Thank You, Thank You
Epilogue to a series of lectures given at University College Dublin
…Don't grieve like Marcus Aurelius
Who said that though he grew old and grey
The people on the Appian Way
Were always the same pleasant age
Twenty-four on average…
I thank you and I say how proud
That I have been by fate allowed
To stand here having the joyful chance
To claim my own inheritance
For most have died the day before
The opening of that Holy Door.
What I have always known, and what I wish all others could realise, about Kavanagh's final
years in Dublin, is the extent to which he was needed, and how much he was loved.
Macdara Woods
March 2004