On Raglan Road

"On Raglan Road" began life as a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, one of Ireland's major twentieth-century writers. He wrote it about Hilda Moriarty, a young medical student he became infatuated with in 1940s Dublin. He was roughly twice her age and a struggling poet, and she did not return his feelings. Raglan Road is a real street in Ballsbridge where he would see her. The words were later set to the traditional air "The Dawning of the Day" (Fáinne Geal an Lae). Luke Kelly of The Dubliners made the song his own after, by his account, meeting Kavanagh in a Dublin pub and getting the poet's blessing to sing it. Kelly's unadorned, aching delivery turned a private heartbreak into a national treasure. On the surface it is a tender ballad of doomed, unrequited love: a man who sees the danger and walks the enchanted path regardless, watching the seasons turn from autumn to winter as the romance fades. Underneath runs a second meaning. Kavanagh casts himself as an artist who lavished on a mortal woman the secret gifts of his craft, the signs known only to those who serve the true gods of art, only to find they counted for nothing. The closing image, of an angel who woos the clay and so loses his wings at the dawn of day, is the poet's verdict on himself: to love too humanly is to fall from a higher calling. That blend of plain grief and literary weight, carried by Kelly's voice, is why it remains one of the most cherished songs in Ireland.