While previously I had picked a random poem every week from my top 100 Irish poems, this week I had to handpick this fantastic poem called “A Christmas Childhood” once again a poem by Patrick Kavanagh.
In fact, this poem was shortlisted by RTE to be one of the top 100 Irish poems of the past 100 years.
In this incredible poem, Patrick Kavanagh writes about a Christmas when he was six years old. A touching poem in many ways, and I share a few thoughts on it below.
A Christmas Childhood
by Patrick Kavanagh
I
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
A Christmas Childhood comes in two parts. In the first, a grown man looks back at a frosty winter on the family farm in Inniskeen, County Monaghan. He links that childhood world with the Garden of Eden, and admits that growing up meant losing it. Only in rare moments, prompted by something quite plain, does the old wonder come back.
The second part moves to one Christmas morning when he was six. Nothing grand happens. There is music at the gate, work in the cow-house and neighbours heading off to Mass. But Kavanagh lays the Nativity story over his own townland, so the ordinary sights of a Monaghan farm take on the glow of Bethlehem. It ends on a quiet, almost holy picture of father, mother and child.
The two parts first appeared separately in the early 1940s, and the finished poem was collected in A Soul for Sale in 1947. Kavanagh is said to have written it while spending Christmas alone in Dublin, and you can feel how much he missed home. It is one of the best loved Christmas poems in Ireland.
We have not found an authorised copy of the full poem online. You will find it in Patrick Kavanagh’s Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Penguin).