As Svetlana Boym remarks in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), “nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time […]. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (xv). Nostalgia can be instinctive, responding to direct sensory triggers like smell, music, and place; or it can be intentionally utilised as a coping mechanism during stressful times. Nowadays, the ever-growing feeling of anxiety caused by the rapid evolution of technology and the wars at play in Europe and the Middle East has intensified the nostalgic experience. Angst, insecurity, and displacement are common feelings to which nostalgia appears as a natural emotional reaction. If we take the etymology of the term, from the Greek nostos (“return”) and algos^[1] (“pain”), nostalgia is related to suffering. Often associated with yearning, and the bitter-sweet feeling of a desire to return home, it is defined by Niklas Salmose as the “place or time that is the object of our longings” (2012: 118). Patrick Kavanagh invokes nostalgia at various stages of his life, in diverse ways and for different purposes. In a series of Christmas poems written from 1939 to 1943, the poet explores the theme of “lost home”, which he associates not only with his birthplace in Monaghan – a place that evokes both love and hatred – but also with the time of childhood and a metaphysical place where one experiences a deep sense of belonging and where one’s identity is intrinsically tied to this feeling. The nostalgic tone of Kavanagh’s Christmas poems denotes a reaction to times of trouble on a personal and a collective level (internal and external nostalgia), revealing both an intimate and a communal emotion. This reaction is mainly imposed by the context: first, the Second World War, which the poet directly associates with Santa Claus in a short eponymous poem published in 1943:

To end in verse without much cause;

Shop windows show old Santa Claus

Down from Arctic’s midnight sun.

Ghosts glimmer on planes and tanks and guns. (Kavanagh 1990: 143)

The second factor that triggers a nostalgic experience is the difficulty for the poet to adapt to the urban context.

By recurring to the theme of Christmas, Kavanagh blurs the boundaries between individual and social imagination, as it represents both a ritual and liminal time, a moment of transition that marks a closure, the end of the year, and a preparation for renewal. Originally a Pagan celebration of the winter solstice (Yule), or midwinter time, and the shortest night of the year, Christmas then became a religious celebration with the nativity epitomising a rite of passage. It is a ritual that fits Victor Turner’s definition of the liminal moment, as it is “expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions” (1969: 95).^[2] Rites and religious celebrations belong to sacred time, suggesting reversibility and openness to new possibilities. As Kate Forrester puts it, Christmas is a time that “may often be experienced as a liminal hinge between past and future” (2016: 96). A study of Kavanagh’s Christmas poems sheds light on how nostalgia serves as a means to cope with present distress, in response to a collective feeling of disorientation and personal pain. To sustain this analysis, I refer to Clair Wills’s book That Neutral Island (2007), a descriptive study of life in Ireland during World War II, to understand the historical context, and to Anthony Cronin and John Nemo’s biographical writings about Kavanagh’s life in Dublin. With the aid of works on nostalgia by Niklas Salmose, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, my aim is to show how Kavanagh recurs to memory and poetry as a positive force to transfigure reality and reinvent the past, and how nostalgia appears as an essential part of his poetics of care and detachment to ultimately contribute to the transmission of hope. In order to demonstrate this, I focus first on both the historical and Kavanagh’s personal contexts, then on the collective and individual pathos (algos) to stress the impact of loss and absence, and finally I cover the transformative power of the return (nostos).

The Context

Consciousness of loss and displacement are common triggers for nostalgia. Kavanagh’s first Christmas poem dates back to 1939, a year marked by two major events in his life: his move to Dublin to settle as a writer, and the declaration of World War II. When Kavanagh arrived in the city, war had just started. Clair Wills explains that, to make a living, the poet wrote several articles and essays for various journals, and “was forced by economic necessity to jump on the nostalgia bandwagon” (2007: 295). She further stresses that representations of rural Ireland brought some relief to those affected by war:

They represented the known, the familiar, that which we like in our lives, and they made Kavanagh money, though not vast amounts of it. Newspaper editors could bank on readers’ interest in a benign and evocative portrait of rural life. The public’s appetite for rural reminiscence was high […]. In books, magazines and newspapers the vogue for misty retrospection was fed by reader’s appetite for reminders of what was being lost in Ireland’s struggle to become modern. (2007: 278)

In Ireland, the shadow of World War II, although lived from a distance, was a source of pain and confusion. The country was neutral during the conflict, but that “neutrality was not peace” (Wills 2007: 4). Ireland was actually “both in and not at war” (4), she stresses. The sense of fear and anxiety was high among the people, who lived a “ghostly existence” (Wills 2007: 10) and were subjected to material deprivation and rationing. In times of uncertainties, with mass emigration to Britain, “one version of Ireland’s wartime story is that it is all about absence – the absence of conflict, of supplies, of social dynamism, of contact with ‘the outside world.’ […] In a total war ‘there is no elsewhere, no other place’” (Wills 2007: 11). In this context, nostalgia is amplified as people need to find an alibi to soothe present anxiety. Salmose describes the nostalgic reaction as an emotional experience composed of three phases: motivation, nostalgia, and reflection. “In motivation, we belong to the present now and are subjectively and subsequently transported into the object of our longings. This transportation is triggered by […] a memorative sign in combination with a dependence on the present moment as well as psychological and sociological facts in the nostalgic subject, the nostalgee” (2012: 95). Memorative signs like Christmas time and childhood evoke stability and a return to innocence, happiness, and peaceful times.

The poet personally experiences absence at several levels: he lives far from his family and homeplace, and lacks money and recognition as a writer. As John Nemo remarks, “[Kavanagh’s] disgust [for many Dublin writers] was deepened by the fact that he was treated as the literate peasant he had been rather than as the highly talented poet he believed he was in the process of becoming” (1979: 79). The context certainly influenced the nostalgic tone of his writings in the years that followed 1939. The recurrence of the theme of Christmas in no less than ten poems responds first to a social demand, but also to a personal need: a necessity to cope with the unhappiness provoked by the opinion of the literary Irish circle, seeing and categorising Kavanagh as a country poet, reducing him to his rural origin and roots. As he wrote in his major work “The Great Hunger” (1942), “A man is what is written on the label. / And the passing world stares but no one stops / To look closer” (Kavanagh 1990: 91-92). Anthony Cronin names this personal distress as Kavanagh’s “second escape”:

The theme of escape in fact predominated over that of regret. More important than either is the theme of the second escape: that which was accomplished after the escape from the country and was from the criles, snares and traps set for him by the bourgeois “art-lovers” of the city. (1982: 193)

Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut highlight the role of “nostalgia [to facilitate] one’s acculturation to a host culture” as it “elevates social connectedness (a sense of belongingness or acceptance), meaning in life (a sense that one’s life is significant, purposeful, and coherent), and self-continuity (a sense of connection between one’s past and present self)” (2022), and can thus respond to a need for social integration. In a context of trouble and personal displacement, Kavanagh started to use a more caustic tone in his writings, which was not present in his earlier poetry. His acquaintances also remark on his pungent temperament, as Cronin describes in his book Dead As Doornails, recalling an episode when he and Brendan Behan visited Kavanagh at his apartment at Pembroke Road after Christmas in the post-war years.

[…] we found a solitary Patrick Kavanagh. Such was his degree of self-pity that he even failed to get upset at the sight of Brendan. ‘I woke up this morning’, he said. ‘And what morning was it? It was Christmas morning, the morning of joy, the birthday of the Prince of Peace. “No war, nor battle’s sound, was heard the world around, / The idle spear and shield were high up hung”. And what had I in the house? I had a stale herring from yesterday, a stale uneatable herring. But there was the telephone, fully connected, and ready, you would surely to God and in the name of the Prince of Peace think, to ring. But was there one person in the whole wide city of Dublin who would ring me up to ask me how I was making out and maybe ask me to spend the holy Christmastide with them? There was not. I waited there on my lonesome in the cold for hours and eventually I had to get on the blower myself to a blackguard I know. On this day of all days it’s essential to drown your sorrows. I know what I’m in for. It’s the worst day in the year and it brings out the bollocks in everybody. But I’ll risk it for the sake of a drink’. (Cronin 1999: 78)

Sarcasm and bitterness, though, do not taint the mood of the Christmas poems analysed in this article. Whilst some of them convey a feeling of disorientation proper to the times, overall, they focus on the idea of renewal and regaining faith. As the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch stresses, nostalgia is different from spleen, anxiety, or boredom as it is not an algos without any motive or that is undetermined. It is a pain that can be named, a sickness the cause of which is known (for example, homesickness), and for which a remedy exists: nostos, the return.

In the Christmas poems, Kavanagh makes no direct reference to his feeling of social displacement, unlike some other later poems where he described daily scenes of conversations between poets at the pub, or his opinion about personal disputes with literary figures. But the feeling caused by unhappiness is clearly there. His choice to recur to the theme of Christmas several times in a relatively short period of time suggests that it served as an escape from his own disillusioned present and, as his brother Peter mentions, there is in all of Kavanagh’s verses, even the earliest, an autobiographical note and “his personality too is stamped on every piece” (Kavanagh 1990: xviii).

Algos: Collective and Personal Pathos of War; the Power of Loss and Absence

Several Christmas poems reveal key aspects such as consciousness of an absence. Written a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, “Christmas Carol” (1941) is a poem that expresses loss and uncertainty about the outcome of the war. Told in first person, it depicts a scene where the poet sees “countless stars”, but the “Star of Peace” is missing, indicating a disruption in the cosmic harmony. Even if the immutable and ever-present North Star is visible, a fact that is reinforced by a dynamic of reciprocity in the first two lines, this stability is contrasted and neutralised by the impossibility for anyone to see the “Star of Peace” at the end of the poem:

I see the North Star

And the North Star sees me,

But who sees the Star of Peace

In the East, cloudy?

[…]

I see countless stars

And the countless stars see me,

But no one sees the Star of Peace

In the East, cloudy. (Kavanagh 1990: 79)

The use of “no one” emphasises a loss that is global. The Three Kings of Orient, who embody harmony between cultures and religions, are depicted as unable to find their way to the newborn Child: “I see the Three Wise Kings, / They’ve lost their way, / Wandering around in rings / Day after day. (Kavanagh 1990: 79) The absent Star of Peace, evocative of the Star of Bethlehem, or Christmas Star, leaves them dis-orient-ed, as a nod to the original meaning of the term: having lost their way to Orient. The passing of time and the idea of a persisting chaos are emphasised with the image of the Magi kings “wandering” in circles, “day after day”, as a representation of war time hanging heavy on the people, or a metaphor of the poet depicting his own feeling of displacement from a distance, seeing “the donkey plod / Through the deep snow / But where can the Mother of God / In this storm go?” (Kavanagh 1990: 79). Whereas the North Star is immutable and always visible, the universal order has vanished, and the missing guiding light becomes an allegory of a lost faith that can no longer feed imagination.

Lack of imagination is associated with loss of childhood, and human beings’ finitude. These themes are introduced in the poem “A Christmas Childhood” (1940): “To eat the knowledge that grew in clay / And death the germ within it! Now and then” (Kavanagh 1990: 144); and in the first line of “Advent” (1942): “We have tested and tasted too much, lover” (Kavanagh 1990: 124), echoing the Bible and innocence lost after tasting the fruit of knowledge. This inevitable loss is a reason to long for days past. In Salmose’s parlance, Christmas time is a “situational memorative sign” (2012: 382) that triggers the memory of childhood and “encourage ideas of stability and repetition” (ibid.). The reason to look for childhood again is because, as the Italian poet Torquato Tasso wrote, “the world grows old and growing old grows sad” (cited in Jankélévitch 1974: 61).^[3] Kavanagh expresses this idea in the first stanza of “Christmas Carol 1942”, his second carol poem, structured like a song:

Sing of the Childhood

That renews in our eyes

Beauty grown tired.

[…]

Sing of the Childhood

That renews in the heart

Of the hopeless hope’s cheer

[…] (Kavanagh 1990: 132)

Childhood regenerates hope and becomes the “laugh of the soul” in the last stanza; and in “Peace” (1942), Kavanagh refers to it as a dream of tranquillity where time is suspended: “Out of that childhood country what fools climb / To fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time?” (1990: 125). Christmas time per se suggests nostalgia of a time where everything is possible. Kavanagh stresses the importance of dreaming and imagination, two inclinations proper to poets and children. In “Christmas 1939” and “Advent” (originally titled “Renewal”),^[4] the poet addresses the “Divine Baby” four times and appears as the only mind capable of dreaming and finding innocence again. This emphasis, like an incantation, adds lyricism to the representation of Jesus as a messenger of hope and renewal: “O Divine Baby in the cradle / All that is joy in me / Is that I have saved from the ruin / Of my soul your Infancy” (Kavanagh 1990: 70-71). The last two lines express the transformative power of nostalgia in a dialectic of remembrance and forgetting, contrasting the self and the other (“I dream” / “You dreamed”), where faith originates both from personal experience and myth. Salvation is possible for the person capable of nostalgia and specifically for the poet who adopts a “child’s philosophy” (Kavanagh 1990: 71). In “Advent”, the poet dreams of an Edenic world and reflects upon a return to innocence as a necessary condition to be able to question the world and see things anew:

And the newness that was in every stale thing

When we looked at is as children: the spirit-shocking

Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill

Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking

Of an old fool will awake for us and bring

You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins

And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins. (Kavanagh 1990: 125)

Nostalgia results from experience, a consciousness of loss and absence experienced mostly in adulthood. The shift to future tense in the last stanza stresses a hunger for reality: “O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching / For the difference that sets an old phrase burning – / We’ll hear it” (1990: 125). The parallel between childhood and humility with the reference to the “old fool”, recalls the following lines from the Bible, New Testament:

And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,

And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.

(Matthew 18:2-5)

Remembering childhood is a catalyst for salvation and the birth of Jesus represents a crucial shift in human history. This is reflected in “Christmas Eve Remembered”, where Kavanagh transposes the poet’s capacity for hope to the community, stressing the importance of ritual time to regenerate faith:

No snow, but in their minds

The fields and roads are white.

[…]

Their thoughts are earthy but their minds move

In dreams of the Blessed Virgin

For one in Bethlehem

Has kept their dreams safe for them. (Kavanagh 1990: 71)

The poem shows how rituals have the power to transform a community and to soothe the soul, being a source of security and providing a sense of belonging:

“These are the dark days.”

Like this my memory saw

Like this my childhood heard

These pilgrims of the North.

And memory, you have me spared

A light to follow them

Who go to Bethlehem. (Kavanagh 1990: 72)

These “pilgrims of the North” are Monaghan people, now capable of dreaming and imagining.^[5] Through memory, the poet carries a message of faith. By seeing “through the glass of memory”, as he wrote in “Kednaminsha” (1940), the poet escapes from present reality. However, this inner exile from external pressures does not mean that he rejects reality or tries to ignore suffering. As he mentioned in his essay “Down the Shannon to Clonmacnoise – Pilgrim at the Oar”, published in The Standard on September 14, 1945, “most of us want the quintessence of things, not seeming to realise that the labour and pain with which all happiness is surrounded is often the best part of the joy – afterwards. That is why the remembered joys of childhood are so sweet” (Kavanagh 2003: 121).

Kavanagh generally recurs to images as “situational signs” that, as Salmose defines them, “encourage ideas of stability and repetition” (2012: 116). Some Christmas poems are structured in such a way that they echo each other, using repetitive patterns and imagery. The “Christmas Carol” poems and “Christmas 1939” are composed of stanzas that start with the same or similar lines. The recurrent images of “snow” and a flower (at the end of “Christmas 1939” and “A Christmas Childhood”) convey the impression of a ritual and sacred time within Kavanagh’s own poetry. Salmose associates repetitions with the anticipation of death which “creates in us a desire for the stable values of life, the repetitions that conquer our own life span” (2012: 116). The use of the deictics “now”, “then”, and of the term “again”, for instance, reflect nostalgia’s potential to provide an answer to that frustration and loss, linking past and present in the act of memory.

[…] Now and then

I can remember something of the gay

Garden that was childhood’s. Again. (Kavanagh 1990: 144)

Through the experience of nostalgia, one remains open to infinite possibilities and renewal. As Jankélévitch suggests, memory can reveal an ideal view of the present, like a ghostly image superimposed on top of perceived reality, where past and present coexist, since memory of the past is strengthened by its insufficiency, what Bergson named its “powerlessness” (1988: 181): memory reflects our hunger for reality, for the present is what summons us to action, whereas the past, as “pure memory”, is detached from life. Salmose highlights that “since nostalgia is not dependent on a ‘truthful’ memory, its quintessence, much like Bergson predicts, lies in our capacity to freely relate to time in a social and personal way” (2012: 120). Nostalgia thus is a way to travel in time and to have more control on emotions as it provides a possibility to return to, or recreate, a point of departure. In “A Christmas Childhood”, the line “the light between the ricks of hay and straw / Was a hole in Heaven’s gable” (Kavanagh 1990: 144) echoes to a certain extent Jankélévitch’s idea of romantic exile and the nostalgic consciousness which makes the melancholy possible. The exiled lives in a presence that is absent, in a life that is glimpsed through the thin layer of daily reality.^[6]

Nostos: the transformative power of the return

Jankélévitch proposes that when one remembers the place of their roots, it provides some stability and the certainty that this place would “remain ours”, wherever we are. The reminiscence of the birthplace in times of trouble, even if it is not associated with good moments, is thus comforting. As the philosopher suggests, love for the birthplace is comparable to parental love, which is immutable. Indeed, Kavanagh’s longing can be triggered by memories that are not always pleasant ones, but the remembered thing, at times hated, is nevertheless loved in an unconditional way. The first stanza of “Christmas Eve Remembered” (1939) illustrates this positive/negative relationship: “Poor parish!”. But out of this unpleasant memory of the parish (that Kavanagh pictures in even darker terms in other poems like “The Great Hunger”), memory weaves for the poet a “romantic cloak”, reminiscent of the old domestic tradition of whitening the laundry and wearing new clothes for Christmas (Cretin 2016). Christmas time, as a time of renewal, reconciles thus the nostalgee[7] with the past.

They may be talking of the turkey markets

Or foreign politics, but tonight

Their plain, hard country words

Are Christ’s singing birds. (Kavanagh 1990: 71)

Lyricism here conveys metaphysical nostalgia, “a longing for objects that are idealised, impersonal, and unattainable” (Salmose 2012: 16), the dream of a golden age, rather than a desire for the past that would be purely rooted in empirical reality or concrete autobiography, and thus transcending mere individual melancholy. Although the point of departure of Kavanagh’s poems is related to his own life story, the representation of an idealised place can be shared with the community, thanks to references such as the imagery of the garden. As Rubem Alves describes it, the garden is a “visible image of the divine beauty” (1990: 126): “[…] in gardens under trees, / Wherever life pours ordinary plenty” (Kavanagh 1990: 125).

Other elements of Kavanagh’s homeplace also respond to the collective imagery. In “A Christmas Childhood”, childhood is compared to a “gay garden” in the first section. The scene depicted in the second section is a representation of the nativity scene revealing “the transfigured face / of a beauty that the world did not touch” (Kavanagh 1990: 144), paving the way to the sacralisation of the scene. The repetition in “how wonderful that was, how wonderful!” reinforces the emotion and draws the reader’s attention to children’s capacity to see the extraordinary and magic in the ordinary. The role of music in this poem reinforces the shift from a profane place to a sacred space. The consonance of “music”, “magical”, “melodeon” and “milking” conveys a sense of unity and harmony between all the elements in the scene around which the stars are dancing. For Antoinette Quinn, the “transfiguration of an ordinary townland into Bethlehem […] not laboured, and the conflation of stable, star and wise king with the homely and local images of cowhouse, stable lamp and whin bushes is credible as fantasy of an Irish Catholic child reared on the Christmas story” (1991: 100). The sacralisation of the scene, with its magic and wonder, is revealed to the remembered child: “I know some strange thing had happened”, which is the music of milking, the music of common life intensified by the memory of it. Everything remembered takes on another dimension: the hay ricks are a hole in heaven’s gable, and the apple tree has become the Tree of knowledge. The tone of regret of the first section is counterposed by the memories in the next lines in a section with no rhyme pattern expressing enthusiasm. The charming nostalgia and the romanticised image of Christmas and childhood are rhythmed by the music played by Kavanagh’s father with the melodeon, the music of nostalgia: “And when we put our ears to the paling-post / The music that came out was magical” (Kavanagh 1990: 143).

The light of the Christmas star initially depicted as lost is now found in the remembered, re-imagined stable. “The light of her stable-lamp was a star” (Kavanagh 1990: 144), and the frost on the “side of the potato-pits” depicted in the first section becomes “the frost of Bethlehem”. Earthly things are paralleled with the constellations in another play on consonances echoing in the ear of the reader: “Cassiopeia was over / Cassidy’s hanging hill”, and “three bushes rode across / The horizon – the Three Wise kings” (Kavanagh 1990: 145). The symmetrical structure of language and time converge visually in the shape of the coat worn by the child: “I hid in the doorway / And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat” (1990: 145). This scene illustrates a liminal moment where the child-poet tightens present and past, reality and imagination, trying to hold the harmony and the instant of the scene virtually in the palm of his hand. A temporal shift from the present occurs as he becomes conscious of time passing and of himself growing old, trying to hide from this rite of passage. However, the young boy leaves a mark for the future on the wood of the door: “I nicked six nicks on the door-post”, engraving his “six Christmases of age” (1990: 145). A metaphor that reveals both the consciousness of the irreversibility of time, and a necessity to transfix the moment. As Vincent Hanley stresses in his interpretation of the poem, the “title gives the game away: [Kavanagh] describes his childhood as ‘a Christmas childhood’ rather than the more limiting ‘a childhood Christmas’” (2022). Christmas and liminality stretch over the poet’s life in an image later echoed in the poem “October” (1958), where time is presented as suspended, shaping human condition: “it is October over all my life”, in “a world that was and now is poised above time” (Kavanagh 1990: 292).

Another example of time suspended and stretched is clear in the poem “The 6.40 p.m. From Amiens Street” (1940). In this poem, reality is transfigured in an adventure and epic tale, where historical events are transposed into the time of a journey by train from Dublin to Monaghan: “We were riding home to Christmas / A thousand years ago” (Kavanagh 1990: 75). Cronin (1982: 193) and Quinn (1991: 91) highlighted the importance for Kavanagh of creating an epic of everyday life.^[8] First, the title of the poem sets the time and place of departure, from the station today known as Connolly station. From the very first lines we are transported to ancient times:

O, is it nineteen forty

Or a thousand years ago?

We are not going home by train

We’re riding through the snow. (Kavanagh 1990: 75)

Train journeys are special moments, propitious for daydreaming and self-reflection. Like Christmas time, the journey by train is a liminal space, a parenthesis in time and space where the traveller can at the same time be moving, passive, watching and thinking. The combination of both themes enhances the magic of a timeless moment, ideal for inspiration and getting lost in memories. Unlike Louis MacNeice’s poem “Train to Dublin”,^[9] Kavanagh’s poem does not describe the landscape as it unfolds before the eyes of the traveller, but it tells epic scenes of the past while “riding through the snow”. The poet is the hero of the story, moving “among the ancient trees”, relating past invasions and reinventing reality in a landscape reminiscent of Jerusalem:

We saw upon a hill

A Christian church in flames:

Some said it was a candlelight

But it might have been the Danes.[10] (Kavanagh 1990: 75)

Jankélévitch suggests that by moving through space, we are more inclined to feel the passing of time and thus, capable of becoming aware of its irreversibility and of our finitude. Although he also stresses that space generates life, as it is the field of mobility and thus of our liberty. Since finite beings are mobile, their mortality can be in part compensated by their ability to move from one place to another: the possibility of returning to the home place is a means to metaphorically vanquish time’s irreversibility. Consequently, mobility reinforces the power of life over death. This idea is presented in the poem as a victory over location, where, in the end, space becomes time, and past is revived in the present:

Some thought that we were in a train –

But my cloak was stiff with snow!

We were riding home to Christmas

A thousand years ago (Kavanagh 1990: 76)

This poem expresses the accomplishment of poetic transfiguration, although reality quickly catches up with the poet in the final line:

Though our lamps are cold blue ghosts

We ride in triumph north

Cheering, laughing…. What voice said to me

“Change at Dundalk!” (Kavanagh 1990: 76)

The feeling of transience, reinforced by the oxymoron in “lamps are cold blue ghosts”, is counterposed, though, by the capacity to reinvent reality.

The outcome of seeing the world anew stands as a “poetic renaissance” for Kavanagh, as Quinn stresses. The poet’s “attitude to the world” (Quinn 1991: 193) and the use of religious imagery convey a visionary tone and contribute to the poetic and “psychic renewal” (192). To demonstrate this, let’s take the example of the two sonnets that compose the poem “Advent”, depicting the “epiphany of a visionary rebirth”: the first one stresses “self-abnegation”, and the second one introduces a change in temporality with Christmas as a transitional moment marking a clear dichotomy between a “before” and an “after” (“O after Christmas”). As Quinn further interprets:

What is promised for the future is poetry for the people whose speech will not be exclusively rural. It will find human and natural images and a language central to the new poetics, a reanimation of everyday talk resulting from the perception of the sacramentality of signs, ‘Wherever life pours ordinary plenty’, […] the vernacular is revitalised [and] central to the new poetics, [occurs] a reanimation of everyday talk resulting from the perception of the sacramentality of signs. (1991: 192)

The final lines of both sonnets are connected by an allusion to the beginning of what Quinn refers to as “a new Christian dispensation” (193).

Of an old fool will awake for us and bring

You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins

And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

[…]

We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minded wages

Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour –

And Christ comes with a January flower. (Kavanagh 1990: 125)

Christmas imagery transmits values like austerity, and renewal of beauty which, by its absence, is longed for and desired. As Alves describes, “beauty is the name of what we have lost. And what we have lost makes itself present by longing and desire” (1990: 41). And to a larger extent, Christian imagery plays an “imaginatively enabling role”, Quinn says, “transfiguring the world into a theophany” (1991: 194). For Una Agnew, Kavanagh was the poet of epiphanies (1999: 202). This passage portrays an isolated man who has turned over a new leaf, leaving his “clay-mind” behind to start anew, even if the result might not be at the height of his expectations. The image “thrown into the dust-bin” (Kavanagh 1990: 125) pictures the writer as throwing away previous versions of a story not good enough, reinventing the past and the future. For Cronin, Kavanagh’s stance is that of a “poet looking, experiencing and remembering: not, as in so much English nature poetry, that of the observer in whom the physical embodiments of nature have created certain emotions and who seeks to recreate those emotions for the reader by describing or delineating the physical fact” (1982: 189). Cronin considered Kavanagh the poet of faith and poems like “The 6.40 p.m. From Amiens Street”, or “A Christmas Childhood”, reflect the transformative power of imagination and memory as a positive force and a possible cure for distress.

Conclusion

Nostalgia, like love, is both cause and effect. The nostalgic loves the homeplace because it conveys a feeling of belonging, like parents’ love for their child. Nostalgia fosters a return to, as Kavanagh describes in the poem “October” (1958), “something [that] will be mine wherever I am”, even if this “something” is an idealised alibi. Kavanagh’s reconciliation with a place originally depicted in his first poems as a hated place, occurs thanks to the restorative force of nostalgia as the remedy. Love and nostalgia both can appear as irrational to the point of being absurd as one can feel attachment for an object of desire that is in reality unattractive or even repulsive. Aestheticised nostalgia holds a cure to the sickness and becomes a beneficial condition. Independently from a wish to return to past times, nostalgia exalts a poetical enthusiasm for the originality of past feelings and impressions, a will to rediscover. As Gaston Bachelard described:

[P]oetry gives not so much a nostalgia for youth, which would be vulgar, as a nostalgia for the expressions of youth. It offers us images as we should have imagined them during the “original impulse” of youth. Primal images, simple engravings are but so many invitations to start imagining again. (2014: 78)

In Kavanagh’s Christmas poems, nostalgia transfigures and sanctifies the place by condensing the value around the homeplace and the cherished moment of Christmas. Hence, “closed nostalgia” – which is, as Salmose defines it, “nostalgia evoked through art that is more specific and needs a specific knowledge, culture, ethnicity, or personality, in order to be evoked” (2012: 375) – paves the way to “open nostalgia” – a nostalgia “evoked through art that is very general and not specific and thus open for most people” (2012: 380). Beyond the physical place, as Jankélévitch and Salmose (2012: 139) argue, there is a “metaphysical place”. Kavanagh’s poetry is not entrapped in the melancholy of present loss and absence: time, and the “now”, become a metaphysical home where, as Laurence Lerner puts it, “the beauty of home is seen through the eyes of loss” (1972: 41).

Through poetry, and in particular the imagery of Christmas in these ten poems, Kavanagh responds to a personal and collective need to escape the burden of present reality. For him, “a true literature, or culture, is born unwillingly and in pain, and is never created out of the itch to write or the personal vanity of someone outside the deep womb of a people” (Kavanagh 2003: 23). He draws an embellished portrait of his rural homeplace to the reader that feeds “pseudo-memorial nostalgia” which, as Salmose defines it, “belongs to external nostalgia and refers to a longing for a space or time that one has not experienced in person” (2012: 381), and that society was looking for in times of war and developing modernity. People needed an idyllic picture of the country. Although nostalgia arises from anxiety of time passing and its irreversibility, the poet’s vision is oriented towards the future. Memories and poetry paradoxically generate a feeling of control over time and a way of partially vanquishing it. As Patrick J. Walsh says, poets are longing souls, “they know that seeking the eternal is an essential part of man’s being and their will [is] to continue to strive to find that crossroad where time, place, and eternity meet” (2021). Homesickness and longing for peace can find an antidote in nostalgia, which becomes an essential piece in a poetics of care and detachment. For Jankélévitch, in order to find an alternative, one has to be able to leave the place of their roots; but vanquishing the irreversible relies on the possibility of finding that place again (1974: 14). This is maybe why he compares poets to Odysseus, the hero of the nostos, perpetually in search of a return. For if departure is a victory over location, the return to the point of departure represents for the mobile being the complete and reassuring availability of space, a phenomenon that Kavanagh similarly described in these terms in his essay “Suffering and Literature”:

There are two kinds of simplicity, the simplicity of going away and the simplicity of return. The last is the ultimate in sophistication. In the final simplicity we don’t care whether we appear foolish or not. We talk of things that earlier would embarrass. We are satisfied with being ourselves, however small. (Kavanagh 2003: 282)

For him, a poet’s journey is the way “from simplicity back to simplicity” (ibid.) and although he recognised that it is a difficult journey, the nostalgic experience provides distance and perspective to consider things simply. Kavanagh named it “the difficult art of not caring, of having the courage of one’s feelings” (1962). The process of nostalgia is an experience of loss that requires acceptance of reality, and its idealisation is part of this process.

To quote Edmond Fleg, “we have a beautiful future behind us, and it is because we have a long past in front of us” (cited in Jankélévitch 1974: 27),^[11] meaning that the experience of the past is intrinsically an experience of the present, the whole forming part of future existence. Only with hope can there be a good future, and imagination is the expression of hope, simply because “in imagination things which do not exist allow themselves to be seen” (Alves 1990: 41). Thinking about the future does not exclude a return to the past since our effort to bring back past experiences to the surface results in the creation of new experiences (Jankélévitch 1974: 27). And as Kavanagh beautifully wrote in the conclusion of his essay “Christmas in the country”, “Of all the wonders! A buttercup, a yellow buttercup on Christmas Day. Exciting. As I looked at the golden petals in the grey grass, I felt spring among the hills. Spring in the heart” (2003: 56).

Notes

[1] In Greek mythology, Algea (ancient Greek: ἄλγεα; singular: ἄλγος Algos) is used by Hesiod in the plural as the personification of pain, both physical and mental. They were the bringers of weeping and tears. From this term is then derived the suffix “algia”.

[2] Christmas also paradoxically intertwines the sacred and the profane as it is an occasion for commerce. In his essay “Christmas in the Country” (published in The Irish Times on December 30, 1939), the poet laments a loss of faith and imagination, where a “metaphysical Father Christmas” has been replaced with fake Father Christmases in “red gowns and white whiskers” at the front doors of every shop and store.

[3] My translation of “Il mondo invecchia, / E invecchiando intristisce”.

[4] Peter Kavanagh’s note in the Complete Poems (1990: 395)

[5] In his earlier poetry, Kavanagh depicted his people as deprived of any imagination, as “dark people” in the poem “Dark Ireland”: “We are a dark people, / Our eyes ever turned / Inward / Watching the liar who twists” (1990: 9).

[6] “L’exilé vit dans une présence absente, une vie qu’il entrevoit comme en filigrane à travers la réalité quotidienne. Il vit comme un somnambule ici-bas.” (Jankélévitch 1974: 280)

[7] In this context, the term “nostalgee” means “each and everyone of us when we are having a nostalgic experience” in an unvoluntary manner, as defined by Niklas Salmose (2012: 97), as opposed to the term “nostalgic”, a “noun [which] seems more to rely on voluntary motivations” (Salmose 2012: 96).

[8] As Kavanagh wrote some years later in the poem “Is” (1958): “Name for the future / The every days of nature / And without being analytic / Create a great epic…” (1990: 287)

[9] “I give you the incidental things which pass / Outward through space exactly as each was” (MacNeice 1986: 84)

[10] Churches and monasteries used to be the target of Viking invaders (The National Museum of Denmark, n.d.). This passage of the poem might be also reminiscent of paganism, and the transition to Christianity.

[11] “L’homme a un bel avenir derrière lui, mais c’est parce qu’il a devant lui un vaste passé” (Fleg, “espérer le passé, se souvenir de l’avenir”).