ABSTRACT
Dublin’s Rialto Chest Hospital provides the setting for a close reading of the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh had a lung removed in the hospital, and this became the stimulus for his celebrated 2004 poem ‘The Hospital’. The poem remains enigmatic for the fact that it does not mention the care that the poet received. Rather, Kavanagh is inclined to give the credit for the process of healing, and the stores of fortitude and perceptiveness that underlie it, to poetry, or, more specifically, to his own poethood. Kavanagh’s time in the Rialto holds a fascinating medicine and poetry story that has not yet been fully set down. It includes at least one outlandish anecdote: the surgeon met the poet in a Dublin pub almost a year after his being discharged and in exchange for a signed copy of his banned novel Tarry Flynn presented him with a parcel that contained one of his own ribs, which had been retained at the hospital after the surgery. The primary intention in this essay is to read ‘The Hospital’ to attempt to explain what the poem can offer to students of creative writing and poetry who are also medical students.
