How To Live, Part Eight: "The Only True Teaching Subsists In Watching Things Moving Or Just Colour Without Comment From The Scholar"

After being successfully treated for lung cancer in 1954 and 1955, Patrick Kavanagh entered a sort of euphoric era in his poetry.  We saw this previously in his poem "The Hospital," in which he asserts that "nothing whatever is by love debarred" and then goes on to enumerate the delights of the Rialto Hospital in Dublin.  During this post-cancer period, he wrote what have become known as the "Canal Bank poems," because they were prompted by his walks along the Grand Canal in Dublin.  The following poem was written during this time.  It is a good piece of advice on How to Live.  

                       Is

The important thing is not
To imagine one ought
Have something to say,
A raison d'etre, a plot for the play.
The only true teaching
Subsists in watching
Things moving or just colour
Without comment from the scholar.
To look on is enough
In the business of love.
Casually remark
On a deer running in a park;
Mention water again
Always virginal,
Always original,
It washes out Original Sin.
Name for the future
The everydays of nature
And without being analytic
Create a great epic.
Girls in red blouses,
Steps up to houses,
Sunlight round gables,
Gossip's young fables,
The life of a street.

O wealthy me!  O happy state!
With an inexhaustible theme
I'll die in harness,
I'll die in harness with my scheme.

Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960).

The lines "Name for the future/The everydays of nature" are reminiscent of a line from "The Hospital":  "Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge."  And, as Kavanagh speaks in this poem of his "inexhaustible theme," he speaks in "The Hospital" of "the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard."

                         Derek Clarke, "Runner Beans, Stoughton" (1948)