A Poet's Country Quotes

“On Monday, the cobblers’ holiday, they would go to the nearest pub and drink their week’s wages. I remember a little fellow called Jem Fagan, who used to come home across the hills, shouting with terrific voice the incoherencies of Bacchus. Jem’s Monday-night shouting was familiar to the whole parish. The children used to come out to listen, and children could listen; for, although noisy, none of today’s shocking vulgarisms were part of his drunken eloquence. He had a pair of large brown eyes that blazed in the dark like two little lamps. My father said the devil was standing in him, but it was a good-humoured devil enough.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, A Poet's Country: Selected Prose

“No poet ever travelled in search of beauty. No poet ever looked at a scene and cried ‘Wonderful’. Memorable beauty comes at us obliquely while we are going about our troubled business. W.H. Davies wrote: What is this life if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare? But Davies was wrong: What is this life if NOT full of care We do not let the cart-tracks stare Into our hearts with love’s despair? This pursuit of beauty is one of the defects of the tourist’s point of view. The tourist is in a hurry; he demands quick returns of the picturesque and the obvious. But for all that, it is possible even when we pursue beauty or happiness to come upon oblique references to it. The job is to recognize them in the hurry. Not everybody can have the fields and lanes stare at him as they stare at a man driving a cow to a fair.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, A Poet's Country: Selected Prose