“On a quiet street where old ghosts meet
I see her walkin’ now
Away from me so hurriedly
My reason must allow
That I had loved 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”
Patrick Kavanagh
Sometimes I know a week in advance what I’m going to write about, and sometimes something just pops into my head. And other times I struggle to come up with something, then hit upon an idea, start writing it, and after a couple of hundred words start getting a sense of déjà vu and realise that I’ve written it before…sometimes only months before.
Yesterday I was driving through town , on the way to Middletown, and was playing the ‘blend’ playlist I have with our favourite daughter , Robyn, on Spotify. A ‘blend’ playlist automatically mixes the musical tastes of two or more connected people , so you get some of your favourite tunes and some new ones that the other participant has picked. Robyn and I share a great love of music and we often send each other a song that we think the other would like. This week she sent me a link to Joy Crookes ‘I Know You Kill’, and I told her to look back at her WhatsApp messages for July 5th, when I’d sent it to her. She maintains that I’ve done the same , and that she was the one that introduced me to The Chats, Greta van Fleet, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Wunderhorse. We agree to differ.
Anyway, there I was happily minding my own business, driving along the North Road , when Luke Kelly popped on, singing Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘On Raglan Road’. I smiled and started singing along, and before I knew what was happening , I was crying, sobbing, snuffling, and still singing.
Raglan Road always does that to me.
We were taught about Kavanagh at school and we all hated him for writing about the stony grey soil of Monaghan. As teenagers if we ever ventured to the bright lights of Dublin and bumped into other teenagers they would ask where we were from because of our angelic accents.
“Monaghan.”
“Monaghan ?”
“Yeah, Monaghan.”
“ O stony grey soil of Monaghan..” they would say, mocking our accents.
We would then be embarrassed, and then angry as the next question invariably asked was “Are you doing your A-Levels ?” as they thought that Monaghan was a suburb of Belfast. And we would mock them with our superior knowledge of Irish geography.
It was only years later, while experiencing the devastation of a broken heart, that I heard Luke Kelly sing his ‘On Raglan Road’ poem and heard his heartache and shared his sense of grief for a love lost. Kavanagh had fallen in love with a medical student that lived near his own lodgings on Pembroke Road in Dublin. He contrived to be on the street when she returned from college each day and eventually worked up the courage to speak to her, told her he was a poet, and asked if she’d look at some of his poems. She did, and told him that they were rather dreary. He gradually realised that they would never be lovers, so he said that he would write a poem that would immortalise her, and wrote ‘On Raglan Road’.
Many years later, while having a pint with Luke Kelly in The Bailey, he challenged him to make a song from it and Kelly thought to himself for a few minutes and them sang it to the bar , to the air of ‘The Dawning of The Day’.
In the years since my appreciation for Kavanagh’s poetry has deepened. I always feel that his poetry has a ruddy honesty to it, but is no less beautiful that anything Yeats put together. Yeats too wrote about his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, but his seemed to be much more contrived.
I sometimes think that’s why I never became a proper writer. I have always been too happy. My Soulmate and I have known each other since ….forever. I was going to say 1984, when we were 17, but I actually remember her from when we were in primary school and making our Confirmation. I went to the old C.B.S boys school and she went to the St.Louis girls school, and they joined us up for practices for our Confirmation. For my non-Catholic readers , Confirmation is the third of the sacraments, after baptism , and first communion. It is supposed to me a sign of maturity, and during the ceremony the Holy Ghost is called upon to imbue a sense of knowledge, courage and general holiness…and a smattering of ghostliness.
My appreciation of Kavanagh’s ‘On Raglan Road’ came about during a time when we weren’t together, sometime between the ages of 19 and 21. I still remember that sense of emptiness. Maybe I should have written my novel then.
Last night we ran 15k around the town and Rossmore Park together. She is much faster and fitter than I am. She had to wait for me at the top of every hill, and she offered to walk bits with me when my wheezing drowned out the sound of the traffic. She told me how well I was doing, when we both knew I was dragging my sorry ass around the place. We chatted walking up the hills. And when we finished the 15k a mile from where we’d parked, as my navigation is as good as my poetry, we held hands until we got to the car.
Sometimes I’m too happy to write anything at all.
Hope you are too
Toodles,
Paul
P.S. This is ‘On Raglan Road’
P.P.S This is an old audio of an old blog
