Patrick Kavanagh at Priory Grove

MARGOT O'TOOLE1

The addition of a poet to our household did not seem out of the ordinary to us. It was not uncharacteristic of my parents to help Patrick Kavanagh; our home was a welcoming place for those in need of generous hearts. As children, we were accustomed to people who stayed a while and became enveloped in our family life. We often had extra guests around the table at mealtimes, and we took it for granted that anyone staying with us would join us on family outings.

The descriptions in my mother's manuscript of my father's sweeping insistence that Paddy would come to the Punchestown Races and the day we spent at the seaside in Greystones are just as I remember them. Each of my siblings has memories of other excursions which are not described by my mother: for example, he came with us for a hike on the Sugarloaf Mountain in County Wicklow, to an art exhibition near the Featherbed Forest, overlooking Dublin, and to Bulloch Harbour in Dalkey, County Dublin, where we bought fish from a fisherman. My father's exuberance enveloped those around him and swept them along. Patrick Kavanagh, often portrayed in years since then as a curmudgeon, joined right in.

It was not only house guests who were invited to join us on family outings. My parents believed in sharing good times as widely as possible. When dad took us anywhere for fun - to the beach, a movie, a museum, on a hike - he would bring along any other relative or neighbourhood child who could get permission to come with us. As one of my cousins said to me recently: 'I remember him as the person who never left any of us behind.' My father's car would have reminded you of those clown cars, loaded with an impossibly large number of passengers. Once, when we were travelling on a country road in west Clare, we passed a man on foot. Dad, as was second nature to him, stopped to offer a ride. The bewildered man pointed out that the car was packed to the brim with us and our cousins and he could not fit into it. Dad directed him to stand on the running board, the bundle he was carrying was passed in to me, and I held it on my lap as I sat on someone else's lap. Front and back car windows were rolled down so our new passenger could keep a secure grip on the frame of the car as we proceeded slowly along the bumpy road.

Paddy enjoyed the company of children. He showed an interest in us, he took part in our fun, and he was supportive. We shared with him what his poems asked children to share with him - the 'meadow ways' of our innocence and laughter.

Our experience with Paddy was similar to Kieran Markey's, Paddy's nephew, who recalled Paddy taking him out to kick football: they played for a while but then his uncle said, 'Go and play on your own, I want to do some dramin' (dreaming) for myself.' He would stand gazing over the fields and let the child play on his own.2 Yet his way with children has not, in my opinion, received the attention it deserves. Perhaps this is because Paddy's nephew John Quinn has reported that Paddy paid no attention to him as a child when he and the poet were staying with his sister, Annie, at her home in Longford town in 1955.3 However, Paddy was at that time recovering from having a lung removed and was undoubtedly even more ill than he was when he arrived in our home some years later. Paddy's interactions with us mirrored the attitudes to children expressed in his poetry. In his 1953 ballad, 'If Ever You Go to Dublin Town', he describes himself 'Playing through the railings with little children/ Whose children have long since died.'4 There seems to have been a healing and restorative dimension for him in the company of children. Little wonder then that in his poem 'Advent' he openly coveted 'the luxury/ Of a child's soul' as essential to his poetic vision.5

Poetry was at the core of my parents' friendship with Paddy. In our home, poems were part of daily life. They were stored in memory so that we could call upon them when needed - needed that is to put experience into the inspirational context of shared humanity; to instil an understanding of our culture; to reveal how language can express ideas and emotions. Each of us learned a different set of poems. It was only after I became an adult that I realized each list must have been selected based on our individual personalities. For the most part, all of us knew the poems from all the lists because we would hear them repeatedly recited. But there was never any doubt about which of us could claim the special connection to a given poem.

For instance, whenever my little sister EllyMay started to cry, my father would grab a small cloth - a handkerchief, a table napkin, whatever was closest at hand - and announce that he was about to perform a 'great magic trick'. He would then use the cloth to shield EllyMay's face from his 'audience' and begin to recite. Often, but not always, he chose 'Kubla Khan' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge because the words at the beginning sounded magical to us:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree

Then, with a magician's flourish, he would whip away the cloth to reveal the laughing face of EllyMay. Transforming an upset child into a child who was laughing uncontrollably, with the tears still wet on her face, was a magic trick that never failed.

As I recall, my father dealt with my own displays of upset in private, perhaps because I was more private about them, or perhaps because I am failing to remember incidents that occurred when I was very young. He had a single, special poem for me. He would stand squarely, reach his arched arms towards me in a ballet-like pose, and melodiously recite Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'Spring and Fall', emphasizing the syllables as Hopkins did:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

The brew of emotions he would stir up with this performance was complicated. This large and loving person focusing intensely on me always seemed to distract me from whatever had saddened me. Often at the start of the recitation, I would feel annoyed that my right to be appropriately upset was not being validated. His recitation would stop when I smiled at him. Sometimes he did not get that smile until near the end of the poem. But I would smile. How could I deny him the pleasure of having his charm work on me?

My father recited many other poems to me, of course. I remember sitting as a small child in the lap of a big and strong man and, in what may seem like an unfathomable paradox, I would get the sensation of being big too. Looking back now at this sense of small-child 'bigness', I suppose the world of literature that he was laying out before me made me feel like I had a place in the world. One day as I scrambled to get up on his lap, I said to him, 'I feel so big in your arms.' The pleasure and pride he took in recounting this early interaction between us never diminished.

Much of our education at home happened through poetry. My mother's sister, Auntie Kitty, told the story that once upon a time, returning from a few years of working in the USA, she asked me to say a poem for her. I was what she described as 'a tiny bit of a thing,' and so she was expecting a nursery rhyme. Instead I subjected her to a full-length recitation of 'The Lady of Shalott' by Tennyson, all 171 lines of it. Some, I am sure, would say that teaching this long poem to a very young child was silly. But with the mastery of that poem came a broadened vocabulary, an awareness of the stories of Camelot and the outfitting of knights, and an appreciation of how words could be strung together beautifully. My brother Larry did something similar: he recited the entire 143 lines of 'Lepanto' by G.K. Chesterton on stage at school when he was about eight. Both he and I learned some history from it. My sister Jaja has especially tender memories of reciting Tennyson's 'Maud' and T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' with my father.

My father's cousin Michael Hayes has told me that my father, upon returning to their shared room the evening he had met my mother, recounted how he had recited poetry to her. It came as no surprise to me that poetry had helped dad win my mom's heart. From the very beginning, it was part of the glue that held them together. My mother recites poetry honed to the situation at hand - I use the present tense because she is still doing it as I write this in October 2019. Her father also loved to tell us stories, with favourites retold many times. Sometimes his storytelling was in the form of epic poems recited from memory. He was very interested in the USA and was a great admirer of Longfellow. His recitations of Longfellow's 'The Slave's Dream' made a big impression on me, and because he often recited 'The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere', I arrived as an Irish girl in my American History class in Massachusetts knowing as much as, if not more than, my classmates did about their local hero. As a child, I enjoyed Paddy's company and his poems. I don't remember knowing that Paddy was famous - that he had already gained wide acclaim as among the greatest poets of the English language. I only remember thinking of him as our friend, and that my parents believed him to be a very important poet. I occasionally organized papers for Paddy. I was, he said, not a 'chatterbox'. While I busied myself, he would...