Another poem by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh whose work I delight in for its quirky originality and its wonderful inclusiveness.
Spraying The Potatoes
The barrels of blue potato-spray
Stood on a headland of July
Beside an orchard wall where roses
Were young girls hanging from the sky.
The flocks of green potato-stalks
Were blossom spread for sudden flight,
The Kerr’s Pinks in a frivelled blue,
The Arran Banners wearing white.
And over that potato-field
A hazy veil of woven sun.
Dandelions growing on headlands, showing
Their unloved hearts to everyone.
And I was there with the knapsack sprayer
On the barrel’s edge poised. A wasp was floating
Dead on a sunken briar leaf
Over a copper-poisoned ocean.
The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart
Broke the burnt stick of noon in two.
An old man came through a cornfield
Remembering his youth and some Ruth he knew.
He turned my way. ‘God further the work.’
He echoed an ancient farming prayer.
I thanked him. He eyed the potato-drills.
He said: ‘You are bound to have good ones there.’
We talked and our talk was a theme of kings,
A theme for strings. He hunkered down
In the shade of the orchard wall. O roses
The old man dies in the young girl’s frown.
And poet lost to potato-fields,
Remembering the lime and copper smell
Of the spraying barrels he is not lost
Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.
Patrick Kavanagh
David Sutton 
“headland” – strip of unploughed land at both ends of a ploughed field where the horses turned when ploughing. “copper-poisoned” – apparently the chemical being sprayed on the potato-plants is copper sulphate.
From The Irish Times: “When Kavanagh made his poetic debut in this newspaper, circa 1940 [ 27th July 1940 ], it was with “Spraying the Potatoes”. The subject matter was duly lampooned on the letters page by a pseudonymous wag, who urged The Irish Times (“tireless champion of our peasantry”) to commission further such poems, and suggested “inflamed goat udders” and “warble-pocked shorthorn” as possible themes.”
That was Flann O’Brien.
there is a reference to young girls in three verses what is the significance of that ?
Kavanagh can be a bit elliptical but I take the repeated motif of the young girls to be expressive of nostalgia for a youth that is lost to the old man, a loss with which the poet himself partially identifies. The choice of the name Ruth for the old man’s remembered sweetheart harks back, of course, to the biblical Ruth who gleaned the harvest fields and was noticed by Boaz, and thus gives us a perspective on a lineage of agricultural toil stretching back to antiquity. But the poet’s own sense of loss seems to relate less to any youthful romance and more to a sense of being separated from his beloved fields, and he finds compensation in the intensity of his memory; he can even summon up the smell of the lime and copper spray and that powerful olfactory trigger conjures the whole scene for him.
Hope this makes sense, but I may be missing things: there is often more to a Kavanagh poem than meets the eye.
Coming from a farming background & having been given the job many times in my teenage years of Spraying The Potatoes,this poem always resonates with me,especially on July 1st.Kavanagh was a master of conjuring up images of farming life.