The enduring fame of Patrick Kavanagh’s doomed affair with Hilda Moriarty

It’s not often that this column inspires poetry, award-winning or otherwise, but it appears such a thing has happened at least once.

The catalyst was some years ago, when I confessed mixed feelings towards Ireland’s favourite ballad, Raglan Road. In short, that I loved the first two verses of Patrick Kavanagh’s song, the last two not so much.

My objection to Verse 3 was the awkward phrasing and terrible “tint/stint” rhyme. In Verse 4, it was just the preciousness of a writer comparing himself to an angel who has fallen for a “creature made of clay”.

Only a poet would get away with this, I suggested: “But if I were an earth-bound woman, not even a poet would be safe trying that verse on me. Assuming my clayey feet were too brittle to kick the angel out the door, he would have his feathers plucked there and then...”

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Well, it turns out that among the earth-bound women who read that column was Georgia Hilton, who sounds like an upmarket hotel but is herself a poet, formerly bound on Irish soil, now based in England.

And as revealed on Twitter recently, it inspired her to compose a comic riposte from the real-life object of Kavanagh’s unrequited love, circa 1944: Hilda Moriarty.

Entitled “Dark Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh”, this then won her a share of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize in 2018. You can hear Hilton read it on her page at iambapoet.com.

The doomed affair continues to reverberate, clearly, 80 years on – I’ll have another example later in this column. But it had unexpected consequences even in its own era, including a cameo role in a pub licensing dispute in Kerry.

That started when, at the height of his infatuation, Kavanagh followed Hilda home to Dingle for Christmas 1944. Not altogether surprisingly, her father – a doctor with big plans for his beautiful medical-student daughter – did not roll out the carpet for the impoverished, middle-aged poet.

The latter stayed instead at the guesthouse of a namesake: the famous “Kruger” Kavanagh of Dunquin.

When he then subsidised the trip by writing a sketch on “My Christmas in Kerry” for the Irish Press, this featured a colourful account of the Blasket islanders who rowed over to Dunquin for Sunday Mass and provisions.

Greatly to Kruger’s annoyance, however, it also mentioned that after mass, they “partook of liquid refreshment, handed out in all manner of vessels from a jampot to a cream jug by a publican whose licence can never be endorsed”.

Amid the rage of the unnamed but very identifiable shebeen-operator, the other Kavanagh had to make a quick getaway to the train station, exacerbating his crime with an unauthorised loan of Kruger’s bicycle.

When a decade later, the publican finally got around to applying for a licence, he faced objections from the local parish priest. Kavanagh-the-poet’s Press piece was also invoked in damning evidence, while the defence countered by suggesting the witness was a bike thief.

Kruger got his licence in the end, but those collaterally damaged by the affair also included Patrick Kavanagh’s mother. She didn’t have her wayward son home that Christmas and, to his great guilt, didn’t live to see another.

In fairness to Kavanagh, he also wrote a second poem about Hilda, far less famous than Raglan Road but rather beautiful.

“Bluebells for Love” describes a blissful walk they took among the eponymous flowers at Dunsany Castle in Meath (where the poet had gone on an equally doomed mission to request funds from Lord Dunsany).

The bluebells deputise as objects of desire and the poem cautions the lovers against gazing on them too openly, less it make them self-conscious and unnatural.

“We will not impose on the bluebells in that plantation/Too much of our desire’s adulation”, wrote Kavanagh. Maybe he should have taken his own implied advice.

Instead, he pursued his adulation of Hilda to the extent of accompanying her on early dates with the man she would marry, engineer and future Minister for Education Donogh O’Malley, who was suave enough to be amused.

But today, in a poignant twist of fate, the fame of the doomed affair is being fanned even by the offspring of that marriage.

I was contacted recently by the producers of a forthcoming podcast series for which actor Daragh O’Malley, son of Donogh and Hilda, will travel around Dublin and Ireland, following in the footsteps of his mother and the poet.

Survivors of “Baggotonia” (the former Bohemian enclave around Dublin’s Baggot St) and anyone else with stories from the era are asked to email raglanroadpodcast@gmail.com.

While we’re at it, I should mention that the annual Patrick Kavanagh Weekend in Inniskeen (patrickkavanaghcentre.com) is almost upon us, opening on September 29th.

This year’s features an extraordinary line-up including Blindboy (already sold out, alas) and Lisa O’Neill. Poet Thomas McCarthy is the keynote speaker. Yours truly will be doing a stage interview with Kavanagh’s successor as Monaghan’s greatest living writer, Patrick McCabe.