Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD 

On April 27, 2020, Ireland lost one of its great poets. 

Eavan Boland (1944-2020) was born in Dublin, Ireland, but her father was a career diplomat, so she spent part of her childhood in London, where she first came up against prejudice toward the Irish, and in New York City. At 14, she went home to Ireland for secondary school, and in 1966 earned a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honors in English Literature and Language from Dublin’s Trinity College.

Boland was still a student when she published her first poetry collection, 23 Poems (1962). She married novelist and playwright Kevin Casey in 1969, and they had two daughters. 

She will also be remembered as a teacher. Boland taught at Trinity College Dublin,  University College Dublin, at Bowdoin College in Maine, and she was a member of the  International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She also spent time as a writer in residence at Trinity, and at Ireland’s National Maternity Hospital. She taught at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin, and was a Professor of English at Stanford University in California. 

Eavan Boland died in Dublin at age 75, after suffering a stroke.

She said in an interview at A Smartish Pace: “I began to write in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other. Ireland was a country with a compelling past, and the word ‘woman’ invoked all kinds of images of communality which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word ‘poet.’ I found that a difficult and resistant atmosphere in which to write. I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.”

When asked “Does the poet have a role in our society or is it a personal endeavor?” This was her answer:

“The true obligation of the poet is to make the poem well and truly. In doing that, she discharges every obligation an artist owes a society.”

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In Which the Ancient History
I Learn Is Not My Own

The linen map
hung from the wall.
The linen was shiny
and cracked in places.
The cracks were darkened by grime.
It was fastened to the classroom wall with
a wooden batten on
a triangle of knotted cotton.

We have no oracles,
no rocks or olive trees,
no sacred path to the temple
and no priestesses–
the teacher’s voice had a London accent.
This was London.
This was England. 1952.
It was Ancient History class.

Ireland was far away.
And farther away
every year.
I was nearly an English child.
I could list the English kings.
I could place the famous battles.
I was learning to recognize
God’s grace in history.

The colours
were faded out
so the red of Empire–
the stain of absolute possession–
the mark once made from Kashmir
to the oast-barns of the Kent
coast south of us was
underwater coral.

And the waters
of the Irish Sea,
their shallow weave
and cross-grained blue-green,
had drained away
to the pale gaze
of a doll’s china eyes:
a stare without recognition or memory.

She put the tip
of the wooden
pointer on the map.
She tapped over ridges and dried-
out rivers and cities buried in
the sea and sea-scapes which
had once been land.
And came to a stop.

The Roman Empire
was the greatest
Empire ever known.
(Until our time of course.)
Remember this, children.
In those days,
the Delphic Oracle was reckoned
to be the exact centre of the earth.

Suddenly
I wanted
to stand in front of it.
I wanted to trace over
and over the weave of
my own country and read out
names I was next to forgetting.
Wicklow. Kilruddery. Dublin.
To ask
where exactly
was my old house?
With its front door.
Its brass One and Seven.
Its flight of granite steps.
Its lilac tree whose scent
stayed under your fingernails for days?

For days,
she was saying, even months,
the ancients travelled to the Oracle.
They brought sheep and killed them.
They brought questions
about tillage and war.
They rarely left with more
than an ambiguous answer.

“In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own” from In a Time of Violence: Poems, © 1994 by Eavan Boland – W.W. Norton & Company
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