Journal
, the other defining poem of the Irish mid-century, is as angry as
The Great Hunger
about Ireland's "purblind manifestoes"Unionist as well as Nationalist:
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 | | And one read black where the other read white, his hope
The other man's damnation:
Up the rebels, To Hell with the Pope
And God Saveas you preferthe King or Ireland.
The land of scholars and saints:
Scholars and saints my eye . . .
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At the same time, Kavanagh's "A Christmas Childhood" (1940) and MacNeice's "Carrickfergus" (1937) differ significantly in their nexus of place and autobiography. Less elaborately than Dylan Thomas, Kavanagh invokes a unified primal vision: "Cassiopeia was over / Cassidy's hanging hill." The assonance between Greek and Irish names suggests once again that language shares in a cosmic harmony. Similarly, parish, universe, and poetry chime when the "child-poet's" mother ''makes the music of milking." Carrickfergus, too, has imprinted a poet's imagination and verbal textures, but there the resemblance stops:
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| | The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential homes
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
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The difference is not only between rural and urban scenarios, or between Inniskeen's homogeneity and the sectarian North. "Carrickfergus," which begins with the advent of the Normans in Ireland and ends with the Great War, is informedlike all MacNeice's poetryby a historical consciousness generally lacking in Kavanagh. The poem's most pervasive images are of barriers, fissures, mutilations, and continuing war in Europeits last phrase, "the soldiers with their guns," is not really a closure. There is also religious difference. Different religious backgrounds also have shaped the cosmologies of these poems. A British perspective indicates that "Spilt religion" has poured more profusely and continuously into poetry beyond secular England. Muir, MacDiarmid, Dylan Thomas, MacNeice, and Kavanagh may wrestle with various forms of life-denying, sex-denying, art-denying puritanism, but their poetry still inclines to the metaphysical or visionary and to quests for cosmic pattern.
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