Writer Benedict Kiely remembers the day, in the office of 'The Standard' journal, that Patrick Kavanagh first showed him the words of 'On Raglan Road' and how they tested how it would sound sung to the air of 'The Dawning of the Day'.

Kiely reckons that he was the first person to see ‘On Raglan Road’ written.

At the time of Kavanagh's move Dublin was very much a hub of literary life where writers and poets gathered in local hosteleries to discuss and analyse what is literary and what is not.

As Brendan Kennelly commented in his Thomas Davies lecture on Kavanagh:

"Kavanagh satirises these events, people and ideas, we would expect him to satirise: Dublin's pretentious poetasters, its bumptious 'intellectuals'; its complacent middle class, its viscious sentimentality and its insincere good nature."
(RTÉ Guide, Oct 4, 1974, Vol.11, No.40, p.13)

This is the side of Patrick Kavanagh's life that Tom McGurk examined in the programme 'The Jungle of Pembroke Road'.

Patrick Kavanagh came to live in Dublin when he was in his thirties, in 1939, and lived there until his death in 1967.

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