Canal Bank Walk

Canal Bank Walk - fact Summary

Spiritual Awakening in Nature

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem depicts a speaker renewed by intimate immersion in the canal’s natural world. The scene reads like a spiritual awakening: ordinary details become sacramental, senses and language overflow, and the speaker asks to be clothed anew in "green and blue" elements. The poem links bodily presence, religious longing and poetic speech, showing nature as the means of redemption and imaginative rebirth in Kavanagh’s work.

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Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal Pouring redemption for me, that I do The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, Grow with nature again as before I grew. The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third Party to the couple kissing on an old seat, And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat. O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech, Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.