'Christ' in Favourite Songs/Poems Vol I ~ 'Advent' by Patrick Kavanagh

My hands are shaking as I write this for a number of reasons. The first would be that I have not written a line exempting academic writing in a long, long time. The second, of course, is that I am writing about Patrick Kavanagh, a relatively  underrated Irish poet whose timeless work I will probably never get enough of. And third, because I am more than aware that the topic in itself is quite intimidating (Yeah, I know I chose to write about it). 

I had come across 'Advent' a couple of months ago when I was still trying to acclimatise with the Dublin air. From Grafton Street to O'Connell bridge, every single time I ended up landed in the city in the evening, it would remind me of Patrick's poems. While I have always been somewhat obsessed with my relationship with Ireland in general and Dublin in particular and its poets and musicians, this time I could feel it more literally than ever - breathing across my skin, cutting through its crevices like the winter breeze. 

How the poem finally begins to sediment inside you from the second or third line instead of the first is the first thing that I noticed about it, after which I kept reading it like running in circles because I couldn't afford to stop. The picture is slowly woven, of a room with little light, like a Rembrandt painting with the golden embers going up in smoke, telling shallow, sullen stories - suspended in mid-air, like a web...of a cycle that has begun. The 'advent' of time at bog-holes and old stables contrasted against the metaphor that compares the distance between meaning in language with "village boys lurching" reminds me specifically of only one other person who might have/would have done it other than Kavanagh - Bengali poet Pranabaendu Dasgupta. 

But what is almost unconsciously yet so brutally baffling is the juxtaposition of the last line with the aimless, truthful vapourisation of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour. It is tantalising how Kavanagh plays with the idea of semanticity and proximity a couple of times without using a lot of words, or heavy complex sentences. The poem is a piece of art - just aimlessly, undeniably there but then comes Christ, and he comes along with a January flower, intermediating the transcendence of one month into the other, allowing time to communicate with what is perhaps only inevitable but also doing it with an entity that despite being there, is wondering about its own vitality, coherently questioning its own existence. Never have I read anything about Christ that resonates quite like it does in 'Advent' elsewhere, and Kavanagh does not fail to surprise me given he was writing somewhere in the earlier half of the twentieth century. This perhaps makes a little more sense when one identifies the poet Kavanagh overrides the Catholic identity from time to time (perhaps more often than not) and thereby, the poet, blessed with his ability to grasp the liminal between the rational and the oblivious, now questions the causality of hunger, scarcity and godliness. 

(Source: The Irish Times)

'Advent' by Patrick Kavanagh 

We have tested and tasted too much, lover

Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.

But here in the Advent-darkened room

Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea

Of penance will charm back the luxury

Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom

The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing

When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking

Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill

Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking

Of an old fool will awake for us and bring

You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins

And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching

For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-

We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning

Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.

And we'll hear it among decent men too

Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,

Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.

Won't we be rich, my love and I, and

God we shall not ask for reason's payment,

The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges

Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.

We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages

Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-

And Christ comes with a January flower.