I have really enjoyed reading a new Irish poem every week! I hope you have as well. If this is your first time stopping by my top Irish poems list be sure to subscribe to my weekly dose of Irish where I send them out straight to your inbox every Friday.
Another short but powerful Irish poem. It comes in at number 8 on the top 100 Irish poems.
Patrick Kavanagh wrote this poem after recovering from lung cancer surgery in 1955. Kavanagh used to take walks along the Canal bank in Dublin after treatment.
The Canal Bank Walk in Dublin City is on the banks of the Grand Canal between Portobello and Mount Street. It is a beautiful stretch of walkway, with leafy green trees and gorgeous benches.
This is a beautiful unhurried poem in which the poet’s emotions and a new lease on life shine through.
Canal Bank Walk by Patrick Kavanagh
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Canal Bank Walk is a sonnet about being given a second chance at life. In March 1955 Kavanagh had a lung removed after a cancer diagnosis, and he spent that warm summer recovering on the banks of the Grand Canal in Dublin. The poem grows out of that time of healing.
Its subject is the holiness of ordinary things. The sonnet is full of small, everyday sights from the towpath, and Kavanagh treats each of them as a sign of grace. Having come close to death, he no longer wants to strain after importance. He wants to let the plain world around him renew him, body and soul.
The tone is grateful and quietly joyful rather than argumentative. The poem reads almost like a prayer, with the poet asking nature to make him new. It was collected in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (Longmans, 1960), the book of Kavanagh’s late flowering, beside its companion sonnet Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin. A bronze statue of the poet now sits on a bench by the canal near Baggot Street Bridge.
The full poem is not published online by an authorised source. You will find it in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (Longmans, 1960) and in Patrick Kavanagh: Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004; Penguin Modern Classics).