Vincent Coyle has been a regular contributor to our website. He graduated from Ballinacree school in about 1958. He has had a lifelong interest in Patrick Kavanagh and his writings.

Seeing the Magic of the Ordinary

Christmas is on top of us already. Where does time go?  I ask you … and I wouldn’t be the first to ask that question.

I think mine was a lucky generation…born just after the war and vaguely remembering ration books. We were born just in time to see a world that had lasted for about 700 years change utterly into some strange ever evolving new world. We saw the open fire on the hearth and the crane and the heavy cast iron pots that a multitude of generations before us depended upon. We now see new houses which are banned from having chimneys.

This constantly changing environment which we grew up in left us immune to a lot of the stresses and strains of change, and new and phenomenal wonders were like second nature to us. 

We look back nostalgically at the “old world” and long to cling to the happy carefree days of our youth. However, if we look clinically at the “good old days “, we realise that they weren’t all good.

Out of that era of deprivation comes a wonderful sense of appreciation. A great man to recall his youth and the magic world he lived in was Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967).

He wrote some wonderful poetry about Advent and Christmas. His poem A Christmas Childhood begins…..

One side of the potato pits was white with frost.
Does anyone have potato pits nowadays?
The tracks of cattle to a drinking place.
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch.

He said that as he pulled on his trousers in a hurry on Christmas morning he knew that some strange thing had happened. He saw Cassiopeia over Cassidy’s hanging hill and looked and three whin bushes rode across the horizon …the three Wise Kings 

He recalled that his father played the melodeon…
his mother milked the cows
and he had a prayer like a white rose
pinned on the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

In the final lines of the poem Kavanagh did something quite magnificent…he undeified (she wasn’t a goddess) the Virgin Mary…..he took her from the staid and standard image of the lady in the blue and white mysterious cloak and put her in a blouse. He took her from her lofty throne and brought her down to earth and among us. You can imagine him meeting her on a fair day in Carrick when all the bargains are done and telling the lads … She was shockin’ nice and not at all stuck up.

Kavanagh took his religion seriously and wanted to be close to his God and all God’s pals. He wrote the famous poem Advent where he longed to get back to the innocence of his childhood.

He wanted to stand at the yard gate to look across at the whins and the bog holes, cart tracks, old stables where Time begins.

He noted that…. After Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching for the difference that sets an old phrase burning – we’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning … he said.  And we’ll hear it among decent men too who barrow dung under trees, in gardens where life pours ordinary plenty.

He finishes off by saying that Christ will come with a January flower.

We know that as we live through these dull, dark and dank days leading up to Christmas, we are merely being carried along by that nature that shortened our winter days to give us time to think a little and to renew and replenish and be fit and well for the first snowdrops … the white rose on the Virgin Mary’s blouse and the arrival of Christ with a January flower.