by Eavan Boland
Hunts without respite among fixed stars.
And they prevail. To his undoing every day
The essential sun
Proceeds, but only to accommodate
A tenant moon
And he remains until the very break
Of morning, absentee landlord of the dark.
Mirages
At various times strenuous sailing men
Claim to have seen creatures of myth
Scattering light at the furthest points of dawn—
Creatures too seldom seen to reward the patience
Of a night-watch, who provide no ready encore,
But, like the stars, revisit generations.
And kings riding to battle on the advice
Of their ambition have seen crosses burn
In the skylight of the winter solstice.
Reasonable men however hold aloof,
Doubting the gesture, speech and anecdote
Of those who touch the Grail and bring no proof—
Failing to recognize that in their fast
Ethereal way mirages are
This daylight world in summary and forecast.
So a prince, a fledgling still, and far
From coronation, kept at home,
Will draw his sword and murder empty air—
And should his father die and that death bring
Him majesty, his games have been his school,
His phantom war a forcing house of kings.
The Pilgrim
When the nest falls in winter, birds have flown
To distant lights and hospitality:
The pilgrim, with her childhood home a ruin,
Shares their fate and, like them, suddenly
Becomes a tenant of the wintry day.
Looking back, out of the nest of stone
As it tumbles, she can see her childhood
Flying away like an evicted bird.
Underground, although the ground is bare,
Summer is turning on its lights. Spruce
And larch and massive chestnut will appear
Above her head in leaf: Oedipus
Himself, cold and sightless, was aware
Of no more strife or drama at Colonus.
He became, when he could go no further,
Just an old man hoping for warm weather.
At journey’s end, in the waters of a shrine,
No greater thing will meet her than the shock
Of her own human face, beheaded in
The holy pool. Steadily she must look
At this unshriven thing among the bells
And offerings and, for her penance, mark
How her aspiring days, like fallen angels,
Follow one another into the dark.
Migration
From August they embark on every wind
Managing with grace
This new necessity, widely determined
On a landing place.
Daredevil swallows, colored swifts go forth
Like some great festival removing south.
Cuckoo and operatic nightingale
Meeting like trains of thought
Concluding summer, in complete agreement, file
Towards the sea at night
And find at last their bright geometry
(Triumphant overland) is not seaworthy.
Sandpiper, finch and wren and goldencrest
Whose baffled
Movements start or finish summer now at last
Return, single and ruffled,
And raise their voices in a world of light
And choose their loves as though determined to forget:
As though upon their travels, as each bird
Fell down to die, the sea
Had opened, showing those above a graveyard
Without sanctity—
Birds and their masters, many beautiful,
Huddled together without name or burial.
Three Songs for a Legend
1. A Lullaby for Lir’s Son
O nurse when I was a rascal boy
Bold February winds were snaffling gold
Out of the crocuses. There in grief
For the pretty, gaudy things I’d shout Stop Thief!
And you would whisper Child, let be. Let be.
Or else we’d come across a sapling tree
To discover frost sipping its new blood.
I’d join my arms around its perished wood
And weep and you would say Now child, its place
Is in a crackling hearth, not your embrace.
And one April morning that was filled
With mating tunes a nest of finches spilled,
Which slipped its flowering anchor in a gale.
I cupped one in my fingers. Dead. Small.
But late that night you came to me on tiptoe
And whispered child, child, the winds must blow.
2. The Malediction
Son of Lir as lonely are you now
As the leaf when lightning strikes the tree
And the bird when thunder breaks the bough.
Now is lost, as bird and leaf and tree,
Son of Lir your humanity.
Now the steady shoulders, the bright arms
You opened wide for battle and love’s sake—
Encumbered to white wings by my charms—
Must beat the air and the air must break
With your human heart, your tender neck.
The seed of man is barren in this body!
The wit of man abandons this cursed brain!
The blood of man turns back and flows muddy
From this changing heart and this fair skin
Is ruffling in the feathers of a swan.
I take your youth under magic seizure.
Farewell the joy of summer in a field.
Farewell the simple seasons and their pleasure,
Farewell true gold and the silk worm’s yield.
Son of Lir I banish you this world
To know the flinching cold of seas which spring
Forgets, whose branch is ice, whose flower is snow
And where the wild dead lie wintering
Forever.
3. Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan
Now the March woods will miss his step,
Finding out a way at spring’s start
To break at once their bracken and their sleep,
And now have lost, robbed of their rightful part,
Some hawk a master’s hand, some maid a heart.
Urchins of the sharp hawthorn, sparrows,
Spiders webbed in hedges, brown
Field mice, wheeled, sleeping in their furrows,
Spared by the plow and stout with corn—
These were familiars of Lir’s son
No less than the stiff, aloof lily,
The oak and the hawk, the Moy salmon
On February mornings, unruly
With new life and the flushed rowan
Stooped with berries, October’s paragon.
Sap of the green forest, like a sea,
Rise in the sycamore and rowan,
Rise in the wild plum and chestnut tree
Until the woods become a broad ocean
For my son in his wilderness, my swan,
That he may see breaking on his breast
And wings, not the waters of his exile,
Nor the pawn of the wind, the cold crest,
But branches of the white beam and the maple
And boughs of the almond and the laurel.
The King and the Troubadour
A troubadour once lost his king
Who took a carved lute
And crossed the world and tuned its heart
To hear it sing.
Starved, wasted, worn, lost—
His lute his one courage—
He sang his youth to fumbling age,
Fresh years to frost.
In bitter spells his king
lay bound
In bitter magic walled:
Within a cruel shape swelled
Love no sound,
No sight, no troubadour searching
Could set free. Fiercely
Came he singing finally
My king, my king.
To the window the king’s head
Came. The troubadour
Dashed his lute on leaf and flower
And fell dead.
The king at one glance,
Seeing ransom ruined,
Majesty perplexed, pined
In magic silence.
The rain of God gathering
Surrounded the smashed lute,
Solving its fragmented heart
Into spring.
The king who in a cruel husk
Of charms became as tragic
Through monotonies of magic
As the dusk,
Each minstrel spring was called and sent
No horrid head, but came
Above the ground, a grassy atom
Hearty as a giant.
Requiem for a Personal Friend
A striped philistine with quick
Sight, quiet paws, today—
In gorging on a feathered prey—
Filleted our garden’s music.
Such robbery in such a mouthful.
Here rests, shoveled under simple
Vegetables, my good example—
Singing daily, daily faithful
No conceit and not contrary—
My best colleague, worst of all
Was half digested, his sweet whistle
Swallowed like a dictionary.
Little victim, song for song—
Who share a trade must share a threat—
So I write to cheat the cat
Who got your body, of my tongue.
The Winning of Etain
Etain twice a woman twice a queen
Possessed of two lives and one love.
Twice the loveliest woman ever seen.
For whom two kings made Ireland a red grave.
This story tells the winning of Etain
A second time by Aengus: how he strove
To own his own. A tale of tears. Of lovers
Lost to each other for a thousand years.
Aengus and Etain lived for each other’s pleasure,
With gold for the head of Aengus as a king
And gold so intricate in Etain’s hair
No one could guess if the light scattering
Were a woman’s beauty or a king’s treasure.
They lived for summer and to dance and sing.
But they were doomed when Fergus, the black Druid,
Followed their happiness with fatal hatred.
A summer’s night Etain in Aengus’s arms
Slept, her head challenging the moon,
Collecting more and more light from beams
Which flared on lovers who would not love again
For a thousand years. All at once the charms
Of Fergus took effect: Unlucky Etain,
Warm in Aengus’s arms where she lay,
Lost her happiness, mislaid her joy.
Her cheeks, blanched with light, were charmed away.
Her long embracing arms convulsed. Her face
Shriveled. Quick and violent decay
Seized her limbs and her body’s grace
Changed from a queen into a dragonfly,
Changed to enameled wings and scales in a space
Of minutes. Then she flew in a glimmer
Away to discover flowers of the summer.
Awakening, Aengus found instead of Etain
His arms as empty as a spring nest
Rifled by hawks and found his love gone—
No hand to kiss and for his head no breast.
From his window in a summer dawn
Bright as blood, idly he watched the haste
Of birds from branch to branch and below
A dragonfly sipping at the dew.
Morning danced on its back and decorated
Every scaly tone twice as bright
As hyacinths, above which it waited
Wings singing, a busy thief of light
And dew. A thousand insect colors scattered
From its body and were deftly caught
By summer flowers like another rain,
And Aengus in that moment cried, “Etain—
“My only love, changed to a brilliant toy
Of sorcery, for you I will compose
A bower of the four seasons and defy
Our new despair. Autumn, the year’s close,
Summer and spring will tangle for your joy,
The frosty snowdrop twine with the rose,
And January buds with fringed grasses
Where you may stay under my jealous eyes.”
At Aengus’s command the thing was done.
Season followed season in his grief
And for each one a sweet, particular crown
Was stolen. Bough and petal, fruit and leaf,
Were interwoven for his spellbound queen
And flowered endlessly about his wife
Who hummed night and day about her many
Suitors, robbing each of dew and honey.
And night and day, Aengus stayed beside,
Asleep or waking, hawking or at rest,
He watched the fertile bower and his bride
Within, but thinking of her white breast,
Her human body in his arms, he cried
Bitterly above the bright twist
Of flowers, but his fast tears were human—
His love, an insect, drank them like the rain.
And still the Druid’s hatred followed them
Redoubled now because they could devise
Happiness within destruction, a form
Of beauty flourishing within disguise.
So he contrived darkness and a storm
Of winds colliding on the fresh seas
To separate the crocus from the rose
And interrupt the dragonfly’s repose.
Suddenly, as Aengus watched, the wind
Tore his green and intricate design
Apart, scattered flowers and unwound
Summer from spring, and wealthy autumn’s vine
From winter leaves. He flung his hand
Among stems broken and a rain
Of petals. But the wind swept them towards
The sea where its strength was bred, like birds.
“O Etain my first love,” Aengus cried,
“Stolen a second time, now who will build
A bower for you over the cold tide?
What blossoms of the country or the field
What flower or fragrance can the sea provide?
And where will you find dew in the salt
Of the waves? I cast this wretched world behind
And will not rest until my love is found!”
At his cry the better powers took pity
On him, loving him because his love
Had once set out to cheat the travesty
Of sorcery and triumphed, but could not save
Etain twice. Invisibility
Was their gift, exemption from the grave—
As well they gave a thousand mortal years
To Aengus and Etain, unlucky lovers.
Like a petal on the flowers sipped
By her on bright days at Aengus’s side,
Etain fluttered while the north wind clipped
Her colored scales and the sea cried
Beneath her. Once she struggled, wings trapped
In the beak of a scavenger, but she escaped
And tossed, a magic atom, on the surface
Of the water, lost in the water’s race.
Etain at last, baffled and long weary,
Was wildly buffeted, now on a snowy
Now on a stifling breeze, until clearly
A green and
quiet shore began, whose dewy
Grasses sprung out of the wind’s way
And there found flowers in hosts, scarlet and showy
Rivals for her wings, petals to soothe
Her misery and honey for her mouth.
And there she flew above a royal palace
Whose roof, involved and circled like a rose,
Bore mosaics like a clutch of crocuses
And marble whiter than the lily grows.
No wonder then she searched for dew and spice
Among its tiles, mistaking them for flowers
And tumbled through a cranny, all unseen
To splash in the bright wine of another queen.
And by that error found another womb,
Another spell of life, another shape
For the queen lifting up the same
Infested gold cup to her lip
Swallowed insect, wine and all, while the fume
Of the delicate fermented grape
Disguised its tenant. But magic had its way
And worked its charm, and swelled the queen’s belly.
Mysteriously she came to be with child,
Another queen, wife of another king
And in another age. She grew heavy and mild.
Contented with the chance, never suspecting
She was fertile from the wine defiled
And not a king’s embrace. And so in spring
Was born human, from a magic womb,
Etain into the world a second time.
And so she grew to girlhood cherishing
All captive things and grew to hate the forest
Because its horned boughs might be concealing
A bold antelope in charmed arrest.
And wept on summer nights imagining
The lion howling from his heaven, cased
In stars; but never guessed from where her pity
Sprung, from what unknown captivity.
Where a river rushed into the sea, on a ledge
Of stone, Etain would sit in the evening glow,
Her cheeks as fresh as berries from the hedge,
Her arms white as a single fall of snow,
Her thighs like stems of a flower. And to the edge
Of the water where outrivaled lilies grew
On a summer night (in every detail the same
As that on which he lost her) Aengus came.
Invisible he watched her silver comb,
Chased with gold, calm her golden hair.
Invisible, he brought to mind a time
When she had bound it up for him with fair