Patrick Kavanagh’s Teaching on the Passionate Transitory

My favorite poem is Patrick Kavanagh’s The Hospital where he describes falling in love with his surroundings. He was admitted to St James’ Hospital in Dublin on a Chest Ward to have a lung removed due to cancer. You might expect this to be just a stressful and frightening event, but some of his greatest poems were written around this time, and the main focus is a love for life or the passionate transitory as he calls it.

How could anyone fall in love with a ward in a chest hospital? It sounds a bit mad, doesn’t it? Especially given the seriousness of his situation. But, I completely get it. The love we have for something is always about recognizing how precious it is. I suspect for Patrick, it was waking up to the preciousness of life as a result of his brush with death. Love and wonder are not something we do, it is more like something we recognize. Or as Patrick puts it in his poem, when we record love’s mystery without claptrap.

When I read the Hospital, it always brings me back to being a 7 year old and my own falling in love with the children’s ward in Dun Laoghaire Hospital. I had been knocked down by a car, and I ended up spending a couple of weeks in there. I loved it. Maybe for a different reason than Patrick though. At the time, I was still an only child, and I just loved having friends around me. I loved people coming it to see me, making a fuss of me, and bringing me sweets, comics, and Lucozade. The TV needed to be fed coins for it to work, but there was something so luxurious about being able to watch it all day in bed with my new friends.  I felt cared for. It felt like an adventure. The only thing that I remember scaring me was the long brown rubber hose they used for given enemas.

There is something crucial that links my experience with Patrick Kavanagh’s that isn’t limited to staying in hospital. It might be easy to dismiss my experience of love and wonder as due to the naivety of childhood, and Patrick’s as a result of his fear of losing the things he had taken for granted. I think the real point is that this enchanted relationship with life is available to anyone. All it takes is to follow the instructions in the poem to record love’s mystery without claptrap.

What is claptrap? Apparently, it refers to the way theatres in the nineteenth century would use cheap gimmicks to get people to clap. Kind of like bullshit. So, the reason why it can be so hard to recognize this enchanted world, to experience love and wonder, is our lives are too caught up in bullshit. I am not dismissing the difficulties we encounter in life, but ask yourself this, if you had only moments left to live, how serious would those problems appear to you? Patrick’s cancer diagnosis put things into perspective for him, and the claptrap fell away so he could recognize the stunning beauty within the ordinary.

People argue that it is not possible for an adult to experience the wonder of a child. Patrick Kavanagh demonstrates the gaping flaw in this view. Yes we can because the world we experienced as children still exists. It is only our way of relating to life that has changed. If we can set aside our own claptrap, the enchanted world is there ready and waiting for us. Why wait for something terrible to happen when we could wake up right now to the passionate transitory.

Here is a video where I go to all of this in more detail

Patrick Kavanagh’s Teaching on the Passionate TransitoryMy Teenage Heartbreak and the Illusion of ShouldThe Conflict Within PerceptionThe Illusion of PowerlessnessDon’t Let Shame Prevent You from Being Authentic

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