SOURCE: "Eavan Boland's Journey with the Muse," in Learning the Trade: Essays on W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Deborah Fleming, Locust Hill Press, 1993, pp. 179-94.

[In the following essay, Mahon analyzes Boland's The Journey and Other Poems, considering what the volume expresses about the poet's development as an artist.]

A young Yeats in 1889 urged an aspiring poet to use Irish legend because it "helps originality…. Besides one should love best what is nearest and most interwoven with one's life." Yet thirty years later Yeats himself found A Vision necessary to give him "metaphors for poetry." Similarly Eavan Boland, born in Dublin in 1944, has searched long to find the right voice and subject. From her earliest volume, New Territory, to Outside History, she has published eight collections altogether, three of which incorporate poems from previous volumes. Introducing Eavan Boland reprints all the poems of The War Horse and In Her Own Image in order to bring this promising poet to a readership outside of Ireland. Juxtaposing the two early volumes points up her range, from Ireland's political unrest to feminist concerns. Night Feed shows Boland turning thematically to the "nearest and most interwoven with" her life in poems of domesticity and motherhood. It is five years later, however, in The Journey and Other Poems, that Boland comes to terms with her sources of inspiration. The two subsequent books, again collections or consolidations, contain actual revision as well as rearrangement of previous poems.

"As an Irish woman poet I have very little precedent," Eavan Boland explained in an interview shortly after the publication of Journey: "I didn't want to do without a discourse with my nation," but

as a woman I didn't want to have a discourse with that national idea on the terms in which it was offered in Irish literature. So I had to rework some kind of relationship I could live with between my sense of being a woman poet and being a national poet—it was very slow and very hand-to-mouth.

Lacking a poet as precedent, Boland turned to a different kind of artist and dedicated The Journey and Other Poems to her mother. Certainly this dedication signifies her physical mother who was a painter, but there is a metaphoric suggestion as well. I believe that the "reworking" can be traced not only in the journey made in the title poem, where Sappho is guide and muse, but also by the entire volume full of relationships with women.

The title poem, "The Journey," does not appear until the middle of the book where, with "Envoi," it comprises the second section. Instead Boland begins with "I Remember," an exploration of her "nine-year-old" consciousness in "the big drawing-room" of "bombed-out, post-war London" where she felt an "interloper" among her mother's "easel" and "portrait brushes" while "an eyebrow waited helplessly to be composed." From this meditation on her artist mother, the poet proceeds to consideration of her own art, one of language, in "Mise Eire." The title of this second poem evokes two other sources of the author's life, Mother Ireland (Eire) and, in the near homonym "miserere," Mother Church. The "mise en scène," the given, of Eavan Boland's life is to be woman, Irish, and Catholic. It is here, as the poet asserts later, that her muse "must come … Let her come / to be among the donee, the given."

The thematic unity begun in the first two poems extends into the next three. Mother-painter and Mother Ireland produce the persona of "Self-Portrait," the woman who herself finds a female heritage in "The Oral Tradition." In the fifth poem, "Fever," the speaker seeks for her identity or heritage in her grandmother's story: "I re-construct the soaked-through midnights; / vigils; the histories I never learned / to predict the lyrics of." The process is one of considering some external event or historical fact and imaginatively reconceiving and interiorizing it. The result is that an ordinary moment or fact is illuminated with larger meaning.

"I won't go back to it—" Boland blurts out in the opening line, and stanza, of "Mise Eire." Then follow three full stanzas elaborating the refusal, qualifying the rejection. This second poem of Journey illustrates both the poet's method and her agenda. "It" is "my nation" but qualified as "displaced / into old dactyls" so that on one level it is epic poetry that is being renounced. The punctuation, making the second stanza a parenthetical expression, separates this rejection from the list which follows: "land of the Gulf Stream, / the small farm" begins stanza three nostalgically. As if examining a childhood memory from an adult perspective (or recalling Mother Ireland's shame as well as her glory), the speaker judges more harshly—"the scalded memory"—and returns to a consideration of language:

      the songs
      that bandage up the history
      the words
      that make a rhythm of the crime

only to climax in the fourth stanza, "where time is time past." The problem is identified and the refusal repeated: "No. I won't go back. / My roots are brutal."

The emphatic use of present tense accentuates rejection of the pastness of the past; "roots" convey the continuing sustenance of history in the present reality. In what appears to be a clear allusion to T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eavan Boland has confronted the discourse with her nation and taken her stand. A colon follows "brutal" in the text, and the fifth stanza, with personification reminiscent of Pearse, goes on to explain:

     I am the woman—
     a sloven's mix
     of silk at the wrists
     a sort of dove-strut
     in the precincts of the garrison—

who is paid for "delight" in "cambric" and "silks." In the interview cited above, Boland resolved the conflict between being a national poet and a woman poet "by feeling that my Irishness and my womanhood were metaphors for one another." The prostitute in "Mise Eire," like the old "songs" and "words," is part of the historical past; she, and they, engender the present, and can be modified by it. Moreover, the spirit which enabled the prostitute to turn her historical situation to advantage is available to the poetess. "I am the woman" is repeated of the immigrant "in the gansy-coat … holding her half-dead baby to her / as the wind shifts," bringing the sound of a new language. Even as the poem, by its title, asks for mercy, it heralds a message from "The Emigrant Irish" in section three of The Journey and Other Poems: "it is time to / imagine how they stood there, what they stood with / that their possessions may become our power."

Under the motif of a journey, the third poem suggests that the speaker takes the insights from poem two and applies them to the subject of poem one. On the level of poetic art, Boland combines the metaphors of womanhood and history with those of painting to draw her own "Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening." Choosing Jean-Baptiste Chardin (1699–1779) from history, the poet portrays him "painting a woman / in the last summer light." Unlike the artist-mother who would compose an eyebrow, thus metaphorically dealing with the hard realities of post-war London, this painter "has been slighting" his subject "in botched blues" and "rinsed neutrals"; following the line "All summer long," the word "slighting" echoes "sighting" as if the man were bird watching. "Before your eyes" objects Boland, drawing the reader or a fellow observer into her confidence, "the ordinary life / is being glazed over." Twice more in the poem the line "before your eyes" is repeated as "her ankle-length summer skirt" becomes "my ankle-length / summer skirt," and the speaker realizes "I am Chardin's woman"

     edged in reflected light,
     hardened by
     the need to be ordinary.

The poetic art of "Self-Portrait" deserves pause, for it shows Eavan Boland at work. It is definitely a poem of threes—indeed, the word "triptych" is used in it. Dependent on three sources of metaphor, it is the third poem of a series; even in Outside History where the order of the poems is greatly rearranged it is placed third. There are three implied groups in the poem: the painter and his easel, the speaker who confides to a listener, and the children whom they are apparently minding. In measuring her position, there are three objects which locate the speaker—the garden, the house, and the whitebeam trees—and three things she keeps "an eye on": "the length of the grass, / the height of the hedge, / the distance of the children." The line "before your eyes" is repeated three times, and so, most interestingly, is "light."

The first stanza states that Chardin is painting "in the last summer light"; the last stanza depicts the speaker as "edged in reflected light." Perhaps the reflection refers to her relationship with the original portrait. Commenting on the neutral tones employed by the painter, and indeed Chardin was famous for his "pastel portraits," the third stanza—in three trimeter lines!—reads:

     What you are watching
     is light unlearning itself,
     an infinite unfrocking of the prism.

Watching, unlearning, unfrocking: the three present participles connote an ongoing development, a journey, even as the root word "frock" relates both women to "light." This connection parallels the metonymous connection of "skirt," the term by which the two women are associated before the eyes of the watcher. That "light" is "unlearning" points to the symbolic meaning of light as intellectual insight or comprehension. The idealized woman under Chardin's brush, made neutral by restricting the prism's range of color, symbolizes the suburban wife and mother whose range of independence unlearns itself in the "reflected light" of her domestic relationships. Unlike the artifact "set upon a golden bough to sing / … Of what is past, or passing, or to come" (Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"), she is "hardened" by daily demands, "the need to be ordinary."

For purposes of the journey, the main thrust of "The Oral Tradition" is that the secrets of the trade can be passed down through a matriarchy. Putting on her coat—again one thinks of Yeats, in "I made my song a coat"—after a poetry reading, the speaker overhears two women speaking of a birth. They tell of a new mother who went out in her "skirt / of cross-woven linen" to "an open meadow … where she lay down / in vetch and linen / and lifted up her son." The appositive stanza which follows this delivery may refer either to the son or to the "shelter" mother and son together would find:

    the oral song
    avid as superstition
    layered like amber in
    the wreck of language
    and the remnants of a nation.

In the talk of the women—itself an oral passing on, in "a firelit room / in which the colour scheme / crouched well down" so that "the sole richness was / in the suggestion of a texture" like a "low flax gleam," the poet has a moment of insight. The fire images her illumination as a log "broke apart in sparks, / a windfall of light/ in the room's darkness."

Shrugging up her coat collar against the "winter's night," the speaker thinks of "distances / ahead," the "miles to go" of Robert Frost's snowy evening which for her are "iron miles / in trains." As her journey takes her home from the cultural evening, so the setting of the following poems shifts to the suburbs. The reconstruction of her grandmother's reality in "Fever" parallels Boland's account in her essay "The Woman, the Place, the Poet" of her coming to terms with a suburban life. Searching out her roots, she discovers an ancestor, who became master of the Clonmel workhouse; ashamed of him, she "imagined a woman. A woman like myself, with two small children, who must have come to this place as I came to the suburb"; "more than likely she would have died" in the fever hospital—"Every few years typhus swept through the town."

Feeling solidarity with other mothers, Boland ponders in her essay the meaning of myth, and asks: "Is there something about the repeated action—about lifting a child, clearing a dish … which reveals a deeper meaning to existence and heals some of the worst abrasions of time?" Through the ritual of daily caring she came to see, as in the aesthetic of poetry and music,

a sequence and repetition that allowed the deeper meanings to emerge: a sense of belonging, of nourishment, of a life revealed, and not restrained, by ritual and patterning.

Surely these are the sentiments evident in the sixth poem, "The Unlived Life," where the speaker exchanges quilting patterns with a neighbor. Through wifely and motherly experience, the poet bonds with all the unsung women who have lived the daily ritual, who have known that the patterning of seasons like the patterning of quilts leads to contentment.

In Woman and Nature, the poet Susan Griffin comments on woman's relation to space "and the place which records her image. Space which she embroiders. Space which she covers in quilts. Space which she makes into lace." In Eavan Boland's Journey it is made clear that, within the limits of "jest so much caliker," "when it comes to cuttin' out / the quilt" one is "free to choose." Confronted with the passing opportunity represented in "the flange-wheeled, steam-driven, iron omen / of another life," the neighbor women do turn away "to choose … the unlived life, its symmetry / explored on a hoop with a crewel needle."

"Lace," the title and subject of the following poem, shows another kind of choice. "Bent over / the open notebook," the speaker begins,

     In the dusk
     I am still
     looking for it—
     the language that is
 
     lace:

and goes on to make a social comment. The "baroque obligation / at the wrist / of a prince / in a petty court," an insignificant adornment in his regard, "is still / what someone … in the dusk, / bent over / as the light was fading / lost their sight for."

How quickly "Adam's Curse" comes to mind, where Yeats puts forth the thesis that the finest things require the hardest work. The "stitching and unstitching" of a single line which "will take us hours maybe" is labor lost on "the noisy set / … The martyrs call the world." In the Yeats poem, both the sewing image and the concern with language are subordinated to the speaker's more immediate focus on love; however, in Boland's work, as we have seen, concern with language immediately evokes concern with cultural identity as well as attention to craftsmanship. Moreover, the needlework, while it connotes womanhood, is a sustained metaphor, part of a larger patterning. So we are not surprised to find "The Bottle Garden" treating lace as a pattern, this time the pattern that unifies life.

The speaker reflects on her bottle garden, decanted in an earlier time "into this globe which shows up how the fern shares / the invertebrate lace of the sea-horse." She then situates herself in time, "in my late thirties, past the middle way." Alluding not only to Dante, but to T. S. Eliot's use of The Divine Comedy in Four Quartets, she continues:

     I can say how did I get here?
     I hardly know the way back, still less forward.

Readers of the Quartets know that "the way forward is the way back," and Boland traces this way through repetition of the word "here."

Looking into the bottle-garden of her youth, the speaker names off the specimens she included: "well, here they are"—and then the transition, the imaginative leap to "here I am a gangling schoolgirl … reading the Aeneid as the room darkens / to the underworld of the Sixth book." The plants have bridged the watcher back to her schoolgirl self, the maker of the terrarium but also the student of the Aeneid; it is in Book VI that Aeneas has the future revealed to him by the sibyl of Cumae, and this discovery will bridge Boland's persona forward to "The Journey" with Sappho into the underworld. The "room darkens," as it did for the poet and for the lacemaker in the previous poem, and, outside, "the open weave of harbour lights" is a patterning like lace joining the moments of the speaker's life.

Other moments—more crewel needles, more dusk, more skirts—recur in the remaining poems of Part I, but Part II commences with "The Journey" and its opening line, "And then the dark fell." When one has walked awhile with this poet-mother to whom twilight means the calling in of children as well as the moment of myth and creativity, one sees that the dark would indeed fall in a child's illness severe enough to require "an antibiotic." The diction of "a poem to an antibiotic" brings a wince, as compared, Boland is quick to point out, "with the odes on / the flower of the raw sloe"; "Instead of sulpha we shall have hyssop dipped / in the wild blood of the unblemished lamb, / so every day the language gets less." The experience of redemption, symbolized by the paschal lamb, is what both the antibiotic and Sappho deliver.

The exhausted mother has been reading while keeping vigil; "the book beside me / lay open at the page Aphrodite / comforts Sappho in her love's duress." The allusion is to "A Prayer to Aphrodite," in which Sappho begs the goddess to come with comfort as she has before: "come to me now and free me / from fearful agony." In Boland's poem, the mother's fearful agony, like Sappho's, proceeds from love. In a state "not sleep, but nearly sleep," the tired persona announces, "she came and stood beside me":

     and I would have known her anywhere
     and I would have gone with her anywhere
     and she came wordlessly
     and without a word I went with her.

For Boland, Sappho has replaced the sibyl who guides Aeneas through the underworld, but like Virgil's seer, the mother of lyric poetry, whom Plato called the Tenth Muse, grants her initiate an underworld vision which illuminates her mission. Upon entering Hades, Aeneas first sees the souls of those who died as infants. "Cholera, typhus, croup, diphtheria," recounts Sappho, as the speaker makes out the shadows of "terrible pietas";

"… these are women who went out like you when dusk became a dark sweet with leaves, recovering the day, stooping, picking up"

the toys that are "love's archaeology." Speechless with horror at their misery, the narrator wants to "at least be their witness," but Sappho replies: "what you have seen is beyond speech … not beyond love." Charging Boland's persona to "remember" as the two emerge again into the upper world, Sappho says:

     "there are not many of us; you are dear
     and stand beside me as my own daughter.
     I have brought you here so you will know forever
     the silences in which are our beginnings.

The narrator awakes—"nothing was changed; nothing was more clear … my children / slept the last dark out safely and I wept."

In a volume dedicated "For my Mother," in which Part I begins with a poem about her physical mother, as she begins Part II, Eavan Boland effectively names Sappho, "Mother." I have tried to show the path by which the poet dramatizes coming to this recognition: her childhood memory of a female artist-model, her choice of lyric poetry over rejected dactyls, her imaginative entering into the mindset of other women or sharing the silent repetitions of daily ritual with them. That Sappho is the predominant inspiration for Boland's craft, seems substantiated by Lillian Feder's summation of the Greek exemplar's style:

The conciseness of Sappho's style and her choice of exact details convey the quality of an intense personal experience. Though her artistry is exquisite, her poetry has a spontaneity and an immediacy which suggest that the poet is experiencing the emotional drama she both records and creates. Most of Sappho's poetry is written in short, simple sentences without subordination; exactness and simplicity of language, economy, and directness are her chief instruments for expressing intense and passionate feeling.

The partner piece to "The Journey," once the speaker has returned from the underworld experience with Sappho, is "Envoi." The subject is the muse who "must come to me," the speaker insists, as we remember Sappho came, in the midst of everyday concerns. The poet needs confirmation of what "The Journey" has revealed, and Boland turns from classical allusions to the Bible and the Church's liturgy to structure "Envoi." "It is Easter," the poem opens, the liturgical season which celebrates Christ's passover and the redemption achieved by the "blood of the unblemished lamb" cited in "The Journey."

"It is Easter in the suburb": the prepositional phrase situates the speaker, as the stanza proceeds with other signs of Spring "in my neighbour's garden" and away towards the Dublin mountains. "In the suburb," therefore away from the center, may signify a positioning in time as well as a geographical positioning. Liturgically the Easter season lasts for forty days, during which time the Scriptural readings tell of appearances of the risen Jesus to his followers. Within the first few days after Easter Sunday, the gospel recounts the Emmaus story (Luke 24:13-35) where Jesus overtakes two disciples on the road and, unrecognized, enters into conversation with them. As they approach the village, the two urge him to remain with them, because the day is nearly over. Halfway through "Envoi" Boland says of her muse, "I need her to remain with me until / the day is over and the song is proven." In Luke, Jesus goes in with the disciples to dine, and in the breaking of the bread they recognize him, remembering suddenly the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist. The last stanza of "Envoi" recalls the Eucharistic transformation of bread and wine as Boland calls on her muse to "bless the ordinary" and "sanctify the common."

The purpose of Christ's appearances after Easter is to show his followers that he has truly conquered death and to confirm their faith in his teaching. Several stories tell of persons who visit the tomb where he was laid; he is not there, though other bright presences are, who reply that he has risen from the dead. Thus when Boland affirms "surely she comes to me," her muse does not show signs of age and decay—"no lizard skin … no podded womb"—but rather the "brightening" and promising "consequences of an April tomb." Like Mary Magdalen, who went alone to the tomb and learned Christ had risen, Boland can say:

      What I have done I have done alone.
      What I have seen is unverified.
      I have the truth and I need the faith.
      It is time I put my hand in her side.

The closing allusion is to the gospel of the first Sunday after Easter, the story of doubting Thomas (John 20:19-31). Because this apostle refused to believe the accounts of the others and the "verifications" of Peter and John, because he insisted on himself putting his hand into the wound made in Christ's side by the Centurion's spear, the risen Jesus appeared to Thomas and said: "Take your hand and put it into my side; be not faithless, but believing" (verse 27).

In "Envoi" Boland asks for a confirmation comparable to that given to Christ's disciples through the events following Easter. Critics have found in her conditional last stanza an insincere expression of self-doubt: if the muse does not come, "then here I am … the most miserable of women." In fact, the phrase echoes I Corinthians 15 for a fitting recapitulation of what the whole Easter mystery—and by extension, the descent with Sappho—has meant: "If in this life only," Paul writes, "we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (verse 19, Douay translation). Christ's resurrection is a promise of transcendence, a life beyond the one we know. Eavan Boland asks no less for her poetry.

After the confirming experience with Sappho, Boland moves in Part III of The Journey and Other Poems to a new voice, a new sense of the speaker's self. The tone changes from one of tentative search to one of conviction, but all the poems in this section treat of displacement. The lovers of the first poem are on the move constantly, the emigrant Irish and the Irish child in an English classroom are out of their element, Canaletto of Venice fame is in the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Lyric Muse is bandaged up recovering from a facelift. Finally, the woeful mismatch between the Glass King and his wife mirrors the abyss between poetry of high romance and the ordinary world.

The poems of the last section seem concerned with working out Boland's assertion in "Envoi" that "My muse must be better than those of men / who made theirs in the image of their myth." Unlike the men's muse which is "made," the woman's muse seems to have an independent existence. Moreover the third person plural pronoun suggests that men collectively created both the myth and the muse, a creation challenged in "Listen. This is the Noise of Myth":

      Forgive me if I set the truth to rights.
      Bear with me if I put an end to this:
      She never turned to him; she never leaned
      under the sallow-willow over to him.
 
      They never made love; not there; not here;
      not anywhere; there was no winter journey;
      no aconite, no birdsong and no jasmine,
      no woodland and no river and no weir.

The noise of myth "makes / the same sound as shadow," the "Tricks of light" and "consolations of the craft" that "put / the old poultices on the old sores." No lasting cure is offered by the "old romances" because "when the story ends the song is over."

Rounding back on themes of "Mise Eire," Eavan Boland rejects the "planets of a harsh nativity"—the possible allusion to "The Second Coming" could signify Yeats and male Irish poetry:

      They were never mine. This is mine:
      This sequence of evicted possibilities.
      Displaced facts. Tricks of light. Reflections.

"I didn't know what to hold, to keep," asserts the next poem, "An Irish Childhood in England: 1951." Here the speaker grapples again with myth and shadow under the guise of a child trying to fall asleep. Nor is the dilemma resolved by the last poem in which the speaker muses on the medieval world of "The Glass King," the mad Charles VI of France. A familiar metaphor for poetry returns as the speaker muses, "under the stonesmith's hand / stone turns into lace. I need his hand now." The yoking of stone with lace expresses the poet's desire for a strong poetry, a poetic of truth, in contrast to romance's "unravelling" in "The Noise of Myth."

As the myth of men is rejected in the last section of The Journey and Other Poems, so is their muse. This is the muse of tricks and "reflections" castigated by Boland in her 1980 volume under the title "Tirade for the Mimic Muse." The tone of "The Woman Takes Her Revenge on the Moon" in Journey is very like the earlier "Tirade"; with pots of make-up and false reflections of love the Mimic Muse eluded Time and Death, but the poet has found her out. Similarly the speaker of Journey, defying reflections, paints herself in sunrise crimson and goes out into the evening to outface the moon. Meanwhile the Lyric Muse lies "propped and swabbed," sutured and "shocked in cambric, / slacked in bandages." Visiting the patient, the speaker remarks: "You are the victim of a perfect crime"—lied to by Time which is personified as a cruel "he." Compassionately surveying the muse's "seams," "stitches," and "sutured youth," the poet articulates the healing relationship she wants with the muse—that of collaborator:

     We have been sisters
     in the crime.
     Let us be sisters
     in the physic:
 
     Listen.
     Bend your darned head.
     Turn your good ear.
     Share my music.

With the publication of Outside History, Eavan Boland re-positioned the poems discussed here and moved beyond the vision represented by her 1987 volume. I believe that The Journey and Other Poems marks an important phase in her development as a poet. For the student of Boland's art, this volume demonstrates the way the contemporary poet followed her exemplar, Yeats, who "took a very powerful elite form," the lyric, "and subverted it thoroughly with a sense of private destiny."