by Eavan Boland
AN
ORIGIN
LIKE
WATER
COLLECTED POEMS 1967–1987
EAVAN BOLAND
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY / NEW YORK / LONDON
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For my daughters,
Sarah and Eavan Frances
Contents
Preface
From New Territory 1967
Athene’s Song
From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin
New Territory
After the Irish of Aodghan O’Rathaille
The Flight of the Earls
A Cynic at Kilmainham Jail
Belfast vs. Dublin
Yeats in Civil War
The Poets
Mirages
The Pilgrim
Migration
Three Songs for a Legend
1. A Lullaby for Lir’s Son
2. The Malediction
3. Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan
The King and the Troubadour
Requiem for a Personal Friend
The Winning of Etain
From The War Horse 1975
I Dedication: The Other Woman and the Novelist
The War Horse
The Famine Road
Child of Our Time
The Hanging Judge
A Soldier’s Son
The Greek Experience
The Laws of Love
Sisters
II O Fons Bandusiae
Chorus of the Shadows
From the Irish of Pangur Ban
The Atlantic Ocean
Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes about Poetry
III Ode to Suburbia
Naoise at Four
Cyclist with Cut Branches
Song
The Botanic Gardens
Prisoners
Ready for Flight
Anon
Suburban Woman
From In Her Own Image 1980
Tirade for the Mimic Muse
In Her Own Image
In His Own Image
Anorexic
Mastectomy
Solitary
Menses
Witching
Exhibitionist
Making Up
From Night Feed 1982
Degas’s Laundresses
Woman in Kitchen
A Ballad of Beauty and Time
It’s a Woman’s World
Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark
The New Pastoral
The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish
The Woman Changes Her Skin
Pose
Patchwork
Lights
Domestic Interior
1. Night Feed
2. Monotony
3. Hymn
4. Partings
5. Energies
6. The Muse Mother
7. Endings
8. In the Garden
9. After a Childhood Away from Ireland
10. Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray
11. Domestic Interior
From The Journey 1987
I Remember
Mise Eire
Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening
The Oral Tradition
Fever
The Unlived Life
Lace
The Bottle Garden
Suburban Woman: A Detail
The Briar Rose
The Women
Nocturne
The Fire in Our Neighborhood
On Holiday
Growing Up
There and Back
The Wild Spray
The Journey
Envoi
Listen. This Is the Noise of Myth
An Irish Childhood in England: 1951
Fond Memory
Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland
The Emigrant Irish
Tirade for the Lyric Muse
The Woman Takes Her Revenge on the Moon
The Glass King
Index
Preface
The first poems here were written when I was nineteen. Altogether, this book consists of five collections, published over twenty years, from New Territory in 1967 to The Journey in 1987. I have revised some poems, but not many. I have tried to leave intact the untidy and telling shape which is the truth of any poet’s work, and I have avoided as much as I could the temptation to make any of it look more achieved and symmetrical than it was.
In a certain sense, I began in a city and a poetic world where the choices and assumptions were near to those of a nineteenth-century poet. The formal poem was respected. The wit of the stanza was admired more than its drama. Most importantly, the poet’s life—in the small circle I knew and even beyond it in the culture—was exalted in ways that were poignant and suspect at the same time.
In my first collection, published when I was twenty-two years of age, those features of my environment showed up in poems that described a safe and well-lighted circle, that struggled for skill and avoided risk. Looking back at them now, I can see myself as I was then trying to get cadences right and counting out stresses on a table. The poems are the visible evidence. What is not visible is the growing confusion and anxiety I felt, my inability to be sure that I would continue to be a poet when I left the lighted circle and moved out into the shadow of what I had learned to think of as an ordinary life—that is, a life not to be found in the approved versions I had encountered. Above all I had no clear sense of how my womanhood could connect with my life as a poet, or what claims each would make on the other.
These poems are a record of the claims. By and large, I have left them as they are, with their failures, their awkwardness, because although the connection was often flawed and painful, it remains central: The truth is that I came to know history as a woman and a poet when I apparently left the site of it. I came to know my country when I went to live at its margin. I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile within it.
These are small paradoxes. They are reflected here in the poems I began to write when I left an eloquent literary city and went to live in a suburb only four miles from the city’s center in actual distance, but unmapped and unvisited in any literary sense I knew. Once I began to live my own life—a life with a husband, a home, and small children— I could see firsthand how remote it was from the life of the poet as I had understood it. I began to realize that a subtle oppression could result from this fracture between the instinctive but unexpressed life I lived every day and the expressive poetic manners I had inherited that might easily—as manners often do—render it merely as decorum. I was grateful for the instruction of an historic poetic culture and I still relished craft and hard work. But increasingly I came to regard each poem not as a series of technical strategies, but as a forceful engagement between a life and a language.
It was never predictable. I could never count on the outcome. The language remained partially inherited: resistant and engrossing. But the life at least was wholly mine. It took place in a house, in a garden, with a child in my arms, on summer afternoons, in winter dusks, and with eventual confidence that however formidable a poetic tradition might be, however assured its inherited language, its ethical survival still depended on the allowance it provided for a single life to make—in the ironic and historic sense—a new name for itself and commend it to all the old ones.
I am not suggesting that this assurance is clearly present in these poems. It could not be. It is retrospective: I only found it by writing them. In the earliest work here I was often too young, too puzzled, too clumsy as a technician to compose my intuitions into forms
and therefore trapped them into patterns. Even later, when I found my voice, I was still capable of drowning it out with a finished poem. But occasionally— and these are the poems I am glad to have included here—the life beckoned to the language and the language followed.
EAVAN BOLAND
Dublin 1995
from
New Territory
1967
Athene’s Song
From my father’s head I sprung
Goddess of the war, created
Partisan and soldiers’ physic,
My symbols boast and brazen gong,
Until I made in Athens wood
Upon my knees a new music.
When I played my pipe of bone,
Robbed and whittled from a stag,
Every bird became a lover,
Every lover to its tone
Found the truth of song and brag.
Fish sprung in the full river.
Peace became the toy of power
When other noises broke my sleep.
Like dreams I saw the hot ranks
And heroes in another flower
Than any there. I dropped my pipe
Remembering their shouts, their thanks.
Beside the water, lost and mute,
Lies my pipe and, like my mind,
Remains unknown, remains unknown.
And in some hollow, taking part
With my heart against my hand,
Holds its peace and holds its own.
From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin
Dressed in the colors of a country day—
Gray-blue, blue-gray, the white of seagulls’ bodies—
Chardin’s peasant woman
Is to be found at all times in her short delay
Of dreams, her eyes mixed
Between love and market, empty flagons of wine
At her feet, bread under her arm. He has fixed
Her limbs in color and her heart in line.
In her right hand the hindlegs of a hare
Peep from a cloth sack. Through the door
Another woman moves
In painted daylight. Nothing in this bare
Closet has been lost
Or changed. I think of what great art removes:
Hazard and death. The future and the past.
A woman’s secret history and her loves—
And even the dawn market from whose bargaining
She has just come back, where men and women
Congregate and go
Among the produce, learning to live from morning
To next day, linked
By a common impulse to survive although
In surging light they are single and distinct
Like birds in the accumulating snow.
New Territory
Several things announced the fact to us:
The captain’s Spanish tears
Falling like doubloons in the headstrong light
And then of course the fuss—
The crew jostling and interspersing cheers
With wagers. Overnight
As we went down to our cabins, nursing the last
Of the grog, talking as usual of conquest,
Land hove into sight.
Frail compasses and trenchant constellations
Brought us as far as this.
And now air and water, fire and earth
Stand at their given stations
Out there and are ready to replace
This single desperate width
Of ocean.
Why do we hesitate?
Water and air
And fire and earth, and therefore life, are here.
And therefore death.
Out of the dark man comes to life and into it
He goes and loves and dies
(His element being the dark and not the light of day)
So the ambitious wit
Of poets and exploring ships have been his eyes—
Riding the dark for joy—
And so Isaiah of the sacred text is eagle-eyed because
By peering down the unlit centuries
He glimpsed the holy boy.
After the Irish of Aodghan O’Rathaille
Without flocks or cattle or the curved horns
Of cattle, in a drenching night without sleep
My five wits on the famous uproar
Oft the waves, toss like ships,
And I cry for boyhood, long before
Winkle and dogfish had defiled my lips.
O if he lived the prince who sheltered me,
And his company who gave me entry
On the river of the Laune,
Whose royalty stood sentry
Over intricate harbors, I and my own
Would not be desolate in Diarmuid’s country.
Fierce McCarthy Mor whose friends were welcome,
McCarthy of the Lee, a slave of late,
McCarthy of Kanturk whose blood
Has dried underfoot:
Of all my princes not a single word—
Irrevocable silence ails my heart.
My heart shrinks in me, my heart ails
That every hawk and royal hawk is lost.
From Cashel to the far sea
Their birthright is dispersed
Far and near, night and day, by robbery
And ransack, every town oppressed.
Take warning wave, take warning crown of the sea,
I O’Rathaille—witless from your discords—
Were Spanish sails again afloat
And rescue on your tides
Would force this outcry down your wild throat,
Would make you swallow these Atlantic words.
The Flight of the Earls
Princes, it seems, are seldom wise.
Most of them fall for a woman’s tears
Or else her laughter—think of Paris
Whose decision stretched to ten alarming years.
Nothing would suit
Until he’d brought
The kingdom down around his ears.
Now in the Middle Ages see
The legendary boy of king and queen:
A peacock of all chivalry
He dies at twenty on some battle-green
And ever since
The good Black Prince
Rides to the land of might-have-been.
Whether our own were foolish or wise
Hardly concerns us: death ran away with our chances
Of a meeting. Yet we strain our eyes
Hoping perhaps just one with his golden flounces
Has outwitted theft.
So are we left
Writing to headstones and forgotten princes.
A Cynic at Kilmainham Jail
There is nowhere that the gimlet twilight has not
Entered, not a thing indeed to see
But it is excellent abroad for ghosts:
A gaslamp in the dark seems to make sea
Water in the rising fog—maybe
For those imprisoned here this was a small
Consoling inland symbol—
how could their way be
Otherwise discovered back to the western seaboard?
How could they otherwise be free in prison
Who for more than forty years have been shot through
To their Atlantic hearts?
But in this wizened
Autumn dark, no worship, mine or yours,
Can resurrect the sixteen minds. O those
Perhaps (Godspeed them) saw the guns with dual
Sight—seeing from one eye with the tears they chose
Themselves the magic, tragic town, the broken
Countryside, the huge ungenerous tribe
Of cowards and the one eye laughing saw
(God help them) growing from their own graves to jibe
At death, a better future, neither tear nor flaw.
Belfast vs. Dublin
I
nto this city of largesse
You carried clever discontent,
And now, the budget of your time here spent,
Let us not mince words: This is no less
Than halfway towards the end. Gathering
In a rag tied to a stick, all in confusion,
Dublin reverence and Belfast irony—
Now hoist with your confusion.
Cut by the throats before we spoke
One to another, yet we breast
The dour line of North and South, pressed
Into action by the clock. Here we renounce
All dividend except the brilliant quarrel
Of our towns: mine sports immoral
Courtiers in unholy waste, but your unwitty,
Secret love for it is Belfast city.
We have had time to talk and strongly
Disagree about the living out
Of life. There was no need to shout.
Rightly or else quite wrongly
We have run out of time, if not of talk.
Let us then cavalierly fork
Our ways since we, and all unknown,
Have called into question one another’s own.
Yeats in Civil War
In middle age you exchanged the sandals
Of a pilgrim for a Norman keep
in Galway. Civil war started. Vandals
Sacked your country, made off with your sleep.
Somehow you arranged your escape
Aboard a spirit ship which every day
Hoisted sail out of fire and rape.
On that ship your mind was stowaway.
The sun mounted on a wasted place.
But the wind at every door and turn
Blew the smell of honey in your face
Where there was none.
Whatever I may learn
You are its sum, struggling to survive—
A fantasy of honey your reprieve.
The Poets
They like all creatures, being made
For the shovel and worm,
Ransacked their perishable minds and found
Pattern and form
And with their own hands quarried from hard words
A figure in which secret things confide.
They are abroad. Their spirits like a pride
Of lions circulate.
Are desperate. Just as the jeweled beast,
That lion constellate,
Whose scenery is Betelgeuse and Mars,