and Frances Kelly Boland, a painter, Boland
was educated in England and the United States.
Her father served as the Irish ambassador in
London, to the Court of St. James, from 1950
through 1956 and then as an Irish ambassador to
the United Nations, from 1956 through 1959.
Boland attended Catholic schools in London
and in New York City and endured anti-Irish
attitudes in London as well as intense isolation in
New York. These senses of exclusion and exile
experienced during her youth would later inform
her poetry. From 1959 through 1962, Boland
attended a boarding school in Killiney, County
Dublin. After graduating from Holy Child Con-
vent, Boland worked as a hotel housekeeper
in Dublin. She published a poetry chapbook
(a small pamphlet of a limited number of copies),
titled23 Poems, in 1962. She entered Trinity
College in Dublin that same year and graduated
with an English degree in 1966. After working as
a junior lecturer at Trinity from 1967 to 1968,
Boland found that an academic career was
incompatible with her goals as a writer, despite
her love of teaching. Her first full-length book of
poetry to be published wasNew Territoryin
- She married the novelist Kevin Casey in
1969, and they have two daughters. Her other
volumes of poetry includeIn Her Own Image
(1980),Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980–
1990 (in which ‘‘Outside History’’ was originally
published, in 1990), andAgainst Love Poetry
(2001). She has also written on the subject of
the place of women in contemporary poetry in
Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the
Poet in Our Time(1995). Boland has intermit-
tently lectured at the School of Irish Studies in
Dublin and published reviews and articles on
literary topics for theIrish Times. Having pub-
lished a number of poetry collections and coed-
ited two Norton anthologies, Boland has also
served as an English professor and as the direc-
tor of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford
University.
POEM SUMMARYStanzas 1 and 2
Boland’s ‘‘Outside History’’ is divided into seven
stanzas of three lines each. In the first two stan-
zas, Boland begins a process through which the
stars in the January sky are compared to the
people in Ireland. The first stanza opens with
the recognition that there are always outsiders,
a notion she will continue to develop throughout
the poem. She points out that the light of the
stars, the light that is now visible in the January
sky in Ireland, was created millennia before the
Irish experienced the pain of their own history.
The reader is left to ponder the identity of the
people referred to in the poem by the personal
pronoun ‘‘our.’’ Based only on what is explicitly
stated in the poem, one may assume that the poet
is referring to the Irish people in general through
the use of this term. However, it is commonly
understood based on Boland’s larger body of
work that women and Irish women poets are
also considered by her to be outsiders.
In the first and second stanzas, Boland states
that the stars have always been in existence; they
are infinite and therefore exist outside the con-
structs of historical time. Furthermore, she stresses
that within the notion of historical time, the Irish
people have not merely existed but also have
endured suffering. The idea of the timelessness of
the heavens, an idea introduced in the two senten-
ces that compose the first and second stanzas,
provides the overarching structure of the poem.Stanzas 3 and 4
In the third stanza, Boland emphasizes the
distance that the stars keep from the people
inhabiting the poem. It may be inferred that this
distance is both physical and metaphorical. As
Boland further explores the notion of the stars
existing outside the confines of history, she seems
to imply, in observing that humans live their lives
under the stars, that humans are trapped within
history. She states that it is under the infinite
heavens that we humans have come to under-
stand our own humanity. In the first line of the
fourth stanza, Boland completes the sentiment:
our understanding of our humanity encompasses
our acknowledgment of our own mortality, that
is, our inevitable death. In contrasting the idea of
being human with the idea of the prolonged lives
of the stars (which have existed for so long that
they cannot be contained within the idea of what
we understand as history), Boland begins to fore-
shadow the theme of human mortality and death
that will continue to be explored in the remainder
of the poem. Thus far, she has emphasized, on
one hand, the long life and far-reaching light of
the distant stars and, on the other hand, simple
human mortality.Outside History