"Wet Evening in April" by Patrick Kavanagh

This poem by Patrick Kavanagh is a wonderful nutshelling of High Modernism.

Joyce’s Dublin, Pound’s dove sta memoria, Proust’s madelines, Eliot’s Four Quartets, Williams’ significant moments, Zukofsky’s treasured observations, Bunting’s Peggy. Copernican non-speciality places one in a timeline so long that one’s place in it loses significance. Troy happened, and is gone—but Homer gave us the griefs, rages, loves, and experiences of those whose lives converged at long-faded Ilium. The poet, intensely experiencing, wishes to preserve and share what is loved and what the poet values. This is one of the hearts of High Modernism, one of its foci—which seems to be missed by many people teaching undergraduates what Modernism was and what the Modernists were up to, creating thereby a Post-Modern reconstruction of Modernism.

As a birder (while I was writing the previous paragraph, a red-tailed hawk was calling from the big maple tree beside the house I am in), this poem speaks to me viscerally in more than one way.

The elderly couple in Yvoire when I was six, sitting on the old stone steps of their old stone house in the old stone village in the old stone walls with the old stone castle that overlooks Lac Léman. The beauty of the girl I loved at 17—the sun, the grass, the wind, the sky, the light, the music of her voice. And that hawk just now, calling from a tree with the white snow covering the awaking soil on a March morning with the Solstice a few days nigh. Dove sta memoria? Ecco, gli uccelli della memoria:

Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him

      The melancholy.