Bluebells for Love

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Bluebells for Love’ was published in The Bell magazine, June 1945. It was inspired by a walk he took with his great love Hilda Moriarty in the wooded demense of Lord Dunsany’s estate in Co. Meath some weeks before.

Bluebells for Love

There will be bluebells growing under the big trees

And you will be there and I will be there in May;

For some other reason we both will have to delay

The evening in Dunshaughlin – to please

Some imagined relation,

So both of us came to walk through that plantation.

We will be interested in the grass,

In an old bucket-hoop, in the ivy that weaves

Green incongruity among the dead leaves,

We will put on surprise at carts that pass –

Only sometimes looking sideways at the bluebells in the

Plantation,

And never frighten them with too wild an exclamation.

We will be wise, we will not let them guess

That we are watching them or they will pose

A mere facade like boys

Caught out in virtue’s naturalness.

We will not impose on the bluebells in that plantation

Too much of our desire’s adulation.

We will have other loves – or so they’ll think;

The primroses or the ferns or the briars,

Or even the rusty paling wires,

Or the violets on the sunless sorrel bank.

Only as an aside the bluebells in the plantation

Will mean a thing to our dark contemplation.

We’ll know love little by little, glance by glance.

Ah, the clay under these roots is so brown!

We’ll steal from Heaven while God is in the town –

I caught an angel smiling in a chance

Look through the tree-trunks of the plantation

As you and I walked slowly to the station.

[ Patrick Kavanagh 1904 – 1967. ]

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Bluebells for Love’ was published in The Bell magazine, June 1945. It was inspired by a walk he took with his great love Hilda Moriarty in the wooded demense of Lord Dunsany’s estate in Co. Meath some weeks before.

Bluebells for Love

There will be bluebells growing under the big trees

And you will be there and I will be there in May;

For some other reason we both will have to delay

The evening in Dunshaughlin – to please

Some imagined relation,

So both of us came to walk through that plantation.

We will be interested in the grass,

In an old bucket-hoop, in the ivy that weaves

Green incongruity among the dead leaves,

We will put on surprise at carts that pass –

Only sometimes looking sideways at the bluebells in the

Plantation,

And never frighten them with too wild an exclamation.

We will be wise, we will not let them guess

That we are watching them or they will pose

A mere facade like boys

Caught out in virtue’s naturalness.

We will not impose on the bluebells in that plantation

Too much of our desire’s adulation.

We will have other loves – or so they’ll think;

The primroses or the ferns or the briars,

Or even the rusty paling wires,

Or the violets on the sunless sorrel bank.

Only as an aside the bluebells in the plantation

Will mean a thing to our dark contemplation.

We’ll know love little by little, glance by glance.

Ah, the clay under these roots is so brown!

We’ll steal from Heaven while God is in the town –

I caught an angel smiling in a chance

Look through the tree-trunks of the plantation

As you and I walked slowly to the station.

Patrick Kavanagh 1904 – 1967.