April Dusk
April Dusk - meaning Summary
Solitary Poet in April Dusk
Kavanagh’s poem presents a poet’s acute loneliness and disillusionment in a simple rural scene. The speaker watches ordinary barnyard life and a careless ploughboy while feeling emotionally and spiritually estranged, likening himself to an uprooted sacred tree. The contrast between the world’s small, untroubled rhythms and the speaker’s internal sense of loss highlights themes of isolation, failed vocation, and the decline of spiritual certainty in modern life.
Read Complete AnalysesApril dusk It is tragic to be a poet now And not a lover Paradised under the mutest bough. I look through my window and see The ghost of life flitting bat-winged. O I am as old as a sage can even be, O I am as lonely as the first fool kinged. The horse in his stall turns away From the hay-filled manger, dreaming of grass Soft and cool in hollows. Does he neigh Jealousy-words for John MacGuigan's ass That never was civilised in stall or trace. An unmusical ploughboy whistles down the lane Not worried at all about the fate of Europe. While I sit here feeling the subtle pain Of one whose Tree of God has been uprooted.
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