the land, to rivers and roads and fields, are made
in the sixth stanza. Through such examples, and
by linking the elements of the landscape to the
places where the dead lie and where we find
ourselves kneeling alongside the dead and whis-
pering to them, Boland associates her visceral
sense of place with the particular notion of
history that she is attempting to solidify in the
poem. Ireland as a place becomes the soil within
which its history is rooted, the history within which
Boland demands to be recognized, accepted, and
acknowledged. The primary tension in the poem,
then, exists between the insubstantiality of myth
and existence as an outsider on one side and
the permanence of place, ofhistory,ofIrelandon
the other.
The last line of the poem insists remorsefully
on the fact that we are perpetually late, and this
insistence engenders a sense of futility. However,
the final image of the poem occurs in the preced-
ing line. The image is one of people kneeling
alongside the dead, in the road where the dead
lay cluttered. With the image of our knees on the
ground, our bodies bent toward the earth,
Boland suggests something of the connection
between the Irish people and their land. Despite
the persistence of the idea of death, one’s con-
nection with the land, with that sense of perma-
nence, is at least as emphasized by Boland as is
one’s connection with death. It cannot be said
that such a relationship between people and
place as depicted by Boland is a hopeful one, or
that it undercuts the idea of the inevitability
of death. Nevertheless, the notion that such a
strong and permanent connection exists is a
reminder of the meaningfulness of the relation-
ship between the living and the land. The trauma
of death is at least somewhat alleviated by the
hint that in this relationship, life does retain
some sense of meaning. This is the redeeming
value of a sense of place, of Ireland, in Boland’s
poem.
Source:Catherine Dominic, Critical Essay on ‘‘Outside
History,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learn-
ing, 2010.
Debrah Raschke
In the following excerpt, Raschke asserts that
Boland’s ‘‘Outside History’’ and ‘‘In a Time of
Violence’’ demonstrate the dangers of myth, par-
ticularly in relation to women and the concrete
world.
Eavan Boland’s poetry has been described
as ‘‘impeccably scornful,’’ as ‘‘denunciatory,’’ as
too ‘‘strident’’ and too ‘‘vehement’’ (Henigan
110), and as justification for ‘‘her dangerous
attachment to bringing up babies’’ (Reizbaum
472). She has been accused of unduly elevating
the domestic, of mythologizing the suburbs, and
of betraying an Irish literary tradition, which, in
emphasizing Gaelic roots, relies heavily on
mythical images. Such claims relegate Boland
to a preoccupation with trivia, to plebeian tastes.
Yet Boland’s two latest works,Outside History
andIn a Time of Violence, contain some of the
most poignant lyrics written within the Irish and
British traditions in the last half of this century.
Her poetry and her criticism, as Hagen and Zel-
man note, display ‘‘a painterly consciousness, a
keen, painful awareness of the shaping power of
language, and a fundamental sense of poetic
ethics’’ (443). Take, for example, the conclusion
of ‘‘Outside History’’ for which her penultimate
collection is named:Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland(ÓRos
Drinkwater / Alamy)Outside History