The grass grows greener
A week spent down on the farm is coming to an end. A helping hand has been lent to the berry harvest, eggs have been gathered and a great fruitcake has been baked. What better way, then, to remember these happy days than with a verse by rural Ireland's greatest 20th century poet, Patrick Kavanagh?
Consider the grass growingConsider the grass growing
As it grew last year and the year before,
Cool about the ankles like summer rivers
Where we walked on a May evening through the meadows
To watch the mare that was going to foal.Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)
Born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, Patrick Kavanagh was the son of a small farmer. He left school at thirteen, destined to work the "stony-grey soil" rather than write about it, but "I dabbled in verse," he said, "and it became my life." In 1936 his first book of verse, Ploughman and Other Poems, was published, and in 1938 he followed this up with The Green Fool, an autobiography. He spent the years of the Second World War in Dublin, where his epic poem The Great Hunger was published in 1942. Tarry Flynn, a novel about a small farmer who dreams of a life as a writer, appeared in 1948. When the Irish Times published a list of "'the nation's favourite poems" in 2000, ten of Patrick Kavanagh's works were in the first fifty.
