English 11.67
Unit 1: Nationalism & Ethnic Identity
Writing Exercise: Analyzing Pathos in Literature

Identify the different emotions evoked by Patrick Kavangh in the following excerpt from his long poem "The Great Hunger" (1942). After figuring out what is actually being described, analyze how the reader is made to feel (as a witness of and perhaps vicarious participant in whatever events are portrayed). Consider the event itself, but also the manner in which it is related. You might consider such devices as: repetition, imagery, metaphor, simile, tone, alliteration, rhyme, sentence length, 1st-person pronouns, verb choice, adverb and adjective use, and punctuation.

from Patrick Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger" (1942)

Part 2

Maguire was faithful to death:
He stayed with his mother till she died
At the age of ninety-one.
She stayed too long,
Wife and mother in one.
When she died
The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son's backside
And he was sixty-five.

O he loved his mother
Above all others.
O he loved his ploughs
And he loved his cows
And his happiest dream
Was to clean his arse
With perennial grass
On the bank of some summer stream;
To smoke his pipe
In a sheltered gripe
In the middle of July--
His face in a mist
And two stones in his fist
And an impotent worm on his thigh.

But his passion became a plague
For he grew feeble bringing the vague
Women of his mind to lust nearness,
Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.

So Maguire got tired
Of the no-target gun fired
And returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage
To the fields once again
Where eunuchs can be men
And life is more lousy than savage.

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu