Eavan Boland: The Making of an Irish Goddess

Length / Form The form is free and the rhythms naturalistic.

Allusion to Classical figure: Boland's Irish goddess is imagined through the image of Ceres. The daughter she seeks is therefore a direct parallel to Proserpina/Persephone (the Greek name is used in ‘The Pomegranate' (In a Time of Violence, 1994).

Allusion to Classical place The poem imagines Ceres' journey to rescue her daughter from the underworld.

Relationship to Classical text ‘The Pomegranate', which also draws on the Ceres/Persephone myth, features in the anthology After Ovid, where it is prefaced by a quote from Metamorphoses V (Hofmann & Lasdun (eds) 1994:140). However, in this poem Boland does not indicate a specific source.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts There are no direct references to the Ovidian rendering, but the poet's body, 'neither young now nor fertile” draws a contrast with Ceres' fertilitas terrae, and the 'failed harvests, / the fields rotting to the horizon” recall the goddess' blighting of the land (474ff).

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Aisling: As in ‘The Journey' Boland uses a classical myth of underworld descent as a parallel to the Irish aisling poems in which a female personification of Ireland appears to the poet, lamenting the country's demise at the hands of colonists (cf. Auge 2004:125-126). However, she does so only to reject the emblematic use of female imagery. Rich: Boland's rejection of mythic authority, both foreign and native, is reminiscent of Adrienne Rich's ‘Diving Into the Wreck', in which the poet seeks 'the thing itself and not the myth” (Rich, 1973). Elsewhere she cites Rich's influential article ‘When We Dead Awaken', which encourages a revisionary approach to myth as cultural authority (Rich 1972; Boland 1997:23). Kavanagh:  Patrick Kavanagh's propensity to identify the divine, classical or Christian, in the mundane and the rural can be felt in the way that Boland makes the Dublin landscape and her own domestic sphere the central focus of the poem, rather than the myth (cf. Kavanagh's ‘Epic' and ‘Stony Grey Soil': Collected Poems, 2005). Classical/Christian intertexts: The later poem ‘Unheroic' reveals the mythic and religious intertexts which Boland draws on in her metaphorical allusions to scarring (The Lost Land, 1998. See also Boland 1989). Here, the hotel manager's unhealing scar, either 'from war or illness”, in his thigh or deep in his side, draws together the significance of Odysseus scar (Odyssey XIX, l.319ff), the rankling wound of Philoctetes, and the anti-heroic emblem of Christ crucified. Conversely, in this early poem, where myth is characterised as 'the wound we leave / in the time we have”, Boland rejects the unblemished sterility of the classical paradigm.

Comment Binding the twelve poems of the ‘Outside History' sequence is a persistent questioning of the role that myth, memory and history play, both to distance and to negotiate an understanding of the past. In this context the classical material deepens the sense of cultural and historical alienation from nationalist literary modes, fracturing and dissipating the authority of mythologizing.