In his excellent study, Transitions (1988), Richard Kearney explores the tensions between Revivalism and modernism in twentieth-century Irish narratives. Revivalism is associated with Yeats's attempt to present a unity of culture by privileging “primordial images of ancient Celtic mythology which predated all subsequent historical divisions into different religious (Catholic/Protestant) or political (Nationalist/Unionist) beliefs.”¹ Modernism, on the other hand, is associated with Joyce and Beckett's denial of “the possibility of sustaining a continuous link between past and present,” and “is essentially a ‘critical’ movement in the philosophical sense of questioning the very notion of origins” (T, 12). Thus the modernist rejects unifying images: “The modes of communication are more significant than the message communicated, since there no longer exists any inherited reservoir of meaning which can be taken for granted. Not surprisingly then, the very notion of culture as a transmission of collective experience is itself at issue” (T, 13). Contemporary texts, Kearney notes, attracted at times to both arguments, gravitate between these opposite poles.

Kearney's thoughtful and rich analysis is based on his perception of Irish culture “as a complex web of interweaving narratives which refuse the facility of an homogeneous totality” (T, 17). He approves inclusive work which embraces different religious and political views and disapproves the ideological and particular. The study lends itself to generalizations about contemporary Irish narrative. I am interested in the extent to which it applies to Irish women poets and propose to examine this relevance by analyzing the poetry of Eavan Boland—a poet who frequently speaks of the intersections of womanhood and Irish nationalism—through the lens of Kearney's conclusions about Joyce and modernism.

Speaking of several modern writers, but particularly of Joyce, Kearney suggests three closely related points: 1) the refusal to acknowledge a continuous tradition of literary experience based on a continuous, homogenous heritage; 2) the dominance of language as the site of meaning; and 3) the multipossibilities of myth. In regard to literary and cultural traditions, Kearney notes that Joyce “was no less sceptical of the allurements of imperial British culture than he was of national Irish culture. This resistance to all forms of cultural hegemony was best expressed at the level of language” (T, 32). Kearney cites the incident of Stephen Dedalus's recognition of his alien status in the English language as evidence of Joyce's awareness of the revealing and concealing tendencies of language.² Joyce “worked inside the language as an outsider, forever mindful of the confusions, ambiguities and discontinuities which this language of Empire—like most hegemonic languages of the European nation-states—sought to conceal in order to preserve the veneer of a pure homogeneous identity” (T, 32). Joyce's deconstructive approach to the literary tradition was not motivated solely by postcolonial resentment, however; Joyce believed with his modernist associates that “the real metaphysical problem today is the word” (T, 33). Writing became for him “a sort of linguistic psychoanalysis of the repressed genesis of western culture. In the Wake he proposes to ‘psoakoonaloose’ the multi-voiced unconscious of language” (T, 34).

Moving to myth, Kearney sees Joyce as “one of the first” to oppose “the multi-minded logic of utopian myth to the one-minded logic of ideological myth” (T, 279). Mythology, Kearney notes, “implies a conflict of interpretations. And this conflict is, in the final analysis, an ethical one” (T, 276). Used for ideological purposes, myth excludes and perpetrates a single ideal of nationalism, for example, but myth also has utopian possibilities which allow it to reach beyond the national to universal aspirations. “The positive universality of myth—which enables it to migrate beyond national boundaries and translate into other cultures—resides, paradoxically, in its very multiplicity. … A postmodern approach to myth construes it as a two-way traffic between tradition and modernity, rewriting the old as a project of the new” (T, 278). Joyce, “in defiance of chauvinistic stereotypes of the motherland … reinterpreted the ancient Celtic heroine, Anna, as Anna Livia Plurabelle—the ‘Everliving Bringer of Plurabilities’” (T, 279).

Kearney's use of the work of postmodernist critics to examine Joyce's linguistic play is appropriate, as the following introduction to the texts of four renowned postmodernists, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, shows: “They force the reader to consider them as objects in their own right. They are designed to prevent the reader from looking through them at some external referent; they are designed to make the reader look at them and to work at them, actively involving him in their construction or recreation.”³ Beckett's comment on Joyce, which Kearney quotes approvingly, makes the same point: “his writing is not about something, it is that something” (T, 13).

In her pamphlet, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition, Eavan Boland admires Joyce's ability to deconstruct the myth of mother Ireland in the opening pages of Ulysses, yet I suggest that the postmodernist impulse, with its emphasis on the play of language, is different in kind from Boland's poetic endeavor. Joyce rejects the myth of mother Ireland as simplification and hypocrisy and seeks to uncover the multi and contradictory mothers concealed by the image; Boland rejects it because by its very pervasiveness it excludes actual women and their situations from Irish narratives, and because it substitutes a false relationship between the image in poetry and the imagination.

Women in Irish poems, Boland notes, are “often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status. This was especially true where the woman and the idea of the nation were mixed: where the nation became a woman and the woman took on a national posture. … Dark Rosaleen. Cathleen Ni Houlihan.”⁴ Even after Irish poets “rejected the politics of nationalism, they continued to deploy the emblems and enchantments of its culture” (KS, 13). The result of seeing women through myths of Ireland, as Boland shows through her analysis of Francis Ledwidge's “The Blackbirds” and Patrick Kavanagh's “Pygmalion,” is the exclusion of the realities of women.⁵ “The wrath and grief of Irish history seemed to me—as it did to many—one of our true possessions. Women were part of that wrath, had endured that grief. It seemed to me a species of human insult that at the end of all, in certain Irish poems, they should become elements of style rather than aspects of truth” (KS, 12). She continues, “something was gained by poems which used the imagery and emblem of the national muse … but only at an aesthetic level. While what was lost occurred at the deepest, most ethical level; and what was lost was what I valued. Not just the details of a past. Not just the hungers, the angers. These, however terrible, remain local. But the truth these details witness—human truths of survival and humiliation—these also were suppressed along with the details. Gone was the suggestion of any complicated human suffering. Instead, you had the hollow victories, the passive images, the rhyming queens” (KS, 13). Later she notes that these simplifications produced “a geological weakness” in Irish poetry. “All good poetry depends on an ethical relation between imagination and image. Images are not ornaments; they are truths” (KS, 23). Boland's insistence on this ethical relationship between the image of poetry and the imagination differs from postmodernism's involvement with language: although it is never simple, Boland's poetry directs the reader outward, toward the object of the imagination, not inward, toward linguistic ambiguity and contradiction. I shall return to this point at the end of this essay.

For Joyce and Beckett, Kearney notes, “It is not what one writes about that is of primary importance but the process of writing itself” (T, 13). In this process, Joyce attempts to reach the “repressed genesis of western culture” (T, 34). For Joyce, then, the language itself carries the trace of the buried, of what has been concealed in order to promote cultural hegemony. Through psychoanalysis of the “nightmare of history,” he hopes to recover the repressed. This is not Boland's enterprise. Although women's experiences have been partially expressed by male poets, she notes:

It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain to men who are poets—writing as they are with centuries of expression behind them—how emblematic is the unexpressed life of other women to the woman poet, how intimately it is her own. And how, in many ways that silence is as much part of her tradition as the Troubadours are of theirs.⁶

Boland cannot play with or psychoanalyze language in an attempt to uncover women's experience because this experience has never been part of the written narrative. Thus Boland's project is by nature different from that of Joyce and the postmoderns: as she notes in “It's a Woman's World,” “as far as history goes / we were never / on the scene of the crime.”⁷

For many years now, Boland has called attention to the absence of women from Irish poetry and to the impossibility of breaking that past silence, of recovering that lost history. In the title poem in the 1986 volume, The Journey, Sappho conducts the persona, here as often a poet/mother/housewife, on a journey to the underworld, where “children of the plague” suckle weary women, while others make “terrible pietas.” Sappho warns the watcher not to “define these women by their work,” for

“… these are women who went out like you
when dusk became a dark sweet with leaves,
recovering the day, stooping, picking up
teddy bears and rag dolls and tricycles and buckets—
“love's archaeology—and they too like you
stood boot deep in flowers once in summer
or saw winter come in with a single magpie
in a caul of haws, a solo harlequin.”

Unable to reach the women across “the narcotic crossing,” the persona begs Sappho to let her “be their witness.” But their experiences, Sappho warns, are “beyond speech, / beyond song, only not beyond love.”⁸ They are unrecoverable because they have never been recorded, have never entered the unconscious of language. Sappho, the mother poet, wishes her daughter to “know forever”—and honor—“the silences in which are our beginnings, / in which we have an origin like water.” The male poet may plumb the language to release the submerged, subversive bodies, the “hitherto concealed, possibilities” (T, 272), but the woman poet exploring the same heritage finds no evidence of her existence.

Believing that silence is part of her tradition, Boland attempts to find ways to reveal this silence. Fever, a word whose etymology is obscure, is linked in the poem of that title to an unseen power which authorities feared in women, a power which provoked irrational acts of injustice against them. Fever

is what they tried to shake out of
the crush and dimple of cotton,
the shy dust of a bridal skirt;
is what they beat, hurt, lashed like
flesh as if it were a lack of virtue
in a young girl sobbing her heart out
in a small town for having been seen
kissing by the river; is what they burned
alive in their own back gardens
as if it were a witch.

(OH, 87)

The persona's grandmother died in a fever ward, the poem notes, leaving only “a half-sense of half-lives.” Nothing else, unless:

I reconstruct the soaked-through midnights;
brokenhearted vigils; the histories I never learned
to predict the lyric of; and reconstruct
risk: as if silence could become rage,
as if what we lost is a contagion
that breaks out in what cannot be
shaken out from words or beaten out
from meaning and survives to weaken
what is given, what is certain
and burns away everything but this
exact moment of delirium when
someone cries out someone's name.

(OH, 87-88)

If the stories were recoverable, the poem hints, they would weaken the “given” story, the accepted histories (and nationalist literary canons). But the effort to recreate women's experiences is also linked to the irrational attempts to beat the elusive power out of women throughout centuries. The stories cannot be retrieved because they were never written: “no page / scores the low music / of our outrage” (“It's a Woman's World,” Night Feed, 52). The silence cannot become rage: today's writers can no more beat the unwritten stories they seek from the past than could yesterday's authorities beat the “fever” they feared from women's bodies.

Throughout her work Boland continues to “unveil the silence” of women's lives.⁹ Ironically, while she suggests that writers cannot reconstruct the stories, hopes, ideas of past women, her work also implies—in contrast to that studied by Kearney—that women share a collective past which the poet can evoke—the experience of loss. The experience is invoked, not in the interest of revivalism, but to expose and destroy its persistence in the present. In the most recent volume, Outside History, “The Photograph on My Father's Desk” and “What We Lost” uncover the silence of the persona's mother and grandmother. Wound becomes an appropriate metaphor in this volume for the silence of women: as the poet writes in “The Making of an Irish Goddess,” “Myth is the wound we leave / in the time we have” (OH, 39).

If postmodern means beating or coaxing repressed meanings from language, Boland—whose major subject is contemporary women's lives and the loss of women's history—could not be classed as such. But Boland also interrogates the myths that pattern women's lives. In “Tirade for the Mimic Muse,” she tracks down the muse who deceives poets into accepting the faded images of traditional myths: the Muse of Mimic Art, the “fat trout,” “fumed in candle-stink,” who uses all the “latest tricks” of makeup but can't disguise the “dead millennium” in her eyes. “Trout” recalls the “silver trout” of “Song of Wandering Aengus,” Yeats's tribute to the god of love and to the pursuit of romantic love:

With what drums and dances, what deceits,
Rituals and flatteries of war,
Chants and pipes and witless empty rites
And war-like men
And wet-eyed patient women
You did protect yourself from horrors.

(In Her Own Image, 31, 32)

The muse protects herself (and by extension the poet and readers) from the aging of women, the drudgery of domestic routine, the sorrow of “beaten women,” the “crime of babies battered,” and all the sorrow that hides “behind suburb walls,” by focusing on traditional images of active warriors and passive women. Ignoring realities that should appear in literature, the muse insists—much as would Aengus, god of love—that women “needed nothing else to know / But love and again love and again love.” The “trout,” the traditional male and female images, and the muse's advice to the young woman all suggest that those who follow the Muse of Mimic Art attempt to follow the early Yeats, to see and depict the world as did the obvious model, the famous Irish poet.

The authentic muse, however, is difficult to reach. Watching a woman tending her child, her busy, cleaning hand “making light and rain, / smiles and a frown” across his face, the persona of “the Muse Mother” reflects:

If I could only decline her—
lost noun
out of context,
stray figure of speech—
from this rainy street
again to her roots,
she might teach me
a new language:
to be a sibyl,
able to sing the past
in pure syllables,
limning hymns sung
to belly wheat or a woman
able to speak at last
my mother tongue.

(OH, 134-35)

The 1982 volume, Night Feed, focuses on the extraordinary side of the lives of ordinary women, as if the Muse mother had responded to the poet's call. Indeed, Boland turned to suburbia as early as her second volume, The War Horse (1975), as she courageously mined the battleground inhabited by many women, ignored or ridiculed by many poets. One thinks of Eliot's satire of suburban women in “Prufrock,” for example. Boland frequently remarks the “restrictive programme” of Irish poetry, nurtured presumably on traditional subjects: “You could have a political murder in the Irish poem but not a baby. You could have the Dublin hills but not the suburbs.”¹⁰ Contemporary poets do not castigate suburbia in Eliot's manner, but they ignore it entirely, believing perhaps that nothing of interest could dwell there, or subordinate it to the public life.

Discussing Pat Murphy's film Maeve in Transitions, Kearney notes that “the solution [to the problem of identity in Northern Ireland] lies not in some escapist return to the haven of family domesticity—for this would simply be to reinforce the traditional gender stereotypes which oppose the public world of male action to the private world of female passivity” (T, 188). Although Kearney's oppositions are accurate in the context of Maeve, I question the assumptions that underlie them as well as the selection of Maeve. The easy traditional opposition begs for analysis. If the domestic is dismissed as passive, uninteresting, the majority of women's lives are so defined and dismissed. The assumption here is that domestic lives consist only of the routines and pettiness of domestic labor. Kearney neither sees the violence of the domestic world which Boland exposes in poems such as “Suburban Woman” and “In Her Own Image,” nor comprehends the imaginative and intellectual reaches of the inhabitants of this world as Boland reveals them in many poems, including “In the Garden,” “We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History.” Limiting domestic to passive, he falls into the trap Sappho warned of and defines the lives of women by their work.

The choice of Maeve as the single work by a woman in a study of twelve writers also invites questions.¹¹ The self-reflexive nature of Maeve aligns it with postmodernist works, but self-reflexive is the norm rather than the exception today. Is Kearney comfortable with Maeve because the discussion here is of the public (male? universal?) world? I am not suggesting that Kearney approves of that world; indeed he praises Maeve's resolve “to liberate Republicanism from its male-dominated mythology” (T, 188). I am reminded, however, of Frank O'Connor's 1963 argument that men rather than women are the authors of Irish Renaissance literature because politics is the material of literature. The Irishman, O'Connor continued, is lost in Mary Lavin's work because the revolution “practically disappears” to be replaced by a “sensual richness” quite foreign to him.¹² Kearney selects Seamus Heaney as contemporary poet, he tells us, rather than “Mahon, Montague, Longley and Kinsella,” or “Durcan and Bolger” (T, 101). Why not consider Eithne Strong, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanaín, Boland, or Medbh McGuckian? Whether by accident or choice Kearney in selecting Maeve continues the tradition that celebrates the public and dismisses the private—ironic in a writer who lauds Joyce's celebration of Molly and Anna Livia as “Bringers of plurabilities” (T, 40).

As she explores and reveals contemporary suburbia, Boland also exposes dangers in traditional interpretations of the myths of Ceres and Persephone and Daphne and Apollo. These myths of loss evoke women's collective experience of the lost past, but Boland also uses them to warn of continued loss if contemporary women's lives, so many lived in suburbia, are deemed unworthy of narrative. Boland is more suspicious of myth than is Joyce. Rather than uncovering liberating possibilities, she discloses confining restrictions. Ceres is introduced in the early poem, “Suburban Woman.” The goddess who loses her daughter Persephone to Pluto the god of the underworld, Ceres punishes with sterility the earth which has closed over her daughter. But when Zeus, in response to her plea, forces Pluto to restore Persephone to Ceres for half of each year, she withdraws her curse and the earth is fruitful for the duration of Persephone's visit. Ceres appears in “Suburban Woman” as poet whose sacrifice of her life as poet is weighed against the advent of her daughter:

The chairs dusted and the morning
coffee break behind, she starts pawning
her day again to the curtains, the red
carpets, the stair rods, at last to the bed,
the unmade bed where once in an underworld
of limbs, her eyes freckling the night like jewelled
lights on a cave wall, she, crying, stilled,
bargained out of nothingness her child,
bartered from the dark her only daughter.
Waking, her cheeks dried, to a brighter
dawn she sensed in her as in April earth
a seed, a life ransoming her death.

(The War Horse, 28-29)

The emphasis here is not on the blessings of fruitfulness produced by Ceres' compromise, but on the sacrifice of Ceres, on woman's surrender of her talent, of her individuality, to promote the general welfare. The day's work over, poet and mother meet, “veterans of a defeat / no truce will heal.”

“Night Feed” shows Ceres in another mood:

This is dawn.
Believe me
This is your season, little daughter.
…
I tiptoe in.
I lift you up
Wriggling
In your rosy, zipped sleeper.
Yes, this is the hour
For the early bird and me
When finder is keeper.
I crook the bottle.
How you suckle!
This is the best I can be,
Housewife
To this nursery
Where you hold on,
Dear life.

(OH, 139)

As the child ends the feed, day breaks, and the persona notes, “we begin / The long fall from grace.” The light of day is associated with the light of reason, and the mother's response to her child is seen here as instinctive and positive. Instinct is also celebrated as “brute grace” in “In the Garden”; in “Monotony,” however, “brute routines” are contrasted to “our gleams,” illustrating the complex, contradictory responses of women to motherhood, and of all human beings to the routines of nature. The self-reflexive nature of many of the poems in Night Feed illustrates the constant interaction of thought and instinct. The persona is never an unquestioning advocate of domesticity or traditional motherhood, but a woman who finds in the basic patterns of life material for philosophical reflection.

The Ceres myth reappears to be rejected in the most recent volume, Outside History, in “The Making of an Irish Goddess.” Ceres went to hell unchanged, forever young, but the contemporary woman asserts,

But I need time—
my flesh and that history—
to make the same descent.

(OH, 38)

In the woman's face and body, the persona reads the signs of time, the evidence of what she has been, of her history. To reject and devalue these signs is to reject one's history, to place value on only one portion, youth, of a woman's life. The lines quoted earlier from this poem, “Myth is the wound we leave / in the time we have,” act as a sharp reminder that contemporary women's lives are—like those of their mothers—in danger of being lost, becoming wound, if women accept traditional mythic and literary concepts of female value and of domesticity.

Focusing on Ceres herself rather than on the results of Ceres' compromise, Boland presents a more complex and less positive aspect of the myth. Daphne—changed into a laurel tree by her father, the river god Peneus, to escape the pursuit and love of Apollo—is also a myth of loss of self and history, as the woman is transformed into the unchanging, ever-green laurel. Daphne becomes for Boland an image of the routines of housework, the housewife as remote sexually as the nymph. In “Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark,” the persona/housewife offers advice, so that her sister “in the next myth / will be wiser.” “The opposite of passion / is not virtue / but routine,” she warns and encourages her sister to go for the exotic, the strange, the passionate: “Save face sister. / Fall. Stumble. / Rut with him.” Those who take chances will have memories, or imaginative life, but those who do not “shall be here forever, / setting out the tea” (OH, 128-29).

While the Daphne myth is an obvious and appropriate myth of loss, Boland's use also highlights Yeats's approval of Daphne as model in his poem “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Delineating the ideal woman, Yeats prays:

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.(13)

Yeats is reacting to what he sees as the inappropriate political and public behavior of Maud Gonne, but his allusion to Daphne's rootedness, her captivity, his wish for his daughter as married woman, is shocking. “Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God” (OH, 41-42) seems prompted by Yeats's “Prayer.” Boland's four-stanza poem establishes no definite connection, but moves by suggestive association. The first stanza places the persona in the garden with another person who tells of “the wedding of a local girl, / long ago, and a merchant from Argyll.” In the second stanza the persona looks to the garden: “The laurel hedge was nothing but itself, / and all of it so free of any need / for nymphs, goddesses, wounded presences.” The third stanza returns to the story: “By the time / I paid attention they were well married: / The bridegroom had his bride on the ship.” In the fourth stanza, the persona and the storyteller clear up; the storyteller goes inside while the persona remains looking at the garden: “freshening and stirring. A suggestion, / behind it all, of darkness: in the shadow, / beside the laurel hedge, its gesture.” The ceremonial nature of the wedding suggests the ceremonial and ritual ordering that Yeats desires. Although physical nature is seen in the second stanza as distinct from and unaffected by human concerns—“nothing but itself,” the “darkness” appears “beside the laurel tree”—Daphne's shadow—at the conclusion of the story of the wedding. Human reason, then, is unable to restrict perception to physical fact, and human perception is molded by an almost unconscious association of the facts of the story with the nonverbalized understanding of a meaning of the myth. Daphne's “horror” arises again as the contemporary persona hears a story remote chronologically from, but somehow frighteningly similar to, that of Daphne.

Boland's revision of myth, then, is quite different from the moderns Kearney discusses: while they unfold new utopian possibilities, she reveals hidden, negative depths. This difference may spring from Boland's idea of history. Like Kearney's writers, she sees that history is a human construct. It is not the sum of human and animal actions, but the human perception and record of these acts, as she notes in “We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History” (OH, 44). The problem is that “we are ourselves constructed by our constructs”—constructs which, for women, include myths of limitation (KS, 19). Boland seems to doubt our ability to free ourselves by reshaping the constructs, and fears instead that human beings are in danger of being trapped by myth, their individuality annihilated beneath its molding pressure. This fear is not groundless, as Yeats's “Prayer” and the continuation of the emblem women in contemporary poetry suggest. As Boland sees it, the shaping mythic force intrudes uninvited, dangerous. In “The Women,” the persona talks of the hour “of metamorphosis,” when she moves from being mother/housewife to poet:

My time of sixth sense and second sight
when in the words I choose, the lines I write,
they rise like visions and appear to me:
women of work, of leisure, of the night,
in stove-coloured silks, in lace, in nothing,
with crewel needles, with books, with wide open legs,
who fled the hot breath of the god pursuing,
who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips
and fell and grieved and healed into myth,
into me in the evening at my desk
testing the water with a sweet quartet, …

(OH, 84)

These lines suggest a causal relationship between the “emblematic nature” of women's unspoken lives, of their loss, and the shaping of the contemporary poet by the stories or myths of the past. The persona understands those lost lives because she and the life she lives is the fruit of their loss. The women have healed into her, as a new language heals “into a passable imitation / of what went before” (“Mise Eire,” The Journey, 72). Although the poet calls up the images deliberately, and can retreat from them to the world of order, “light, linear, precisely planned, / a hemisphere of tiered, aired cotton,” she cannot cut herself off completely. As she moves between the two worlds, she brings something with her that she “should have left behind.”

In “Suburban Woman: A Detail,” mythic pressure lies in wait, hidden, threatening and transforming the individual. Leaving her house in the evening, the woman notes:

I am definite
to start with
but the light is lessening,
the hedge losing its detail,
the path its edge.
Look at me, says the tree.
I was a woman once like you,
full-skirted, human.
Suddenly I am not certain
of the way I came
or the way I will return,
only that something
which may be nothing
more than darkness has begun
softening the definitions of my body, leaving
the fears
and all the terrors of the flesh,
shifting the airs and forms
of the autumn quiet,
crying “remember us.”

(OH, 99)

To sum up: Boland—unlike Joyce—rejects myths because they offer women only limitations, and because they threaten to obscure consciousness and conscious choice. There are two possible avenues, she suggests, myth or history; we cannot have both. “Out of myth into history I move to be,” she notes, as she chooses existence, becoming rather than the stasis of myth. A second difference is her belief in her ability to evoke women's collective experience of loss, the “unexpressed life of other women” (KS, 44). Finally, by bringing to poetry the contemporary experience of real women—their intellectual and philosophical reflections as well as their actions, emotions, and instinctive responses—Boland illustrates their richness and variety. To neglect or dismiss suburbia because of the routine dullness of domestic tasks is to see women as synonymous with the tasks. This attitude is satirized in “It's Woman's World.” “Appearances reassure” the viewer that:

that woman there,
craned to
the starry mystery,
is merely getting a breath
of evening air.
While this one here,
her mouth a burning plume—
she's no fire-eater,
just my frosty neighbour
coming home.

(Night Feed, 52)

Whether she writes of the women of the past or of the present, this is Boland's point: it is not just the record of women's work that is lost, it is the record of their lives, thoughts, reflections, fears. This is “What We Lost.” And this is what we will continue to lose if we are foolish enough to “define these women by their work”; to celebrate only women's achievements in the “public” world, to believe that action alone defines life. An Irish woman who “could not easily do without the idea of a nation” (KS, 8), Boland valorizes the hitherto excluded and helps to transform Irish poetry from a set of “predictable component parts” into “a changing interior space” (“Symposium,” 9).¹⁴ Now it's time for critics to catch up and to introduce gender, not just token women, as a site of critical analysis.

I would like to conclude by referring to “The Achill Woman,” a poem which underscores the need for an ethical relationship between image and imagination, and one which has been misread. The student narrator of the poem describes a woman carrying a bucket of water up the hill, wearing “a half-buttoned, wool cardigan, / a tea-towel round her waist.” The woman puts her bucket down; its “zinc-music … tuned the evening” into a series of conventional poetic images. The persona is “all talk, raw from college,” the evening cools, the woman goes back down the hill, and the persona turns to “the set text / of the Court poets of the Silver Age.” The conclusion of the poem is heavy with regret:

but nothing now can change the way I went
indoors, chilled by the wind
and made a fire
and took down my book
and opened it and failed to comprehend
the harmonies of servitude,
the grace music gives to flattery
and language borrows from ambition—
and how I fell asleep
oblivious to
the planets clouding over in the skies,
the slow decline of the spring moon,
the songs crying out their ironies.

(OH, 35-36)

Like the persona in the poem, Boland vacationed in Achill while at college and talked each night with a local woman. This woman on Achill, Boland notes, was the first person to speak to her about the famine. “She kept repeating to me that they were great people, the people in the famine. Great people. I had never heard that before” (KS, 5). Through the years the woman's image remained with Boland, and while she could not articulate the experience at the time, she realized that “the anguish and power of that woman's gesture on Achill, with its suggestive hinterland of pain, was not something I could predict or rely on in Irish poetry” (KS, 7). Appropriately, “The Achill Woman” is the first poem in Outside History, a sequence which takes us from the “False Spring” of a young poet's career, through her recognition that myth and superstition entail limitation and loss of history for women, to her rejection of myth for history. Trained on the poetry of the past, the young poet is trained to perceive certain images and stories as poetic, others as ordinary and nonpoetic. Human perception, as noted earlier, is shaped not only by acts, but by the words of stories and poets. This is where the tone of regret enters the poem: the poet turned from her real experience with the Achill woman to accounts of experience foreign to her own. She sought poetry not in the actual world of anguish and sorrow but in the world of artifice, from whence she might hope to write “derivative, formalist, gesturing poems,” works inspired by the Muse of Mimic Art (KS, 10).

Ignoring Boland's insistence on “The Achill Woman” as the first poem of a sequence, Edna Longley suggests that Boland “feels unnecessarily guilty for (as an apprentice poet) having read ‘English court poetry’ on Achill, and having imitated the English ‘Movement’ mode of the early sixties.” “To whom,” Longley asks, “to what avatar, to what icon is she apologizing?” She answers, “it is to Mother Ireland herself.” Longley further argues that “Boland's new Muse, supposedly based on the varied historical experience of Irish women, looks remarkably like the Sean Bhean Bhocht. … The ‘real women of an actual past,’” she accuses, “are subsumed into a single emblematic victim-figure.”¹⁵ It is inaccurate to suggest that the nationality alone of the poets prompted Boland's apology—it is her own conditioning she regrets, her own training which causes her to look to conventions of the past rather than to the actual figure of the woman; Boland is in fact condemning the young poet she was for “wasting / his [her] sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious / emblem instead of the real thing” (The Journey, 87).

It is true that Boland does not allow the figure of the Achill Woman to speak in her poem. To do so would have been easy, but inaccurate and a contradiction of the argument, the self-condemnation of the poem. The ethical relationship of image to experience demands this representation. Indeed, it is instructive to compare “The Achill Woman” with Yeats's “The Fisherman.” Yeats's fisherman,

The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,

is not distinct from, but ironically, has no counterpart in, nature. He is “A man who does not exist, / A man who is but a dream” (Yeats, 61-62). Yeats's image corresponds to a mental composition, created in opposition to, not in harmony with, the reality around him. Yeats castigates those who do not appreciate his poetry; Boland castigates herself for not appreciating the woman's world. Just as Boland refused in earlier poems to give voice to the silent, to allow “silence … [to] become rage,” she refuses to give voice to the Achill woman. The silence of women of the past in history is an “aspect” of their truth, and the silence of the Achill woman is the truth of the young “gesturing” poet's response; to presume to break this silence is an insult, not unlike the earlier “human insult” of silencing them by making them “elements of style rather than aspects of truth” (KS, 12). Here we have a difference from both Yeats and the modern poets: while Yeats would present a tradition, largely self-created, as a unifying concept, and Joyce and Beckett would reject such a concept, immersing themselves instead in the indeterminate play of signifiers, one suggesting multimeanings, one suggesting none, Boland still believes in a relationship between image and experience that the ethical poet must not distort or defer.

Notes

1. Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 25; hereafter T, with page references cited in the text.

2. See James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 189.

3. Eve Tavor Bannet, “Introduction,” in Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 8.

4. Eavan Boland, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (Dublin: Attic Press, 1989), 12, 13; hereafter KS, with page references cited in the text.

5. Eavan Boland, “The Woman Poet in a National Tradition,” Studies 6 (Summer 1987): 148-58.

6. Eavan Boland, “The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma,” Midland Review 3 (Winter 1986): 44.

7. Eavan Boland: Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), 51. This selection features poems from five volumes: New Territory (1967), The War Horse (1975), In Her Own Image (1980), Night Feed (1982), and The Journey (1986). Hereafter, poems from these volumes will be cited in the text by volume title, with page references to Selected Poems.

8. Eavan Boland, Outside History (New York: Norton, 1990), 95, 96. This edition features poems from three volumes: Outside History (1990), The Journey (1986), and Night Feed (1982, listed as Domestic Interiors). Hereafter, poems from this edition will be cited as OH, with page references to this 1990 edition.

9. Nancy Kelleher, a student in my “Irish Revolutionary Literature” class, University of Arizona, Fall 1992, coined this phrase for Boland's endeavor.

10. “Eavan Boland at the Symposium,” James Joyce Newestlatter (November 1992), 8; hereafter “Symposium,” with page references cited in the text.

11. Kearney devotes six of 282 pages of text to an analysis of Maeve, plus a little over one page to a concluding analysis of Maeve and Neil Jordan's Angel.

12. Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1963), 203-4.

13. Selected Poems and Three Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthal, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 91; hereafter Yeats, with page references cited in the text.

14. Marilyn Reizbaum speaks of Boland's “valorizing” that which has been excluded in “Canonical Double Cross,” in Decolonizing Tradition, ed. Karen R. Lawrence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

15. Edna Longley, From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands (Dublin: Attic Press, 1990), 17.