Rose Kavanagh (1860-91)

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Note: Her best-known poems incl. “Rose of Knockmany”; “Northern Blackwater” “Lough Bray”, and “St. Michan’s Churchyard”. She contrib. an article on ‘Gerald Griffin’s Life and Poetry’ to Irish Monthly 28 (1900), pp.15-27. She is anthologised in Brooke/Rolleston, Cooke, Graves, Sparling, and Yeats.

Bibliographical details

Rev. Matthew Russell, S.J. [ed. & intro.], Rose Kavanagh and Her Verses (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son 1909), 70pp. CONTENTS: 1. HERSELF [1]. II: HER MEMORY. Rose Kavanagh - Katharine Tynan [23]; To Rose in Heaven - Tynan [24]; Requiescat - J. B. Killen [16]; In Remembrance of Rose Kavanagh - Thomas Donohoe [27]; In Memoriam Rosae - Eugene Davis [28]; Requiescat in Pace - Northern Gael [29]. III: HER VERSES. The Northern Blackwater [33]; Lough Bray [35]; An April Day [36]; St. Michan’s Churchyard [37]; Knockmany [39]; Gerald Griffin [39]; The Swallows’ Message [40] Charles Kickham [43]; A Caoine - John Boyle O’Reilly [44]; The Turn of the Tide [45]; In Exile [47]; Dearvorgill at Mellifont [51]; Christmas Eve in a Suspect’s Home [55]; Bresal’s Bride [57]; A Night in ’98 [60]; Vainer than Vanity [62]; The Hillside To-day [65]; An Autumn Day in Ireland [66]; Anne [68]; Ellen O’Leary [69]; Afterword [70].

Note: The poems can be read in the copy [attached] while an extract from Russell’s “Afterword” is given under Commentary, infra.)

Note: In “Herself”, his introduction to Rose Kavanagh ... [&c.] (1909; as supra), Fr. Russell includes the text of the poem that Kavanagh sent to Merry England in 1855 and which the editor rejected with a mixture of criticism and encouragement. For the full text see Appendix, in “Poems of Rose Kavanagh” [attached],

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Cuttings: There is a notice of her death among the cuttings of the Linen Hall Library (Belfast). See also Irish Book Lover Vol. 1.

Website: A notice by Sarah Baker-Meehan appears on a page devoted to Rose Kavanagh on the Kavanagh Family website [online; accessed 3.07.2010.]

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Commentary

W. B. Yeats, ‘Death of a Promising Poet’ in the Boston Pilot (11 April 1891): ‘[…] The mere May blossoming of a young inspiration whose great promise was robbed of fulfilment first by ill-health and then by an early death. Readers of future anthologies will know the name [...] but they will not know the noble, merry, and gentle personality that produced them. [... In] “The Northern Blackwater” Miss Kavanagh seems to me to have reached a delicacy of thought and expression that reminds one of Kickham at his best. The last verse begins finely with - “Once in the May-time your carols so sweet / Found out my heart in the midst of the street -” and ends with a note of that tender sadness so very near to all she has written. Was it a shadow of the tomb?’ [Cont.]

W. B. Yeats (‘Death of a Promising Poet’, in Boston Pilot, 11 April 1891) - cont.: ‘Like most of the best Irish verse of recent years it is meditative and sympathetic, [13] rather than stirring and energetic - the trumpet has given way to the viol and the flute. It is easy to be unjust to such poetry, but very hard to write it. It springs straight out of nature from some well-spring of refinement and gentleness. It makes half the pathos of literary history. [...]’ (Q.p.; quoted in Matthew Russell, S.J., Rose Kavanagh and her Verses, 1909, p.13-14 [n.p.].) Also quoted in small part in “Rose Kavanagh”, in Dictionary of Ulster Biography, by Kate Newmann, Belfast: QUB/IIS 1993; see also Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, p.85 & n.)

W. B. Yeats, “Tradition and Poetry” (1907): ‘Rose Kavanagh, the poet, wrote to her religious adviser from, I think, Leitrim, where she lived, and asked him to get her the works of Mazzini. He replied, “You must mean Manzoni.”’ (In The Cutting of an Agate, 1912; rep. in Essays and Introductions, Macmillan 1961, pp.246-60; p.246.)

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[Rev. Matthew Russell, S.J.], ‘Some Scraps from Her Life and Letters’, in The Irish Monthly, 19, 220 (Oct. 1891), pp.512-21: ‘Since her death, six months ago, the name of Rose Kavanagh has appeared in these pages almost, every mouth, Three of our poets have paid tribute to her memory, one of them twice, over; and a gifted Irish priest has given some touching reminiscences of her, calling her by her quaint nom de plume nom “Uncle, Remus,” To many of our readers her name was unknown; and, changing the pronoun in a well-known Scripture text, they were doubtless inclined to ask : “Who is she, and we will praise her?” She was a young Irishwoman, who in her short life, found or made opportunities of showing that she possessed a beautiful nature and many gifts, by which she won the deep regard and admiration of all who had the privilege of her friendship. [...] Rose was passionately fond of books from the earliest year that it was possible for a bright child to read them. She was educated at the Loretto Convent, Omagh. Her twentieth year found her studying in the Metropolitan School of Art: for her first aspiration was to be a painter. She gradually, however, transferred her allegiance from Art, to Literature, like Thackeray and many another; and she soon became a contributor, and even a paid contributor, to several journals and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. One long story and innumerable short stories, many essays and a few poems, constitute her contribution to Irish literature. For the last three or four years of her life any exertions that her failing health allowed her to make were devoted to the superintendence of the Children’s Department of The Irish Fireside, in which she (and not any white-headed old gentleman such as her youthful correspondents probably imagined) was the Uncle Remus of the Fireside Club, afterwards transferred to The Weekly Freeman.’ (See full article at JSTOR [online; accessed 02.07.2010].)

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Rev. Matthew Russell, Rose Kavanagh and her Verses (Dublin & Waterford: M. H. Gill 1909) - “Afterword”: ‘“Foreword” is sometimes employed as a less formal title than “preface”; and the use of a corresponding term on this concluding page of our book will save me from appending to the last of Rose Kavanagh’s verses a note longer than itself. That little poem has been placed last of all because it was the very last written by the dying girl, to be put in front of Ellen O’Leary’s “Lays of Country, Home, and Friends,” published about the time of her death, in 1891. Miss O’Leary had died two years previously, seventeen years before her brother, John O’Leary, the most thoughtful and intelligent of the Fenian leaders of ’65. To this brother she was devotedly attached, and her influence and her prayers during life and afterwards helped to secure for that remarkable man the grace of a good Christian death. With the change of one word this tiny but stately elegy might have been written for the writer of it - the sweet and gifted young Irishwoman, pure-souled, high-minded, and warm-hearted, to whose very lovable memory this book is lovingly consecrated.’ (p.70.)

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W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (London 1894; rep. Lemma Publishing Corp., NY 1970): ‘Rose Kavanagh furnished studies of a simple, idyllic Ulster life of the kind certain political utterances would never lead us to expect in the northern province.’ (p.8.) Further: ‘with a weak frame, a pale and beautiful face, whose light was alas! to be quenched by an untimely death, a simple and joyous nature, she [Kavanagh] embodied to her associates some of the tenderest and worthiest traits of Irish womanhood. She was the conducting a children’s department in the Weekly Freeman (“Uncle Remus”) … Jacobite bards would have called her Rosaleen; Shakespeare would have set her side by side with Imogen.’ (pp.45-46.)

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Quotations

Letter to Rev. Matthew Russell (q.d.): ‘It is not alone that I liked the corncrake; its song used to have a soothing effect on me. So had another very dissimilar thing - to drive very hard through a [6] bog on frosty moonlight [sic] night; and yet another thing which was strongest of all - to thin I should some day succeed in literature or art, and get rich enough to go to Italy and sail through Venice in a gondola. But I am not coming much speed on that road, since, instead of being away in London with all my armour on in the struggle for success, it is sitting here in the sunshine I am, nursing my littl old cough. Thanks be to God for the same sunshine, however. I believe, if it lasts some time longer, I shall be just as well as ever. I shall be just as well as ever. Such a good harvest time has not been for years, they say; nearly all the corn is stacked already, and then it is so dry! What a wonderful stillness there is among the hills in September! After all, September is a lovely month, too. I wish it had a poet as devoted as Denis Florence MacCarthy was to May. Perhaps you will tell me the meaning of the title “Underglimpses” in Mr. MacCarthy’s book. Does it mean glimpses under the surface of life, or nature, or what? But it must be nature, I think. I like his “Irish Emigrant’s Mother” greatly - it always brought the tears into my mother’s eyes. “The Foray of Con O’Donnell” always rises in my mind as the Foray of Dan O’Connell. Dublin ought to be pretty hot now, with the asphalt soft and springy under one’s feet. I miss the National Library a good bit, but one can’t have everything. And here I have my own people, and the sun, and the birds, and such landscape-pictures every day as make little of the best of painting.’ (Quoted, without date, in Rose Kavanagh and Her Verses, [ed.,] Rev. Matthew Russell, S.J., M. H. Gill 1909, pp.6-7.) Note that the corncrake mentioned here features in the poem “The Hillside To-day”, in her collection Rose Kavanagh and Her Verses, 1909, edited by Russell in 1909 [as attached].

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References
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives the “Northern Blackwater” [‘Many a ruin, both abbey and cot / Sees in your mirror a desolate lot’], with a footnote ref. to Dr. William Drennan’s poem “The Ford, Beal-an-atha-Buidhe”]; and “Lough Bray” [‘A little lonely moorland lake / Its waters brown and cool and deep / The cliff, the hills behind it make / A picture for my heart to keep’. Biog. [as above].

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John Cooke, The Dublin Book of Irish Verse (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1909), gives bio-dates, 1859-1891; “Lough Bray”; “St. Michan’s Churchyard” (‘Inside the city’s throbbing heart / One spot I know set well apart / From Life’s hard highway, Life’s loud mart’ - but no specific burials mentioned.

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Notes
Merry England: The poem “April” which Kavanagh unsuccessfully submitted to Merry England (ed. Wilfred Meynell) is at variance with the other of that name which appears in Rose Kavanagh and Her Verses (1909). In noting the difference, Rev. Matthew Russell reprints the former 4-stanza version (op. cit., p.11-12.) Meynell observed that the metre was ‘not quite regular’ complaining of a shift from heroic to anapaestic, adding: ‘There is not quite enough really careful substance in the verses either’, but speaks of the writer as ‘capable of very good things.’ Russell remarks: ‘This might seem a sufficiently cordial recognition for an unknown Celtic maiden writing to wring from a Saxon editor at the first attempt; but, in fact, it thrust Rose Kavanagh [12] aside forever - she never made a second assault on that citadel, but confined herself to her beloved Dublin and Ireland.’ (pp.12-13.)

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‘Heart’s core’: In her poem on Gerald Griffin, Rose Kavanagh wrote of the voice of Ireland calling him home from London: ’twas from her deep heart’s core / She called thee: “Gille Machree,” come home, I pray - / In my green lap of shamrocks sleep, asthore!’ [my itals.] (Rose Kavanagh and Her Verses, ed. Matthew Russell, S. J., Dublin: M. H. Gill 1909, p.40 [see attached].) Almost certainly the date of publication of her poem in Irish Monthly, was prior to Yeats’s composition of “Lake Isle of Innisfree”, which he wrote in London in 1890 and which he called ‘my first lyric with anything of its rhythm of my own music’ while identifying its theme as ‘the hatred of London’ (Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue, Macmillan 1972, p.31., n.4). All of this suggests that Yeats’s poem is something of a rewrite of the other, taking its theme and stripping it of both its biographical association with Gerald Griffin and with its nationalist associations. What remains, however, is the signature phrase itself, ‘deep heart’s core’ - which has gone down in literary memory as his invention. Noticeably, the ‘heart’ to which she refers is Ireland's while that to which he refers is his own - or, rather, the heart of an idealised Irishman shorn of political animus and cast into a reverie of monastic retreat from both modernity and the strife of human (and especially gender) relations.

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‘Warm hillside’: A slighter resemblance in theme and treatment can perhaps be detected in Yeats’s allusion to the ‘warm hillside’ in his poem “The Stolen Child”. Although there is no exact parallel to be drawn between her Land-League poem “The Hillside To-day” and his folkloric lyric on the theme of changelings [iarlais], there is an obvious similarity of tone in his treatment of the rural scene - a similarity which is ultimately assignable to their common origins in Kickham’s Knocknagow and Sally Cavanagh: The Untenanted Graves. (This, in turn, influences the “narrow grave” which invites the famine-victims in “The Unappeasable Host”.) Viewed from this standpoint, Yeats can be seen to profit from a body of nationalist sentiment which he is modifying for the purposes of a non-political poetry in which the elements of romanticism and transcendentalism, faery magic and anti-modernism, are positioned as the proper aesthetic good. Hence, in his praise of her, he wrote that her poetry was that of viol and flute rather than trumpets - meaning that she had withdrawn from the political stridency of so much of Irish poetry. (See Yeats's remarks on Kavanagh, supra.) [BS - 04.07.2010.]

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