The Great Hunger - Patrick Kavanagh

Clay is…

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh

• Opening the poem with this quote and its biblical connotations (associations) suggests the fanatical outlook of Maguire

Which of…

Which of these men / Loved the light and the queen / Too long virgin?

• The narrator is asking which of these farmers is most devoted to the Virgin Mary.

And thought… …of experience.

And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland / When he laughed over pints of porter / Of how he came free from every net spread / In the gaps of experience

• This is our first direct insight into Maguire's thoughts and here we see him in the pub fully confident and bemused in his lack of wife and family.

Lost in…

Lost in the passion that never needs a wife

And he is… …bride.

And he is not so sure now if his mother was right / When she praised the man who made a field his bride

• Again, we return to Maguire's thoughts. However now there is a tension between the fertility of the land and the sterility of Maguire's existence."

He lives that… …in Christ’s Name.

He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ's Name

• Contrast between fertility of land and Maguire's death.

O God…

O God if I had been wiser!

And he knows…

And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar

• He has a bitter epiphany where the depressing reality of the life he has lived becomes apparent