Wet Evening in April
The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.
Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (Allen Lane/Penguin 2004).
Patrick Kavanagh was more than a little preoccupied with the role of The Poet in society -- perhaps too much so. He wasted a great deal of energy in literary quarreling and in producing satirical verse about the Irish literary and political world. However, I think that "Wet Evening in April" is a lovely evocation of what a poet is capable of doing at his or her best. After all, here we are -- not yet a hundred, but sixty years later -- reading about Patrick Kavanagh's birds singing in the wet April trees. (And thank you, Mr. Kavanagh, for recording the melancholy.)
A serendipitous side-note: I am writing this post on April 19, 2012. In preparing to write the previous paragraph, I thought that I should find out exactly how long it has been since Kavanagh wrote "Wet Evening in April." I checked the Notes to his Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) and this is what I found: the poem was first published on April 19, 1952, in Kavanagh's Weekly. Thus, a tiny, but nice, coincidence: the poem was published exactly 60 years ago today.
2 comments:
Stephen -- I love this sort of time-marking approach. It reminds me, at least in terms of its effect, of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Whitman. I remember reading late into a summer morning and being chilled by: "What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you...I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born...Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?"
Chris: thank you very much for the fine lines from Whitman. They fit perfectly! I can see why they would have brought chills as you read them.
I suppose that to write what Whitman and Kavanagh wrote on the one hand takes a great deal of self-confidence, but on the other hand is a very tender (I hope that that word doesn't sound too corny) and touching gesture. The idea of the connection across time is, I agree with you, lovely.
As always, I appreciate hearing from you.
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