Paddy Kavanagh died with Christmas only a few weeks away. The poet was taken down by a virulent bout of pneumonia, aided and abetted by his addiction to strong drink. He had once cuttingly remarked that the ‘standing army of Irish poets never fell below 20,000’. His death robbed the country of one of the very best of them.
Kavanagh had battled alcoholism all his adult life. But by the end of November 1967 he had lost any strength for the fight. He died at home in County Monaghan, among the little hills of the Irish borderlands, in the very place where he had written his magnificent ‘A Christmas Childhood’.
It is the finest poem ever written about Christmas, a hymn to simple faith, conjured from the memories of his childhood on a small farm.
My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
A water hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
Feet crunching on the iced-up lanes of a Christmas morning. I have only to read those words now and I am taken back to an Ireland before the plenty, and the vulgarities, of the Celtic Tiger. It was certainly a poor place. The politicians and the priests were locked in a joyless tango. I need not elaborate. You will all be familiar with the litany of woes described by every memoirist to emerge from the narrow, rain-sodden, priest-addled byways.
But as Patrick Kavanagh knew, there was a lot more to the story than that. His poetry of Christmas in particular suggests another narrative, more complex and more forgiving, rooted in the traditions of the Irish countryside but transcending national boundaries. It is both celebratory and awestruck and above all filled with gratitude for the coming of the Christ Child.
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