semblance, phantasma or ghost of a woman rather than the ërealí
thing. Once more, the poem holds within it the recurring tension in
Bolandís poetry between the secular time of the contemporary woman
and a sacred time as represented by the statue.
The aesthetic representation of the sorrowful woman is polished
and monumentalized ëset and finished in/ a mutton fat creaminess, a
seamless flutter in/ marble.í Although her ësorrowí has ëentered
marbleí, the weeping statue is ëseamlessí, she makes no noise or ëno
dissonance of griefí. However, sorrow is presented as inharmonious
and the mother is presented weeping in a different way:
I could see that weeping itself has no cadence.
It is unrhythmical, unpredictable and
the intake of breath one sob needs to
become another sob, so one tear can succeed
another, is unmusical: whoever the muse is
or was of weeping, she has put the sound of it
beyond the reach of metric-makers, music-makers. (pp.208ñ210)The message here is clear enough: grief is being represented yet the
essence of it is beyond artistic representation. In the poem, grief is
beyond the visible and also thought of as beyond sound. What the
woman experiences is ëbeyond the reachí of those who chart noise or
the ëmetric-makersí and ëmusic makersí. Yet the poetic speaker
attempts to say the unsayable within the poetic representation; she
attempts to represent the unrepresentability and the silences of sorrow.
The way in which this is conveyed is through ëdissonanceí, the
ëunrhythmicalí and ëunpredictableí. The polished stanzas of the poem
break up for a moment with caesura and shorter lines that are
comparable with the moment in ëStoryí where the woman attempts to
write herself into the poem. The poetic form disintegrates and the
language begins to break down into silence.
Paradoxically, the poetic speaker attempts to smash beyond
artistic emblems within the aesthetic confines of the poem to write a
non-form within the form of poetry. She tries to blast representation of
the woman with the differential, ëunrhythmicalí, ëunpredictableí and
ëunmusicalí, but in a fairly smooth and coherent poetic language. The
way in which the poem remains more lyrical than discordant is an
example of how, for Boland, the work of art is something that remains