Relevant Background | Summary | Themes | Style

On Raglan Road - Patrick Kavanagh [1904-1967]  

Relevant Background

• Patrick Kavanagh is a celebrity for readers and writers in Dublin and Monaghan in particular.
• He was raised on a farm in Inniskeen Co. Monaghan.
• Patrick only had primary school education. He became an apprentice shoemaker to his father and worked on the family farm.
• Patrick Kavanagh dropped shoemaking and started writing poetry in his teens while continuing his farm duties
• Patrick didn’t fit in with farm life.
• His early 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 so he left farm life forever to work as a writer in Dublin. There, Kavanagh pursued a writing career as a journalist, novelist, lecturer and poet.
• ‘On Raglan Road’ is an unusual love-song that captures some of the longings and moods of Kavanagh’s unusual bachelor life in Dublin.

Summary

• The poem is an account of a brief love-relationship in Dublin in the 1950’s.
• The poem both celebrates and laments the memory of the relationship. The poet’s account is both sweet and sad.
• In the first stanza, Patrick recalls his first meeting with a charming woman on Raglan Road late in the year. He remembers details such as the road covered in autumn leaves.
• Patrick immediately fancied her and yet sensed that she would trap him in a relationship that would later leave him in distress.
• Her beautiful hair was too much to resist. She strikes him as a figure from mythology, perhaps like the Medusa. She seems to cast a magical spell over him.
• Patrick couldn’t resist the first feelings of love and took a risk with the woman./li>
• In the second stanza, Patrick remembers walking with his new beloved along Grafton Street in Dublin. The edge of the path seemed to be a ledge over a steep valley, indicating his feeling that the relationship contained dangers.
• The street litter and leaves in the gulley were like a warning to Patrick that love’s promises don’t last.
• Kavanagh uses a snippet from a nursery rhyme to show that his lover was just playing with him and that he was not making the most of the relationship. Perhaps in the end he means that she was just a tart playing with his feelings.
• He admits that he had a strong feeling of love, perhaps too strong. He blames this strong feeling for his later loss of happiness.
• In the third stanza, Patrick admits that he wrote poems as gifts for this fascinating lady. He expressed his feelings through the symbols used by poets and sculptors. He did not hold back in what he had to say to her.
• He praised her beauty in the poems he gave her as gifts, including in them references to her lovely dark hair. This same dark hair that once snared him would soon be like a cloud over the fields of May. The cloud image suggests Patrick’s new friend was depressed and her moods would soon sour the relationship.
• In the final stanza, Kavanagh refers to a time after they broke up. She is like an old ghost now that he sees on his walks down Grafton Street. Patrick’s former lady friend now walks away to avoid him.
• He realises he probably frightened her off with his love-poetry. He treated her as an angel but she was more ordinary than that and didn’t appreciate his romantic ways.
• Patrick feels that he has lost his romantic ability since his failed relationship. He concludes that she was inferior to him and dragged him down. He wanted to be poetic with her rather than deal with her as an ordinary man would.
• As a result of having too much passion and expressing it the way he did, he has temporarily lost the ability to write poetry and suddenly ends the poem.

• The dangers of Love
  The poet learns that all attractions are not certain to end happily. The poem describes a short experience of love from Patrick Kavanagh’s point of view. The sweetness of the relationship causes him to be over-intense. As a result he frightens off the woman with poetry and now when they meet on the same street she walks away from him. As a result the ‘enchanted way’ becomes a place of litter and fallen leaves.
• A description of Dublin in Autumn
  The poet describes the scenes of leaves on Raglan Road and litter in Grafton Street. He describes a street scene involving a woman who resembles the nursery rhyme figure, the ‘Queen of Hearts’.
• A Loss of Happiness
  The poet describes an experience that saddened him. He throws away his happiness by falling in love too deeply. He cannot resist the charms of an attractive lady and ignores the danger signs. The feeling is magical at first. But when he fails to develop the relationship, she leaves him. He feels that he has thrown away his happiness. He has lost the ability to write poetry because he is upset at her rejection.
• The Difference between Poets and Ordinary people.
  Patrick Kavanagh’ s poetic approach to expressing his feelings lost him a relationship in the end. He saw more than she saw: a snare, danger and enchantment. He probably freaked her out with his ‘gifts of the mind’. The ordinary woman he fancied found his approach too intense. He felt love would put an end to all grief, but the way he spoke to her soon frightened her off. Kavanagh put her up on a pedestal but maybe she wanted to be treated in an ordinary way. Now she’s embarrassed every-time she meets him.

• Form The poem is a lyric in four short stanzas with a clear rhyming pattern.
• Structure The poem contains sixteen lines that rhyme in pairs, with two pairs of rhyming lines per stanza.
• Rhyme Examples are ‘ledge’ and ‘pledge’ in the second stanza, ‘clay’ and ‘day’ in the final stanza. Note internal rhyme such as ‘grief’ and ‘leaf’.
• Language The poet uses a mixture of everyday and poetic language. The first line of each stanza is written in everyday informative English, but the second line is poetic and mysterious.
• Diction [The poet’s words] Some of the expressions are concise, clever and need to be figured out: e.g. ‘passion’s pledge’. Some of his words refer to mythology e.g. how as a poet he loses his wings and how his lover’s hair weaves a snare.
• Full Stops and Commas Many lines run on and only make sense together. So the poet’s use of full-stops allows his thoughts and feelings to flow.
• Comparison Kavanagh uses comparisons such as when he compares his beloved to an angel and her hair to clouds.
• Imagery The poem has images of autumn, the streets of Dublin, ghosts etc.
• Metaphor Kavanagh compares his new girlfriend’s hair to a snare, showing how she captured his feelings for her. He compares the feeling of love to ‘an enchanted way’.
• Simile Kavanagh compares his new girlfriend’s dark hair to clouds that block sunshine because his memories of her six months later still cause unhappiness.
• Personification In referring to how her hair weaves a snare, Kavanagh is personifying his girl-friend’s hair
• Contrast [difference] The poem is built from a contrast between Kavanagh’s poetic approach and his girlfriend’s different, more down to earth approach.
• Mood/Atmosphere There is a mood of mystery in the early part of the poem along with an atmosphere of danger, with the reference to a woman’s hair weaving a snare. The mood changes to bitter sadness at the end when the poet has lost his relationship and been damaged by it.
• Hyperbole [Exaggeration] The poet exaggerates the the height of the pavement of Grafton Street. He uses hyperbole to suggest that his girlfriend proved to be made of clay rather than an angel. This is used to show that she was less than he thought she was originally.
• Allusion There is a reference or allusion to the bible in the use of the words ‘clay’ and ‘angel’. There are also hidden allusions to Greek Mythology e.g. the poet as a winged horse [Pegasus], the charming lady with the hair that snares [Medusa].
• Tone The early use of the word ‘rue’ shows that the poet’s voice is dominated by a tone of regret. This tone continues in the phrase ‘O I loved too much’. Words like ‘enchanted’ and ‘tripped lightly’ indicate a light and happy tone.
• Repetition is used for musical effect. Look at the repetitions indicated in the sections here on rhyme, consonance, alliteration, assonance and sibilance.
• Assonance [similar vowel sound repetition] Note how music is created in the eight line by the repeated ‘o’ sounds and then the repeated ‘u’ sounds.
• Consonance [similar consonant sound repetition] Note the way the sound ‘r’ runs through the first two and a half lines of the poem. This musical repetition may emphasise ‘rue’ or even suggest the poet’s hidden anger at the start of his story.
• Alliteration [repetition of consonant sounds at the start of nearby words] There are many examples used in the poem to deepen feeling or to emphasise a point: e.g. the ‘p’ in ‘passions pledge’, the ‘d’ at the end of the fourth line.
• Sibilance [repetition of ‘s’ sound] Note how the ‘s’ sounds in ‘secret sign’ add to the atmosphere of mystery.