Tom Bliss a écrit: "Personally, I feel the poem passes through a number of emotions, though it's hard to judge having heard the song many times before I read the words as they were laid out on the page (and that makes a big difference as any poet will tell you). The tune now informs my reading of the poem, so it's hard to grasp that Kavanagh was really driving at.
I suspect the local Dublin references are almost in-jokes, or geographical puns perhaps, so maybe there's some dry humour in poem, which is lost in the sad but quite opulent setting, leaving these references sounding merely perplexing."

The poem's intentions are very clear.   I simply cannot understand why you find it "hard to grasp what Kavanagh was really driving at."   He wasn't "driving at" anything. He was writing a poem. The message of the poem is overwhelmingly simple and clear. I find nothing perplexing about the Dublin references and I don't understand your notion that Mr Kavanagh was perplexing us with near in-jokes. The poem's "message" is simple and clear, even to a non-aficionado like me. We need less of this wishy-washy bullshit when we are presented with poetry and more of the simple directness of the Luke Kellys of this world conveying the message to us. That way, poetry becomes that bit more accessible to us all.