John McLaughlin sent me this superb essay on the subject of  Kavanagh.  i have held onto it a couple of months thinking to myself that I will organise a whole site about this song, and I would use this essy - however rahther than let wait any longer as an interim move I am pblishing it here.

 

I know you will enjoy it:-

 

ON RAGLAN ROAD

 

On Raglan Road, on an autumn day, I met her first and knew,

That her dark hair would weave a snare, that I might one-day rue,

I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,

And I said, "Let grief be a fallen leaf, at the dawning of the day".

 

On Grafton Street, in November, we tripped lightly along the ledge,

Of the deep ravine, where can be seen, the worth of passion's pledge,              
The queen of hearts still making tarts, and I not making hay,

Oh! I loved too much, and by such, by such, is happiness thrown away.

 

I gave her gifts of the mind: I gave her the secret sign, that's known,

To the artists, who have known the true gods of sound and stone,

And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say,

With her own name there, and her own dark hair, like clouds over fields of May.

 

One a quiet street, where old ghosts meet, I see her walking now,

Away from me so hurriedly, my reason must allow,

That I had wooed, 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.

 

 Widely regarded as one of Ireland’s greatest songs, it’s ironic that when its composer, Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67), first tried to publish it, as a poem, On Raglan Road was rejected. When it was eventually printed, in the Irish Press on 3 October 1946, it was more prosaically titled Dark-Haired Miriam Ran Away. “Miriam”, the name of a girlfriend of his brother Dr. Peter Kavanagh (1916-2006), was an attempt to disguise the identity of the woman involved: a twenty-two year-old medical student called Hilda Moriarty. The original third line of the second verse, “synthetic sighs and fish-dim eyes and all death’s loud display” was rather more-weighty than the nursery rhyme-like “queen of hearts still making tarts”.

   The lyrics, punctuation, and the title On Raglan Road, rather than Raglan Road, given above are all taken from the 1964 edition of Kavanagh’s Collected Poems, which gives the air as The Dawning of the Day. Raglan’s eventual phenomenal success, as a song, owed much to the singing of Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, for whom Kavanagh sang it personally in the Bailey pub, Duke Street, Dublin, around1966.                                                                                                                                                                 

   Raglan’s melody is an almost perfect match for the traditional 18^th century air Fáinne Geal an Lae – “the dawning of the day”, translated by Edward Walsh (1805-50),

 

On a mossy bank I sat me down, this maiden by my side,
With gentle words I courted her, I asked her “be my bride”,
She said "young man don't bring me shame" and swiftly turned away,
And the sun’s first light, pursued her flight at the dawning of the day.

 

   Kavanagh certainly knew The Dawning of the Day, which had been popularised by McCormack’s 1934 recording, and he himself matched lyric to melody. The structure of both songs is very similar, as is the theme of lost love. Kavanagh also retained the key refrain, “the dawning of the day”. There are also similarities of phrasing: for example; “with gentle words I courted her” is surely echoed in Kavanagh’s “I gave her poems to say”?   

   Kavanagh first sang On Raglan Road (in public) some time between August 1945 and April 1947; when he was employed on the Standard newspaper. Writer Benedict Kiely (1919-2007), then also working for the Standard, recalled Kavanagh walking into the office one day and saying, ‘there, sing that to that [On Raglan Road] to The Dawning of the Day’.                                                                                       

   The song contains a couple of particularly enigmatic phrases. “The worth of passion’s pledge”, is sometimes interpreted as Kavanagh’s term for the pieta sculpture of Jesus and Mary in the courtyard of St. Teresa’s Carmelite Church in Clarendon Street, Dublin, just off Kavanagh’s old haunt of Grafton Street. However, when I visited the church and checked with officials, they had never heard of ‘passion’s pledge’ and were quite adamant that the sculpture is known only as “The Pieta”. The possibility though, remains. Similarly, “the deep ravine” could be Kavanagh’s poetic term for the lane linking Grafton and Clarendon Streets, the mundanely-named Johnson’s Court, which leads down to St. Teresa’s.                            

   The inspiration for the song, Hilda Moriarty from Dingle, Co. Kerry, was a medical student at University College, Dublin. “On an autumn day” in 1944, Kavanagh noticed her walking to college on Raglan Road, where he was living in lodgings at number 19, while subletting his flat round the corner at 62 Pembroke Road. Though he couldn’t afford to furnish or heat it, Kavanagh had rented the large apartment to impress the family of his then-fiancée, twenty-three-year-old Nola O’Driscoll, a daughter of Michael Collins’ sister Margaret. The engagement didn’t last very long but Nola never married anyone else. 

   Because number19 was then a boarding house, which imposed tiresome constraints on his independent lifestyle, Kavanagh stayed in the street that he would immortalize for only some six months: though he did move back there again in 1958. Strangely, the present-day tourist wall-plague makes no reference to his residency there in 1944-45, when and where he composed his best known work. The house is part of a substantial red-brick terrace.                                                

   Kavanagh soon learned Hilda’s daily routine and took to following her around the Grafton Street area. Grafton Street was then, in writer Anthony Cronin’s words, “Dublin’s main boulevard of chance and converse”: a sort of Irish Left Bank, where everyone in the in-crowd knew everyone else. Eventually, Kavanagh was introduced to Hilda and a “relationship” began.                          

   For Hilda, an attractive, dark-haired young woman with many admirers and potential suitors, the attentions of the well-known poet were welcome enough; indeed quite flattering, and, for a time, she enjoyed being seen around literary and bohemian Dublin in his company. She was just the sort of woman for whom the highly romantic and perennially impecunious Kavanagh spent most of his life vainly searching: young, beautiful, artistic, intelligent and well off, her father being a doctor.                                                      

   However, Hilda’s main interest in Kavanagh was in his poetry and in his image and reputation. As a potential husband, it’s unlikely that he was seriously considered. Already aged forty, the “peasant poet” with no visible income was little more than an interesting diversion in her young life. .                                    

   The “romance” was certainly well over by 10 January 1946, when Kavanagh published a short story called The Lay of the Crooked Knight, wryly describing how he pretended to change to please her,                                                                                                                    

 

He put on an artificial accent…he had been fond of his bottle of stout…the lady advised him to take sherry…she told him not to smoke cigarettes except with a holder…she chose new clothes for him. “Bedad, I ought to plaze you now” he said in his excitement, showing the old vulgar tongue in all its grossness.

 

Then one evening,

 

He rang her on the phone, she was out...later that evening he rang again. Still not in…he went down the town…he could hardly believe his eyes…it was indeed she walking with a man whom the knight placed as…active young country solicitor.

 

   Kavanagh quickly recovered and, as his brother Peter has written “got something out of it – three or four excellent poems”. Hilda was certainly the inspiration for Kavanagh’s greatest love poem, Bluebells for Love, written in May 1945 as the couple walked in the grounds of Dunsany Castle. However, by May 1947, Kavanagh was writing to Peter, “Hilda wanted a man with a future, the sure sign of a shallow mind”.                                                                                     

   In 1946, Hilda met the dashing, younger, and much better off Limerick engineer Donogh O’Malley (1921-68) and the two were married in August 1947. O’Malley, from a prominent political family, became Mayor of Limerick in 1961 and later Minister of Education. In 1968, he was the only politician to contribute towards the cost of Kavanagh’s memorial bench on the banks of his beloved Grand Canal: inaugurated on St. Patrick’s Day 1968. In 1991, a bronze statue of a seated Kavanagh was added, opposite on the north bank                                                                                                                                                                            

   Although Hilda retained an interest in Kavanagh’s career - he was after all lauded as “the greatest Irish poet since Yeats”, (not a comparison that Patrick agreed with, he thought he was better) - she met him only one more time, at an official function shortly before his death. When he died, she sent a wreath of red roses shaped in the form of an “H”. After qualifying as a doctor, Hilda later became a prominent psychiatrist. She died in Dublin on 4 March 1991. She was the mother of Daragh O’Malley (born 1954), the well known actor who played the “Irishman” in the cult film Withnail and I.  

   Today, Kavanagh is ranked among the giants of twentieth century Irish literature alongside the likes of Joyce, O’Casey and Yeats. His work, utilizing “the language of the people”, is unpretentious but very “real”, characterized by lyricism, seriousness and uncompromising honesty. For Kavanagh, poetry was no mere dilettantish diversion: it was a way of life, profoundly spiritual, almost a form of prayer.                                                                                                         

   His other most popular poems include The Great Hunger (1942): a long poem, not specifically about the Famine, but “concerned with the woes of the poor”, inspired by his early life on the family farm in Co. Monaghan. Kavanagh claimed to have originated the term “the great hunger”, which has since become standard for describing the Famine. Kavanagh ranted against Cecil Woodham-Smith, accusing her of appropriating the phrase for the title of his classic study of the Famine. Other popular poems include Inniskeen Road: July Evening (1936) and Shancoduff (1934).

   Patrick Joseph Kavanagh was born in the Co. Monaghan townland of Mucker, a mile from the village of Inniskeen, near Carrickmacross. His father James (1856-1929), a hardworking and intelligent man, was a shoemaker and small farmer in whom the habits of hard work and careful husbandry were deeply ingrained. For six days a week, James worked with awl, wax-end and last, from six in the morning to midnight, until “God send Sunday”. Kavanagh’s mother, Bridget Quinn (1872-1945), shrewd, industrious, humorous and affectionate, was a major influence on her son, who spent most of his life trying to find someone to emulate her.                                 

   The young Kavanagh, though deeply influenced by his rural environment, had little interest in practical farming and no aptitude for mending shoes. From an early age, he dabbled in poetry and it came to dominate his life. Songs were also very meaningful. At a young age he recalled his father playing the melodeon and singing an old ballad, which stayed with Kavanagh all his life, becoming “the greatest song in the world”, Starry Night for a Ramble,

A starry night for a ramble, in a flowery dell,
Through the bush and bramble, kiss and never tell.

 

   By his mid 30s, Kavanagh had drifted away from the farm, making his first journey to Dublin in 1931. In true peasant-poet tradition, and influenced by American Jim Tully’s Beggars of Life: a hobo autobiography (1924), he had walked all the way there: sleeping in hay lofts, taking nearly three days to cover the fifty-five miles. His purpose was to meet poets, especially “AE”, George Russell (1867-1935), an early mentor. After some misadventures, he eventually found Russell, a gentle and generous man, who pressed so many books on him that he had to return home by train.                                                        

   In 1939, Kavanagh settled permanently in Dublin, staying at numerous addresses, all rented,        

 

51 Drumcondra Road (Upper) 1939

35 Haddington Road 1939

122 Morehampton Road 1941

9 O’Connell Street (Lower) 1942

55a Percy Place 1942

62 Pembroke Road 1943

19 Raglan Road 1943-44

62 Pembroke Road 1944-58

19 Raglan Road 1958-59

110 Baggot Lane 1959

1 Wilton Place? 1960?

37 Mount Street (Upper) 1963

136 Leeson Street (Upper) 1965

77 Palmerston Road 1966

Winton Road 1967

67 Waterloo Road 1967

 

   His first poetry collection, Ploughman and Other Poems was published in 1936. Although well received, small poetry collections generated little income and Kavanagh dissipated much of his energy struggling to make ends meet. Most of his earnings came from freelance journalism, which, owing to his abrasive style, did not lend itself to security of employment. Always independent-minded, always confident of his opinions, and never shy of expressing them, Kavanagh rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. As he became better known but no better off, he became embittered almost to the point of paranoia. His financial status was not helped by his complete inability to handle money and, from the late 1940s until his death, his increasing reliance on alcohol.                                                                    

   Kavanagh did not take kindly to literary rivals and as the star of Brendan Behan began to rise, the relationship between the two writers degenerated into unforgiving hatred, particularly on Kavanagh’s part. For a time, Behan had everything that Kavanagh craved: literary success, money, international fame and women fawning over him. Kavanagh, who considered himself the superior talent, was not amused. Behan, considering himself to be a city slicker, dismissed country people as “culchies”. As far as he was concerned, the sooner “the fucker from Mucker” returned to his “stony grey Monaghan hills” the better. Kavanagh, weary of the obvious rhyme since childhood, was not amused. (Mucker means “place of the pigs”). Kavanagh retaliated by refusing to stand for the National Anthem, because, he said, it was written by “Behan’s oul granny”! (It was written by Behan’s uncle Peadar Kearney).                                                                                                         

   When the two first met, they had been on friendly-enough terms and Behan, a painte to trade, volunteered to decorate Kavanagh’s Pembroke Road apartment. Later, Behan would joke that it was the only flat in Dublin, ankle deep in empty soup tins, old newspapers, beer and whiskey bottles, that you had to wipe your feet after leaving!     

   The enmity between the two men was cemented in 1954, when Kavanagh sued the Leader magazine for a nasty, anonymous article about him, portraying him as an egotistical, drunken loudmouth. He mistakenly suspected the hand of Behan and hoped to collect considerable damages without the case ever coming to court. However, the Leader defended the action: there was a long drawn out trial and appeal, the stress of which impacted negatively on Kavanagh’s health. During the trial, he bitterly denounced Behan. However, the defense produced a copy of his novel Tarry Flynn, inscribed “to my friend Brendan Behan, on the day he painted my flat”. This helped convince the court that Kavanagh was untrustworthy and he lost the case. Although he later won on appeal, no financial compensation was awarded.                     

   On 19 October 1959, or in the early hours of the 20th, Kavanagh was involved in a bizarre incident which left him floundering in the Grand Canal. Patrick claimed that it was an “assassination bid”, by gangsters whom he had exposed in a magazine article. Others were inclined to the view that that he had simply fallen in after a session in Searson’s pub at 42 Upper Baggot Street. The bridge wall is solid and fairly high and it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could fall over it. Perhaps he had tried to cross by one the rickety, wooden lock gates or perhaps he was victim of an “ordinary decent” mugging. The mystery deepens considering that both Searson’s and Baggott Lane, where he was then living, are on the same, southern, side of the Canal. It’s possible that after leaving Searson’s, he met friends, crossed the Canal with them, had more drinks and fell, or was thrown in, on his return journey.                                                                        

   Whatever the truth, Behan managed to turn the situation into another joke at Kavanagh’s expense. Denying involvement, he allegedly whispered, “I wish, though, I could lay my hands on the bollux that pulled him out”! For his part, Kavanagh took to describing himself as “the man they couldn’t kill”!

   His later years were to be plagued by ill health and continued financial concerns. In 1955, he survived surgery for lung cancer and had problems with his liver and kidneys as well as thrombosis. He was in debt to just about everyone: publishers (advances didn’t last long), taxman, utility providers, landlord, family and friends. He suffered from insomnia and began to take sleeping pills. He was a lifelong heavy smoker, he had little concept of a healthy diet and he was by now a virtual alcoholic, sneaking bottles of whiskey into pubs to fortify his beer. When he remarked, “not bad stuff at all this beer, it sets up a buzz”, his friends winked knowingly.               

   Inexorably, Kavanagh became trapped in a vicious circle: the more he drank, the less he worked. The less he worked, the less he earned. The less he earned, the more he worried. The more he worried, the more he drank. He was well aware of his situation, saying: “alcohol is the enemy of creativity”; but he couldn’t break the cycle. The misery of this period was however alleviated by his ever growing literary reputation and by his relationship with Katherine Barry Moloney (1928-89), an aunt of Kevin Barry, whom he had lived with, on and off, for a number of years and who devotedly cared for him. They married on 19 April 1967. Patrick sang On Raglan Road at the reception.               

   In and out of hospitals, “another of my addictions”, he finally succumbed and died of pneumonia on 30 November 1967. One of his best friends and staunchest supporters, writer, and owner of the Bailey pub, John Ryan (1925-92), summed up his brilliant but chaotic life well. “Did he not, like the patriarch, show us the Promised Land? And, like the prophet, fail to attain it himself”?