The Wednesday Poem: The Hospital

July 03, 2016

The Hospital

A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: squares, cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, washbasins – an art lover’s woe,
Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.

This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

-Patrick Kavanagh.

Imagine writing a formal Petrarchan sonnet about a hospital ward where the eyes look out on cubicles and concrete, and the ears are ambushed at night by snoring. Yet this is what Kavanagh does. The original title, April 1956, tells us when it was first published. But the poem is a memory of March 1955 when he was operated on for lung cancer in the Rialto Hospital – ‘the most spirit-shocking event since leaving Inniskeen.’ But through the illness and the convalescence that followed, the muse did not desert him. This poem belongs to a new level of writing, which, with tongue in cheek, he calls ’noo pomes.’ No longer the truculent Kavanagh, admirable in the versatility of his language and interesting in a gossipy way, now he is writing beyond the stickiness of self-necessity.

I believe the insight grounding this new writing is formally announced in the long confessional poem Auditors In. After recording many diversions in that poem, the poet with relief comes upon his own commonweal, the place where the Self reposes/ The placeless heaven that’s under our noses. The gateway to the poet’s commonweal is love. Indeed the word love occurs five times in the poem. Love is love-act; it is a naming, an active direct encounter with what the senses bring to him. No attempt to please audiences or journalists here, no claptrap. Indeed, it is only the direct naming of love’s mysteries with total presence has power. It has the heat of the sex act.

The poet feels privileged. It’s as if he is residing in a place of light from where he views the world. The suntrap seat at the back of the shed, which possibly he was allowed to use as a patient, becomes a metaphor for this new light. But also there is an urgency to this love-act of naming. We note the word snatch in the last line, the sense of time passing and the transitory. After a serious illness, we get the feeling of Kavanagh’s relief and gratitude that he has been given more time to cherish the world.

Patrick Kavanagh reads The Hospital. Taken from the album Almost Everything: Written and Spoken by Patrick Kavanagh