Remembering Rose Kavanagh

Rose Kavanagh was a romantic, republican poet, whose lyricism often sang of the local landscape where she was raised; from Knockmany to the Northern Blackwater River.

Born in the townland of Killadroy, on June 23, 1859, Rose’s brilliance was to be cut short by a seldom-abating sickness, a life-long malaise that reached its conclusion when she died of ‘consumption’ (otherwise known as TB) in 1891.

However, before ill health took her and her talents away, the young poet, author and article-writer earned the respect and affection of some of the most highly-esteemed members of Ireland’s literary class during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Among those who regarded her as a writer and person of serious standing were W. B. Yeats (poet), Maud Gonne (revolutionary), John O’Leary (revolutionary), his sister Ellen O’Leary (poet) and Charles Kickham (revolutionary).

I know, quite the company to be kept by a young cuddy from between Beragh and Seskinore.

As a teenager, Rose was schooled in the Loreto Convent, Omagh.

It was during this time that her family – who belonged to the small farming class that constituted the core of rural Irish society – decided to move out of their first home, in favour of a new abode near Augher, not far from the picturesque banks of the Blackwater River.

When the young bard-to-be left home and moved to Dublin to pursue life as an art student, her earliest writings revealed that her time roaming and resting around the valleys of south Tyrone had imbued her with one of her primary poetic preoccupations: The land and people of her homeplace.

During her formal education at the Metropolitan School of Art, Kildare Street, Dublin, it became increasingly clear that Rose possessed a capacity to capture the nature and culture of Ireland as she seen it.

However, somewhat to her surprise, she found that it would be the pen, rather than the brush, with which she would etch her world.

As Rose began to write more prodigiously for popular publications, her interest in her studies steadily waned.

Though her writing varied in form and subject, authoring a long-running serial story for Young Ireland and a regular verse for the Irish Monthly, scholars say that her most-read work was probably that which she published under the pseudonym, ‘Uncle Remus’.

Every Friday, first in the pages of the Irish Fireside and afterwards in the Weekly Freeman, Rose would bring her stories to children across the county.

However, despite Rose’s unashamed obsession with Irish county life, and her love of writer for a younger audience, her writing somehow transcended the parochial.

In a letter she wrote in 1886, she said, “At the other end of the world, Australia, two editors have written, asking me to supply their weekly Irish correspondence.”

Social life and politics

Patriotic and clever, when Rose got to Dublin, she soon found herself being accepted into an elite nationalist circle that consisted often of W. B. Yeats, John and Ellen O’Leary and Maude Gonne.

It was with the last of these remarkable characters that Rose spent time in Paris in the late 1880s during a period of abject sickness.

Another interesting relationship, though, that announces itself from the colourful pages of her biography is the one she enjoyed with the old Fenian and writer Charles Kickham, with whom she lived and nursed until his death in 1882.

A proposal of marriage from Kickham stands as evidence that the dying republican thought romance may have been the reason for Rose’s compassion. However, the young lady’s rejection of his matrimonial hand demonstrated that her care was born not of lust or infatuation, but of her humanitarian instinct, one likely inflated by her own feeble health.

After returning from her time in France with Maude Gonne, Rose moved back to Tyrone, where she died on February 26, 1891.

Notes from friends

It is often said that the quickest shortcut to get to the crux of somebody’s character is to be found in the assessments of their closest associates.

It was once wrote of Rose by a fellow poet and friend, Katharine Tynan, “One recalls her in the days when her health was best, and she always looked for stronger than her state warranted – tall and handsome, with a dear fresh Irish beauty that delighted one. It was the most honest face in the world, with brave grey eyes, and a country brownness over the clear tints, as if it loved the sun and the breezes.

“ I used to call her the Wild Rose… there was scarcely ever a face or form that expressed more truly the fair soul within.”

Another, pithier person once said of her, “She always had a genius for friendship.”

In 1907, the UH asked one of Rose’s school friends to remember the person they encountered in their early days at the Loreto Convent, to which they obligingly responded, “When Miss Kavanagh first came to our Convent she appeared so very backward that she was put into a class with the youngest children to learn the common rudiments of English.

“Owing to her rare talents, she rapidly progressed in knowledge and in a wonderfully short time, she was promoted from grade-to-grade.

“I never met anyone so naturally endowed with an equal capacity for learning anything to which she applied her mind.

“Her ideas, too, were so refined and nice, and her memory so retentive.

“Her patriotism rendered her such a loyal daughter or Erin, and her writings proved her attachment to her native land. What a triumph it should have been had she lived to see the successful efforts that have been made to restore to her fellow-countrymen the language and rights which they had been deprived for so many centuries!”

In that same edition of the UH, the literary loss that came with Rose’s death was compared to that which vanished with the premature passing of the great Scottish poet, Robbie Burns.

The writer, reflecting on her untimely death wrote, “Rose Kavanagh was an Irish writer of unquestionable merit and great promise, whose leaf ‘perished in the green’ some years ago.”

After her death, W.B. Yeats wrote an obituary for the Boston Pilot: “Everything she did was so like her self – it had the same quiet and gentle sincerity”.

lOn Saturday, June 22, Seskinore Rural Community Group will host a ‘Rose Kavanagh Historical Tour’ – led by one of her descendants, Mary Gillen – around different locations relating to her life and works.

Those interested in attending should contact Jonny Clements on ‘07816 845 117’. Booking is essential. Light lunch will also be provided with tea/coffee afterwards.