Hi there, welcome to this Studyclix podcast on Eavan Boland. My name is Laura Daly, I’m an English teacher from Dublin and will be taking you through an exam-focused podcast on Boland’s poetry for the Leaving Cert. 

I will go through each of the poems on the course with a view to condensing them into the bitesize elements to make them easy for you to remember. These bitesize element will include looking at: 1) Themes 2) Key images and language 3) Stylistic features and 4) Tone. 

Or if you prefer, you can watch listen to it on Youtube instead!

If you have ideas for the Studyclix Explains channel, topics you'd like us to cover, or guests you'd like us to get on, please let us know. You can follow Studyclix on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat and share your ideas with us there.

• Youtube and Spotify: Studyclix Explains
• Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram: @studyclix
• Tiktok: @studyclix.ie
• Snapchat: study_clix

Otherwise, drop us a line at info@studyclix.ie

Below is a transcript of this full podcast packed full of top tips and H1 notes. Make sure to copy these into your notebook to use on the day of your exams!

Hi there, welcome to this Studyclix podcast on Eavan Boland. My name is Laura Daly, I’m an English teacher from Dublin and I’m going to be taking you through an exam focused podcast on Boland’s poetry for the Leaving Cert.

I will go through each of the poems on the course with a view to condensing them into the bitesize elements to make them easy for you to remember. These bitesize elements will include looking at:

So let’s look at Boland’s background first as it will give us the cultural context of her poetry.  She was born in 1944 in Dublin, and although she spent a lot her childhood outside Ireland, she returned and studied English and Latin at Trinity College. This was at a truly vibrant time for emerging Irish poets; also studying in Trinity around that time were Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Brendan Kennelly, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon.  

She married and had two daughters, moving to the suburbs.  Her poetry often deals with the fact that as she herself put it, she didn’t see herself, or her life, in the poetry of the time, and therefore she set about writing her reality.  

It is a fantastic idea for your essay to include a quote by the poet about their own work, and it works really well to have it in your introduction.  Boland says, ‘Poetry begins where language starts in the shadows and accidents of one person's life’, this is the perfect quote to focus on the common themes outlined in her poetry.

So what are those common themes? Well, her poetry has a distinctly feminist slant. She writes about the nature of love and marriage; her poems explore marginalisation, voicelessness and agency; she conflates the political and the suburban; and elevates the ordinary and the domestic, to the divine.  Mythology also features strongly in her poetry, influenced by her studies of Latin, so familiarise yourself with the myths mentioned in the poems on the course, through your textbooks, to gain a greater insight into the themes explored.   

So just before we move to the poems themselves, I wanted to let you know that you can also check out annotated sample answers on the poets on the studyclix website.  So, let’s get started…

‘Child of Our Time’ is a fiercely political poem, in response to a devastating act of violence during the Troubles.  The Dublin and Monaghan bombings caused many deaths, but in the poem, Boland specifically addresses a child who was killed.  She uses her art as a searing criticism of a society which is full of ‘idle talk’ and allows the death of innocents to continue. 

The poem is framed as a lullaby, its rhyme scheme and rhythm echoing that which used to put a child to sleep.  This ‘song’ is used to soothe the child to his ‘final sleep’, making it a poignant and heart-wrenching poem.

The poem opens with the fact that the world has irrevocably changed for Boland since the sudden and death of the child.

This opening six-line stanza is full of contrasts; ‘Cry’/ ‘tune’, ‘unreasoned end’/ ‘reason’, ‘rhythm’/ ‘discord’ are all juxtaposed as she tries to make some sense of the senseless death.

The second stanza shifts from using the personal pronoun ‘I’ to ‘we’, as collective responsibility is assumed, and blame assigned to society as a whole, ‘We who should have known how to instruct’.  The imagery of the stanza is extremely evocative, a litany of things associated with childhood: bedtime stories, ‘tales to distract’; cuddly toys ‘animals you took to bed’ and learning new words ‘an idiom for you to keep’.  The tone is angry, then sorrowful but ultimately, resolute in the alliterative final line:

The meaning in the child’s death must come from what we’ve learnt from it, this is emphasised by the repetition of ‘learn’.  

This theme echoes in the final stanza also, which is a rallying call for political change, for peace talks or ‘a new language’.  The language is violent; ‘broken’ ‘limbs’ ‘robbed’, she repeats ‘broken image’ showing how what she had conceived of as society is now shattered. The cacophonous alliteration of ‘t’ and ‘b’ throughout the stanza adds to this image of societal discord.   She finds fault in those whose political discourse has found no resolution to the conflict, ‘our idle talk has cost’. But she hopes this moment will awaken a new world:

The final sibilance in the repetition of ‘sleep’ can be seen as both sinister and soothing, the poem is full of these contrasts.  Ultimately, the poet hopes for change but this hope is not enough to relieve the devastation felt at the untimely loss of the child. 

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: war and the death of innocents in conflict, political and societal apathy in the face of violence, a new discourse for peace.
• Key images: the imagery of childhood, the imagery of violence, the idle talk and new language, the robbed cradle, sleep as death.
• Stylistic features: juxtaposition, rhyme and rhythm of a lullaby.
• Tone: anger, sorrow, resolution.

‘The War Horse’ is an allegorical poem, on the surface it is about a Traveller’s horse who escapes and causes minor damage in a suburban housing estate, by trampling in some gardens.  It was written during a time of great violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, so metaphorically, the horse represents war and how it can come to encroach on seemingly distant domesticity, particularly in the Republic.  The tone of the poem is slightly accusatory at times, as Boland wonders at our ability to disassociate from the violence of the world and asks, ‘why should we care’ once ‘we are safe’.   In this way, the poem encourages the reader to reflect on their role as a bystander in the conflicts of society.  

In terms of form the poem is written in rhyming couplets, the poet is mirroring the orderliness of suburbia, but the enjambment hints at how that façade of order is always under threat by the realities of conflict and war. 

The poem opens with a sense of immediacy, ‘This dry night’ and Boland lulls us into a false sense of security with ‘nothing unusual / about the clip, clop, casual’ the onomatopoeia and alliterative ‘c’ creating a musicality and rhythm boldly interrupted by the simile of the following couplet:

The language is suddenly filled with connotations of war and violence, ‘iron’, ‘stamp’, ‘death’ and ‘innocent’.  A speaker, an observer, enters the poem and watches the horse ‘pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head / down’ and the sibilance intimates a sinister undertone to the benign image. 

This subtle contrast continues throughout the imagery in the poem, Boland states:

The leaf is compared to a ‘maimed limb’, following this a ‘rose’ is a ‘volunteer’ and a crocus’ head is ‘one of the screamless dead’; the effect of the imagery is disturbing.

Suddenly the focus shifts back to the speaker, ‘But we, we are safe’ the repetition of ‘we’ emphasises the selfishness of human nature.  The central theme of the poem is captured in this rhetorical question.

The themes of migration, death, and human suffering, coupled with our lack of empathy, makes this a stark and jarring image for the reader.  

As the horse moves on the speaker and her neighbours under the ‘subterfuge of curtains’ feel ‘relief’.  Momentarily her ‘blood is still with atavism’, this innocuous incident recalls past and present violence for Boland.  The closing lines are sharply pessimistic:

This cycle of violence is nothing new, nor is our disinterest; we have betrayed our humanity by ignoring it. Powerful stuff. 

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: war and it’s victims, the lack of empathy by those not directly affected.
• Key images: the horse as a metaphor for war, the flowers as metaphors for the casualties of war, and the language of violence throughout.
• Stylistic features: rhetorical question. Sibilance, onomatopoeia, contrast.
• Tone: threatening, accusatory, pessimistic.

In terms of form, ‘The Famine Road’ is the most unusual, and interesting, on the course. Two distinct narratives run parallel, they seem almost completely unrelated, until Boland ties the two together in the final stanza.  The first narrative deals with the Great Famine, letters are exchanged between Lord Trevelyan and Colonel Jones from the Relief Committee as they oversee the building of pointless roads to keep the starving Irish busy.  The sub narrative is the voice of a doctor, callously explaining to an unnamed woman that there is no obvious cause, and therefore, no cure, for her infertility. For simplicity’s sake, I will deal with the two narratives separately, but you can weave the two narratives in your analysis in your essay if you wish. 

Tone is crucial in understanding this poem as the voices completely lack empathy.  It’s a harsh statement on the inhumanity of people.  Trevelyan offers no relief to the suffering Irish; he sees them as inferior:

The committee’s response is to suggest to ‘give them roads, roads to force/ from nowhere, going nowhere of course?’ the repetition of nowhere emphasising the utter pointlessness of the endeavour.  

The imagery turns to the victims, like the roads they are building, they too are ‘directionless’.  They are so hungry that their thoughts turn to cannibalism, ‘each eyed / as if at a corner butcher – the other’s buttock’; this simile shows the extremity of their situation. 

Disease and death are so rampant that the Irish too have lost their empathy, one is described as ‘typhoid pariah’, he is abandoned even by his relatives who, in fear for their own lives will offer him no comfort as he dies.

Ironically the Relief Committee report back their endeavours have been a success, ‘sedition, idleness, cured’, despite the fact that death is rampant ‘I saw bones out of my carriage window’.  The oppressed and the oppressor are contrasted in the imagery of the ‘bones’ and the ‘carriage’ and disgust is evoked in the reader.

This disgust also slowly builds as the doctor gives his unfeeling diagnosis to the woman in the sub-narrative.  He lists statistics ‘one out of every ten’, then he offers no cause ‘one sees / day after day these mysteries’.  His medical advice amounts to ‘take it well woman, grow your garden, keep house, good-bye’.  Her infertility is completely minimised, her suffering dismissed in the matter-of-fact tone adopted earlier in the poem.

Her voice is eventually heard in the final stanza, when the two strands cohere.

There is so much to unpack in this final stanza, the woman’s devastation at her inability to have children, the mournful assonance in this stanza echoes her despair.  But there is also the insidious suggestion that her body is ‘useless’ now that she cannot have children. Her value, like the Irish, lies in her ability to produce; both are deemed useless when they are no longer vehicles for production.  A sinister thought the woman herself has internalised. 

In both narratives, the voices of the marginalised are silenced.

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: people’s inhumanity, cruelty, lack of empathy.  Voicelessness of the oppressed and marginalised in society. 
• Key images: the famine road, both literally and metaphorically in terms of the woman’s body. The simile of cannibalism. The simile of the snowflakes, the typhoid pariah. 
• Stylistic features: use of direct voice of the British imperialists and the doctor, the direct voice of the woman at the end.
• Tone: matter-of-fact, dismissive, condescending.

‘Love’ is a poem that captures the different stages of a marriage.  While appreciating her marriage in its current state, the poet looks back longingly on a period of intensity at the beginning of her relationship and yearns for the passion of that love once more.  The myth of Aeneas from classical literature is used as an extended metaphor throughout the poem.  Aeneas travels to the Underworld in search of his father and meets his comrades who are unable to speak to him.  The metaphor is used predominantly to show how Boland and her husband are failing to communicate effectively, but also that she views her husband as a hero like Aeneas. 

The poem recalls a specific time in Boland’s life when she lived in the ‘mid-western town’ of Iowa with her husband and young children.  On a visit back she is reminded of that time ‘when myths collided’, here she is referring to the story of Aeneas intersecting with the story of her relationship.  The river in the town in the dark becomes ‘the water / the hero crossed on his way to hell’, the soft alliterative ‘h’ belies the menacing undertone of the image.   

Boland recalls the simplicity of their lives at that time, encapsulated in the image of the ‘Amish table’, and the predominant feeling explored is the intense passion they experienced at that time.  Love is captured in the sensuous image,

Love is also compared to one of the elements; essential to survival 

The intensity of the early years of their marriage is heightened by the near fatal illness of one of their ‘two infant children’, who was ‘touched by death in this town and spared’.  The narrative shifts again at this point back to the imagery of Aeneas who cannot communicate with the fallen comrades that he meets in hell:

This arresting metaphor shows how for Boland and her husband communication has failed, what is it from their shared life that they have lost since this time?

Boland appears to answer this in the second half of the poem, there is a shift in tone, the passion has dissipated, and she is matter of fact, reflected in the short sentences. 

The pronouns have also subtly shifted from ‘we’ to predominantly ‘I’, as we see a distance between the spouses.  The love has not gone, but it has transformed they ‘love each other still’ but ‘speak plainly’.   While the poet respectfully acknowledges how their relationship is now, and their ‘ordinary differences’ are quite common, she yearns for the passion and intensity they had before.  This longing is captured in the verbs ‘I want’, ‘I long to’ and the rhetorical questions ‘Will we ever live so intensely again?’ ‘Will love come to us again…?’.

Ultimately, the poem is a lament and ends with a pessimistic tone.  The final couplet is full of mournful assonance as she mourns the intensity of her early marriage, returning to the metaphorical image of Aeneas as her husband:

The communication has failed and there is an impassable gulf between them.

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: love and its various stages, the intensity of early marriage and the challenges of long-term relationships.
• Key images: the metaphors of love ‘feather and muscle of wings’, ‘a brother of fire and air’ the extended metaphor of Aeneas. Images of stunted communication. 
• Stylistic features: The sensuous imagery contrasted with the matter of fact lines of the later stanzas. The rhetorical questions. Verbs of longing and desire.  Shift in pronouns. 
• Tone: nostalgic, regretful, yearning, appreciative. 

‘The Pomegranate’ is one of my favourite of Boland’s on the course, and another that relies on Greek and Roman mythology.  Therefore to understand the poem you must have a basic understanding of the myth of Ceres and Persephone, which I will give you a brief synopsis of now.  Hades, God of the Underworld, kidnaps Persephone and tricks her into eating pomegranate seeds which means she must stay in the Underworld forever.  Following an intervention by Zeus, Persephone is allowed to return from the underworld but only for six months of the year. Ceres her mother, goddess of agriculture, allows nothing to grow when she is apart from her daughter.  This myth is what explained the seasons in Greek and Roman times.   The theme of the poem is mother-daughter relationships and the evolving stages of our lives. 

The poem opens with Boland espousing her love for Ceres and Persephone myth:

There’s lovely soft alliteration of the ‘l’, and assonance as well, that gives the opening a musicality.  The myth appeals to the poet due to its relevance to her at all stages of her life ‘I can enter it anywhere.’ The poem has three distinct narrative threads that mark these stages.

She begins by recalling her time spent in London 

The repetition of ‘exile’ in this part of the poem emphasises Boland’s isolation as an expatriate, at this point, she is Persephone in the myth.  

She grows to associate herself with the mother, ‘I was Ceres then’, and the imagery in this section is very much reminiscent of the poem ‘This Moment’. 

Boland captures the visceral sentiment felt by all mothers at one point; the desire to keep your child with you always.  But the reality is that time passes and children grow, this is captured in the pathos of the image of the trees losing their leaves:

In the third narrative ‘It is winter’ her small daughter has grown to be a teenager.  Boland passes her room and sees her 

The exclamation mark signalling that she is jolted back into the significance of the myth.  There is lovely juxtaposition throughout the poem of the two worlds; the mythological and the modern.  Boland rues the plucking of the Pomegranate and there are definite allusions throughout to the plucking of the apple by Eve in the Garden of Eden also.  She sees the Pomegranate as symbolic of her child’s coming of age, her impending entry into adulthood and she yearns to protect her from the world she will enter; ‘I could warn her.  There is still a chance’. 

The poet uses two rhetorical questions in the poem, it lends to the conversational tone of the poem.

The crux of the poem lies in the evocative line that follows the question ‘If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift’.  If we try to protect our children from the world, they will never fully experience it.  The gift to daughters is their freedom ‘The legend will be hers as well as mine’.  

Finally, the closing image of the poem is one of rebelliousness and sexuality as the daughter takes her bite of the pomegranate while the mother doesn’t stop her.

What a bittersweet moment for a mother, watching her daughter on the cusp of adulthood.

So to recap:

• Themes: mother daughter relationships, the transience of parenthood and the desire to protect children, awakening sexuality.
• Key images: the Pomegranate, the three narratives – Boland as a child, Boland as mother to a young daughter, her teenager on the cusp of adulthood.
• Stylistic features: Metaphor the Ceres and Persephone myth as Boland and her daughter, rhetorical questions, juxtaposition of the modern and the mythical. 
• Tone: desperation, love, resignation.

‘This Moment’ is the celebration of the ordinary, the everyday, the domestic.  It is a snapshot of suburban life, and the use of the present tense throughout, gives the poem a lovely immediacy.  It is vivid and sensuous, and its simplicity belies the depth of the message; cherish this ordinary moment.

The stanzas are short, the opening couplet sets the suburban scene: 

Dusk is time of change a transition, this state of flux is alluded to in the second stanza where ‘Things are getting ready / to happen /out of sight.’  So often the ordinary and the domestic are maligned as dull, but here a sense of mystery is evoked with the tone of anticipation, ‘But not yet’.

Boland uses subtle repetition in the poem of ‘stars’ and ‘moths’, stars are symbolic of the very edge of our imagination and the moths are symbolic of ordinariness; this imagery shows us that the magical and ordinary simultaneously coexist all around us.

She describes the scene in terms of colour, the shadow of a tree is ‘black’ and the simple simile, ‘One window is yellow as butter’, evokes the simple domestic theme once again. 

The central image of the poem is the stanza in which a nameless ‘woman’ catches a ‘child’, the lack of names lends a wonderful universality to the image, this is an action repeated all over the world.  This central image of love and embrace and connection between mother and child, surrounded by the dynamic world of nature, is the moment the poem celebrates.

The last line stands alone, ‘Apples sweeten in the dark.’  The line has multiple interpretations, the apple sweetening in the dark, reinforces the idea of transience we see in the poem, nothing is static in nature, everything is continuously changing from moment to moment, hence it’s so difficult to capture the moment. As seen in ‘The Pomegranate’ The apples could also be a reference to Eve in the garden of Eden and the impending loss of innocence.  The scene is idyllic in the youth and innocence that’s captured but this is also fleeting and he poem carries this tension throughout.

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: celebration of the ordinary moments that make up a life. 
• Key images: the neighbourhood, stars and moths, apples, colours black and yellow, the woman catching the child.
• Stylistic features: repetition, the use of the present tense, simile, stillness juxtaposed with movement.
• Tone: celebratory, meditative, grateful. 

‘Outside History’, written in unrhymed tercets, is a poem with a certain ambiguity, which can allow various readings. I will be approaching the poem in the most common way it is interpretated, through a feminist lens, where those who are ‘outsiders’ are women.  The poem is an awakening of the poet and her desire to move into a position of agency in the world and therefore, become part of history. 

The poem opens with a matter-of-fact tone ‘There are outsiders, always’ illuminating a core theme of the poem, marginalisation.  She moves to a metaphor of the stars, because their light takes so long to reach the earth, it happened ‘thousands of years before our pain did’, therefore, they are outside history too.  There is juxtaposition between the celestial and mythical nature of the stars and the cosmos, and the realism of the human condition on earth;

The use of the pronoun ‘you’ suggests the poem is self-reflective with an introspective tone.

She decides the landscape that she will choose to inhabit will be the mortal one, ‘out of myth into history I move’, as she claims her rightful place in society.   The erasure of women from history and their contribution to all aspects of society, including literature is being overtly challenged by Boland through her art; she resolutely asserts her place among the male Irish poets.  There is a play with imagery of light and darkness throughout the poem that echoes this need for illumination, a coming out of the shadows of history. 

The language in the final stanzas of the poem becomes significantly disturbing, reflecting the darkness of human civilisation, she refers to; ‘that ordeal’ ‘darkness’ ‘roads clotted’ ‘dead’ all culminating to a final pessimistic image;

The mournful sibilance and assonance of this stanza, as well as the repetition of ‘too late’, emphasises the defeatist outlook of the poet.  Although she has decided to step into history, the violence of it, leaves her feeling as if her earlier resolution was futile.  There is a sense that the marginalised will always remain so.

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: marginalisation, erasure or absence of women as agents throughout history or in art.
• Key images: light and darkness, the metaphor of the stars, the landscape of humanity and the accompanying mortality, myth versus history, kneeling beside the dead.
• Stylistic features: metaphor, assonance, sibilance, repetition in the final stanza, negative language.
• Tone: resigned, assertive, pessimistic.

‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’ is a poem about a fan, given to the poet’s mother by her father, in the early days of their romance in Paris.  The poem is a reconstruction of the beginnings of a courtship, but it is also a poem that suggests that we can never really know the intimate details of a relationship, parts of the narrative will always be beyond reach. 

The poem comes from a series entitled ‘Object Lessons’ and the relationship is examined through the object of the fan, the first love token, passed down to Boland.  It is therefore evidence that her parents’ relationship survived those early passionate, yet tentative days of their budding romance:

Here we see the soft, alliterative ‘f’ and ‘p’ in the opening stanza lending to this tentative tone.  The image of ‘pre-war Paris’ suggests a time of innocence and hope in the world, and indeed romance, as Paris is considered the city of love. Right from this opening stanza an atmosphere of anticipation and tension is created with the imagery of the torrid weather, ‘A starless drought made the nights stormy’.  

The parents’ contrasting personalities are evoked in the short snappy sentences, ‘She was always early.  He was late.’ He is even later this evening as he has stopped to buy her the fan.  As she waits she thinks ‘the distance smelled of rain and lightning’, creating a sense of foreboding about their shared future captured in the metaphor of ‘the distance’. 

The focus shifts to the intricacies of the fan, and it is described in detail over two stanzas, the most striking feature of the fan is the ‘tortoiseshell’:

The language here unsettles and disturbs as the tortoise has been violated for its beautiful shell, what other inferences are here?  Has the love token itself been violated in its very bequeathment? We see this unsettling language throughout the poem; ‘stifling’, ‘drought’, ‘killing’, ‘worn-out’, ‘violation’, ‘overcast’, ‘airless’.  To add to this there are many instances of sibilance throughout which also creates a slightly threatening tone. 

The image of the fan is supplanted again by the narrative, the man running late, the impatient woman waiting as the storm gathers.  It finishes unsatisfactorily, the poet asserts that there is

It is a blackbird and its wingspan, on a ‘sultry morning, in summer’, which has caused the poet to recall the black lace fan and all its suggestiveness:

Here the fan holds a sensuality and again we think of the metaphorical meanings of the fan in terms of her parents’ relationship. Yet ‘The past’, as Boland puts it, is indeed, ‘an empty café terrace’, full of expectation but really and empty tableau onto which we assign stories and infer meaning. 

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: love, her parents’ relationship, never truly knowing the details of an intimate relationship as an outsider.
• Key images: the fan, Pre-war Paris, the café terrace with the woman waiting, the encroaching storm, the man running, the blackbird. 
• Stylistic features: metaphor, alliteration, sibilance. 
• Tone: passionate, tentative, uncertainty.

‘The Shadow Doll’ also comes from the series ‘Object Lessons’ and just as the fan is used to explore her parents’ relationship, the Shadow Doll is used to explore marriage and what it might mean to be a new bride. The poet explains that a shadow doll is a porcelain doll in a glass dome wearing a small replica of the bride-to-be’s dress.  The doll acts as a metonymy, standing for women on the cusp of marriage. There are three female figures in the poem, the shadow doll, the (presumably Victorian) bride, and Boland, on the eve of her own wedding.  

The replica dress is described in terms of the labour exerted to make it, 

and the colours in the poem are white, with the usual virginal connotations; ‘ivory’, ‘oyster’, ‘porcelain’. The wedding, if not marriage itself, is seen as an oppressive force, one that paralyses a woman in state of artificial beauty ‘an airless glamour-’ the image is one of suffocation ‘under glass’, and voicelessness, ‘under wraps’.  The poet announces that the shadow doll ‘survives its occasion’ which is such an interesting image, so much is conveyed in the poet’s selection of the verb ‘survives’.  Do women survive marriage as opposed to thrive in it? 

The doll transforms into a sort of silent witness as the marriage progresses but is ‘discreet about visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts’.  The imagery here is of real life; menstruation, fertility, sexuality, all are in sharp contrast to the artifice of weddings, represented by the doll.  However, the woman still sees herself in the doll ‘inside it all…never feeling the satin rise and fall’, there is again an image of breathlessness here. 

The final two tercets move to the night before the poet’s nuptials, as she nervously repeats her vows

The enjambment here, and elsewhere, shows the lack of control the speaker feels. She is ‘astray’, lost, among the gifts she is surrounded by, as she packs her suitcase to begin her new life ‘among the cards and wedding gifts-’.  You will notice that Boland uses a lot of dashes throughout the poem, images are suddenly cut off and it adds to the disjointed and disconcerting feeling evoked by the poem.

Significantly, the poem ends with the image of the suitcase, ‘the battered tan case’, closing with difficulty, it must be pressed down and ‘pressing down again. And then, locks’.  The repetition of pressing down here, as with the repetition of ‘under’ earlier in the poem, emphasises the oppressive nature of the journey she is about embark upon.  The finality of ‘locks’ makes the reader question, what parts of the woman are required to be pressed down and locked away ‘under’ a patriarchal system of marriage?

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: marriage in a patriarchy, the contrast of the artifice of a bride with the reality of being a married woman, oppression.
• Key images: the shadow doll, the dress, the white colours, Boland the night before her wedding. The case locking. 
• Stylistic features: enjambment, repetition of pressing down and under, metonym, the dash.
• Tone: oppressive, disconcerting. 

White Hawthorn is associated with Irish folklore and myth, and the West of Ireland always evokes a sense of wildness, linked to the wildness of the landscape; we see both these connotations in the poem, ‘White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland’. In the poem the poet desires to be part of the landscape of Ireland, but decides against, deterred by myth and superstition.

The poem opens with the speaker on a journey, out of their normal milieu: 

The language and the sentences are short and clipped, evoking a tone of discontent with the ordinary and every day, a desire to escape, in this transitional time of year. The sibilance throughout also lends to the sense of the sinister in the mundane. 

The second quatrain we see the poet undergo a transformation she ‘assumed the / hard shyness of the Atlantic light / and the superstitious aura of Hawthorn’ she becomes unreadable, and at one with the mythology of the landscape.  She has a strong desire to pick the hawthorn ‘to be part of / that ivory, downhill rush’.  The enjambment in these stanzas mirroring the strong emotions that have carried the speaker away.  

However, her desire is halted by ‘custom’ and superstition as bringing the hawthorn indoors invited bad luck:

In the final stanzas is the key metaphor of the poem; the fluid nature of the hawthorn blowing on the hills is compared with the fluidity of water. But interesting the poet uses the word ‘fluency’, which has connotations of language.

The hawthorn, ‘like water’, is ‘able to re-define the land’, just as the words of a poet can redefine the cultural landscape that they find themselves in, which is what Boland asserts is the purpose of her poetry, the ‘re-define’ the landscape of Irish poetry, giving voice to untold aspects of women’s experiences.

She continues the water metaphor saying that the hawthorn ‘is the only language spoken in those parts’ and this is an interesting image in that the West is in sharp contrast with the ‘small talk’ of suburbia we see in the opening stanza, it is a place beyond language.   There is a slightly ominous tone to the image ‘travellers astray in  / the unmarked lights of a May dusk -’, has the poet found themselves adrift in a landscape where she cannot access language and is this a metaphor for her brave journey as a female poet?

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: a journey, the journey of a poet to find her voice and language in an unhospitable landscape, the impact of mythology and superstition on people.
• Key images: the white hawthorn, suburban gardens, small talk, the bad luck, the travellers, fluency of water, 
• Stylistic features: metaphor, sibilance, enjambment, the seasons, the dusk and their connotations of transition. 
• Tone: discontent, reticence, slightly ominous.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of Boland’s poetry, always use at least 4 poems in detail in your essay and quote as much as you can throughout!  Finally, remember to check out studyclix.ie for more sample answers. Best of luck!

Want more resources on Eavan Boland? Find review sampled answers here.