OPINION (AN COLÚN): The two sides of a great Irish poet

LAST WEEK I wrote about the two-headed Roman God Janus, whose name gave us the word January. Janus for the Romans was a symbol for any crossroads or transition moment in life. It also represented one part of us looking back on the past and another part of us looking to the future.
To the modern mind the two-headed image sometimes conjures another meaning, a meaning which was not part of the Romans' belief system: namely, people who become two-faced, suddenly turning on you.
I've often come across two-faced people and it upsets me every time. I've thought long and hard about what could be causing this behaviour. One answer is to do with the presence of power or money. Some people are deferential and on their best behaviour when someone is present who has power or money; when the influential person is removed from the equation some feel there is no need to be polite or civil anymore.
There are some who display two completely different facets of character. They can be benign and decent in one of their manifestations; while rude, difficult and nasty in another of these. A poet whom I admire greatly, Patrick Kavanagh, could be either of these. When he was in his foul and grumpy mood Kavanagh could be intolerable. There's a famous story of an altercation in a Dublin pub between Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien. O'Brien couldn't take Kavanagh's curmudgeonly and sharp temper anymore and threw a pint of guinness at him. The poet caught it in mid-air and drank it.
A lot of his ill-conceived behaviour was fuelled by drink. He admitted he was overly fond of whiskey and it could bring out an unfortunate temper. One day, in October1938, he was having a row with the staff in Hodges Figgis bookshop because his book wasn't in the shop window. The poet claimed they were deliberately hiding his book. On another day, in the same month and year, he was having a similar argument with the staff of Hanna's bookshop. “He appeared to have some drink taken,” said one staff member afterwards. “He commenced throwing books off the shelves onto the floor.” The poet said the books were trash. A shop assistant grabbed him by the arm and asked him to stop. “Are you looking for a fight?” retorted Kavanagh. “My name is Kavanagh and I an an Irish poet. They are not giving my book a fair do. They are not displaying it in the window. “ He asked where the owner was and added, “By God, I'll break his skull. I'll wreck the joint.”
By contrast, Kavanagh's benign, attractive behaviour was outlined in a book I read recently, called “The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh” (written by Una Agnew). One of the beautiful things about Kavanagh's poetry is his ability to see illumination in the midst of darkness, or what he refers to as “chinks of light”. I think we all know what he is referring to: we are often besieged by life's difficulties, by overbearing, caustic people, and by negative, grim moods, but then something happens which lifts our mood, something which is like a blast of trumpets on a faraway hill. One of Kavanagh's symbols of these moments of illumination is light gleaming through the awnings of a stone bridge over a slow-flowing river. The light whispers to us of another world, of something beyond which fills us with hope. The world and people tell us we are failures, that we are lacking in some way; the world and people can seem badly in need of affection and love; the light shining through the bridge shows us there is something else, beyond harsh gossip and harsh judgementalism. The saint Catherine of Siena imaged God as “light filtering through a narrow street.” Kavanagh also imaged it as “when the sun comes through a gap” while a farmer is ploughing. He referred to these moments as a “flash of Divine Intelligence” and he considered this Divine Intelligence to be the inspiration of all great poetry. In his poem “From Failure Up” he wrote beautifully,
“Can a man grow from the dead clod of failure
Some consoling flower
Something humble as a dandelion or a daisy,
Something to wear as a buttonhole in heaven?”
Moments of epiphany are scattered through much of his poetry, moments such as “when the new moon hung by its little finger” from the telegraph pole; moments when he feels in his soul that he knew “how God had happened.” He saw the Holy Ghost as being similar to the poetic fire which burned within him and nourished him. The Holy Spirit could take “the bedlam of the little hills” and create something other than bedlam, something soothing. He spoke of the dance of the Holy Spirit in April, in the woods and the hedgerows of south Monaghan. “This was my God,” he stated, “who made the stones and streams in April.”