EAVAN BOLAND
Eavan Boland.
Eavan Boland has said that her poetry seeks to “bless the ordinary, sanctify the common”. She seeks through her poetry to give a voice to the voiceless, to include those who have traditionally been silenced. As a mother living in a typical, ordinary, rather dull middle-class suburb she felt that her unique voice had been excluded from the canon of literature and poetry. Classical poetry tended to deal with masculine themes and to locate itself in grand, exotic, or Romantic settings. When studying Boland’s poetry consider the following: Its domestic and suburban setting. Its visual, painterly language. Its themes of loss, separation, powerlessness. Its feminist concerns. Its political concerns. Its use of myth and legend. Its moving from the personal to the universal. Its focus on the family, on marriage, love, loss, motherhood. Its imaginative recreating of the past.
In The War Horse Boland confronts the violent history of Ireland with honesty. A horse breaks loose and wildly canters into a quiet suburban street, crushing flowers and neat hedges, while neighbours peer from behind curtains, relieved when the horse moves on. In this violent intrusion into suburban calm and order, the horse stands as a metaphor for the violence in Northern Ireland which the South tried to ignore until it erupted in their streets. The poem begins with alliteration “the clip clop casual…” The sense of power, menace and destruction is conveyed in the lines “…as he stamps death / like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth” The great powerful hooves casually destroy everything in their path. Violence is random. It could be you. It could be your neighbour. The poet is a detached observer “..I lift the window.” So too are the peering neighbours “ Neighbours use the subterfuge of curtains” Suddenly the scene shifts and the mood changes “Like a maimed limb ”. We are now dealing with war, terrorism and the awful power of political violence. “No great harm is done.” We have escaped this time. But something has been damaged, something has had its life, its potential, destroyed, like so many young lives which are lost to violence “Only a rose which now will never climb” The poem is full of war images “A volunteer” “The screamless dead” Boland uses the shock tactics of these images to wake us up, to challenge our complacency, to rebuke us for our detachment “But we, we are safe.”As long as the violence stays on the other side of the Border we can ignore it. Our race memory, ---our “atavism”-- is awakened in the memory of the invaders who pillaged and “smashed” their way across our lands. We cannot remain indifferent or detached.
Child of Our Time is a political poem inspired by a press photograph after the Dublin bombings of 1974 which showed a fireman tenderly cradling the body of a dead child as he carried him from the carnage. The poem is dedicated to Aengus, the child of a friend. This child died by cot death. So the poem contains within it the personal as well as the political. It is a poem full of compassion and tenderness, but also outrage at the killing of the innocent. The child is a symbol of innocence, potential, love. The violent death of the child demands a response. She must make sense of this senseless act. Her poem, her “song”, must try to find “from your unreasoned end its reason/Its rhythm from the discord of your murder” She must try to make order out of disorder. The violent outrage of the murder contrasts with the tender images of childhood—lullaby, nursery rhymes, fluffy animals to take to bed. In the poem the natural order has been reversed by this terrible atrocity. It is we who should teach the child. But now the child—through his death---must teach us, about our casual, dangerous mythologizing and our “idle talk”. This poem also deals with language as a powerful force. Our language of hate has cost the child his life. We must learn a new language. The legends, the myths, the stories we have taught our children have led to this. We must change the record. “And living, learn, must learn from you dead” The dead child will be our teacher. All our symbols, images, flags and emblems must be cast aside. Around the most powerful image of all---the photo of the dead child---we must slowly build a new Ireland, which will speak the language of love, not hatred. “Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken” The poet hopes that the child’s death (his “final sleep”) has not been in vain, that it will be a wake-up call to us all.
In The Shadow Doll, one of her feminist poems, Boland explores the idea of marriage from Victorian times until the modern age. Using the silent doll as a starting point, she gives voice to what is unspoken about women and their lives. The doll in its “airless glamour” becomes a symbol for entrapment, constraint, silence, an airless prison. The porcelain doll has been passed down the generations from a Victorian bride to whom it was sent by her dressmaker to model her wedding gown. The doll is encased in glass. The doll is beautiful and fragile, stitched into a constricting crinoline dress. “under glass, under wraps” The doll is silent and discreet. It tells nothing of what it has witnessed of women’s lives ---sex and childbirth “Quickenings and lusts” Women and their experiences have been written out of history. They have been silenced. Are they too, passive objects, like the doll? The “she” in the poem is the Victorian bride. The “I” refers to the poet’s own wedding, and her sense of being “astray” the night before her marriage as she looks at all these lifeless objects, her wedding gifts “coffee pots and clocks.” The wedding has a sense of unreality about it. Has marriage changed much since Victorian times, really? The bride wears a kind of mask, acts in an artificial way---symbolized by the fake flowers “holding less than real stephanotis”. Her real self, her true identity may be lost in the marriage. The suitcase image is very powerful. It challenges all the accepted ideas about weddings. The sense of a door slammed shut, a locked prison, brings the poem to a close. The poem clicks shut, like the suitcase, like the bride’s future. “Pressing down again. And then, locks.”
The Pomegranate also deals with a woman’s experience---the painful duty of a mother to accept her daughter’s entry into adulthood, and the separation that will follow. In one long unrhymed stanza the poem meditates on loss, change, love and letting go. The poem is inspired by the classical myth of Persephone and Ceres. Ceres was the goddess of crops, fertility, corn. Her daughter Persephone is carried off to the Underworld by Pluto to become his wife. Ceres is grief-stricken at the loss of her daughter and goes in search of her. She threatens Pluto that if he does not release her daughter, she will curse the earth and cause all the crops to fail. But Pluto has given Persephone sacred pomegranate seeds to eat, and she must spend part of the year in the Underworld. Ceres has to accept this deal, having her daughter with her for half the year, when all the earth is fertile. When the earth is bare and barren, in winter, Persephone returns to the Underworld. The myth deals with, among other things, the mother- daughter bond, and the grief of separation.
The poet says she has “entered” this myth many times in her life. The first time was when she was a child exiled, like Persephone, in London “a city of fogs” The poem deals with time and change, and now the poet is a mother herself, living in a modern suburban street. Her small daughter wandered off one summer evening. Like Ceres she went in search of her, and carried her back in her arms. Glancing at the summer flowers and blossoms she realized that “Winter was in store for every leaf / On every tree on that road…..And for me” Change and age are inevitable, and our relationship with those we love will change too.
Now time has moved on again and her daughter is sleeping, a seventeen year old girl on the brink of adulthood “She reached out a hand and plucked a pomegranate” The fruit symbolizes knowledge, experience, loss of innocence. Her daughter must “eat the fruit”,--- live her own life independent of her mother. Could she warn her about what lies ahead or try to protect her? No, she can only give her daughter her freedom as a woman. Delaying the gift of freedom will lessen it. “If I defer the grief I diminish the gift” The poet/mother must accept the reality of change, and deal with her own sense of loss “I will say nothing”
Love is another intensely personal poem, also dealing with the relationship with a loved one, and how that relationship is changed by time. The poet revisits Iowa where she had originally lived with her husband in the “mid-western town”. This visit brings back memories of their early, youthful passion. She wonders if life will ever have that intensity or passion again. She connects her own experience with the myth of Aeneas visiting the Underworld. Aeneas crosses the bridge on the River Styx to reach Hades (The Underworld) . Aeneas sees the ghosts of his former comrades. When he tries to greet them, he cannot communicate with them. Boland is exploring here the powerlessness of language. It cannot console us or bring back what is lost. Language has its limitations. Even with those we love, we find it difficult to communicate. Is she herself experiencing a sense of loss and separation from her husband? The marriage has been changed by time and something has been lost. She uses a beautiful image of their love “Love had the feather and muscle of wings” Love is strong like a muscle yet light and carefree. It allows us to soar like a bird, to fly free.
She compares her young husband to Aeneas, a classical hero. This is how she remembers him, strong and heroic.. She lists the ordinary, simple things they had in their home “..an Amish table” Their love was intense and passionate “fire and air.”
They were “touched by death”. Their daughter almost died during that time
The poet speaks of the changing nature of married love. Love becomes ordinary. “You” becomes “I”. “I am your wife / It was years ago” Some of the earlier romance is gone “We speak plainly” She remembers her husband as her hero, as she looked at him with admiration “Snow on the shoulders of your coat” She longs for that passion to return. She wants to speak, to revisit that time with her husband, but like Aeneas she cannot communicate. This is a poem about love and memory, and the cruelty of time.
This Moment. The setting is a suburban neighbourhood at twilight. The moment is fleeting. It will not last. The poet must paint it for us as it changes before our eyes. In this poem Boland challenges the idea of the suburb as a dull, bland, lifeless place. There is a richness, a depth, a mystery in this ordinary “neighbourhood at dusk” There is a great economy of language in this poem. Everything is pared back. It is dusk, a time to reflect. There is a stillness, an intensity about everything. The atmosphere is quiet, dramatic, intense. The world seems to be holding its breath. The images are rich and sensual “rinds slanting around fruit”
The poet paints the scene like an artist with rich shadings and perfect detail “Stars and moths” Colour is suddenly introduced---the window “yellow as butter” This is a perfect, domestic, woman’s eye view of a lit window in a suburban house. The yellow contrasts with the stark black of the tree. Gradually the poem unfolds, detail by detail. The action is frozen for a moment “But not yet” while the poet paints the scene. Everything has been building up to the beautiful image of the mother and child. Everything makes sense now. This may be the dull, ordinary woman’s world, but beautiful things happen here. There is life and love and mystery here. The moment is personal, but also universal. The mother and child exist in a wider context. The short last lines of the poem tell us that life’s mysteries continue. At the centre of it all is the image of the child running into her mother’s arms. There is a sense of joy and motherly love, underlined by the verbs “Rise. Flutter. Sweeten” The whole poem seems like a still life painting, and celebrates the wonder, mystery and beauty of ordinary family life.
Boland’s themes: The role of women and how they have been marginalized and excluded, how their voices and experiences have been silenced
Revisiting the suburb. Traditional poetry rarely concerned itself with the suburbs. Life was too dull, bland, un-artistic there. Boland challenges this idea, painting the suburb as a place of love, beauty, richness
Classical myth as a way of understanding modern, human relationships (Love. The Pomegranate)
A single incident or object having a universal theme or significance
Moving from the personal to the universal
The moral responsibility of the poet to deal with political issues, and to speak out against violence and to give a voice to the powerless.
The past. We cannot hold on to it or relive it. We can only remember
What it means to be a woman. What it means to be a mother. What it means to be a wife. Love, loss, letting go.
The beauty and tenderness of maternal love.