SOURCE: "The Woman as Icon, the Woman as Poet," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 188-202.

[In the following essay, Henry analyzes the connection between Boland's poetry collection, In a Time of Violence, and her collection of essays, An Origin Like Water, and complains that the two works repeat too many themes and are too focused on Boland herself.]

In what appears to be a bid to be considered the woman Irish poet, Eavan Boland has recently published two volumes of poetry—In a Time of Violence and An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987—and Object Lessons, a collection of essays subtitled "The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time." The poems and essays reveal a powerful intellect at work, though her intelligence can at times seem like calculated shrewdness, especially when we examine the poetry and prose together. These three books allow us to trace Boland's progression as a poet and to evaluate her emergence as a significant literary figure, a spokeswoman for her generation. They are roles that she takes seriously and that, for her, are inextricably linked.

From the beginning, Boland's poetry is historically and politically aware as well as utterly humorless. Despite an evident ambition toward grandeur, her early poems emerge as stilted and pseudo-Yeatsian in rhythm and tenor. However, to loudly criticize Boland's early poetry would be redundant, for she herself dismisses these poems in the preface to An Origin Like Water because they "struggled for skill and avoided risk." She includes these early poems, "with their failures, their awkwardness, because although the connection [of her womanhood with her life as a poet] was often flawed and painful, [that connection] remains central." Although she criticizes these poems, she clearly does not expect us to follow suit. Her inclusion of a substantial number of poems that she considers failures compels us to consider them beside the later poems as stations on her journey toward a more capacious identity and vision. As with Adrienne Rich, one of Boland's obvious models in craft as well as ideology, the early work is exhibited as symptomatic of an undeveloped feminist sensibility in need of re-vision.

In Boland's first collection, New Territory, occasional dramatic monologues appear with more common third-person narratives, allowing the poet to remain outside the poems and to withhold feeling or emotion. We can see everywhere the work of a young poet struggling with form and slavishly imitating Yeats. In the first three quatrains of the sonnet "Yeats in Civil War," one of the strongest poems in the collection, Boland forces several rhymes to achieve her line breaks; the slant rhyme of the final couplet, however, is a sign of formal rebellion, or at least innovation:

     In middle age you exchanged the sandals
     Of a pilgrim for a Norman keep
     In Galway. Civil war started. Vandals
     Sacked your country, made off with your sleep.
 
     Somehow you arranged your escape
     Aboard a spirit ship which every day
     Hoisted sail out of fire and rape.
     On that ship your mind was stowaway.
 
     The sun mounted on a wasted place
     But the wind at every door and turn
     Blew the smell of honey in your face
     Where there was none.
                                   Whatever I may learn
 
     You are its sum, struggling to survive—
     A fantasy of honey your reprieve.

The "reprieve" is not only for the great poet, but also for the reader whose ear is jarred by the ostentatious rhymes.

In Boland's second collection, The War Horse, she becomes more historian than mythologist, and she eases up on her strict rhyme schemes. Unfortunately, most of the weaknesses of the poems in New Territory—especially the stiff cadences and the poet's distance from her subjects—are carried over to these poems. We see more dramatic monologues and the third-person narratives, but Boland's focus is more political now, in poems like "The Famine Road," "A Soldier's Son," and "The Hanging Judge," as well as two poems written "after" Mayakovsky. Her preoccupation with the suburbs, which strengthens with time, emerges in "Ode to Suburbia," where the suburb is "an ugly sister" that "swelled so that when you tried / The silver slipper on your foot / It pinched your instep." Is the poet feeling hemmed in by her surroundings?

In the title poem, however, we see Boland for the first time entering and occupying her own poem. In its reliance on a first-person narrative and in its equating of the domestic world with the violent outside world, "The War Horse" foreshadows Boland's later poems. In the poem the passing of a horse is imbued with a sense of danger:

      This dry night, nothing unusual
      About the clip, clop, casual
 
      Iron of his shoes as he stamps death
      Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth.

The slant rhymes and lack of regular meter give the poem a more natural and more pleasing rhythm. When the horse passes by, the poem acquires a pentimento effect, as if Boland were rewriting Yeats's epitaph from "Under Ben Bulben":

     Cast a cold eye
     On life, on death.
     Horseman, pass by!

But here there is no horseman—no agent—only an unwitting and clumsy horse. After the horse disappears, the poet finds that "No great harm is done. / Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn / / Of distant interest like a maimed limb." Now the floral landscape, marred by this seemingly harmless horse, becomes a human landscape, with the rose bush "expendable, a mere / Line of defense against him, a volunteer," and the crocus "one of the screamless dead." Before she allows herself too much melodrama, Boland wisely remembers,

     But we, we are safe, our unformed fear
     Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care
 
     If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted
     Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?

But the rose, hedge, and crocus are not corpses; and despite her inclination to make them so, Boland returns to the unwitting horse who "stumbles on like a rumor of war, huge / Threatening." The horse threatens neither the poet nor her suburban neighbors, but his passing through—the wreckage he leaves behind—reminds the poet of "A cause ruined before, a world betrayed." This hugely symbolic horse gallops improbably into Boland's milieu straight from the poetic tradition, as her historical analogies suggest—a masculine force of immense threat to the safe world of the suburban present.

Casting off her male influences, Boland delivers a cornucopia of psychological misfits in In Her Own Image. A cathartic collection of dramatic monologues, the book begins at a high pitch with "Tirade for the Mimic Muse," a blast against everything poetically and politically oppressive. In its rhythm and tone, the poem reads like a re-tuned version of Plath's "Daddy." The poem steamrolls us with its Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, hard consonants, and loud internal rhymes:

    I've caught you out. You slut. You fat trout….
    Anyone would think you were a whore—
    An aging out-of-work kind-hearted tart.
    I know you for the ruthless bitch you are:
    Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse—
    Our Muse of Mimic Art.
 
    ...
 
    How you fled
    The kitchen screw and the rack of labor,
    The wash thumbed and the dish cracked,
    The scream of beaten women,
    The crime of babies battered,
    The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief
    That seeks asylum behind suburb walls….

After two books of mostly insipid poems, it is refreshing to encounter such voltage in Boland's language. But if we return to any stanza of Plath's "Daddy," we realize that "Tirade" is a weak imitation:

     You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
     In the picture I have of you,
     A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
     But no less a devil for that, no not
     Any less the black man who
 
     Bit my pretty red heart in two.

Boland's mimicking of Plath raises an important question: Does imitating a male poet (Yeats) produce bad poetry while imitating a female poet (Plath) produces good poetry? What kind of value system does that imply? Boland's acknowledgement of her debt to Yeats and her criticism of the resulting poems seem like a preemptive strike because she knows her readers will recognize the Yeatsian echoes in those poems. But she expects us to ignore that these poems mine Plath territory.

Although the other poems in In Her Own Image seldom attain the verbal power of "Tirade for the Mimic Muse," they attempt to shock us with their content—domestic violence, breast cancer, anorexia, menstruation, masturbation. Because these subjects are common fodder for American poems, these poems carry the extra burden of convincing already skeptical readers. They seldom succeed. For example, the narrator in "In His Own Image" does not feel normal unless her husband beats her, ostensibly in order to recast her in his own image:

      Now I see
      that all I needed
      was a hand
      to mold my mouth
      to scald my cheek….
 
      He splits my lip with his fist,
      shadows my eye with a blow,
      knuckles my neck to its proper angle.
      What a perfectionist!
      His are a sculptor's hands:
      they summon
      form from the void,
      they bring
      me to myself again.
      I am a new woman.

Although the poem is a dramatic monologue, the narrator's total submission rings false to me. The cheap irony of the last line invites a programmatic feminist response: "Look how this poor woman has conspired in her own victimization! All her abuser has left her is a useless sarcasm." Readers of poetry are likely to resist this simplistic rhetorical stratagem.

In contrast, the dramatic monologue of "Anorexia" is faithful to the complexity of this disease: "Flesh is heretic. / My body is a witch. / I am burning it." Much of the poem recalls Plath's "Lady Lazarus," but Boland manages to fully explore the motives of the narrator who is destroying her body yet protecting her spirit:

     I vomited
     her hungers.
     Now the bitch is burning.
 
     I am starved and curveless.
     I am skin and bone.
     She has learned her lesson.

When Boland can transform her narrators from stock characters to fully realized women, the poems work as verbally taut performances. The too-close resemblances to Plath's staccato short-line speech acts, however, diminish these poems' long-term significance.

With Night Feed, Boland cools off a bit and enters her own territory rather than that of Yeats or Plath. The poems are carefully crafted and more subdued. In the opening poem, "Degas's Laundresses," we hear Boland savoring the textures of language instead of the harshness of it:

      You seam dreams in the folds
      of wash from which freshes
      the whiff and reach of fields
      where it bleached and stiffened.
      Your chat's sabbatical….

But it is the domestic that dominates Night Feed—a domestic life that can be stultifying ("a room white and quiet as a mortuary") as well as exhilarating. In this white-washed suburbia—where "It's a Woman's World" is more than the title of a poem—Boland observes a seemingly static world that is actually full of flux. The possibility of transformation in such a setting is Boland's real concern here, whether physical ("The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish," "Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark," "A Ballad of Beauty and Time") or cognitive ("Woman in Kitchen," "It's a Woman's World," "Patchwork").

Transformation is paramount in the book's central poem, "Domestic Interior," where the poet negotiates her world as a mother. Boland's treatment of this mother/daughter relationship can be touching, as in the section "Night Feed":

     This is dawn.
     Believe me
     This is your season, little daughter.
     The moment daisies open,
     The hour mercurial rainwater
     Makes a mirror for sparrows.
     It's time we drowned our sorrows.
 
     I tiptoe in.
     I lift you up
     Wriggling….

The scene is an ordinary one, but perhaps it seems more tender to us because of Boland's usually hardened stance. She is now looking beyond herself to another person who is completely reliant upon her ("we are one more and inseparable again").

Another transformation—the alternation between day and night—appears in "Domestic Interior." Boland treats this transformation deftly throughout the poem, where dawn becomes a prelapsarian world (after the feeding "we begin / The long fall from grace") and night is hardly innocent ("And in the dark / as we slept / the world / was made flesh"). What makes this poem succeed—in addition to its economy of language and tenderness of emotion—is how Boland inscribes an entire world into such a small, desultory space.

In The Journey, the final book represented in An Origin Like Water, Boland continues to explore the domestic life in an attempt to come to terms with "the terrors of routine." By now her poems focus almost exclusively on her life. But a new subject preoccupies her here: language. Whether she is searching for "the language that is / / lace: / / a baroque obligation" or asserting that "a new language / is a kind of scar / and heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before," Boland is intent upon the power of language—to oppress, to transform, to liberate.

In "The Women," Boland explains her reasons for writing poetry:

     This is the hour I love: the in-between,
     neither here-nor-there hour of evening.
 
...
 
     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-colored 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….

Hence the women in her poems: Daphne, suburban women and country women, her daughter and mother and grandmother, women in paintings, the faceless women of history. These women were present in Boland's early poems, but by now their identities, or lack of identities, have acquired a sense of urgency for the poet. For her, no woman's life is too insignificant to enter a poem. Thus, when Sappho guides her to the Underworld in "The Journey," she encounters women and children, victims of "[c]holera, typhus, croup, diphtheria," washerwomen, court ladies, laundresses; and she pleads, "'Let me be / let me at least be their witnesses.'" Sappho answers, "'What you have seen is beyond speech, / beyond song, only not beyond love'"; and, as they ascend, she tells Boland, "'I have brought you here so you will know forever / the silences in which are our beginnings, / in which we have an origin like water.'" Poetry, then, becomes a way to usurp those silences, to bring back from an immersion in the collective unconscious, like Dante from his journey, the language that can liberate an oppressed community.

This notion of empowerment through poetry energizes many of the poems in The Journey. By claiming "My muse must be better than those of men / who made theirs in the image of their myth," Boland rejects the conventional and depersonalizing perceptions that arise from myth. This is a theme that Boland also explores in her essays. Indeed, the strong connection between her poems and her essays makes a consideration of Boland's efforts in one genre contingent upon her efforts in the other.

The subtitle of Object Lessons—"The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time"—makes a huge claim, leading one to anticipate a book devoted to a commentary on the woman poet's condition in Ireland today. But the book presents only essays on Boland's life and poetry: when Boland writes, her subject is always herself. While this can be an enjoyable and illuminating trait in poetry, in prose it comes across as egotistical. Part of the reason that Boland's recent publishing endeavors seem self-aggrandizing is her reticence about other women Irish poets—this despite all her talk about women progressing from being the objects of poems to being the authors of them. When she mentions other women Irish poets in these essays (she quotes Medbh McGuckian, Paula Meehan, and Eilean ni Chuilleanain), she does so only in passing. Her discussion of women Irish poets other than herself amounts to less than two pages of the 250.

Perhaps it is overly optimistic of me to expect Boland to reach out to her sister Irish writers, but her continual focus on "the woman poet" practically begs for such a communal gesture. When asked in a recent interview whom she considers to be successful writers of the political poem, Boland mentions only Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon—male poets with firmly established reputations. In my mind, McGuckian's omission from that list is an egregious one, because of her ability to control her environment (Belfast) by means of linguistic innovations more original and remarkable than Boland's. Boland's is the most familiar name to those of us interested in women's Irish poetry, and it seems that she wants to keep it that way.

By holding herself up in Object Lessons as the model woman poet who struggled through Irish patriarchy and a male-dominated poetic tradition, she contributes to her relatively uncontested reputation. How unfortunate, then, that the book is so tedious. Although Boland has an elegant prose style, her essays rarely have true emotional power. And because she obsesses so much about herself, she often cannot connect with her readers, leaving us amazed at and increasingly intolerant of her infinite capacity for self-examination.

Boland divides her book of essays into two parts: "Objects" and "Lessons." The essays in "Objects" explore the experiences that shaped her as a woman and as a poet and examine the relationships among gender, nationhood, and poetry. As an Irish citizen, she addresses the colonization and subjugation of Ireland by England; as a woman, she tries to find a place in her society and in the Irish poetic tradition. In these essays, Boland strives to articulate the impetus for and the consequences of her poetry because she will not allow her poems to speak for themselves. When read in tandem with her poetry, some of Boland's essays become redundant.

In her preface to Object Lessons, Boland explains (excuses?) the repetition in the essays as being akin to those in a poem, with "turnings and returnings." The way she describes her prose technique makes it seem attractive:

Therefore, the reader will come on the same room more than once: the same tablecloth with red-checked squares; the identical table by an open window. An ordinary suburb, drenched in winter rain, will show itself once, twice, then disappear and come back. The Dublin hills will change color in the distance, and change once more. The same October day will happen, as it never can in real life, over and over again.

While this returning of details in the essays enriches them, the recycling of the same themes and issues as in her poetry is objectionable because it detracts from her poetry. The essay "Lava Cameo," for example, is an expanded version of the poem of the same title in In a Time of Violence. The essay "Outside History" shares its title with Boland's volume of selected poems as well as a poetic sequence. The theme of the poem "An Irish Childhood in England: 1951" and most of its details reappear in the essay "A Fragment of Exile." At the risk of sounding puritanical, I believe that assigning the same title to an essay and to a poem diminishes the poem's importance, as if the poem could be written in prose with little difference. Ultimately, this book of essays negates the need for many of the poems in In a Time of Violence (or vice-versa).

Occasionally, an essay gives us the feeling that Boland has discovered something new about herself without writing a poem about it. In "In Search of a Language," she explains the effect of her family moving to London when she was five years old. Not knowing the Irish language as a teenager (by now she had moved back to Ireland), she searched for both a mode of expression and an identity through that expression. With Irish closed to her and English oppressive to her, she found solace in Latin. Knowing Latin—the language that had "forged alliances and named stars"—gave her a sense of power and a path to clarity and safety. Because this feeling of possessing a language enabled her to write poetry, the language she discovers becomes her own.

In the "Lessons" section of Object Lessons, Boland becomes more political. She begins "The Woman The Place The Poet" with an eloquent consideration of the idea of place:

There is a duality to place. There is the place which existed before you and will continue after you have gone … there is the place that happened and the place that happens to you.

Boland has lived in Dundrum, a suburb of Dublin, for nearly half her life. Before moving to Dundrum (and she makes much of this forced displacement), she lived in London, New York, and Dublin itself. Her position as a suburban poet would merit little, if any, discussion if she did not feel compelled to rationalize it as a landscape for poetry. Perhaps she feels guilty, or uneasy, about her locale while other women Irish poets live in troubled areas such as Belfast. When Boland makes an argument for the "fragile and transitory nature of a suburb," or argues that lives in her suburb "thrived, waned, changed, began and ended here," she doesn't convince me. Don't lives thrive, wane, and change everywhere?

In "Outside History," Boland gets to the heart of her project as a poet: her analysis of the idea of woman as object/subject/author in Irish poetry. She begins the essay with a formative event: an old woman—the caretaker of the cottage where Boland is vacationing—brings her water, and they talk about the famine. This encounter also comprises an earlier poem, "The Achill Woman." By beginning an essay on women with her own poetic experience, Boland makes herself a metaphor for all women: This is my experience, she says, this is our experience.

Boland then turns to the "virulence and necessity of the idea of a nation" and how male Irish poets blended the idea of the female with that of the nation. Mother Ireland, in their poems, becomes a woman raped and conquered by the English, violated while her poets/protectors can only watch and scribble in their notepads. Because these male poets created a poetic tradition and an idea of an Irish nation that excluded activist women, Boland as a young poet realized that "the Irish nation as an existing construct in Irish poetry was not available to [her]." The only way to enter that tradition was to repossess it. Thus, Boland, as well as other women (though, characteristically, none is mentioned in the essay), "moved from being the objects of Irish poems to being the authors of them." She perceptively exposes a tendency in Irish male poets to fetishize the female:

The majority of Irish male poets depended on women as motifs in their poetry…. The women in their poems were often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status.

The trouble was these images did good service as ornaments…. Women in such poems were frequently referred to approvingly as mythic, emblematic. But to me these passive and simplified women seemed a corruption. Moreover, the transaction they urged on the reader, to accept them as mere decoration, seemed to compound the corruption.

However convincing her argument might be, Boland's sweeping focus (she directs her attack at most most male Irish poets, with "the later Yeats [being] a rare exception") inevitably leads to the author herself, forcing us to ask how Boland treats women in her poetry.

In fact, Boland can be as blinkered as her male predecessors in her treatment of the female, especially in her more recent poems. In "The Death of Reason" in In a Time of Violence, Boland contrasts the violence in Ireland with the "art of portrait-painting" in England. The woman sitting for a portrait emerges both as an anonymous female and as Brittania, the English version of Cathleen ni Houlihan:

      And she climbed the stairs. Nameless composite.
      Anonymous beauty-bait for the painter.
      … The easel waits for her
      and the age is ready to resemble her and
      the small breeze cannot touch that powdered hair.
      That elegance.

Boland strives to accomplish two tasks here: to reveal the objectification of women and to contrast the daily realities in Ireland and England. In the poem the violence in Ireland threatens the English: "The flames have crossed the sea. / They are at … the door. / At the canvas, / At her mouth." Because the woman represents the English and their enlightened ways, reason itself becomes engulfed in the spreading fire: "the eighteenth century ends here / as her hem scorches and the satin / decoration catches fire. She is burning down." Although Boland deftly uses the woman to represent several things (art, reason, England), she falls into the trap that she denounces in "Outside History": she transforms the woman into an icon. The woman is faceless, a stock figure with no depth or humanity. On this central polemical point, then, Boland's credibility in her essay becomes questionable when we examine her treatment of the woman in "The Death of Reason" and elsewhere in In a Time of Violence ("In a Bad Light," "Legends," "The Pomegranate").

In the very poem that emerged from Boland's encounter with the cottage caretaker, "The Achill Woman" (originally part of the "Outside History" sequence), she uses the woman as a token, as a way to give the poet a chance to arrive at the end of the poem. The title alone depersonalizes the woman; and because Boland ignores the class distinction between herself and the old woman, the woman becomes nothing more than an unrealized figure. She represents the peasantry and the Irish language while Boland, a privileged college student, speaks English, the language of the oppressor. By failing to remark on this distinction, Boland fails to do justice to the woman's story and the meeting between them. Perhaps Boland omitted this poem from An Origin Like Water because it represents exactly what she condemns in her male predecessors. In any case, the poem is an excellent example of Boland using the power of poetry to objectify other women while empowering herself.

Indeed, in both poetry and prose, Boland continually concerns herself with power: the power of language, the power of the woman, the power of the nation. However, the only woman in In a Time of Violence to acquire power is the poet herself; she never develops her female characters or narrators except when the central figure is the poet. When she comes to understand the power of language through rhetoric, Boland finds strength, for herself, in "Writing in a Time of Violence." She talks of the destructive power of language:

      we will live, we have lived
      where language is concealed. Is perilous.
                                  … But it is too late
      … to refuse to enter
      … a city of whispers
      and interiors where
 
      the dear vowels
      Irish Ireland ours are
      absorbed into Autumn air,
      are out of earshot in the distances
      we are stepping into where we never
 
      imagine words such as hate
      and territory and the like—unbanished still
      as they always would be—wait
      and are waiting under
      beautiful speech. To strike.

Although she uncovers the terrors that lie under "beautiful speech," she serves merely as a distant witness, not as a participant. Rhetoric becomes a tool of persuasion, the people of Ireland the object of that tool. However, the poet lives far from this "city of whispers / and interiors" where language is concealed and veiled beneath glorious words. Her protests seem impotent even though she sees hateful language waiting to strike. By placing herself at the periphery of the poem, "at a desk in college," she fails to enter the realities of the poem.

Because most of the issues in In a Time of Violence also appear in Object Lessons, we must look to the language in the poems to notice the differences in her treatment of ideas in her poetry and prose. The language in most of these poems vacillates between being purposefully flat and being perfectly crafted. The first three lines of "The Parcel," for example, are prosaic, and the line breaks are weak: "There are dying arts and / one of them is / the way my mother used to make up a parcel." But the poem gathers momentum, and its ending is stunning:

      See it disappear. Say
      this is how it died
      out: among doomed steamships and outdated trains,
      the tracks for them disappearing before our eyes,
      next to station names we can't remember
      on a continent we no longer
      recognize. The sealing wax cracking.
      The twine unravelling. The destination illegible.

Many of these poems begin insipidly and end explosively. But the prosaic quality of much of the poetry again calls into question Boland's shifting between genres.

One poem in In a Time of Violence that avoids flat language, rehashed themes, and objectifying the female is "Anna Liffey," the most ambitious and most human poem in the book. The "turnings and returnings" that Boland describes in her preface to Object Lessons occur here to great effect. Dublin's River Liffey courses through the poem: it is free, as it "rises in rush and ling heather and / Black peat and bracken and strengthens / To claim the city it narrated." But the poem's narrator is not so free: "If I could see myself / I would see / A woman in a doorway." The river frames the poem while the doorway (read: suburbia) frames (read: restricts) the woman. Because she displays both real emotion and technical adroitness here, this poem marks a significant departure from the other poems in this book and in An Origin Like Water. This emotion is restrained, yet we feel that Boland is barely holding it in:

      Make of a nation what you will
      Make of the past
      What you can—
 
      There is now
      A woman in a doorway
 
      It has taken me
      All my strength to do this.
 
      Becoming a figure in a poem.
 
      Usurping a name and a theme.

The locutions of Adrienne Rich are readily identifiable in such a passage. But influence need not be a problem. Boland is more human here than in any of her other poems. If she continues to explore these difficult areas in her poetry, her prediction at the end of "Anna Liffey"—"In the end / Everything that burdened and distinguished me / Will be lost in this: / I was a voice"—may prove true. But if she persists in self-aggrandizement in her poetry and prose and if she continues to ignore the valuable writing of the women around her, her work risks becoming overwhelmed by the weight of her ego.