Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Patrick Kavanagh Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Patrick Kavanagh poems. This is a select list of the best famous Patrick Kavanagh poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Patrick Kavanagh poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of patrick kavanagh poems.

Search and read the best famous Patrick Kavanagh poems, articles about Patrick Kavanagh poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Patrick Kavanagh poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

See Also:
Written by Galway Kinnell | Create an image from this poem

Oatmeal

 I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the "Ode to a Nightingale.
" He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket, but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas, and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn.
" He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.


Written by Patrick Kavanagh | Create an image from this poem

Advent

 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.
Written by Patrick Kavanagh | Create an image from this poem

Epic

 I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul" And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen Step the plot defying blue cast-steel— "Here is the march along these iron stones" That was the year of the Munich bother.
Which Was more important? I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Til Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row.
Gods make their own importance.
Written by Patrick Kavanagh | Create an image from this poem

Canal Bank Walk

 Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third Party to the couple kissing on an old seat, And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech, Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Written by Patrick Kavanagh | Create an image from this poem

Stony Grey Soil

 O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.
You clogged the feet of my boyhood And I believed that my stumble Had the poise and stride of Apollo And his voice my thick tongued mumble.
You told me the plough was immortal! O green-life conquering plough! The mandrill stained, your coulter blunted In the smooth lea-field of my brow.
You sang on steaming dunghills A song of cowards' brood, You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch, You fed me on swinish food You flung a ditch on my vision Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan You burgled my bank of youth! Lost the long hours of pleasure All the women that love young men.
O can I still stroke the monster's back Or write with unpoisoned pen.
His name in these lonely verses Or mention the dark fields where The first gay flight of my lyric Got caught in a peasant's prayer.
Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco- Wherever I turn I see In the stony grey soil of Monaghan Dead loves that were born for me.


Written by Patrick Kavanagh | Create an image from this poem

Memory Of My Father

 Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
That man I saw in Gardner Street Stumbled on the kerb was one, He stared at me half-eyed, I might have been his son.
And I remember the musician Faltering over his fiddle In Bayswater, London, He too set me the riddle.
Every old man I see In October-coloured weather Seems to say to me: "I was once your father.
"
Written by Patrick Kavanagh | Create an image from this poem

Shancoduff

 My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.
Lot's wife would not be salt if she had been Incurious as my black hills that are happy When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.
My hills hoard the bright shillings of March While the sun searches in every pocket.
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage.
The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush Look up and say: ‘Who owns them hungry hills That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken? A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor.
' I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?
Written by Patrick Kavanagh | Create an image from this poem

In Memory Of My Mother

 I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily

Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday--
You meet me and you say:
'Don't forget to see about the cattle--'
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.
And I think of you walking along a headland Of green oats in June, So full of repose, so rich with life-- And I see us meeting at the end of a town On a fair day by accident, after The bargains are all made and we can walk Together through the shops and stalls and markets Free in the oriental streets of thought.
O you are not lying in the wet clay, For it is harvest evening now and we Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight And you smile up at us -- eternally.
Written by Patrick Kavanagh | Create an image from this poem

Primrose

 Upon a bank I sat, a child made seer
Of one small primrose flowering in my mind.
Better than wealth it is, I said, to find One small page of Truth's manuscript made clear.
I looked at Christ transfigured without fear-- The light was very beautiful and kind, And where the Holy Ghost in flame had signed I read it through the lenses of a tear.
And then my sight grew dim, I could not see The primrose that had lighted me to Heaven, And there was but the shadow of a tree Ghostly among the stars.
The years that pass Like tired soldiers nevermore have given Moments to see wonders in the grass.