious matters.

Opinions range between his being as important as Yeats to his being only a partial success useful for elementary school memorizations. Thus, while Kavanagh does

get critical nods, these are not always congruent headsignals, and the Kavanagh

supporter knows there are those reluctant to allow Kavanagh much significance in

a national literature which includes the names it does. I want to consider this Kavanagh question, but without making any overt

comment on his "worthiness." He obviously already has "significance," and an

audience, even if it is sometimes an incongruent one. One slight shift in considering Kavanagh (or any writer who does not write quite out of the critical tradition or

"mainstream") could be to focus more on his urge to share his perspective with us.

Or, "What is there about the mind behind this that is different from other minds I

have met?" An author' s offering of a different perspective, if accepted, expands our

experience. The passing of meaning between individuals, (in literature between the

author/text and the reader, intended or actual) expands and flexes the mind, and this

growth or exercise (or sharing or confrontation) seems to be why we readers choose to encounter other minds, other texts.

Critical theory emphasises variously one arc or another of that loop of meaning shared between author and intended audience, or between text and reader. But,

wherever the emphasis is placed, this loop or encounter inevitably remains as

additional experience for the reader, and indeed has the ability to affect mental and/ or physical states. Reading is very much like real life ? it is real life or else readers fail to live for long periods of their existence. With texts or authors, as in meeting people face to face, the less we predetermine what our demands will be, the more it seems they will have to offer us. So too with a poet who perhaps does not quite

fit our expectations. Then, if we allow for difference as to where meaning might dwell, the question about Kavanagh's place in literature is not so much about his caliber but instead can be expressed as, "What is there about Kavanagh that is different enough to stimulate mind and perception in our encounter with him?"

From these assumptions, then, I think it useful to draw attention to one feature in his writing that is a hallmark, a feature of his point-of-view or voice which gives it

individuality and an ability to contribute something unique to the "canon." This feature is an acute and a chronic sense of the spatial, of spaces and places, a sense

pervasive as his voice seeks to offer meaning. People locate "meaning" in phenom ena in various ways. For Kavanagh, his consciousness, his perspective, is domi nated by this awareness of the immediate and physical; topographical expressions



32 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

and spatial relationships occur over and over. The perceptual filters through which

Kavanagh knew things were such that he understood things in the world differently,

specifically differently from other writers who display a dominating sense of

temporality in their work. And it is thus that Kavanagh adds to his nation's

literature.

Kavanagh's way of experiencing reality, though, was not necessarily unique in

itself. What was much more unusual was that someone with his phenomenological accent took it to heart to be among those who write down how they encounter the

world so others can participate in their "mind." While many have shared his

perception, fewer have shared his ontology. He combined the phenomenological outlook of the small farmer with a drive to written expression, the "being" of a poet.

Kavanagh's spatially dominated way of seeing the world was bom and developed in the fields and lanes of a most physical world. In later life he choose to ignore the

temptation to become another poet of Ireland's history and thus continued in the

perspective of his youth, ahistorical and atemporal. The spatial viewpoint in his

work is key to its character, and what draws readers into its particular loop of

meaning.

An example of the effect: Seamus Heaney has written long since of Kavanagh's role in inspiring him to develop into a poet. Recently Heaney gave an address entitled "The Placeless Heaven," subsequently published with the subtitle "Another Look at Kavanagh" in The Government of the Tongue. This article has as its implicit theme the importance of spatial perception to Kavanagh, as well as to Heaney, and

although Heaney does not make an open distinction between spatial and temporal perceptions, the theme alludes, perhaps unknowingly, to a major identifying feature in Kavanagh: the concern with a space so profoundly important that it exists outside

of time, as aptly expressed in Heaney's own symbol of the space where a tree used to grow.

Heaney's comments on Kavanagh's landscape implicitly attest to Kavanagh's reliance upon spatial relationships:

The horizons of the little fields and hills, whether they are gloomy and

constricting or radiant and enhancing, are sensed as the horizons of conscious

ness. Within those horizons, however, the poet who utters the poems is alive

and well as a sharp critical intelligence. (7)

Ultimately, Heaney's self-referential point is:

Kavanagh gave you permission to dwell without cultural anxiety among the

usual landmarks of your life. (9)

Heaney makes a paramount statement about Kavanagh's sense of place. This sense has implications beyond the more evident contribution of Kavanagh's providing a rural topology, for Kavanagh's poems are also about the city. Kavanagh's sense of

place and his spatial perspective represent an alternative perception, a different filter of reality that was evidently sensed by some to be liberating.



Patrick Kavanagh's Space Beyond Time 33

To help illustrate this atemporal perception that Kavanagh offered, I wish to move back to the figure that stares with a cold eye over every Irish writer's shoulder

from some angle or other. There has been debate over just what revisionist position one might take in respect to Yeats's place in Irish letters. Such polemically titled works as Dillon Johnston'sIrishPoetry after Joyce and Michael 0'Loughlin's4/fer

Kavanagh are but two examples of the effort to reconsider Yeats's distinction in

Anglo-Irish/Irish verse. As I am writing about one of the figures sometimes used to chip away at Yeats's dominance, I again want to make it clear my intention is not to view the small farms from Thor Ballylee, or vice-versa, but to illustrate one

essential difference between the two poets that engages them with two often

different audiences, audiences that might sometimes fail to appreciate the percep tion that the other values.

The difference between these poets is more than talent or style, but of respective

phenomenologies. Yeats saw matters in a historical sweep, and his poetry contains an unfolding and changing temporal pattern. Here are two well-known examples:

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud; A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches to Bethlehem to be born?

We can also note a similar temporality in the poems of Austin Clarke, as with these lines from 4The Young Woman of Beare" and "Night and Morning":

I am the dark temptation Men know ? and shining orders

Of clergy have condemned me.

How many councils and decrees

Have perished in the simple prayer That gave obedience to the knee. .

O when all Europe was astir

With echo of learned controversy.

Or from Louis MacNeice in 'The Sunlight on the Garden" and "Bagpipe Music," let alone considering "Carnckfergus":

We cannot cage the minute

Within its nets of gold .

Our freedom as free lances

Advances towards its end




Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever.

Returning to Yeats once more, Yeats's temporal perspective indeed can be seen

to be deliberate in his aesthetics. Harold Bloom in Yeats writes:

Invoking S wedenborg, Yeats distinguishes between "three different degrees" he finds absolutely separated in Blake: natural, intellectual, and emotional.

Natural things have their spatial form; so do intellectual things, but their space is mental. Emotional things have "neither form nor substance ?

dwelling not in space but in time only.'* This distinction is Yeats's and will reappear,

much modified, in the late "Seven Propositions" of what Yeats insisted upon

terming his "private philosophy" of A Vision. (70)

While Yeats may be missing the mark in giving spatial imagery little evocative

power, it is not difficult to imagine Yeats labelling Kavanagh as an author of

"natural things," of "spatial form."

Unlike these poets above, Kavanagh's perception is almost devoid of ideas

dependent upon the movement of time. His poetry has a still aspect, looking through an unblinking eye towards landscape and cityscape. The traditional division of

human perceptual filters into time and space, though, is not an absolute one.

Certainly we all have both, as did Yeats and Kavanagh. Kavanagh, though, had far more of one than the other. Time and space phenomenology is well-discussed in our

philosophies and our literature, as is the nature of phenomenological criticism. Such discussions as time and space perceptions have provoked also attest that the

language of these perceptual modes is difficult to stabilize. For my purposes,

though, it is enough if we agree that there is a noticeable difference between much of the language and perception we call spatial and much of the language and

perception we call temporal. Being language after all, the meanings of such terms as "place" "infinity" or "eternity" are difficult to hang on to. (From a perspective such as God must enjoy, there is probably much less difficulty in describing

whatever reality is.)

Kavanagh's spatial perspective occurs in both prose and verse, and the reader can

follow this point-of-view as Kavanagh's life unfolds. In The Green Fool, we are

shown how the community was itself biased against the temporal. As Kavanagh describes his home, he does it with a locational grid, and some special references to time:

The railway line to Carrick was visible from our back window. One hundred

yards from our house was the railw ay-gate house and level-crossing where the

Mucker Road joined the county highway. The railway was important: we set

our clock by the three-thirty train. My father said the three-thirty was the only train you could depend on. It was the only train that had a connection to make.

The other trains started just when the driver felt in the humour, and made no

important connections except the pubs, where driver, fireman, and guard

quenched their smoky thirst. We possessed the only clock in the townland

(9-10)



Patrick KavanagKs Space Beyond Time 35

Just as his family was unusual for housing a timepiece, Kavanagh was unusual for

looking outward, like the "three-thirty," to see what connections there might be to

make in the outside world. For Mucker, the outside world comes distantly through minimal attention to the temporal, only via a schedule-keeping train. Field size was

more important than clockwatching, train catching, or reading history, as numerous

local scenes in Kavanagh's first works illustrate.

Kavanagh's early frustrations are often found in spatially patterned scenes such as occur at the crossroads, a symbol of decision, of crisis, and of the various

characters assembled there whom he found difficult Indeed, roads themselves are

used to represent being lost, as in the chapter "Fairyland" in The Green Fool:

The roads around Mullacrew were a tangled skein; they were laid down by random and led everywhere and nowhere. My mother knew these roads well

and we managed to find our way till we came to the town of Louth_At one

time all roads led there. One crooked street comprised the whole town. All

roads surely led to it and as far as we could make out none lead from it My mother knew the town well; she had lived there for a year and normally would

have been a good guide through the maze of roads.... All that evening we

drove around the wet roads. The poor ass was tired and as broken-hearted as

ourselves.. . . We were in Fairyland, and it was a wet day. (103-105)

The crossroads, though, has neither humour nor mystery. It is a shady place, a

place where the sexual and imaginative frustrations of Tarry Flynn and other young men are in danger of antisocial expression, a place of alternatives:

'Huh! Is that the way it's with you? A girl knocked off her bicycle at Drumnay cross and there's going to be a lot of trouble about it

* It's a pity you

wouldn't try to keep away from that cross. (8-9)

Tarry wants release from this cage of small lives on small farms. He goes walking, thinking of alternate places and sexual possibilities, "slowly towards the old road that had once been a great highway between Dublin and Deny," (93) but ends up inevitably frustrated and back at the crossroads:

There were he observed, the usual two groups at the crossroads ? a main

party discussing football, politics and the crops, and a firing party of whom

Charlie was the leader. . All Tarry wanted to do was join the crowd quietly,

anonymously. Tarry moved away pursued by the Finnegans. (128)

Tarry/Patrick finally breaks away from the cage and hitchhikes to Dublin, his life's central journey, a distancing gesture expanding the known world.

In verse, the early frustration comes across in poems such as "Inniskeen Road":

I have what every poet hates in spite Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.

.

A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

Even though the poet relocates, his way of seeing the world remains, as Dublin's streets replace Monaghan's roads. Literally dozens of poems depend upon spatial




metaphors or the sense of location for their core, from the momentous "Lough Derg" to the canal bank sonnets and Kitty Stobling:

No, no, no, I know I was not important as I moved

Through the colourful country, I was but a single Item in the picture...

And in almost his last verse, "In Blinking Blankness," he continues the metaphor:

Nature is not enough, I've used up lanes

Waters that run in rivers or are stagnant., So I sit tight to manufacture

A world word by word-machine-to-live-in structure...

It is easy to say that Kavanagh is more down to earth, more everyday than Yeats, but this is not necessarily to say he is more simple, rather that the appreciative reader of either poet perhaps may look for quite different poetry to begin with. An audience

feeling meaning in a centuries-old Yeatsean sword is not automatically to be an

audience inclined to feel the meaning in Patrick Macquire's traversing his fields, or in the rows of potatoes implied in a barrel of copper sulfate. For some it is much

easier to come into rapport with the historical culture of a figure like Yeats. With others it is much easier to "relate" to Kavanagh's everyday fields. This is Heaney's praise for Kavanagh's liberation, and also John Montague's moan that Kavanagh "liberated us into ignorance."

Critics have made allusions to Kavanagh's spatial eye without noting how

pervasive it is, or how it links with Kavanagh's own historic journey from

Monaghan to the Grand Canal, and his walking of headlands and pavements. Here are two comments that hint at the dominant spatial in Kavanagh, the first from his early biographer, Alan Warner in Clay is the Word:

Ulysses is the only Irish book that Kavanagh lists among the books that most interested him. The others were Moby Dick, Gil Bias and Knut

Hamsun's The Wanderers. This seems a strange list, but Kavanagh found in them the spiritual food that he needed. . . .

Perhaps it is not without

significance that the central figures in all four of these books are wanderers?

wanderers in search of love, of life, and of something intangible to quench the thirst of the mortal soul. (85)

Terence Brown in an article in The Honest Ulsterman (July, 1978) remarks:

Like much of 'Ulysses*, like much of J. F. Powers, in Tarry' the author is as a medium in a trance with the past miraculously reappearing through him

without hindrance in all its three-dimensional glory. The disadvantage of such writing is that it is static: the focus of time has been so narrowed to catch the detail that it cannot the movement in time. The glory is three-dimensional,

but in truth we live in a four-dimensional world and the dimension of time is

barely present in such writing. (77)

Brown's assumption about the priority of the fourth-dimension may be worth

debating, but he senses Kavanagh's characteristic spatial emphasis.



Patrick Kavanagh's Space Beyond Time 37

But what, then, does Kavanagh do about time? He certainly has poems about

personal aging, and about how seasonal variation affects the landscape, but these

alone imply a minimum awareness of time's sweep. One implication (or cause

perhaps) of Kavanagh's spatial perception is that his temporality displaces into a

mystic, eternal (ie. atemporal) perspective. Kavanagh's mystic vision has been

noted elsewhere in his seeking of God in ordinary things, and is related to his

religious upbringing. But how his stance actually takes itself "out of time" is shown

in the following from "Requiem for a Mill":

They took away the water-wheel,

Scrap-ironed all the corn-mill; The water now cascades with no

Audience pacing to and from

Taking in with casual glance Experience.

The cold wet blustery winter day And all that's happening will stay

Alive in the mind: the bleak Water-flushed meadows speak

An enduring story To a man indifferent in a doorway

And with this mention we withdraw

To things above the temporal law

The poet/narrator stands framed in a space, static, indifferent to time, and indifferent to experience, time's play upon the mind.

This out-of-time stance "above the temporal law" occurs when Kavanagh wants to make an especially personal and powerful statement, as here:

The Ploughman

In these small fields

I have known the delight of being reborn each morning And dying each night.

Memory of My Father

Every old man I see

In October-coloured weather

Seems to say to me:

4I was once your father.'

Wet Evemng in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now




If Ever You Go to Dublin Town

On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost, Dishevelled with shoes untied,

Playing through the railings with little children

Whose children have long since died.

Thus his time begins, ends, and is in eternity. Kavanagh's spatial perspective releases him and the reader from the weight of time, and is in the pattern of

Kavanagh's desire to achieve an effortless weightlessness in his verse. Ironically, not by walking, but by standing still, he finally found that place that Heaney also

finds in Kavanagh's later work, a space that is empty and forever, "beyond the

temporal law."

WORKS CITED

Bloom, Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Brown, Terence. "The Hu Business Section." The Honest Ulsterman. 60(1978): 60-80.

Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue. London: Faber&Faber, 1988.

Johnston, Dillon. Irish Poetry afterJoyce. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame

Press, 1985.

Kavanagh, Patrick. Tarry Flynn. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978. -. The Green Fool. London: Martin Brian & O'Keefe, 1971. -. The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh. New York: The Peter Kavanagh

Hand Press, 1972.

O'Loughlin, Michael. After Kavanagh. Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1985.

Warner, Alan. Clay is the Word: Patrick Kavanagh 1904-1967. Dublin: The

Dolmen Press, 1973



patrick kavanagh's space beyond time

Documents