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Life and Background
Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944. His parents were from Mayo where he spent many of his childhood summer holidays. His father, a circuit court Judge, had high expectations for his son but was to be disappointed when Durcan abandoned his university education to write poetry and live a precarious lifestyle in London.
He spent some time in and out of mental hospitals but found stability in poetry, art and his marriage to Nessa O'Neill with whom he returned to Cork and took up poetry writing full-time. He now lives in Dublin, writing extensively and travelling widely doing readings of his poetry, which have a unique performance quality.
Durcan's poems are frequently satirical and deal with controversial issues. Nonetheless, his poetry is often extremely personal, drawing from his own experiences. The break-up of his marriage is explored with both humour and poignancy in the collection The Berlin Wall Café, and the relationship between himself and his father over the years is charted in the collection Daddy Daddy. Going Home to Mayo, Winter 1949 comes from the 1978 collection Sam's Cross.
Commentary
The poem follows the car journey of the poet and his father from their Dublin home to Durcan's grandmother's house in Mayo. The journey is both a real one and a symbolic quest for happiness and a sense of belonging.
The first half of the poem conveys the child's sense of wonder and excitement as he urges his daddy to "pass out the moon" and hasten their arrival in the village of Turlough. Dublin is the "alien, foreign" place they have left behind. The grandmother's house and the surrounding village are, in contrast, welcoming, familiar and magical with a warm, feminine presence. Although familiar, the village is also new and intriguing to the boy, a chaotic, "seamless" place where his bedroom is "over the public bar" and where animals greet the dawn with their chorus of "screeches and bellowings". The language and imagery tell us that the boy is happy here.
His happiness is short-lived, however, and the journey back to Dublin is filled with images of death and loss. In contrast to the "seamless" village, the city is laid out in an orderly fashion, marked out by railings and traffic lights, roads and rows of buildings. These buildings, unlike the towns on the way to Mayo, which were like "magic passwords to eternity", remind the boy of crosses in a graveyard. It would seem that for both the boy and his father, the city is a place of loneliness and death; for the father, a reminder of his own ongoing journey towards death; for the boy, the death perhaps of his dreams and the happiness he knew in Mayo; for both, the end of a shared experience.
Durcan's relationship with his father was often a turbulent one, but here we see evidence of a strong connection between father and son. The journey to Mayo has all the quality of a magical adventure with the father engaging in the excitement of his son. The journey back to Dublin, on the other hand, has all the qualities of a nightmare, filled with crosses and graveyards. In Mayo, the two took long walks and talked in a way that was "unheard-of" in the city. The silence between them grows as the city approaches. The country village brought them together in a way that the city, with its divisive "railings and palings", cannot.
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