SOURCE: Sullivan, Nell. “Righting Irish Poetry: Eavan Boland's Revisionary Struggle.” Colby Quarterly 23, no. 4 (December 1997): 334-48.

My muse must be better than those of men
who made theirs in the image of their myth.

—Boland, “Envoi”

Traditionally, the envoi sends the poet's work out into the world with modest hopes, anxious disclaimers, and humble apologies. But in her poem “Envoi” from Outside History, Evan Boland unabashedly announces her agenda: “My muse must be better than those of men / who made theirs in the image of their myth.” She must exceed the male poetics of Ireland to correct the mythology inherited from the male tradition because its dangerous appropriation of the female image estranges women from their own bodies and abets the exclusion of women's experience from both literature and history. Discussing her dilemma as an Irish woman poet, Boland states that given a tradition that depicts women as merely “passive, decorative,” or “emblematic,” “it seemed to me that I was likely to remain an outsider in my own national literature, cut off from its archives, at a distance from its energy. Unless, that is, I could repossess it” (Am. Poetry Rev. 32-33).¹ In order to “repossess” Irish poetry for dispossessed women, Boland engages in what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call a “revisionary struggle” with the myths of the male tradition (Madwoman 49), speaking from both the female body and female experience to authorize her own creativity.

Boland first articulated her nascent suspicion of the male tradition in the collection In Her Own Image, published in the United States within the volume Introducing Eavan Boland. The title of In Her Own Image suggests Boland's usurpation of the Romantics' prerogative of God-like creation. In the poem “Making Up,” Boland toys in particular with the Coleridgian notion of the infinite I-am, the God-like imagination. The poem plays with the connotations of the phrase “making up,” for as Boland's speaker describes her toilette, she makes it clear as she “raddles” and “prinks” that she is also talking about the “making up” of poetic truths:

I look
in the glass.
My face is made,
it says:
Take nothing, nothing
at its face value
…
it's a trick.
Myths
are made by men.

(ll. 29-40)

Boland's speaker implicitly critiques the male versions of femininity (inscribed in the poem as “thigh and buttock / that they prayed to”) by creating a “false” version of herself in a morning ritual, by redefining the lines of her face with cosmetics in the image of ideal women who have been themselves defined in the lines of poetry “made by men.” At the end of the poem, the speaker seizes the symbolic tools of artifice: “Mine are the rouge pots / … out of which / I dawn” (ll. 53-59). This gesture is ambivalent, however, since the tools of creativity she seizes are used to inscribe “made up” (that is, false) versions of womanhood.²

In “Tirade for the Mimic Muse” from the same collection, Boland comes closer to finding a poetry free from masculine inscriptions of femininity. Here, Boland's speaker rebukes the muse erroneously adopted by some women poets (even the very young Boland), the muse that encourages women to “mimic” male poetry and thus leads them astray. For women poets, this muse is “Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse— / Our muse of mimic art” (ll. 9-10). She is a traitor to her sex, a whore luxuriating in (and spawned by) male myths. But if it is “before the glass” that Boland's speaker recognizes the dangerous lies of traditional poetry in “Making Up,” it is also before a mirror, ironically, that Boland's speaker will show the “mimic muse” the treachery of her failure to reproduce faithfully the truth of women's experience:

I will wake you from your sluttish sleep.
I will show you true reflections, terrors.
You are the Muse of all our mirrors.
Look in them and weep.

(ll. 57-60)

Reforming this fallen muse becomes Boland's first step in her search for the “better muse” she later invokes in “Envoi.”

The rage that pervades In Her Own Image is quieted in Boland's later poetry collected in Outside History. As Patricia Hagen and Thomas Zelman note, Boland moves from the belligerent “announcement” of In Her Own Image to an active “inauguration” of “her own aesthetic, one that bears witness” in her later poetry (449). This inauguration, however, requires her acknowledgment of her previous unconscious complicity with the mimic muse. In the confessional “The Achill Woman,” for example, Boland admits her own failure to recognize “true reflections.” The poem recounts an encounter the young Boland had with a serving woman in Achill, an encounter whose significance became clear only years later. According to Boland, “When I met the Achill woman I was already a poet, I thought of myself as a poet. Yet nothing that I understood about poetry enabled me to understand her better” (Am. Poetry Rev. 33). Under the tutelage of the mimic muse, the young Boland fails to comprehend the implications of the woman's servitude, for Boland is immersed in the study of her male precursors:

And she was nearly finished for the day.
And I was all talk, raw from college—
weekending at a friend's cottage
with one suitcase and the set text
of the Court poets of the Silver Age.

(ll. 14-18)

Boland and the woman part with the growing chill of evening, and Boland begins to study the verses commended to her by the canonical curriculum of her college. Yet she “fail[s] to comprehend” both in the existence of the woman and in the lines she reads “harmonies of servitude.” The “raw” Boland does not yet understand that the Court poetry both inscribes and obscures the power structure that oppressed women and helped to defeat the Irish nation, nor does she understand that as a student of those very lines, she is a servant bound by defeat just as surely as the Achill woman is. “The Achill Woman” is Boland's confession of her apprenticeship to the mimic muse, for she falls “asleep,” like the muse of that earlier poem, “oblivious to / … the songs crying out their ironies” (ll. 33-37).

In rejecting the mimic muse (and hence challenging her male precursors), Boland wins her first battle with what Gilbert and Gubar have called “the female affiliation complex”(No Man's Land 168). As Gilbert and Gubar note, Bloom's “anxiety of influence” does not explain female poetics and thus “must give way to a paradigm of ambivalent affiliation, a construct which dramatizes women's intertwined attitudes of anxiety and exuberance about creativity” (170). According to Bloom's paradigm, the male poetic tradition endlessly repeats the Freudian family romance as male poets struggle with their literary fathers for possession of their mother-muse. Since the female poetic tradition is one marked by silences, women poets suffer from an anxiety about their creativity (the “anxiety of authorship,” discussed in Madwoman); instead of engaging in agonistic struggles with literary mothers, then, women poets actively seek these mothers as proof that women can write.³

Boland herself has expressed a desire for a poetic matrilineage, for when she discovered that the predominantly male tradition excluded women's truth, she regretted “the absence of an expressed poetic life” dignifying and authorizing her own (Am. Poetry Rev. 33). In “The Rooms of Other Women Poets” (a title recalling Virginia Woolf's anxiety of authorship in A Room of One's Own), the speaker “wonders” about other women at their writing. She wonders if they reject, as she does, the relegation of women's creative expression to dried flowers arranged on the “rims” of saucers (or other such marginal art) as “a savage, old calligraphy” (l. 8), if they write prolifically instead, “bearing up unmarked, steel-cut foolscap / a whole quire of it” (ll. 13-14). By an act of imagination, Boland creates her mothers and sisters, affirming by the end of the poem that she is not alone: “Somewhere you are writing or have written in / a room you came to as I come to this” (ll. 19-20).

In Outside History's “The Journey,” Boland chooses to affiliate with Sappho, an historical (rather than imaginary) literary mother. Even given the historical distance of some 2500 years, this choice is appropriate. As Gilbert and Gubar note, “female genealogy does not have an inexorable logic because the literary matrilineage has been repeatedly erased, obscured, or fragmented” (No Man's Land 199). Perhaps in choosing Sappho as her guide to the underworld in “The Journey,” Boland recalls Sappho as a symbol of the silencing of women's writing throughout history, for Sappho's poems have only been handed down to modernity in fragmented form; some of them were recovered when archaeologists discovered them written on strips of papyrus gracing the remains of mummified bodies in Egypt (Wilkie and Hurt 574). The silence enshrouding her writing enables Sappho to reveal to Boland's pilgrim the “real terrors” Boland herself shows the mimic muse of In Her Own Image.

In writing “The Journey,” Boland wanted to “invert” the male tradition (Klauke 61), purposely using the mythic journey to the underworld that has come to us via the literary patriarchs Homer, Virgil, and Dante. In all three of the male journeys, men seek the wisdom of other men: Odysseus seeks Teiresias, Aeneas seeks his father Anchises, and Dante seeks Virgil as the personification of Reason itself. Tellingly, Sappho has no place in the literary lineage Dante forges for himself in Inferno, an exclusive group called the “Six Intelligences.” In “The Journey,” Boland creates an alternative to the patriarchal line of descent for truth and wisdom by inserting women's experience, as she says, “in one of the elite conventions of poetry which had turned its back on experience of that sort” (Reizbaum 473). As Alicia Ostriker has argued, women poets who opt to use myths must alter them “by female knowledge of female experience, so that they [myths] can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy. … They are retrieved images of what women have collectively and historically suffered” (Ostriker 318): Before the pilgrim Boland falls asleep in the poem, she bemoans the fact that “somewhere a poet is wasting / his sweet uncluttered meters on the obvious / emblem instead of the real thing” (ll. 7-9, emphasis mine). Boland's choice of pronouns shows it is a male poet who thus misses the truth, but Boland's journey reclaims the truth of women's suffering by pulling to the center that which traditional (male) poetry marginalizes or simply dismisses as “private.” In this poem, Boland seeks wisdom not only from women, but in the silences of women, specifically of mothers.

According to Boland, the genesis of “The Journey” was the experience of nearly losing her own infant daughter to meningitis. After the ordeal, she felt moved to voice the pain of mothers who had not been spared such terrible losses (Houston MFA, March 1991). At first it may seem unclear why Boland chooses Sappho, who wrote sensual love lyrics, to guide her to the underworld of bereaved mothers. But the poem the pilgrim Boland is reading before she dozes is “Aphrodite comforts Sappho in her love's duress,” a poem that proves Sappho is also a poet of inconsolable loss. Her lyrics often entail an elision of maternal and sexual love in a prototype of Adrienne Rich's “lesbian continuum” in which diverse kinds of love forge “woman-identification” (Rich 159). In Boland's poem, the pilgrim is “calm and unsurprised” when Sappho appears beside her: “and I would have known her anywhere / and I would have gone with her anywhere” (ll. 29-30). This moment of spontaneous bonding reveals the reason Sappho is an appropriate guide to the world of grieving mothers: the relationship that the literary mother Sappho shares with the daughter Boland.⁴ In a move akin to Dante's making of himself one of the six immortal poets, Boland has Sappho place her firmly in the literary matrilineage: “there are not many of us; you are dear / and stand beside me as my own daughter” (ll. 84-85). This gesture of inclusion ironically underscores women's exclusion from the patriarchal canon, for Sappho admits, “there are not many of us.”

“The Journey” reiterates the traditional patriarchal silence about the suffering of women with its own poignant silences. Sappho comes to Boland “wordlessly” and Boland's pilgrim follows her “without a word” (ll. 31-32). The dead children, victims of “Cholera, typhus, croup, diptheria,” are “suckling darknesses” and their mothers who hold them create “terrible pietas.” The pilgrim, who has herself been saved from this terrible fate, cannot “reach or speak to them.” She “whispers” her desire to “at least be their witness” in the world above, but her guide insists on the impossibility of breaking this silence: “what you have seen is beyond speech / beyond song, only not beyond love” (ll. 79-80). Finally, the ironic “witnessing of silence” is the purpose of Sappho's journey, for as she tells the pilgrim, “I have brought you here so you will know forever / the silences in which are our beginnings” (ll. 86-87). The tradition with which Boland chooses to align herself, then, is born of the silences in which women have suffered.

Women across all social and historical boundaries are united in maternal suffering and “love's archaeology” in “The Journey.” However, it is particularly the silences about women's suffering in Irish history that prove the most fertile space for Boland's myth-making. For Boland, poetry is “where myth touches history” (Ga. Rev. 104), and in a “defeated” history such as Ireland's, the defeated sex is enveloped in the greatest silence. The poet is then much freer to create the myths that explain history, freer to “make up” details (108). Boland, of course, became thoroughly dissatisfied with Irish poetry the way she found it; with its “Cathleen ni Houlihan or the Old Woman of the Roads or Dark Rosaleen,” Irish poetry doubled the defeat of Irish women by refusing to portray them honestly (Am. Poetry Rev. 38, 34). Boland evoked instead the real, suffering women, “the paragons of dispossession” (Ga. Rev. 107), women whom Swift acknowledged, but Yeats did not. To repossess Irish poetry for these dispossessed women, Boland is bound to engage in what Gilbert and Gubar refer to as the “revisionary struggle” with the myths of the male tradition (Madwoman 49).

The Irish poetic tradition, as Boland inherited it, was concerned with “public” issues such as nationalism and politics rather than “private” matters such as the fate of individual women during the famine years. Women's experience everywhere has been relegated to the “private” sphere, and as Iris Marion Young has noted, modern political philosophy exacerbates this split between the feminine/private and the masculine/public by characterizing the difference between public and private as “an opposition between reason, on the one hand, and the body, affectivity and desire on the other” (Young 59). As Alicia Ostriker suggests, myth-making is one alternative available to women writers who, like Boland, want to break down the public-private barrier. Myth has “double power”:

It exists or appears to exist objectively, in the public sphere, and consequently confers on the writer the sort of authority unavailable to someone who writes “merely” of the private self. Myth belongs to “high” culture and is handed “down” through the ages by religious, literary, and educational authority. At the same time, myth is quintessentially intimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire, inexplicable motivation.

(Ostriker 317)

“The Making of an Irish Goddess,” an overtly revisionist poem, calls attention to Boland's conscious effort to make up, in her own image, a mythology that breaks down the rigid distinctions between the “public” history and “private” stories of women's experiences. In fact, Boland makes herself the Irish goddess, revising the myth of Demeter and Persephone to establish a connection between individual moments of universally suffered maternal pain. In the classical myth, Demeter goes to the underworld to retrieve her daughter, whom the rapacious Pluto has abducted. The loss of the child shatters the prelapsarian world where there is “no sense of time” and the “wheat at one height” covers “a seasonless, unscarred earth” (ll. 2, 7, 10). Demeter's grief fragments this timelessness and pristine plenitude into seasons—the cycle of birth, death, rebirth all stemming from a mother's sorrow. To make her own myth, Boland says, “I need time— / my flesh and that history” (ll. 11-12). “That history” refers to Demeter's original sorrowing, but it also looks forward to “that agony” (l. 23) later in the poem, the “private” history of Irish mothers in the time of famine. The famine itself seems to reenact the blight imposed by Demeter's cyclical grieving. Here, however, “the failed harvests” and “the fields rotting to the horizon” become the causes of the grief rather than its effects. Moreover, the descent these famine mothers make to the underworld is one-way, and the despair unconditional:

the children devoured by their mothers
whose souls, they would have said,
went straight to hell,
followed by their own.

(ll. 26-29)

In fact, these mothers, driven by hunger, seem to dispatch their children to hell rather than redeem them from it. Yet, the ambiguity of the pronouns “they” and “their” causes confusion, if not elision, of identity. “They” in line 27 could even refer to an outsider passing judgment on these women, the “they-would-have-said” of a public authority that fails to comprehend that life itself was hell for these women and children. In “The Journey,” the “terrible pietas” seemed to be “shadows” (l. 46), but in “The Making of an Irish Goddess,” Boland insists on the reality of these ironic versions of Demeter: “There is no other way” (l. 30).

In her essay “The Woman the Place the Poet,”⁵ Boland discusses her inspiration for “The Making of an Irish Goddess”: the Clonmel Workhouse where her great-grandfather had been Master. Boland imagined, in the absence of surviving accounts, a history for a Clonmel inmate, “a woman like myself, with two small children” who is destined to “a final and, almost certainly fatal, homelessness” (102). This woman would haunt Boland in the most mundane moments, particularly when she was safe in her Dublin suburb, calling her children home at sunset. In these moments, Boland recalls, she felt an almost mystical connection with that famine-ridden past (105-06). Thus, in “The Making of an Irish Goddess,” the “gesture” of calling in her daughter unites myth and history. The gesture that inscribes the “agony” of motherhood is Boland's:

holding up my hand
sickle-shaped, to my eyes
to pick out
my own daughter from
all the other children in the distance.

(ll. 37-41)

The “sickle-shaped” cupping of her hand recalls Demeter as the goddess of harvests, and the anxious peering through the twilight recalls Demeter's search for Persephone. The poem ends with the recognition of her daughter's “back turned to me,” a milder, transitory version of the loss that the Demeter myth describes and Irish history bears out. In the anxiety of finding her child before nightfall, Boland becomes part of the continuum of irremediable loss and suffering experienced by the “defeated” mothers. Elsewhere Boland has said, “In myth there are healing repetitions” (Ga. Rev. 108), but in “The Making of an Irish Goddess” Boland seems to deny the healing properties of myth: “Myth is the wound we leave / in the time we have” (ll. 31-32). This apparent contradiction resolves when we realize that Boland is invoking once again what Alicia Ostriker calls the “double power” of myth. Women's voices and stories have been consistently silenced and marginalized in historical discourse, but as the inscription of unutterable loss, myth disrupts the fabric of those literal (male) chronicles of “time” by interjecting women's pain (just as Demeter's grief wounds her time with seasons). A wound is, after all, the visible sign of pain; a scar, its artifact. Because, as Ostriker says, myth sanctions the “private,” it serves Boland as a way to leave a visible sign of the unchronicled suffering during the famine. But since myth further serves to voice and thus to externalize suffering in this poem, it also “heals” by diffusing “private” pain in a public ritual.

These defeated Irish mothers form links in the chain that binds Boland herself to the Demeter myth in “The Making of an Irish Goddess.” From the suffering of these women, she devises her own deification. “In my body … in my gestures … must be / an accurate inscription / of that agony” (ll. 14, 18, 21-23). That is, Boland becomes the goddess by embodying the myth, literally giving it a body, her own. Boland needs her “flesh” to make the journey that deifies her (l. 12). “Neither young now nor fertile,” her body bears “the marks of childbirth” and a “stitched, healed blemish a scar” (ll. 15-16, 20). Her body is not that of the eternally beautiful goddesses of classical myths, but the body of an historical female subject who has suffered and still does.

Boland's revision of myth in this poem resembles what Hélène Cixous called “a new resurgent writing” (284), or feminine écriture. According to Cixous, this form of writing allows woman to “carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” and “return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (284). Only by this kind of writing can a woman put herself “into the world and into history” (279). As Jody Allen-Randolph argues, Boland's earlier volume In Her Own Image answers Cixous' call with “a writing practice grounded in female experience, a practice which uses the female body as both vehicle and cipher, as both the site of female knowledge and writing and the interpreter of the knowledge unearthed” (53). However, writing the body is not enough; “I need time,” the would-be Irish Goddess says, “my flesh and that history.” It is by extending the female body and experience diachronically, across time, that Boland fully establishes them in “The Making of an Irish Goddess” and throughout Outside History as bases of authority in her revisionary struggle.

Another implication of Cixous' call to repossess the female body and text is that Gilbert and Gubar's paradigm might be extended to describe the true anxiety women poets feel in relation to their poetic fathers. Far from suffering merely from the pen envy suggested by Gilbert and Gubar's early formulation of “anxiety of authorship,” these daughters must eventually do battle with their poetic fathers for possession of themselves. Male precursors “must be annihilated” not only because male authority undermines a woman poet's faith in her ability to write, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest (No Man's Land 214), but because male appropriation of the imaginary female body seems to violate the woman poet physically, as well. I would suggest that the “revisionary struggle,” especially in the case of Eavan Boland's attempt to “repossess” Irish poetry, is a struggle for self-possession. In an interview with Amy Klauke, Boland insists that a woman poet can be her own muse and, by implication, that a woman can possess herself (58). But this literary self-possession requires the overthrow of the usurping male authority. To repossess the imaginary female body from the Irish tradition, Boland must therefore contend with Yeats. Because he was, according to Boland, the first Irish poet to make “poetry a great construct of reality” (Klauke 58), rewriting Yeats's limiting version of Irish womanhood is a prerequisite for writing women into the Irish tradition.

In 1971, Boland, along with Michael MacLiammoir, co-authored W. B. Yeats and His World, a rather uncritical biography possibly intended for coffee tables and high-school libraries. Boland was still then a dutiful daughter, but over the next twenty years, particularly the ten years between the publication of In Her Own Image and Outside History, her rebellion against her literary father surfaced in her own lyrics. In “Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God,” which is both a revision of and an answer to Yeats's “A Prayer for My Daughter,” Boland directly confronts the specter of Yeats in the Irish tradition. In her poem, Boland rebukes Yeats for the threat he poses to his daughter Anne, whom he manages to delimit in a prayer proclaiming his daughter as a possession to be exchanged with another man. Clearly, Boland, the literary daughter, views the encroachment on the biological daughter as a threat to herself.

As Harold Bloom (among others) has pointed out, baby Anne is merely a pretext for Yeats's poem; the true subject is Maud Gonne (Bloom 326, Perloff 29-33).⁶ Other critics have attempted to redeem the poem as the poignant wish of an anxious father. Douglas Archibald, for example, does a careful reading of Yeats's poem in relation to Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight” (Archibald 1-12), but fails to note one crucial difference—while Coleridge opens up possibilities for his son, Yeats in effect limits them for Anne:

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught
…
An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.

(ll. 17-18, 57-58)

Yeats's poem becomes a prescription for appropriate feminine behavior, with Maud Gonne—thinly veiled as Helen and Aphrodite—as the negative example. By refusing his many marriage proposals, Maud failed to “choose right” (l. 24). The poem thus becomes a celebration of the marriage that Maud refused. By the end of the poem, Yeats has Anne safely married off (although she is still ostensibly asleep in her crib) with a “bridegroom” who brings “her to a house / Where all's accustomed, ceremonious” (ll. 73-74). But as Bloom has noted, Yeats makes himself the bridegroom (Bloom 326), since Anne the daughter is merely a supplément for Maud. This implicitly incestuous possession of the daughter (which Bloom fails to acknowledge as such) is supported by Yeats's casual use of the Daphne myth in the sixth stanza:

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.

Here, Yeats prays for the same transformation for his daughter that Daphne beseeches of her own father. In the myth, Apollo pursues Daphne, who resists his advances. When rape seems imminent, Daphne prays for the assistance of her father Peneus, a river god, who transforms her into a laurel tree. Since Apollo's mind dwells more on the woman lost, he promptly makes the laurel sacred to himself and, as the god of poetry, possesses Daphne by appropriating her transformed body as the emblem of poetry, his domain. As Boland would point out, behind this myth lies the silence of a woman as well as the scene of rape, another confiscation of a woman's body by a man. In Yeats's poem, his desire that Anne be “rooted” in one place is really just the translation of his daughter into the kind of emblem of art that Boland so detests in Irish poetry. Thus Yeats plays the roles of Peneus and Apollo, both father and possessor.

By invoking the Daphne myth, Yeats eroticizes his daughter's body in what Luce Irigaray calls “the double movement of exhibition and chaste retreat” (Irigaray 25-26). Anne, “rooted in one place,” is thus objectified, and throughout the poem Yeats will insist upon her “stillness” as an image. He desires for his daughter “radical innocence,” which, as Douglas Archibald notes, means “rooted”—hence “immobile”—innocence (9). In his lines recalling Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Yeats says, “She can, though every face should scowl, / And every windy quarter howl / Or every bellows burst, be happy still” (ll. 70-72, emphasis mine). It is after the establishment of this happy stillness that the bridegroom (who, like Apollo, is another figure for Yeats in the poem) takes possession of the daughter, who can acquiesce since this chase begins not in terror but “in merriment” (l. 45).

The title of Boland's “Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God” denies the “merriment” of the chase. Boland adopts an eight-line stanza that mimics Yeats's ottava rima, but she dispenses with the rhyme and meter of “custom” and “ceremony.” Boland begins her poem in the deceptively tranquil “early summer,” a setting quite different from Yeats's symbolic storm. The sinister element introduced with the “cutthroat sweetness” of the stephanotis disturbs this peace. The “you” of the poem tells a story very much like the scenario Yeats imagines for Anne, “a story … about the wedding of a local girl, / long ago, and a merchant from Argyll” (ll. 6-8). Hardly enthralled by her male companion's story,⁷ the speaker's thoughts wander to the garden, which she “thought … looked so at ease”:

The laurel hedge was nothing but itself,
and all of it so free of any need
for nymphs, goddesses, wounded presences—
the fleet river daughters who took root
and can be seen in the woods in
unmistakable shapes of weeping.

(ll. 11-16)

As yet unaffected by the tale she is hearing, the speaker thinks of the garden as only “itself” rather than as an emblem. The laurel does not recall to her poetry, nor does she think the garden needs explanatory myth, tellingly figured here as the “wounded presences,” which recall Boland's statement in “The Making of an Irish Goddess”: “Myth is the wound we leave in the time we have.” Of course, Daphne, whose horror the title proclaims, is evoked as “a fleet river-daughter who took root,” yet in this stanza, Boland seems to dismiss the need to voice suffering as she does in “The Making of an Irish Goddess.” If there really is no “need” here for the wounded presences, why does she name them? Boland has adopted nicely a Sapphic strategy of letting her title stand apart from the poem as a sort of gloss on the poem, so that Daphne is always already in the poem even before the male authority describes his version of the Argyll wedding. The invocation of Daphne is crucial to Boland's revision of Yeats, since as Alicia Ostriker suggests, altering myths “by female knowledge of female experience” ensures that these myths “can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy. … They are retrieved images of what women have collectively and historically suffered” (318).

Boland's poem builds a connection between the wounded presence of Daphne in “unmistakable shapes of weeping” and the local girl who is married off in the story within the poem. This unnamed girl becomes—like Daphne, the Irish mothers, and the emblematized Anne Yeats—a “paragon of dispossession”; she doesn't even have a name. Boland begins paying attention to the story only after “they were well married.” “The bridegroom had his bride on the ship” (ll. 17-19, emphasis mine). “Had” suggests not only location, but possession, specifically the threatening corporal possession that Apollo sought of Daphne and perhaps Yeats of Maud Gonne. Certainly, this is a bride with neither voice nor agency, and she is caught up in the “accustomed, ceremonious” (“Prayer” l. 74) as the “well-wishers / took in armfuls, handfuls, from the boats / white roses and threw them on the water” (“Daphne” ll. 22-24).

In fact, the story that Boland listens to does need “wounded presences.” For though the “wounded presences” are absent from this tale of marriage, the garden evokes them after the speaker begins to “pay attention”:

the garden in its last definition,
freshening and stirring. A suggestion,
behind it all, of darkness: in the shadow,
behind the laurel hedge, its gesture.

(ll. 29-32)

Syntactically, the “suggestion” first seems to arise from the garden, but the phrase “behind it all” indicates that the story of the girl's ceremonious dispossession, and not the garden, suggests Daphne and “darkness.” The “gesture” of the laurel is “weeping,” and by restoring the laurel's ability to “gesture”—a form of agency—Boland reembodies the woman behind the myth, returns to Daphne, and all the emblematized women whom she represents, the bodies that have been confiscated from them in life and art.

Moreover, because the title stands apart from the rest of the poem, it may refer just as easily to Boland the listener as to the girl who marries the merchant of Argyll. Obviously, the “you” shares a domestic relationship with the speaker of the poem, for they drink tea and discuss “how / the greenfly needed spraying” (ll. 25-26). And the teller is obviously a male authority like Yeats, invoking another emblematic image of womanhood, this time the blushing bride. Since Boland's speaker is the listener here, perhaps she also “hears with horror” yet another story that fails to represent women as they are. There is a sort of “cutthroat sweetness” about the story similar to the “radical innocence” of Yeats's prayer for his daughter's future. Certainly by the end of the poem, the speaker's mood has darkened as she perceives the “gesture” of the laurel, implicitly the expression of Daphne's horror in the title. With both the title and the final stanza, Boland evinces that which is suppressed in and by the “sweet” traditional view, thereby revising, in effect, the story the male authorities (both Yeats and the unnamed “you”) tell her.

“Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God” therefore shares the same agenda as “Making Up,” “The Journey,” “The Making of an Irish Goddess,” and many other Boland poems: the struggle to move the marginalized experiences of women to the center of poetry, a struggle entailing the revision of both myth and history, and the “repossession” of Irish poetry and the female body. Boland recognizes the formidable nature of her undertaking; the fear of failure she expresses in “Envoi” reveals how much is at stake personally for her. As she says of her muse in “Envoi,”

If she will not bless the ordinary,
if she will not sanctify the common,
then here I am and here I stay and then am I
the most miserable of women.

(ll. 25-28)

Yet her tenacious assertion of “I” in line 27 suggests that in spite of any anxiety, Boland will not retreat. By such a contest with the male tradition, Hélène Cixous says, woman will make “her shattering entry into history” (284). In her revisionary struggle, Boland forges a female voice from the “silences which are our beginnings,” a voice forceful enough to tumble the walls of an official history which has for too long refused women entry.

Notes

1. A version of the essay “Eavan Boland: Outside History” also appears in Boland's Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (123-53). In this collection (published after I completed the present essay), Boland discusses her project at length, within the context of personal, literary, and political history. In “Turning Away,” for example, Boland discusses her retrospective recognition of even the poems she wrote as a teenager as “radical acts” that began a “series of engagements and assessments with the place and the time and the poem” (94). After reading Sylvia Plath's Ariel, a more mature Boland would “see increasingly the stresses and fractures between a poet's life and a woman's. And how—alone, at a heartbroken moment—they might become fatal”(113). However, the recognition of these “fractures” did not oblige her to abandon poetry or its forms, for as she explains in “The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma”:

   Artistic forms are not static. … They are changed, shifted, detonated into deeper patterns only by the sufferings and self-deceptions of those who use them. By this equation, women should break down barriers in poetry in the same way that poetry will break the silence of women.

   (254)

   The “equation” Boland discusses in this passage precisely describes her revisionary struggle in the collection Outside History.

2. In her insightful article on Boland's poetry. Jody Allen-Randolph similarly reads “Making Up” as a critique of “a patriarchal discourse which constructs feminine identity in its own image” (59). Allen-Randolph, however, does not note the ambivalence involved in Boland's choosing cosmetics as a metaphor for female creativity. See “Ecriture Feminine and the Authorship of Self in Eavan Boland's In Her Own Image,” cited below.

3. In “Anxiety, Influence, Tradition, and Subversion in the Poetry of Eavan Boland,” Kerry E. Robertson notes the double nature of the anxiety experienced by Irish women poets who write in English: “First, not only are they forced to write in a language that is in many ways antagonistic to their gender, they also must write in one that is at odds with their national and cultural heritage” (267).

4. Ellen M. Mahon reads Boland's 1987 volume, “The Journey” and Other Poems (in which “The Journey” was originally collected), as a collection of woman-centered poems in which Boland eventually recognizes Sappho as “Mother.” See “Eavan Boland's Journey with the Muse,” cited below.

5. A version of “The Woman the Place the Poet” also appears in Object Lessons (154-74).

6. For a thorough reading of Yeats's attempted appropriation, see Marjorie Perloff's “Between Hatred and Desire: Sexuality and Subterfuge in ‘A Prayer for My Daughter,’” cited below.

7. Here I disagree with Mary Kinzie, who interprets the teller as a commiserating female. According to Kinzie, [the speaker] and the companion who pours the tea are also mentally turning and touching again in the homely anecdote the ageless mystery of money (the merchant) and rapine (the innocent local girl bartered against her future), responding in a subtly womanly way to what Philip Larkin too neatly labeled the ‘religious wounding’ at the wedding night. (12, emphasis mine)

   Although it is true the speaker of the poem recognizes the import of the story, I do not read any sympathy in the teller's version of the wedding; he seems oblivious to the fact that something is amiss in the wedding tale. Further, the teller's action in the final stanza negates the possibility of a “womanly response”: “and you went inside. I / stayed in the heat looking at / the garden” (ll. 27-29). Boland here reasserts the inside/outside dichotomy permeating Outside History. The male authority retreats, tellingly, inside the tradition, while Boland's speaker remains outside. This spatial arrangement underscores the absence of female bonding between the speaker and her companion, an absence further suggested by the speaker's admission in line 18 that she hadn't been paying attention to the tale. See Kinzie, “Meaning in Place: A Moral Essay,” cited below.

Works Cited

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———, and Michael MacLiammoir. W. B. Yeats and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.

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