Representing Ireland in poetry as women

By pinknfluffy76 | Updated: July 15, 2024, 7:43 a.m.

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Eavan Boland's poetry gives voice to Ireland and her suffering by representing them as women in her poetry, ushering Ireland towards a new identity as triumphant Survivors.

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Eavan Bolan
Giving Voice to Lost Irish Identities
By Verity Langan
ENG 218
Eavan Boland
"They became their own muses, validating female experience as both starting point and subject of their literary work" 
(Rodriguez qtd. Haberstroh 91).
1. Atlantis - Lost Sonnet
2. Amethyst Beads
3. Quarantine
"Consumers could feel that by purchasing Vodrey Dublin Pottery, they were contributing to the development of the Irish economy and were also advocating a newly emergent 'national style'" (Malloy 39).
National Identities = Women
“The use of female iconography to represent national identity in postcolonial territories arises as a result of the generalized feminization of nature… the Irish territory has been feminized both by English allegorical representations and by Irish myths of colonial resistance” (Rodriguez 92).
"… everything that has been done to women has been done to Irish. It has been marginalized, its status has been taken from it, it has been reduced to the language of small farmers and fishermen, and yet it has survived and survived in extraordinary richness” (Keen qtd. Sleeping 30).
Identity
culture
language
history
self-worth
“This female allegory works as a representation of grieving Ireland, anxious to be rescued from British oppression” (Rodriguez qtd. Innes 92).
Atlantis - Lost Sonnet
by Eavan Boland

“Lots of women's poetry has so much to reclaim… a whole Atlantis under the water to reclaim. It's like this island, again in Irish folklore, which surfaces from under the water every seven years, and if somebody can go out to it and light a fire, or do something, it will stay up forever” (Keen qtd. Sleeping27).
“in the best traditions of where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it”
(Boland, Atlantis).
“These isolated and perishing words of a dead language also arouse the sympathy of the poet: they are like the oppressed women” (O’Connor).
“How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder, that a whole city… had all one fine day gone under?” (Boland, Atlantis).
Amethyst Beads
by Eavan Boland
“Now I wear at my neck an old stress of crystal: an impression of earthly housekeeping. A mysterious brightness made underground where there is no sun” (Boland, Beads).
“The colonization of Ireland is redoubled by a colonization of women that is affected by the circulation of simplified images of femininity within nationalist discourses...
...Boland would refigure nationalism in the image of women, not as ornaments but as particularized individuals experiencing poignantly realized desires and struggles” (Keen 26).
Quarantine
by Eavan Boland
“in the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history" (Boland, Quarantine).
“Gender relations are at the heart of cultural constructions of social identities and collectivities. The question of adopting a subject position becomes further complicated if the female voice is located in a postcolonial territory, as is the case of Ireland” (Rodriguez 90).
“I was a half-named poet. My mind, my language, my love for freedom: these were named. My body, my instincts: these were named only as passive parts of the poem. Two parts of the poem awaited me. Two choices. Power or powerlessness” (Rodriguez qtd. Boland 91).
“her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her" (Boland, Quarantine).
“Let no love poem ever come to this threshold” (Boland, Quarantine).
The poetry of Eavan Boland
1944-2020
“The fusion of the national and the feminine… (is) which the poems of women and by women have disrupted… subverted. Irish women poets can therefore be seen as the scripted, subservient emblems of an old image file come to life....
...In a real sense, the Irish woman poet now is an actual trope who has walked inconveniently out of the text” (Rodriguez qtd. Boland 98).
“become the site of… a fully independent and sovereign state with a unique and separate identity” (Keen qtd. McCartney 21).
“The story will continue to change long after the poem is finished, as too will her place within it” (Shara 37).

Representing Ireland in poetry as women

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