SOURCE: “Pastoral Design in the Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh,” in Renascence, Vol. 34, No. 1, Autumn, 1981, pp. 3–16.

In the following essay, Grennan demonstrates that many of Kavanagh's poems can be understood as lying within the poet's idiosyncratic version of the Christian pastoral and points out many associations.

Only they who fly home to God have flown at all 

Patrick Kavanagh often described his work and his life in the image of a journey: “All we learn from experience is the way from simplicity back to simplicity.”¹ It is a traditional image, at root that of an Eden lost and a journey through the infernal places of the world to a recovered innocence, a paradise regained which is like and unlike the original, its innocence more aware, radical, profound, its simplicity “the ultimate sophistication.”² Although, therefore, he bemoaned the lack of a sustaining myth (“A myth is necessary, for a myth...