It’s unusual, if not rare, for a work by an acclaimed poet to appear in the pages of a national newspaper, only for it to vanish without trace, then resurface, 18 years later, and go on to become one of Ireland’s greatest poems.
The poet was Patrick Kavanagh, and on the anniversary of his passing on November 30th, we should also remember another great Irish writer who died on the same date, Oscar Wilde. While both of them had their own bitter experience of love, loss, and regret, each couldn’t have been more different in their output let alone personal lives.
Where Wilde thrilled London with wit and extravagance, Kavanagh’s genius was in the rural and the ordinary. And none of his poems captured that better than one whose origins are as remarkable as its endurance. In recent times it has been criticised as the work of an older man obsessively pursuing a woman half his age. But the truth of that relationship is a little more complicated.
It was October 1946 when Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away appeared in the Irish Press. Unregarded and unheralded, the poem disappeared as quickly as it arrived. And despite Kavanagh publishing two more collections, A Soul for Sale the following year, and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling in 1960, it lay forgotten or ignored until 1964, when it reappeared in a new collection.
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Dark Haired Miriam was Kavanagh’s companion piece to a poem he had published the previous year. At the time, the early 1940s, Kavanagh was not just an acclaimed poet and novelist, but something of a celebrity too. As Piers Ploughman, the social diarist for the Irish Press, he had been a regular at every opening night, opera and ballet across the capital. Photos of him from that time, a decade before the libel case that would destroy him physically, show a dashing and romantic man about town.
So it’s no surprise that he had the audacity to ask a 22-year-old UCD medical student from Kerry, Hilda Moriarty, out on a date. Literary folklore would have us believe that Moriarty gracefully declined the invitation there and then. But what actually followed is far more intriguing.
It was an idea as bold as it was naive. Kavanagh’s column had come to an end the previous year, and he was in dire need of a new income. So in his wisdom he decided to visit an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, known for his patronage of numerous writers, and ask him to be his patron. It was a May morning when Kavanagh and Moriarty set off by train to visit Lord Dunsany in Co Meath. Although we can’t be sure exactly how the visit went, we know that Dunsany declined Kavanagh’s request and a despondent poet returned to Dublin. But something significant of that afternoon stayed with him. The walk from the train station along a sea of wild bluebells, and the love he was beginning to feel for Moriarty, had inspired something deep within. A few weeks later a new poem, Bluebells for Love, appeared in the June issue of The Bell.
But for Moriarty, the poem told her what she already had begun to fear, that his feelings for her had grown. She made it clear that he was far too old, and their relationship, if it were to last, could only be platonic. Kavanagh was devastated and went off to make sense of it all the only way he could, in verse, so sat down and began work on what would be an antidote to Bluebells for Love; Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away. But why, after publication in late 1946, did it lie silent for two decades? Why not include it in his collection A Soul for Sale, which was published the following year? After all, Bluebells for Love was included. Was it too confessional, too raw? Or maybe it had just been buried away, waiting for the right moment for him to dig it up again?
[ The enduring fame of Patrick Kavanagh’s doomed affair with Hilda MoriartyOpens in new window ]
That moment came when Kavanagh was preparing poems to include in what would be his last book, Collected Poems. By then, perhaps tempered by time, and with more years behind him than ahead, he decided to revisit the poem. It was the simplest of rewrites. Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away became On Raglan Road, and a line in the second verse was replaced. What had originally been “Synthetic sighs and fish dim eyes and all death’s loud display”, now became “The Queen of hearts still making tarts and I not making hay ...”
Just a few months before he died, fate was to bring the poem to a whole new audience when Kavanagh and Luke Kelly encountered one another for the one and only time at The Bailey on Duke Street. Over drinks and songs, Kavanagh gifted Kelly the poem along with an air he had used himself to sing it. Four years later, On Raglan Road was immortalised when The Dubliners released it as the B-side to Scorn Not His Simplicity. Soon it was played in the kitchen, parlour and livingroom of every home with a record player and sung – to death, many would say – at many social gatherings since.
And the truth of that relationship? Perhaps the last word on that is best left to Moriarty, the reluctant muse whose rejection of a great poet was not the final word, but an inspiration. And who, in a final, elegant act, had a wreath of red roses sent to her old friend’s funeral. Formed in the letter H, it was a simple gesture, but one she knew he would understand best; that love, even unrequited, can still be full of grace and mark a friendship that would outlast rumour and outlive them both.
