Relevant Background | Summary | Themes | Style

Shancoduff - Patrick Kavanagh [1904-1967]

Relevant Background

• Patrick Kavanagh was born on a farm in Co. Monaghan. His family farm was located in hilly countryside, which was made up of drumlins [low rounded hills].
• They had an out-farm in the valley of Shancoduff. Shancoduff was a valley on the north side of a drumlin and was a wintry place in spring. It faced away from the sun.
• As ‘Shancoduff’ shows, the Kavanaghs carried on mixed farming. The farm activities included growing potatoes and rearing calves. Some of the fields were of poor quality.
• This part of the family farm, in Shancoduff, was near a cattle trail on which herdsmen or drovers drove cattle by foot from one part of the country to another. There were no cattle trucks in the 1920s or 1930s.
• Kavanagh only had primary school education. He became an apprentice shoemaker to his father and worked on the family farm.
• Kavanagh dropped shoemaking and started writing poetry in his teens while continuing his farm duties.
• Kavanagh didn’t fit in with farm life. His poetry shows he was uneasy with life on a Monaghan farm as a young man. He felt the farming community didn’t appreciate poetry and were too caught up with farm work.
• Later Kavanagh pursued a writing career as a journalist, novelist, lecturer and poet.

Summary

The first stanza contains a simple admission that the dawn sun never shines directly on the dark fields of Shancoduff. These fields face Armagh City to the North, forever. The north-facing hills never turn their heads to the sun. They are unlike the very nosy woman from the bible, married to a holy man called Lot. Her curiosity caused her to look behind her. As a result, God turned her into a pillar of salt. These hills are satisfied with the reflected beams of the sun when it shines on the white walls of Glassdrummond chapel to the North.

In the second stanza, Kavanagh humorously imagines the struggle between the sun and the stubborn fields on the north-facing hillside. He imagines that the fields hide their ‘shillings’. ‘Bright shillings’ may mean the recently planted seed potatoes, round like a shilling coin, or the scattered remains of a frost that the sun’s rays cannot melt. Kavanagh shows the importance of the fields to him personally, when he compares them to the Alps. The highest hill point in his area is like the famous alpine peak, the Matterhorn, in his view. He has arrived in the valley of Shancoduff to feed hay to three cold and hungry calves. The field is located below the Celtic hill fort of Rocksavage.

In the third stanza, Kavanagh illustrates the wintry weather, sleet, and the poor quality fields, ‘rushy’. Kavanagh accepts these harsh conditions. He imagines the sleet fondles or strokes the bearded faces of the rushy fields. He likes his harsh home place. Kavanagh hears cattle drovers making little of the poor quality of his fields as they pass by them on their long walk across the countryside. This remark hurts him. The herdsmen mock the fact that birds like snipe and water hen avoid the place. When one of the drovers informs the others that a poet owns the fields, another declares that the owner must be poor. Kavanagh shows his loyalty to the fields and to his writing by finishing with the remark that the over-head conversation hurts him deeply. His last remark may also be sarcastic.

Themes

• Home place
  He loves his home place despite its drawbacks: ‘The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff’. The word ‘fondle’ shows his affection.
• Where you live is the best place in the world
  Your locality is of supreme importance in your life. The here and now is all: ‘They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn’. He names Rocksavage, Glassdrummond and Shancoduff with pride and affection.
• The role of the poet
  Others look down on poets: ‘A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor’. This hurts Kavanagh, shakes his heart. He is proud of being a poet.
• Nature
  The poem portrays the struggle of the sun to reach the north facing fields: ‘the sun searches in every pocket’. The sleet pets the fields. It’s harsh, but it'
• Time
  Time has no influence on the local hills: ‘My hills hoard the bright shillings of March’. They have never seen the sun rising, they look north ‘eternally’. The sun cannot reach them and they never turn around to look at the sun.

Style

Comparison: Kavanagh compares the hills to the Alps and the hilltop to a peak in the Alps called the Matterhorn.
Contrast: Kavanagh contrasts the hills to a nosey bible woman, Lot’s wife, who was punished for being curious. The hills are not curious.
Metaphor: Kavanagh compares the hills to a secretive miser, they ‘hoard’. Seed potatoes or frost patches are compared to coins, ‘bright shillings’.
Personification: The hills can see or ‘look’. They are ‘incurious’. The winds ‘fondle’ or pet the fields. The rushes in a field are compared to a beard, thus suggesting the field is a face.
Rhetorical question: See the final line of the poem.
Tone: It can sound gloomy with words like ‘black’, ‘eternally’, ‘perishing’, ‘forsaken’. The poet seems to feel hurt when he uses the word ‘shaken’. But the tone also sounds warm and affectionate with words like ‘fondle’, ‘happy’ and ‘bright’.
Alliteration [consonant repetition at beginning of words]: The repeated ‘h’ in ‘hungry hills’ emphasises their poverty, and links ahead to the poet’s private reply where he uses the words ‘heaven’ and ‘heart’.
Repetition: The main physical feature of the area is repeated four times:
‘black hills’ [twice], ‘hungry hills’, ‘Alps’.