A bit late in the day, here's my tuppence worth.

I can only echo ard mhacha's comments regarding the Green Fool and Tarry Flynn. Anybody who's ever sang Raglan Road and felt moved by it in any way ought to check out his two prose works. Along with The Poor Mouth and The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, they stand head and shoulders above any other works of prose that were being published in Ireland at the time, the only contemporaries being vaguely in the same league as them being Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey and Behan.

Sinead O'Connor sings a great version of Raglan Road. But my mate Dermot Maguire – piper, singer and guitarist, who has a summer-long residency in The Annexe Inn in Keel, Achill Island, Co. Mayo only a few days left, hurry, hurrry, hurry – renders the song better than anyone I've ever heard. (For that man's voice I would slaughter the innocents!)

I can see how people interpret the last verse as implying that Kavanagh has inflated, pompous opinions of himself. But this, to me, is a flawed reading (and out of kilter with the rest of the poem in any event). Anyone reading Tarry Flynn or The Green Fool will be struck by just how hard Kavanagh was on himself! Calling your autobiography "The Green Fool" is not the actions of a bombast …

I've always read the lines as pointing to the fact that when we're in love we feel exhilarated, uplifted, immortal. But we love only mortals like ourselves – as capable as we are of ballsing up. And when he/she/I/we cause(s) the relationship (or potential or imaginary relationship as may have been the case in this poem) to go wrong, we suddenly lose that heightened sense and become "clay" again.

As I say, just my tuppence worth.