Relevant Background | Summary | Themes | Style

Going Home to Mayo, Winter 1949 - Paul Durcan [1944]  

Relevant Background

• Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944.
• His father followed a legal career and worked as a judge in the circuit court during Durcan’s childhood.
• Paul Durcan began his education in Dublin, going on to study at University College Dublin but he completed his B.A. in University College Cork.
• He won an Irish poetry award in 1974, the Patrick Kavanagh Award. He won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1990 for 'Daddy, Daddy'. This is a major international reward.
• In a lot of his poetry he mocks aspects of Ireland that he doesn’t like. In this poem, he glorifies the countryside and shows hatred for Dublin.
• The car journey described here would have been unusual in 1949. Few Irish people had cars then.
• Paul Durcan’s relationship with his father was often distant, a factor that troubled Durcan. This fact comes to the fore in this poem.

Summary

• This is a poem of two sections. One twenty-line section describes the poet’s experience in the countryside; the other nine-line section describes a journey mainly along the grand canal in city of Dublin.
• In the first long section of the poem, Durcan recalls a childhood journey and visit to his father’s home place in Mayo.
• He begins with a dig at Dublin, giving us the impression he didn’t enjoy his childhood there.
• The words ‘alien, foreign’ suggest he hated Dublin in contrast to Mayo. He describes his destination there as the ‘heartland’.
• Durcan remembers clear details like the make of his father’s car and the smell, texture and colour of the car-seats.
• The fact that it was a moonlight night struck the five year-old Durcan. He found it magical. He imagined the moon ‘peering’ in at him. The journey was like a voyage into eternity or heaven.
• In typical childish excitement, he pleaded with his father to overtake the moon. Of course his father couldn’t do that.
• The towns they passed were like stages on the way to a place of happiness. He names many of the towns.
• He names and describes their final destination, Turlough, the ‘heartland’.
• It is obvious he has an emotional connection with Turlough. It was paradise for a boy from Dublin.
• They stayed in his grandmother’s house, which was a pub.
• He remembers certain details clearly about the house, like the oil-lamps and all the women who lived or worked there. Oil-lamps showed that electricity hadn’t arrived in Turlough.
• In his bedroom over the bar he was awoken by country sounds that he remembers with a sense of joy.
• In the early morning, the cries of cattle and roosters broke the perfect peace of the country-side wonderfully for him.
• He loved the evenings when he walked the meadow down by the river talking to his father.
• Here we get a clue as to why he disliked Dublin.
• On holidays in Turlough they spoke together as father and son. These conversations apparently only happened on holiday in Turlough but were unheard of in Dublin.
• In the shorter second section of the poem, Paul Durcan describes his return to Dublin.
• In the sixth stanza, Molly Carney rejects John Montague again. She puts a stop to his visits and the chats they had about her youth. She suddenly tells him she is afraid of getting attached to him.
• The sense of home in Mayo was wonderful, yet it wasn’t home for most of the year.
• Just as Durcan’s childish wish to overtake the moon was impossible, a permanent escape from Dublin to Mayo was also impossible.
• His father made the journey back to Dublin in the day-time. But it was a nightmare for Durcan to return there.
• Just as the list of towns heading west had been like magic passwords, the locks of the canal as they drove back into the south city were like bells ringing out their doom.
• He lists the ugly physical reality of the city; railings, fencing, black roads and endless blocks of new flats to house the poor of the inner city.
• In Durcan’s mind the blocks of flats were unhappy symbols. They were like crosses that made him feel lonely.
• They marked the end of their happy time together in Mayo.
• Looking back on this time, he links the unhappy symbols of the blocks of flats with his father’s eventual death and the ending of his own childish contentment.

• The poet’s relationship with his father
  Paul Durcan looks back with love to his journey to Mayo with his father in 1949. It stands out in his memory for the close chats he had with his dad which were ‘unheard of’ at home in Dublin. Dublin is ‘alien’ probably because of his failed relationship with his father. On the journey to Mayo, young Durcan asked his father to pass out the moon. Paul wasn’t disappointed that his father couldn’t do so on the happy journey to Mayo. But he mentions this as a failure on his unhappy return to Dublin. He treasured walking and talking with his dad down by the river in Turlough. He loved the atmosphere of his father’s home place. However he regards his father’s life after this as a narrowing grave. This shows sadness and anger in his relationship with his father. The fact that he speaks of Dublin as a place of loneliness further shows his need for an active relationship with his father. But the phrase ‘mutual doom’ really shows the failure of their relationship.
• Home
  The poem looks at the difference between home in physical sense and home in an emotional sense. The poem shows a contrast between life in Dublin and life in rural Ireland The poet’s physical home is Dublin. Dublin is described in two simple words that mean the same: ‘alien, foreign’. The poet’s emotional home is Mayo. Turlough is described in one warm word: ‘heartland’. The loneliness of highly populated Dublin contrasts with the friendly scene of the public bar, the women and the cries of animals in Mayo. Dublin is an unpleasant place, somewhat like a prison with its locks, railings and palings. Durcan hates the asphalt of Dublin, but loves the meadow in Mayo. The canal in Dublin depresses him, though the river in Mayo uplifts him. The lock gates on the canal reinforce the feeling of being trapped in Dublin. The poet plays on the word ‘lock’ to show this. But the rural towns by contrast are described as ‘magic passwords’. Mayo means freedom. It is his idea of paradise. Mayo is home for the poet in a spiritual sense, Dublin in a physical sense only.
• Childhood
  Durcan had an active imagination as a child. His demand that his father pass out the moon shows this. Durcan’s idea that the moon was ‘peering’ in on him also shows childhood imagination. The idea that town names are magic passwords also shows his imagination. It is typical of a child to love a visit to his grandmother’s place in the country. Durcan certainly loved the place, calling it ‘eternity’. What he means is that Mayo is paradise. But his childhood in Dublin is compared to a graveyard with thousands of crosses. This is a bleak image. This image connects to his sense that his childhood was a cemetery. The reference to passing out the moon becomes a way of mentioning his disappointed hopes in childhood in the second half.
• Memory
  Paul Durcan remembers vividly a journey with his father as a five-year old. He has the fondest memories of his visit to Mayo and bleak memories of his home in Dublin. He sums up his memories of growing up in Dublin with funeral images. The entire summary above contains material to expand on the theme of memory. Note how the poet remembers colour, texture and sounds. Note the precise details he recalls when the memory is happy. He remembers Mayo as paradise. He speaks in metaphors to portray his unhappy experiences in Dublin. He speaks of crosses of loneliness to convey his disappointing childhood. He remembers pain. He remembers disappointed hopes. His dreams were as impossible as outflanking the moon. He remembers Dublin as a graveyard.

• Form The poem contains two verse-paragraphs of different length.
• Structure The twenty-line first section deals with a journey and a brief period of happiness in Mayo. The nine-line second section describes his depressing return to Dublin and contains metaphors that reveal the unhappiness of his childhood.
• Rhyme The poem doesn’t have an overall rhyme pattern. Some line endings rhyme e.g. ‘city’ and ‘city’. Others contain half-rhyme e.g. ‘moon’ and ‘milestone’.
• Language The poem is written as a story from childhood in language that is easy to understand. The main difficulty is with the allusion, described below. The poem contains a lot of metaphors. Some words take on a second meaning, like ‘lock gates’. They are part of the canal system, but the word conveys that the poet was locked away from his happiness and from his father. Some of the language is very specific, providing details of the journey at the centre of the poem. The poem contains a list of place names.
• Diction Many of the words are in simple every day English e.g. the second last line of the first section.
• Full Stops and Commas occur where needed and are not influenced by the form or structure of the poem. Many of the sentences are long sentences e.g. lines one to seven is one sentence.
• Comparison The poem contains many comparisons. See metaphors below.
• Imagery The poem contains images of rural life in Turlough, and city life in Dublin. There are also images from a journey throughout the poem. Houses along the Grand Canal in Dublin are compared to crosses. They are a symbol of loneliness, of Durcan’s failed relationship with his father and of the end of the his childhood happiness.
• Metaphor The idea that town names are magic passwords is a metaphor. The comparison of his father’s life to a narrowing grave is a metaphor. So to is the comparison of his childhood to a cemetery.
• Personification Durcan’s idea that the moon was ‘peering’ personifies the moon.
• Contrast [difference] The words ‘alien, foreign’ for Dublin contrast to the word ‘heartland’ for his father’s home place in Mayo.
• Mood The mood is excited and expectant in the first section. But it is very sad and bleak in the final section. The reference to his relationship with his father as a ‘mutual doom’ is dark and painful. The comparison of his childhood to a cemetery creates a horrible atmosphere.
• Hyperbole [Exaggeration] Durcan exaggerates the number of tenement blocks, ‘thousands’, in order to emphasise his empty and bitter feeling.
• Paradox [apparent contradiction] ‘Home was not home’. This means the poet’s physical home was not his spiritual home.
• Pun The poet uses the word ‘home’ in two senses, a spiritual sense and a physical sense. He plays on the meaning of canal lock to suggest Dublin was his prison.
• Allusion The reference to the morning sounds in Turlough as a rent in a seamless garment is a reference to the bible.
• Tone The same remarks that apply to Mood above apply to tone. Though the tone is harsh and pained at the start it becomes forgiving at the end. In the centre of the poem the poets tone becomes loving as he describes his mother in her glory days before her marriage.
• Allusion The reference to the morning sounds in Turlough as a rent in a seamless garment is a reference to the bible.
• Repetition The poet repeats many words to create sound effects and to emphasise points e.g. ‘home’, ‘blocks’. Find some more yourself.
• Assonance [similar vowel sound repetition] One example is the repeated ‘o’ sound in line 25. This sound effect strengthens the dark mood suggested by doom. Can you find some more?
• Alliteration [repetition of consonant sounds at the start of nearby words] Durcan catches the musical aspect of his countryside wake up with four echoing ‘c’ sounds in ‘cattle cries and cock-crows’. There are other examples of alliteration that provide music in the language of the poem. Can you find any?
• Sibilance [repetition of ‘s’ sound] Note how the ‘s’ sounds in ‘seemingly seamless’ as well as the rhyme of ‘seem’ and ‘seam’ add to the music and sense of perfection experienced by the poet while in Mayo.