Myth and experience: the poetry of Eavan Boland

The distance between the early and later collections of the poet, who is 70 next week, marks the changing landscapes of her life

Illustration: Dearbhla Kelly

Colm Toibin

What are we going to do with experience? In some poems the very experience of making the poem itself is conveyed, as though the technical impulse, the urge to find the right words, sound patterns and rhythmical system might be enough to satisfy some need within the poet’s nervous system. It matters then what the poem mysteriously does as the poem becomes close to a musical performance. It matters less what the poem says, or what it is about.

There is a beautiful moment in the ancient Irish narrative Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Gráinne in which the king, now an old man, has wished to marry the young and beautiful Gráinne, who in turn has convinced Diarmaid, one of the king’s handsome warriors, to run away with her. As they are pursued across Ireland Diarmaid, out of loyalty to the king, is unwilling to make love with Gráinne. She taunts him as they cross a stream, telling him the water that has splashed her thigh is braver than he is. And thus they become lovers.

Eavan Boland’s version of the story, called Song, appears in her 1975 collection The War Horse. The first of four six-line stanzas has 27 words, a comma, a semicolon and a full stop. Twenty-four of the words have only one syllable. The other three need more time; they take time; they are almost the key words: “outsleep”; “water”; “afraid”. The beat is iambic trimester, with a variation in the fourth line – “Too fast, too fast” – that matches the meaning, catches the speed, not only the speed of the water but the speed of the voice itself, with the comma denoting a hesitation in the first-person-singular voice that will declare itself in the last line:

Where in blind files
Bats outsleep the frost
Water slips through stones
Too fast, too fast
For ice; afraid he’d slip
By me I asked him first.

The stanza depends on its rhythm, the single-syllable words suggesting fear, flight, urgency. Although the stanza does not rhyme, there are many repeating sounds, the ‘i’ sound in “blind” coming fast in “file” and again in “ice”. And then there are the half-rhymes of “frost”, “fast” and “first” at the end of the second, fourth and sixth lines; there is the waking echo of “outsleep” in “slip”; and the waking echo too of “bats” in the repeated word, “fast”.

The last two stanzas of the poem tell the story of the water hitting Gráinne’s thigh and her taunting Diarmaid, and then his giving in. The third stanza reads:

My skirt in my hand,
Lifting the hem high
I forded the river there.
Drops splashed my thigh.
Ahead of me at last
He turned at my cry.

This story of female transgression is not, in Boland’s version, a translation but an attempt to find a mode in English that will not only match the sense of risk and movement of the text it is based on but also suggest, using words of Anglo-Saxon origin, a premodern time.

The song of the title has a prose origin; it manages with concise skill to tell a story in a poem, a story that has its original form in prose narrative.

What does this have to do with experience? For those of us brought up in Ireland with parents or grandparents who belonged to the revolutionary generation, these ancient stories had a special power.

Indeed, the act of translation itself into a vernacular by figures such as Douglas Hyde and Lady Gregory at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries gave an impetus to the movement for Irish independence more powerful than, say, any set of economic arguments.

Suggesting that these texts belonged to Ireland, and, in Lady Gregory’s phrase, added dignity to the country, stirred up a set of strong emotions in what was a sort of political vacuum after the fall of Parnell in 1890.

Some of the ancient stories remained controversial even then, however, because of their portraits of a female sexuality that could not be easily ignored. This was apparent not only in the story of Gráinne but also in the depiction of Queen Maeve in The Tain, the epic translated by Lady Gregory in 1902. Lady Gregory, more interested in the heroic elements in The Tain, was uneasy about the frank depiction of sexuality in the text and made some cuts.

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/myth-and-experience-the-poetry-of-eavan-boland-1.1932189