This week it is number 21 in the top 100 Irish poems list. A great poem by Patrick Kavanagh.
This poem ‘Advent’ is a very religious poem. If you don’t know Advent is a four week period before Christmas, where people would traditionally look at themselves and their actions. Kavanagh feels that experience has corrupted him, as he has ‘tested and tasted too much’.nbsp;
Enjoy this great poem.
Advent By Patrick Kavanagh
And Christ comes with a January flower.
Advent is a poem about getting back a sense of wonder. Kavanagh speaks to a lover and admits that they have seen and tried so much that nothing surprises them any more. His answer is the self-denial of Advent: a few weeks of penance and plain living in the dark days before Christmas.
If they can go without, he believes, they will see the world again the way children do. The ordinary sights and sounds of the Ulster countryside and village life will feel new and full of meaning. God is found in the everyday, not in clever argument or analysis.
Kavanagh wrote it around 1942 under the title Renewal, and it was published as Advent in A Soul for Sale (Macmillan, 1947). It is often shared in the weeks before Christmas, and it sums up his belief that holiness lives in the commonplace.
The full poem is not published online by an authorised source. You will find it in Patrick Kavanagh’s Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane/Penguin).
Patrick Kavanagh 1904 – 1967