Well, this week I have picked number 30 from the top 100 Irish poems list. It is titled Inniskeen Road, July Evening and is primarily about what Irish life was like in the countryside in the 1930s.
Kavanagh writes this poem (as he does in so many others) with such great imagery. You really get the feeling of isolation and his rustic imagination for the Irish countryside.
It seems that there is a big event going on that evening but Kavanagh was not invited to “Billy Brennan’s barn.” So as a result depicts the isolation and loneliness that he would have felt. Mainly because he was in a different class to regular people back then.
I love his line “A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king.” Here Kavanagh is saying that he is the king of everything that he surveys, but he is only king “Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.”
A wonderfully written poem that perfectly encapsulates how he must have felt that July evening.
I like this poem as it reminds me of his other very descriptive poem Spraying the Potatoes.
Inniskeen Road: July Evening
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Inniskeen Road: July Evening is a sonnet from Patrick Kavanagh’s first collection, Ploughman and Other Poems, published by Macmillan in 1936. It is set on the road near his home place of Inniskeen in Co. Monaghan, on a summer evening when the young people of the parish are heading to a dance in a local barn.
The poem opens with the buzz of the evening, full of the knowing looks and private jokes of people who belong. Then the road empties and goes quiet, and the poet is left on his own. He admits that the loneliness he feels is the price of being the one who watches and writes rather than the one who joins in.
Kavanagh compares himself to Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor marooned on a Pacific island whose story helped inspire Robinson Crusoe. The closing couplet is gently ironic. He is master of everything he can see, but his kingdom is only a mile of country road with its ditches and stones. It is a funny, honest little poem about being an outsider in the place you love.
Read the full poem: Inniskeen Road: July Evening by Patrick Kavanagh at the Patrick Kavanagh Trust. You will also find it in Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Penguin).
Lesley
Saturday 8th of January 2022
Interesting that they didn’t invite him. Nice poem….!