An Analysis of Patrick Kavanagh

            Patrick Kavanagh's "Canal Bank Walk" is a hopeful sonnet about the redemption from the banality of adult corruption and the renewal of innocence. The poet's choice of syntax exhibits his personal renaissance by breaking away from classical structure and creating a more natural formation. Furthermore, Kavanagh's sense of diction helps the reader to construct his own vision of the life-giving, baptismal waters of the canal and its verdant surroundings. Lastly, the brilliant images created between the lines of the sonnet help to illustrate the poet's walk along the canal as he ventures to find salvation amongst the green lands that encompass the enchanting waters. The persona's journey in Kavanagh's passage from sin to salvation is a spiritually satisfying piece for both the poet and his reader.
             The poet's unconventional sonnet possesses a new and more organic form of syntax, which emulates the continual flow of the canal waters. "Canal Bank Walk" has the same rime scheme as an Elizabethan sonnet, but it contains a Petrachan octet and sestet. By initially giving the reader a sonnet with a seemingly sense of form accentuates the theme of past adulthood sin. Customarily sonnets are composed in iambic pentameter, but the lines have inconsistent rhythm: "Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal" (1). The atypical meter complement to the theme of renewal through nature. The unstructured beats allow for a more natural rhythm rather than a prearranged, structured one. At first glance one may notice an Elizabethan or Petrachan sonnet due to its pseudo-form, but at closer examination it is clear that no meter is present. The poet defies tradition and goes back to innocent childish haphazardness. The sonnet is comprised of three separate sentences, which easily aid to the Petrachan form. The first two sentences make up the two quatrains of the octet, and the third sentence makes up the sestet of the poem:.