connection to her society at first as a poet but
not as a woman, then later as a woman but not
as a poet, and this fractured sense of self is
apparent in her poetry. Rose Atfield, in her
study of postcolonialism in Boland’s poetry (in
Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writ-
ing/Practice), investigates the way Boland seeks
to restore a sense of ‘‘identity in terms of place,
history and literary tradition.’’ Other critics,
such as Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle (inA
History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s
Poetry), have also examined Boland’s ‘‘sense of
exile,’’ while Shara McCallum (in theAntioch
Review) has observed Boland’s ‘‘desire to etch
out a space for women within Irish history and
poetry as subjects rather than objects.’’
Given Boland’s own statements, and these
critical interpretations of Boland’s poetry in
general, one may reasonably infer that the out-
siders Boland refers to in ‘‘Outside History’’ are
those classes whom she has previously acknowl-
edged as existing, at one time or another, outside
of Ireland’s social, cultural, or literary history:
women and poets. In this poem in particular,
Boland portrays a moment of choice, the choice
between existing as an outsider or living with the
right to be included in history. This moment is
painted in terms of turmoil and darkness. She
depicts the choice as one clouded by the specter
of death, and slow, painful death at that. The
precise instant at which she states her need to
choose is found in the exact middle of the poem.
All the lines that precede the choice are colored
by the concept of movement, by a sense of pro-
gressing through centuries of historical time.
Boland speaks of the distance of the stars, the
millennia that have transpired since the light of
those stars first shone, and the years of pain
endured during the course of Irish history. The
sense of movement through time conveyed by
Boland is powerful, and it stops abruptly at the
moment of her choice.
The lines that follow that moment are
equally filled with a sense of movement, though
not the rush of thousands of years but the slow,
plodding, painful movement of death. The poet’s
expression of the desire to exist not in the realm
of myth as an object, one written about, but in
the historical world as a subject, a contributor to
history, is a metaphorical transition from insub-
stantiality into reality, from fiction into fact.
Boland is quick to point out that with reality
comes death. Death in the subsequent stanzas
is depicted in stark and traumatic imagery, as a
drawn-out struggle peopled by mourners who
kneel beside the dying and lament the fact that
the past is fixed. To fully understand the remorse
of the final line of the poem, it is helpful to review
an idea from another Boland poem, one from
the greater series in which this one appears,
‘‘Outside History: A Sequence.’’ In the last line
of ‘‘Outside History,’’ Boland reiterates the title
of another poem in the sequence, that of the tenth
poem, ‘‘We Are Always Too Late.’’ In this poem,
Boland explores the way we attempt to remake
history through the reenactment of our memo-
ries. Yet despite our efforts, we are too late to
change things. We arrive at the moment in our
minds after it has already happened, as it already
exists within history, and this is the very idea
Boland stresses in the final line of ‘‘Outside His-
tory,’’ when she declares that we will always
arrive on the scene too late to change it, too late
to forestall death.
The poem as examined thus far reveals
Boland’s desire to claim a place for women in
Irish cultural and social history, a place for the
female poet in Irish literary history, and most
significantly, a place for herself in a world she
has long felt excluded from. ‘‘Outside History’’ is
additionally marked by a sense of movement,
whether it be the vigorous onslaught of time in
the first half of the poem or the plodding march
toward death in the second half of the poem.
‘‘Outside History,’’ then, is characterized by
transition (movement through time and toward
death) and struggle, by the tension between two
modes of existence—between living within the
insubstantial world of myth as an outsider and
living within the realm of history in a life viewed,
apparently, only in relation to death. Embedded
within all the conflict, struggle, transition, and
tension of the poem, however, is a sense of some-
thing permanent, lasting, fixed, and solid.
In the second line of the first stanza Boland
refers to Ireland specifically, describing January
in Ireland in terms that connote a strong sense of
constancy. Later, the pivotal idea in the third
stanza presents itself as a strong sense of place,
a sense of Ireland as the place where one’s
humanity has become apparent. Again, in the
first line of the fourth stanza, the landscape
becomes an anchor for the next idea. It is on
this particular landscape, the Irish landscape,
where one’s mortality is made known. Addi-
tional references to various physical aspects ofOutside History