Eavan Boland Essay

1414 Words6 Pages
. Eavan Boland’s poetry has many appealing qualities. Discuss Eavan Boland’s poetry has many appealing qualities. Some of these are how her poetry links with her life, its perceptiveness of Irishness, history and myth, its treating of the suburbs as a suitable locale for her poetry and its use of language and imagery. The poems I am studying are The War Horse, Child of Our Time, Love, The Pomegranate, This Moment and The Shadow Doll. As said, one of the appealing qualities of Eavan Boland’s poetry is how it links with her life. Boland includes a personal perspective in her poetry which allows other readers and myself to use her biographical details to understand and view the poem. The result is that I do not get lose as I try to understand the poem, which often happens when reading other poets on the Leaving Certificate course. This is seen with The War Horse. Boland links this poem to the troubles of Northern Ireland; it is written in 1975 – the 1970’s were a time of violence for Northern Ireland and of trouble even for those south of the border where Boland was living – these people had to endure violence occurring close to their homes and live with the threat/possibility of it spilling down into southern Ireland. In doing so, Boland allows us a perspective to view the poem. She is comparing the horse to violence in Northern Ireland. The horse intruding into the suburb she lives in, ‘like a rumour of war, huge,/ Threatening’ is like the intrusion of violence into Northern, and to a greater extent, Irish life. Boland even uses such words as ‘a maimed limb’ as comparisons to gardens uprooted to make the comparison more concrete. We see this again with Child of Our Time. Boland wrote the poem in May 1974, the time of the Dublin bombings while she still lived in Ireland – the child spoken of in the poem was seen by Boland in a newspaper photo, his dead body being taken
Open Document