Another great poem by the incredible Patrick Kavanagh (1904 – 1967). A lovely Irish poem that has no break in its 14 lines. Kavanagh speaks about the thought and feeling of remembering someone whose name is on a seat on the Grand Canal in Dublin. In Kavanagh’s later years, when he had an alcohol problem, he liked to walk by the Grand Canal or sit watching the water.
I am sure you will agree that this poem is wonderful. The most superficial descriptions put you right where he was sitting.
There is now a statue of him on the Grand Canal that I encourage you to stop and sit if you ever get a chance. You can imagine how he felt sitting on the erected bench to the memory of Mrs Dermot O’Brien.
Lines Written on a Seat
on the Grand Canal, Dublin
‘Erected to the memory of Mrs. Dermot O’Brien’
By Patrick Kavanagh
O commemorate me where there is water,
Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin is one of Patrick Kavanagh’s famous canal bank sonnets from the late 1950s. It was published in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, which Longmans brought out in 1960. The title comes from a real bench on the canal bank, put there in memory of a Mrs Dermot O’Brien.
In 1955 Kavanagh had surgery for lung cancer, and he spent that summer recovering on the banks of the Grand Canal near Baggot Street. Those long, quiet days gave his later poems a new sense of calm and wonder. Here he asks to be remembered not with a grand monument but beside the water he loved. The ordinary life of the canal, from the rush of water at the lock to a passing swan and barge, takes on an almost magical quality, as if this stretch of Dublin were a place of myth and poetry.
His wish came true. After his death in 1967 friends placed a seat for him on the canal bank, and since 1991 a bronze statue of Kavanagh has sat on a bench beside the water. It is a short, generous poem about finding the sacred in everyday things.
Read the full poem: Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin by Patrick Kavanagh at the Patrick Kavanagh Trust. You will also find it in Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Penguin).
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