On Raglan Road

Baggot Street Bridge with Parsons bookshop in the background on the Grand Canal, Dublin

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.


On Raglan Road - Patrick Kavanagh 1946

People make big cities their own and give them a human scale and personal reference points by dividing them into villages. There is an urban village, which you will not see on maps of Dublin, known as Baggotonia, that village of lanes and gardens from the Grand Canal to Ballsbridge. Basically, the old Pembroke Township developed by the Pembroke’s (Earls of Wilton and Pembroke) Irish agents the Herbert’s from 1820 to 1838, just at the end of the Georgian and the beginnings of the Victorian age. This chronology ignores one of the more interesting British monarchs, William IV who reigned from 1830 to 1837. His reign saw several reforms: the poor law was updated, child labour restricted, slavery abolished in nearly all the British Empire, and the Reform Act in 1832 refashioned the British electoral system. There is a particular Irish interest for he had 10 children with the Irish actress Dorothea Bland (known as Mrs Jordan) but on his death his niece Princess Victoria of Kent became Queen as he had no legitimate heirs and his eldest son became Earl of Munster, his other offspring taking the surname FitzClarence and receiving titles. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is a direct descendant of their sixth child, Elizabeth FitzClarence. On his accession in 1830 as was the custom an election was called and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington lost his position as Prime Minister.

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Waterloo Road, Dublin

Arthur Wellesley was Irish, the son of Lord Mornington, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and he had been an MP in the Irish Parliament which was abolished by the Act of Union in 1800. Two Irishmen called Wellesley were responsible for setting the course of British history in the 19th Century. Arthur by defeating Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815 at Waterloo and his elder brother Richard who established the rule of the British Crown in India and was later British Foreign Secretary and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The Duke of Wellington was not entirely proud of his native land for when asked did he consider himself Irish he spat in reply “My good man, because Jesus was born in a stable does not make him a horse!” Nevertheless this member of the Protestant Ascendancy and hugely reactionary Tory Prime Minister was widely commemorated in Ireland not least by the huge Wellington Memorial in the Phoenix Park. And when the Pembroke estate came to layout its land south of the Grand Canal at its heart were five imposing roads commemorating the “Iron Duke” lined with large houses which unlike their Georgian predecessors were set back from the road which with their great granite steps to their Piano Nobile gave them an imposing presence. The first great avenue was called Waterloo Road, the second Wellington Road after our local hero and the three off that were called Elgin, Clyde and Raglan after his commanders at Waterloo.





These roads are the core of Baggotonia which along with the stretch of the Grand Canal bordering it will always be associated with the Poet and Writer, Patrick Kavanagh. It is an area which became known for its bohemian inhabitants including this Sage who lived at one time on Waterloo Road and relished both its village feel and the fact it was only 10 minutes walk home from the centre of Dublin after a night out. Baggotonia has a High Street where its inhabitants meet, talk and replenish themselves, Upper Baggot Street, south of the Grand Canal. Some Dublin geography – the city centre is defined by the arcs of two canals, to the north the Royal Canal which goes from Spencer Dock on the River Liffey at Dublin to the River Shannon at Cloondara in County Longford and to the south the Grand Canal which joins the River Liffey at Grand Canal Dock and continues through to the River Shannon at Shannon Harbour in Co. Offaly with various branches, including a link to the River Barrow waterway at Athy. The centre is then divided into “Northside” which is from the Liffey to the Royal Canal and “Southside” which is from the river to the Grand Canal. In Dublin where a street is divided into “Lower” and “Upper” the “Lower” is the end nearer the Liffey and the “Upper” is the end furthest from the Liffey. Thus you walk over Baggot Street Bridge into Upper Baggot Street into Baggotonia leaving Dublin 2 and entering Dublin 4, the area which houses Embassies, the Royal Dublin Society where the famous Dublin Horse Show is held, leafy Herbert Park, the seaside “village” of Sandymount and the Rugby Stadium at Lansdowne Road.




Upper Baggot Street south of the Grand Canal, the High Street of Baggotonia



Baggot Street Upper has changed since Patrick Kavanagh’s time with the Royal Dublin Hospital now converted to upmarket apartments but still generally has the same mix of pubs, boutiques, coffee bars, restaurants and real shops such as Meagher’s Chemist and Weir’s Hardware store. If one place captured its essence for forty years from 1949 to 1989, Parsons Bookshop was a Dublin literary landmark and meeting place. Situated on the crest of Baggot Street’s Grand Canal Bridge, it defined the Bohemian quarter of writers and artists known as Baggotonia. Owned by May O’Flaherty who was ably assisted by Mary King and three other ladies, Parsons Bookshop played a major role in Ireland’s literary and cultural development. In this affectionate chronicle of a very special establishment, Brendan Lynch describes the Dublin literary and artistic scene from the fifties to the eighties. Parsons was a second home to Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, and other literary customers included Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty, Frank O’Connor, Mary Lavin and Seamus Heaney. Artist customers ranged from Louis le Brocquy, Patrick Scott, Patrick Pye, Michael Kane and Brian Bourke to the ultimate Bohemian, Owen Walsh, who occupied a local studio-cum-boudoir for the lifespan of the bookshop. I am the proud owner of his son Ronan Walsh’s 1983 painting “Eugenie on a Bicycle.” Archbishops of various denominations also worshipped at this shrine to literature, while political visitors ranged from senators and government ministers to Taoisigh Garrett Fitzgerald and Jack Lynch.

“Parsons, where one met as many interesting writers on the floor of the shop as on the shelves!” — Mary Lavin.


Lower Baggot Street

Patrick Kavanagh was born on 21 October 1904, in Mucker townland, Inniskeen parish, Co. Monaghan, the son of James Kavanagh, a small farmer with sixteen acres who was also a cobbler, and Bridget Quinn. He attended Kednaminsha National School from 1909 to 1916 and worked on the family farm after leaving school. For twenty years he lived a life as an ordinary young Irish farmer of the period, toiling for pocket money in fields he expected some day to inherit. However, he was often more interested in reading than farming and the farm horse 'Oul Glug' "knew the way home better than he did." Kavanagh began writing verses at a young age. He began submitting poems to local and national newspapers. He became increasingly dissatisfied with life as a small farmer, and in 1938 he left Inniskeen for London and remained there for about five months. In 1939 he finally settled in Dublin.

Kavanagh lived in Pembroke Road., Dublin, close to Raglan Road, from 1946 (the date of the poem) until 1958 and then at 19 Raglan Road itself from 1958 to 1959.




Raglan Road

His earliest poems were printed by the Dundalk Democrat and Weekly Independent, in1928; three more were printed by George Russell (Æ) in The Irish Statesman during 1929-30. In 1931 he walked to Dublin to meet Russell, who introduced him to Frank O'Connor. Ploughman and Other Poems was published by Macmillan in 1936; soon after he moved to London in search of literary work but returned to Ireland when this failed to offer a living. An autobiography, The Green Fool appeared in 1938 but was withdrawn after a libel threat from Oliver Gogarty. A long poem, perhaps his best, The Great Hunger, appeared in the London-based Horizon in 1942; its tragic statement of the mental and sexual frustrations of rural life was recognised as masterly by Frank O'Connor and George Yeats, who issued it in Dublin as a Cuala Press pamphlet; it seems also to have attracted the attention of the police and censors. Another fine long poem, Lough Derg, was written the same year though not published until 1971.

A Soul for Sale (1947) was followed by Tarry Flynn (1948), more realistic than the former autobiography, and called by the author 'not only the best but the only authentic account of life as it was lived in Ireland this century'; it was briefly banned.


Writers on Sandymount Strand; L-R; John Ryan, Anthony Cronin,Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh

Kavanagh first sang On Raglan Road (in public) sometime between August 1945 and April 1947; when he was employed on the Standard newspaper. Writer Benedict Kiely (1919-2007), then also working for the Standard, recalled Kavanagh walking into the office one day and saying, ‘there, sing that to that [On Raglan Road] to The Dawning of the Day’. The song, often known simply as "Raglan Road," has since been sung by the Dubliners, Van Morrison, Sinéad O'Connor, Dire Straits, Billy Bragg, Roger Daltrey and Loreena McKennitt among others.



Writer Benedict Kiely tells Ciarán Mac Mathúna how he thinks he was the first person to see the words of 'Raglan Road' written out and how Kavanagh asked him if he thought the poem could be sung to the air of 'The Dawning of the Day'.
1st Broadcast: 10 January 1979; Presenter: Ciarán MacMathúna .

Luke Kelly of the Dubliners explains how he met Patrick Kavanagh only once in the Bailey pub in Dublin in 1966. During this encounter Kavanagh told him he had a song for him. The song was 'On Raglan Road'. For many people Luke Kelly's interpretation of 'On Raglan Road' is the definitive one. Luke Kelly performs 'On Raglan Road' accompanied by Al O'Donnell. On Raglan Road’s melody is an almost perfect match for the traditional 18th century air Fáinne Geal an Lae - “the dawning of the day”, translated by Edward Walsh (1805-50),

On a mossy bank I sat me down, this maiden by my side,
With gentle words I courted her; I asked her “be my bride”,
She said "young man don't bring me shame" and swiftly turned away,
And the sun’s first light, pursued her flight at the dawning of the day.

Kavanagh certainly knew The Dawning of the Day, which had been popularised by McCormack’s 1934 recording, and he himself matched lyric to melody. The structure of both songs is very similar, as is the theme of lost love. Kavanagh also retained the key refrain, “the dawning of the day” which is name checked in the last line. There are also similarities of phrasing: for example; “with gentle words I courted her” is surely echoed in Kavanagh’s “I gave her poems to say”?


Locks on the Grand Canal seen from Baggot Street Bridge

It was first published as a poem in the Irish Press on 3 October 1946 under the title "Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away." Peter Kavanagh, Kavanagh's brother said that "it was written about Patrick's girlfriend Hilda [Moriaty] but to avoid embarrassment he used the name of my girlfriend in the title." Patrick Kavanagh met Hilda Moriarty in 1944. The inspiration for the song, Hilda Moriarty from Dingle, Co. Kerry, was a medical student at University College, Dublin. “On an autumn day” in 1944, Kavanagh noticed her walking to college on Raglan Road, where he was living in lodgings at number 19, while subletting his flat round the corner at 62 Pembroke Road. Though he couldn’t afford to furnish or heat it, Kavanagh had rented the large apartment to impress the family of his then-fiancée, twenty-three-year-old Nola O’Driscoll, a daughter of Michael Collins’ sister Margaret. The engagement didn’t last very long but Nola never married anyone else. Because number 19 was then a boarding house, which imposed tiresome constraints on his independent lifestyle, Kavanagh stayed in the street that he would immortalize for only some six months: though he did move back there again in 1958. Strangely, the present-day tourist wall-plague makes no reference to his residency there in 1944-45, when and where he composed his best known work. The house is part of a substantial red-brick terrace.




Pembroke Road

Most of his earnings came from freelance journalism, which, owing to his abrasive style, did not lend itself to security of employment. Always independent-minded, always confident of his opinions, and never shy of expressing them, Kavanagh rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. As he became better known but no better off, he became embittered almost to the point of paranoia. His financial status was not helped by his complete inability to handle money and, from the late 1940s until his death, his increasing reliance on alcohol.


Patrick Kavanagh

Despite working as a journalist, Kavanagh was not an enthusiast for the genre, writing;

“It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities - life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.”

With his brother Peter and financed by him, Patrick edited a paper, Kavanagh's Weekly, subtitled 'a journal of literature and politics' (13 issues; 12 April-5 July 1952); he contributed most of the articles and poems, usually under pseudonyms. In 1952 a Dublin paper, The Leader, published a profile which depicted him as an alcoholic sponger, and he sued for libel. He was harshly cross-examined by John A. Costello, defending The Leader, when the case came to trial in 1954, and he lost. The following year he was diagnosed with cancer and had a lung removed. My father once met him but in truth it was not too difficult to meet him as he was always being “introduced” in pubs if you looked like you might buy him a drink.

At this low point he experienced a sort of personal and poetic renewal; Recent Poems (1958), (Peter Kavanagh, Hand Press, New York), was followed by Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (London, Longmans, 1960); these contain some of his best known shorter poems. His Collected Poems were published in 1964 by MacGibbon and Kee who also brought out Collected Pruse (1967). Tarry Flynn was dramatised by P.J. O'Connor and produced by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and in Dundalk in 1967.

Kavanagh did not take kindly to literary rivals and as the star of Brendan Behan began to rise, the relationship between the two writers degenerated into unforgiving hatred, particularly on Kavanagh’s part. For a time, Behan had everything that Kavanagh craved: literary success, money, international fame and women fawning over him. Kavanagh, who considered himself the superior talent, was not amused. Behan, considering himself to be a city slicker, dismissed country people as “culchies”. As far as he was concerned, the sooner “the fu#ker from Mucker” returned to his “stony grey Monaghan hills” the better. Kavanagh, weary of the obvious rhyme since childhood, was not amused. (Mucker means “place of the pigs”). Kavanagh retaliated by refusing to stand for the National Anthem, because, he said, it was written by “Behan’s oul granny”! (It was in fact written by Behan’s uncle Peadar Kearney).

When the two first met, they had been on friendly-enough terms and Behan, a painter by trade, volunteered to decorate Kavanagh’s Pembroke Road apartment. Later, Behan would joke that it was the only flat in Dublin, ankle deep in empty soup tins, old newspapers, beer and whiskey bottles, that you had to wipe your feet after leaving!


Behan and Kavanagh reunited in the Wax Museum Dublin - In reality they were the best of enemies

The enmity between the two men was cemented in 1954, when Kavanagh sued the Leader magazine for a nasty, anonymous article about him, portraying him as an egotistical, drunken loudmouth. He mistakenly suspected the hand of Behan and hoped to collect considerable damages without the case ever coming to court. However, the Leader defended the action: there was a long drawn out trial and appeal, the stress of which impacted negatively on Kavanagh’s health. During the trial, he bitterly denounced Behan. However, the defence produced a copy of his novel Tarry Flynn, inscribed “to my friend Brendan Behan, on the day he painted my flat”. This helped convince the court that Kavanagh was untrustworthy and he lost the case. Although he later won on appeal, no financial compensation was awarded.


Searson’s pub

On 19 October 1959, or in the early hours of the 20th, Kavanagh was involved in a bizarre incident which left him floundering in the Grand Canal. Patrick claimed that it was an “assassination bid”, by gangsters whom he had exposed in a magazine article. Others were inclined to the view that that he had simply fallen in after a session in Searson’s pub at 42 Upper Baggot Street. The bridge wall is solid and fairly high and it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could fall over it. Perhaps he had tried to cross by one the rickety, wooden lock gates or perhaps he was victim of an “ordinary decent” mugging. The mystery deepens considering that both Searson’s and Baggot Lane, where he was then living, are on the same, southern, side of the Canal. It’s possible that after leaving Searson’s, he met friends, crossed the Canal with them, had more drinks and fell, or was thrown in, on his return journey.

Whatever the truth, Behan managed to turn the situation into another joke at Kavanagh’s expense. Denying involvement, he allegedly whispered, “I wish, though, I could lay my hands on the bollix that pulled him out”! For his part, Kavanagh took to describing himself as “the man they couldn’t kill”!



His later years were to be plagued by ill health and continued financial concerns. In 1955, he survived surgery for lung cancer and had problems with his liver and kidneys as well as thrombosis. He was in debt to just about everyone: publishers (advances didn’t last long), taxman, utility providers, landlord, family and friends. He suffered from insomnia and began to take sleeping pills. He was a lifelong heavy smoker, he had little concept of a healthy diet and he was by now a virtual alcoholic, sneaking bottles of whiskey into pubs to fortify his beer. When he remarked, “not bad stuff at all this beer, it sets up a buzz”, his friends winked knowingly.

Inexorably, Kavanagh became trapped in a vicious circle: the more he drank, the less he worked. The less he worked, the less he earned. The less he earned, the more he worried. The more he worried, the more he drank. He was well aware of his situation, saying: “alcohol is the enemy of creativity”; but he couldn’t break the cycle. The misery of this period was however alleviated by his ever growing literary reputation and by his relationship with Katherine Barry Moloney (1928-89), an aunt of Kevin Barry, whom he had lived with, on and off, for a number of years and who devotedly cared for him. They married on 19 April 1967. Patrick sang On Raglan Road at the reception.

In and out of hospitals, “another of my addictions”, he finally succumbed and died of pneumonia on 30 November 1967. One of his best friends and staunchest supporters, writer, and owner of the Bailey pub, John Ryan (1925-92), summed up his brilliant but chaotic life well.

“Did he not, like the patriarch, show us the Promised Land? And, like the prophet, fail to attain it himself”?

In 2000 the Irish Times surveyed 'the nation's favourite poems' and ten of Kavanagh's poems were in the first fifty. His poem 'Raglan Road', written to be sung, was performed by the folk group, The Dubliners, and remains very popular. The Great Hunger was adapted for the theatre by Tom MacIntyre, and produced in Dublin (Abbey Theatre, 1983).

There is a statue of Kavanagh by Dublin's Grand Canal, inspired by his poem "Lines written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin." Every 17 March, after the St Patrick's Day parade, a group of Kavanagh's friends gather at the Kavanagh seat on the banks of the Grand Canal at Mespil road in his honour. There is also another, original, seat situated on the South Bank at the Lock Gates close to Baggot Street Bridge (As is well known from his poem and heavy hints to his friends, he wished to be commemorated with a simple canal side seat near the lock gates of Baggot Street Bridge). It was errected by his friends, led by John Ryan and Denis Dwyer, in 1968.

Lines written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin.


"Erected in Memory of Mrs. Dermot O'Brien” by Patrick Kavanagh

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully.
Where by a lock Niagariously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges -
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.


Next to the Ulysses Industry deciphering James Joyce there is an almost equivalent industry deciphering On Raglan Road.

See James Joyce and Me;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/06/james-joyce-and-me.html

It is not a problem to Dubliners who don’t have difficulty interpreting On Raglan Road. Apart from the obvious, the line "and I not making hay" may refer to his absence from Inniskeen during the autumn haymaking because of his obsession with Hilda Moriarty, or his unemployment in Dublin at the time.

Grafton Street is Dublin's principal shopping street, running from St. Stephen's Green in the south to College Green in the north. In the 1970s Noel Purcell sang "Grafton Street's a wonderland with magic in the air . . .". The street was named after the first Duke of Grafton, who owned land in the area. It was developed from an existing country lane by the Dawson family in 1708, after whom the parallel Dawson Street is named. Street entertainers such as buskers, poets and mime artists commonly perform to the shopping crowds.


Grafton Street, Dublin

However the main thing to remember about Raglan Road is that it is an allegorical tale of unrequited love. Allegory is used often in Irish poetry and song for during British Rule references to Irish Freedom were often coded, but understood by the listener. So a song might refer to “My Dark Rosaleen” meaning Ireland and say “Spanish wine will give you strength” expressing the hope that England’s enemy would help Ireland’s liberation. Allegory exists in many cultures in tales, song and poetry especially to express love, longing and loneliness from the Gaelic, Aishling, a vision represented by young women to the Hindu Maya, an incarnation of the Goddess Devi represented by a pure young girl.

Indeed On Raglan Road probably “works” because it isn’t “joined up” and creates a sense of mystery about what is being sung so that the listener makes the song their own by filling in the gaps. If On Raglan Road was a painting it would certainly be an Impressionistic offering probably with the title “Heartbreak; An Impression.”


Sinéad O'Connor sings On Raglan Road on the Late Late Show Donal Lunny Tribute


On Raglan Road

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion's pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay
O I loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay -
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.

In an interview filmed for the documentary 'Gentle Tiger', Hilda Moriarty-O'Malley, who inspired 'On Raglan Road', explains the origins of the poem. Actor John Kavanagh sings an extract from 'On Raglan Road'.



Today, Kavanagh is ranked among the giants of twentieth century Irish literature alongside the likes of Joyce, O’Casey and Yeats. His work, utilising “the language of the people”, is unpretentious but very “real”, characterized by lyricism, seriousness and uncompromising honesty. For Kavanagh, poetry was no mere dilettantish diversion: it was a way of life, profoundly spiritual, almost a form of prayer.

As for his life, often lonely, often unhappy, often unhealthy, often dissolute he anticipated and set his legacy in Baggotonia;

On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost,
Dishevelled with shoes untied,
Playing through the railings with little children
Whose children have long since died

He knew that posterity has no use
For anything but the soul,
The lines that speak the passionate heart,
The spirit that lives alone.

'If ever you go to Dublin town'



See; Farewell Ronnie Drew;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/08/farewell-ronnie-drew.html