82 The EconomistMay 16th 2020
W
hen summernights were warm, Eavan Boland liked to stand
in the front doorway of her small suburban house in Dun-
drum, outside Dublin. She would look at the buddleia, and at the
lamplight glossing the leaves of the hedge. Yet these things were
not simply visible to her. She saw them with her body. It was as if
she was part of some great continuum, or stood in a place of myth,
like the women singers she imagined in the hard west of Ireland
whose mouths were filled with “Atlantic storms and clouded-over
stars/and exhausted birds”.
This sense of communality, which led her to be one of Ireland’s
finest poets, was essentially a woman’s feeling. And it was missing
almost entirely from Irish poetry. There the voice was male, bardic,
authoritative, grown sweet and self-confident on the flattery of
princes. It was “I”, not “we”. The poet was a hero, a seer, a towering
figure (Yeats above all), whose themes were history, epic and elegy.
This was not a world for women. When they featured in the work
they were mostly objectified, passive and silent. No page recorded
“the low music/of our outrage”. Their own poems were not encour-
aged, as if they were women’s-magazine things that would defile
the pure, visionary flow. If she were to write in the men’s style, with
their assurance, she would fit right in, as she fitted into the clever
literary conversations in the pubs round St Stephen’s Green when
she was at Trinity College. But once she was married and the moth-
er of two small daughters, happy if she could jot down just one line
or one image, that was not her life.
Her days now revolved round cooking, washing up, nappies,
feeds; lifting the kettle to the gas stove, setting her skirt over a chair
to have it without creases for the morning. They were full of small
untidinesses and oversights which assumed huge importance,
like the loaf forgotten by the cash register, or washing left wet.
They were full, too, of hidden satisfactions: a row of cups winking
on their saucers, a copper pan well polished, fresh green celeryfeathers. Much of this was so ordinary that it might have seemed
unremarkable. Certainly it was not named in Irish poetry. But ordi-
nariness, “dailiness”, was precisely what she wanted to capture.
The surfaces of things could barely hold what was under them; just
as the small, routine gestures of many couples contained the un-
spoken steadfastness of love.
Other “women’s subjects” needed tackling more forcefully. She
had no qualms about that. The whole poetic tradition had to be
scrubbed and abraded with the wash stones of resistance. So an
anorexic torched her witch-body, its “curves and paps” until, “thin
as a rib”, she could slip back into Adam again, “as if I had never been
away”. A menstruating woman confronted the moon, “dulled by it/
thick with it...a water cauled by her light...barren with her blood.”
Shockingly, a wife who believed “I was not myself, myself” in her
everyday dutifulness felt herself remade when her husband, com-
ing home tight, split her lip and knuckled her neck “to its proper
angle”; and was grateful for his remodelling.
Yet the all-too-ordinary often slipped into something else. She
was too deeply read in the myths and epics of Ireland for it to be
otherwise. The life that was lived in a brick house could still have a
visionary quality. In “Night Feed”, she noticed not only the rosy
zipped sleeper, the hard suckling, the silt of milk left in the bottle,
but the movements of earth and stars, and the “long fall from
grace” as the feed ended. The stopping of the tumble-dryer, like
death, began “to bury/The room in white spaces.” An old florin,
brushed on a shelf, turned into a silver salmon.
That everyday life was also not remote from history. But she
preferred to call it The Past: a place of shadows, fragments, defeats,
rather than heroics. The Troubles appeared, through an ancient
television set, as “grey and greyer tears” and “moonlight-coloured
funerals”. Emigration to America was a woman in a gansy-coat on
the deck of the Mary Belle, holding her half-dead baby to her. In
“Quarantine” the worst year of the famine, 1847, was encapsulated
in a couple found frozen, he still carrying her, holding her feet
against his breastbone to try to warm them. Just two people’s
deaths, how they had lived, what they had suffered,
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.Such themes were inevitable, for her discovery of her woman’s
voice in poetry was meshed to her discovery of Ireland. She had left
that home at the age of six, when her diplomat father was posted to
London and then New York. When at 14 she returned, she did not
know the secret language of the country, especially of Dublin,
which she grew to love. As a woman she saluted “Anna Liffey” as
the river rose in the hills above her house, flowing through black
peat and bracken, then claiming and “retelling” the city for her,
putting the pieces together, as she went on trying to.
Ireland, though, could still disappoint her. In 1991, when the
monumental Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing came out, she
was one of only three contemporary women poets included. Furi-
ous, she fired up her campaign for women to be noticed and,
through poetry workshops, for poetry to be extended to all who had
no voices. After 1996 a professorship at Stanford, alternating with
trips home, allowed her to check on progress from abroad. By the
21st century, to her delight, women poets were flourishing in Ire-
land, and two new Field Day volumes were devoted to women’s
writing. Though she never liked to take credit, she had been a voice
and a constant encouragement; she had changed the conversation.
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. 7Eavan Boland, poet, died on April 27th, aged 75Visions in the ordinary
Obituary Eavan Boland