Special Issue: Eavan Boland || Heart Mysteries There: The War Horse

Heart Mysteries There: The War HorseAuthor(s): Terence BrownSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, Special Issue: Eavan Boland (Spring - Summer,1993), pp. 34-39Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484531 .

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Terence Brown

Heart Mysteries There: The War Horse

In June 1974 Eavan Boland published an essay in the Irish Times

entitled "The Weasel's Tooth". It took its title of course from Yeats's

grim poem of revolutionary violence and counter-violence, "Nineteen

Hundred and Nineteen", but did so not in any attempt to associate her own art with her predecessor's resonant poetics, but rather to

repudiate his vision of an Irish cultural and national unity in whose name atrocities were being committed as she wrote. For 1974 was a

year in which the northern crisis reached a kind of climax in the

Workers' Strike, the fall of the power-sharing executive, and the

bombing of Dublin in the worst single incident of violence to date in

the current lamentable imbroglio. In face of such manifestations of

division and destruction it would have taken a peculiar form of

myopia to have continued to sponsor a Yeatsian vision of cultural

unity. With exacting moral courage Eavan Boland not only reckoned with this fact but also addressed the imaginative and political

bankruptcy to which she believed the Yeatsian dream had brought the

country:

For there is, and at last I recognise it, no unity whatsoever in this culture of ours. And even more important, I recognise that there is no need whatsoever for such a unity. If we search for it we will, at a crucial moment, be

mutilating with fantasy once

again the very force we should be liberating with reality: our one strength as

writers, the individual voice, speaking in tones of outcry, ven

geance, bitterness even, against our

disunity, but speaking, for all

that, with a cool tough acceptance of it.1

In this article Boland referred to a poem which the recent Dublin

bombings had provoked her into writing. A photograph in a national

newspaper, which recorded a moment of tenderness when a fireman

lifted a dead child from the debris of a bomb-blast, drew from the poet a poem which found its way into her second collection The War Horse

published the following year. Entitled "Child of our Time" it is an

elegy for the dead and a prayer that the child may not have died in

vain; that from the murder of innocence the poet might learn a new

language. We must, the poem insists,

1. "The Weasel's Tooth", Irish Times, 7 June 1974.

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HEART MYSTERIES THERE: THE WAR HORSE

learn from you, dead,

To make our broken images rebuild Themselves around your limbs, your broken

Image, find for your sake whose life our idle Talk has cost, a new language. Child Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.

Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

("Child of Our Time")2

In "The Weasel's Tooth" Boland gave some hint of the kind of

language to which she aspired in the difficult circumstances of con

temporary Ireland. Having eschewed the vision of cultural unity celebrated by Yeats she set herself a poetic task:

Now any reader of this statement may well ask what this means for a woman writer, at my age, at this moment in this country? It

means I fear, turning my face away from the philosophy of poetry I have loved, used and abused in such poems as I have written.

This philosophy is Romanticism, which sees the poet as a person apart, an exceptional individual voice. For of course the concept of the exceptional individual is a contradiction in terms. The individual and the poet who writes out of his own individuality honestly, is simply the voice of unheroic, dull and tedious

humanity whose dullness and tedium requires to be structured in the tedious craft of words to fight back against that deepest fear of

individuals, their fear of anonymity, of the annihilation of self. This unity, this disunity of selfhood, of individuality is, I believe, the only true adventure for poetry

? or indeed any writing in this

country.

And to weight even more the burdens of artistic responsibility which

Boland took up in this essay she concluded that she felt bound to

explore "individual evil"; even as a woman to try to discover "the evil

intrinsic in womanhood".

In The War Horse, Eavan Boland's second collection of poetry which

appeared eight years after her poetic debut in 1967 when New Territory had met with some critical success, there is much evidence of the

forces that had recently so disrupted the poet's sense of a unified

cultural reality. The danger that northern violence might spill over the

Irish border to engulf the south is edgily suggested in the title poem where a tinker's nag is a rumour of war in the suburban setting that

these poems largely occupy:

he stumbles down our short street

Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait,

2. The War Horse: Poems by Eavan Boland (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1975), p. 11.

All subsequent quotations from this book will be given parenthetically in the

essay.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Then to breathe relief lean on the sill And for a second only my blood is still

With atavism, (pp. 9-10)

In "A Soldier's Son" a father kills his own son in a terrifying image of a society at war with its own inheritance and future: "You twist/ That

heart today; you are his killed, his maimed" (p. 12). But it is not only in poems and images that have a direct relationship to the political

violence that became so intense in Ireland in 1974 that Boland betrays an imagination assailed by forces that threaten disruption of fragile structures.

In the domestic world too she senses predatory presences, the

violence of emotion and conflict that lion-like can disrupt, for

example, the "suburban/ World" (p. 18) of "Prisoners". In "Sisters"

"Snowdrops" are "poised for assassination" (p. 20); in "The Laws of

Love" "sisters kill... sisters die" (p. 24); in "Naoise at Four" "The trap baited for them snaps./ Like forest pests they fall for it" (p. 26) and as

if reliving the ancient Irish myth in which three brothers die in a trap,

"nightly on our screen/ New ones are lost, wounds open". In

"Suburban Woman" 'Town and country" are "at each other's throat"

(p. 42). In a poem of obsessional military metaphor and atavistic

primitivism:

Haemorrhaging to hacked

roads, to where in back gardens, like a pride of lions toiled for booty, tribal acres died

and her world with them. She saw their power to sever with a scar. She is the sole survivor.

Formally too the poems in The War Horse suggest disruption, invasion, even violation. The stanzas are often those of the well-made

English poems of the nineteen sixties, deploying a cautious, exact syn tax in lines of controlled logic. "Ready For Flight" is representative,

with its almost syllogistic opening lines:

From this I will not swerve nor fall nor falter: If around your heart the crowds disperse,

And I who at their whim now freeze or swelter Am allowed to come to a more

temperate place.... (p. 19)

But such a poem (which reads like something from Boland's English

contemporary Elizabeth Jennings) has to bear witness to violent erup tions of emotion which are not easily contained within the contortions

of a metaphysical conceit:

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And if a runner starts to run to me

Dispatched by you, crying that all is trampled Underfoot, terraces smashed, the entry Into holy places rudely sampled,

Then I would come at once my love with love.

The strain shows here, the rhymes seem a little too hard-won. Indeed

there is throughout the volume a sense of carefully constructed

literary artifact encountering rawer and more painful experience than

it had perhaps bargained for. In numbers of the poems, animals and

birds sport themselves like emblems from some Renaissance painting, or like entries in a stylised emblematic bestiary ("Christ's blood

created the first informer,/ The robin redbreast", "Sisters" (p. 21)). But

these artful creatures have to exist in the same imaginative universe

with the war horse of the title poem or the lion "who tore stripes/ Once off zebras" (p. 46) in "Ode to Suburbia".

Which is really to say that The War Horse is a collection marked by a

sense of transition, distinguished by a pervasive impression of a

young poet, flexing newly discovered muscles, not quite sure if they will be adequate to the challenges before her, discovering possible

identities in translations and versions of other poets' work (Maya

kovsky, Nelly Sachs, the Horace of the Odes serve as models),

identifying themes.

In her pamphlet A Kind of Scar Boland has herself argued that a

more profound state of transition than the merely personal is in fact

the imaginative context in which the woman who is poet in Ireland

must perforce work. There she argues that "over a relatively short

time ? certainly no more than a generation or so ? women have

moved from being the subjects and objects of Irish poems to being the

authors of them. It is a momentous transit. It is also a disruptive one. It

raises questions of identity, issues of poetic motive and ethical

direction which can seem almost impossibly complex."3 Now The War

Horse at the most simple level was a work of transition as I have

indicated in the sense that in its pages we encounter a 'prentice poet

beginning to forsake the predominantly literary modes of her first

volume for something more individual and personally achieved. At

the most immediate level too, at which it functions as a socially attentive text, the poetry reflects the pressure of contemporary events, as it responds to the northern crisis which challenged the national

definitions the poet had taken for granted when she had published her

first book. The thematic and formal indications that the poet was

affected by her awareness of threatened invasion, disturbance and

disintegration seem accordingly in the first instance predominantly

3. Eavan Boland, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (Dublin: Attic

Press, 1989), pp. 6-7.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

matters of personal artistic development and of current political occasion. But there is evidence too, perhaps more distinctively coloured in retrospect, now that the shape and pre-occupations of Boland's career are more fully drawn, that this more radical transition, about which Boland writes so eloquently in her pamphlet of 1989, was

beginning to affect the poet's work as early as 1975.

There are obviously such poems as "The Famine Road" in which

the poet seeks to align female experience (in this case sterility) with

the Irish racial experience of famine. There are "Surburban Women"

and "Ode to Suburbia" in which she gives a voice to the marginalised,

submerged anguish of a daily life led in limbo. It is not these poems however (self-consciously fraughtand violent as they are) that seem to

me to be the most telling in the book as poems of the particular kind of

transition that Boland has identified in A Kind of Scar. Rather, it is

those poems where personal experience is accepted in its irreducible

particularity that most compellingly bear the traces of an innovatory historical, cultural moment. In such poems in The War Horse as

"Sisters", "The Laws of Love" and "The Botanic Gardens" Boland

writes of int?mate personal experience in the way which is to charac

terise her later successes as a poet. In these poems she takes emotional

risks, investing the work with a confessional quality that never

suggests it is merely a mode of therapeutic self-indulgence. The

mystery of the heart's affections (the word "heart" recurs indeed in

this volume) is granted its full power in poems which set self and

ineluctable otherness in the context of a precisely itemised natural

world (no female figures here shade into a partly mythological land

scape as in the work of so many of her male contemporaries) and an

acknowledged social and historical present. In consequence the poems bear authentic witness to lived experience seeking neither consolation nor elevation of mood in mythic perspectives, master narratives or

poetic convention. The moral energy that such writing possesses is

rooted in its manifest awareness that the site of poetic opportunity and

responsibility for Irish women must now and henceforth be the

insecure, fragmented, even violated female subject, product of natural, social and historical forces but not for ever and inevitably to be their

victim. For even at the moments of most pained uncertainties Boland's

poetry as a whole (and these poems in The War Horse are an earnest of

what lay ahead of her as an artist) as we now know, rarely loses its

capacity, movingly revealed in this book, to remind of the inherent

dignity of the human person and that, as she has it herself, "Past or

present there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it

and human griefs ordained by it":4

4. A Kind of Scar, p. 24.

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Three years ago, your bride, I felt your heart in darkness, a full moon

Hauling mine to it like a tide. Still at night our selves reach to join. To twine like these trees in peace and stress Before the peril of unconsciousness.

Now you have overstepped My reach, searching for something this February Like a scholar in poor light over a script, Able at last to decipher its coded story And so preoccupied you do not see

My absence in the conservatory

Where you, while African grotesqueries Sweat in sandy heat, at last stand

Wondering at cacti, deformed trees

Most ridicule. Each pumpkin history Turns coach at a touch of your hand.

I watch and love you in your mystery.

(p. 17, 'The Botanic Gardens")

Heart mysteries there.

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Special Issue: Eavan Boland || Heart Mysteries There: The War Horse

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