This song breaks my heart every time I hear it. One of those songs where I stop everything, compelled to listen, helpless in the spell of the song.
This song first took life as a poem written by Patrick Kavanaugh in the 1940s inspired by his doomed love for Hilda Moriarty, he is a 40-year-old poet, she is a 22-year-old medical student from Dingle. He knew a relationship could not last, but he could not help himself. Love can make fools of us all.
Decades later, Kavanaugh convinced Luke Kelly of the Dubliners to perform the poem as a song. Kelly took the tune from a traditional Irish air, “The Dawning of the Day,” and their performance took root in Ireland. A conversation between Van Morrison and Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains at a music festival led Morrison and the Chieftains to record an album of Irish songs (Irish Heartbeat) and this stunning rendition. It finds Morrison at his expressive peak, plumbing his depths to convey the desire and the futility of unrequited love.
I share this song today because it is my eldest son, Patrick’s birthday, and his name derives in part from Patrick Kavanaugh, one of the more important poets in my life, who wrote about “The Great Hunger,” could find God in the hospital washbasin and the middle-class women at the beauty parlor, and understood that simply naming things vest a beauty in them. He is the bridge that carries Irish poetry from Yeats to Heaney.
So happy birthday Patrick. I am fortunate to watch you forge a life as a man of great kindness, empathy and joy. And now I’m heading off to read some Kavanaugh.
#Songoftheday #spreadinghappiness #vanmorrison #thechieftains #patrickkavanaugh #irishpoetry #raglanroad
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Vbl7a69FDvY?si=8mSXzH1fCkYh_BHi
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/1uAWWuXyCJsZMA4wDZVYOV?si=6efb677f884344d8