The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is

the story of a daughter lost in hell.

And found and rescued there.

Love and blackmail are the gist of it.

Ceres and Persephone the names.

And the best thing about the legend is

I can enter it anywhere.  And have.

As a child in exile in

a city of fogs and strange consonants,

I read it first and at first I was

an exiled child in the crackling dusk of

the underworld, the stars blighted.  Later

I walked out in a summer twilight

searching for my daughter at bed-time.

When she came running I was ready

to make any bargain to keep her.

I carried her back past whitebeams

and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.

But I was Ceres then and I knew

winter was in store for every leaf

on every tree on that road.

Was inescapable for each one we passed.

And for me.

                    It is winter

and the stars are hidden.

I climb the stairs and stand where I can see

my child asleep beside her teen magazines,

her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.

The pomegranate!  How did I forget it?

She could have come home and been safe

and ended the story and all

our heart-broken searching but she reached

out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.

She put out her hand and pulled down

the French sound for apple and

the noise of stone and the proof

that even in the place of death,

at the heart of legend, in the midst

of rocks full of unshed tears

ready to be diamonds by the time

the story was told, a child can be

hungry.  I could warn her.  There is still a chance.

The rain is cold.  The road is flint-coloured.

The suburb has cars and cable television.

The veiled stars are above ground.

It is another world.  But what else

can a mother give her daughter but such

beautiful rifts in time?

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

The legend will be hers as well as mine. 

She will enter it.  As I have.

She will wake up.  She will hold

the papery flushed skin in her hand.

And to her lips.  I will say nothing.

                I chose this poem because one of my favorite Greek myths is the story of Ceres and her fierce love for her daughter Persephone. Boland uses the old legend to introduce this poem about aging and a mother-daughter relationships. Also, it was important to me to conclude my blog project with a Boland poem about mothers and daughters and “The Pomegranate” was the most pertinent to me. The final straw, that motivated me to write about this particular poem was when I read that Boland said “The Pomegranate” was the most difficult poem for her to write.

                This poem also makes use of an allusion, however this allusion is more classical than the painting referred to in “Domestic Interior”. The first half of this poem is an allusion to the Greek myth about Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, and her daughter Persephone. Persephone was captured by Hades and imprisoned in the Underworld. Ceres tried desperately to get her daughter back. Finally one day Hades agreed to free Persephone if she had had nothing to eat. Unfortunately Persephone had eaten four pomegranate seeds. Her consequence was that she had to spend four months of the year with Hades. Boland uses the pomegranate to symbolize the mandatory transition that a mother must accept when her daughter becomes older and begins to stray from home. There are multiple enjambments in this poem, a notable one from line 8 to 9 because it forces a pause that the reader would not have made had the sentence stayed intact as one line. In lines 11 and 33, onomatopoeia occurs with “crackling” and “plucked”. Boland is telling a story and these words make it more present to the reader. In the second to last line of the poem Boland uses a synecdoche. She describes her daughter taking a bite of a symbolic pomegranate, but instead of using the word pomegranate she replaced it with a description of the inside of a pomegranate where the seeds are attached. The pomegranate represents her daughter’s growth and Boland knows it will be a scary time and also a time where she, as a mother, will have little control but she also knows that she must allow her daughter to go through with it. The synecdoche portrays the pomegranate as fragile because of the "papery flushed skin". Boland's daughter bties into the pomegranate and also symbolically 'bites' into her future, a fragile time. Finally, Boland’s diction in how she discusses the pomegranate’s etymology is interesting. She says it is the combination of a fruit (the French word for apple) and a rock (granate sounding like granite). She is not writing to show the reader that pomegranate is a funny word but really to highlight the discrepancy in the pomegranate as a symbol. It is a fruit, and fruit and plants have a connotation with growth and so the pomegranate represents the passing of time. But Boland also mentions that it has a word for rock in its name because with growth comes difficulty, pain, and struggles. This poem is about Boland’s/the speaker's growth as a mother. It uses the story of Ceres and Persephone and the pomegranate as a symbol to explain the anxiety and grief that mothers go through in order to award their daughters the freedom to make the same mistakes.

The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

It was the first gift he ever gave her,
buying it for five francs in the Galeries
in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy.

They stayed in the city for the summer.
They met in cafes. She was always early.
He was late. That evening he was later.
They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,
darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent clear patience
of its element. It is

a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast as if the weather
it opened for and offset had entered it.

The past is an empty cafe terrace.
An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
And no way to know what happened then—
none at all—unless ,of course, you improvise:

The blackbird on this first sultry morning,
in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing—
the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.

                I like this poem because it is a story and the poem’s purpose is conveyed through the story’s details. After the first stanza I was easily imagining the scene, and Boland’s carefully selected words facilitated my visualization of the couple meeting at a café in Paris. The poem forced me to reflect on my own parents' lives and emotions. I thought about how I know my parents mannerisms well and I know many facts about them, but the truth is a huge portion of their lives occurred without me and I can never truly know what they felt or experienced when they were young.

                This poem contains seven quatrains and does not follow a strict metric form throughout but a good number of lines do follow iambic pentameter. For instance, the first line is in iambic pentameter and the flow of the line sets the scene and subtly introduces the subject. And it indisputably ties the fan to the man. The reader initially believes they will read a poem about a woman’s mother but the first line changes track and introduces a potential love poem. The second and third stanzas use quick little observations to describe the events. It gives the poem a staccato sound through choppy, slightly disconnected sentences. Boland seems to be giving the harried details of the couple’s love affair. These stanzas contrast with the fourth stanza, which is taken up by a slow, detailed description of the fan. This emphasizes the importance of the fan, not the activities. Again, Boland uses an enjambment, this one in fact located between two stanzas. The enjambment connects the two stanzas that describe the fan but also contrasts them. The fourth stanza lovingly depicts a beautiful, intricately embroidered fan while the fifth stanza describes a fan that has grown old with time just as the couple’s love probably faded over time. The fan is beautiful but is spoiled by the humid weather, and I believe that Boland uses the enjambment to show how the couple’s love could be similar to the fan and was also ruined by some bad storms.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season

    of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

     He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

     There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

      Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman.

And in which darkness it can best be proved.

                On the majority of the sites I used to research Eavan Boland’s life, “Quarantine” was almost always present as an example of her poetry. I also found a video on YouTube of Boland reading some of her poems and introducing each one, and “Quarantine” was the first poem she chose to read aloud. I decided I wanted to study this poem and understand why it was so popular.

                This poem has more structure than the previous two poems I selected. It is comprised of five quatrains. It does not follow iambic pentameter but most of the lines hover around ten syllables. Boland’s quatrains do not contain any rhyme scheme and I believe this adds to the unconventionality of this particular love poem. "Quarantine" comes from her book Against Love Poems and in many interviews she agrees that it could be categorized as a love poem but it is atypical and the lack of rhyme or metric structure in the poem adds to that. Boland employs anapest in this poem and it is especially recurrent in the first stanza with “in the worst…of the worst…of a whole…from the work(house)…he was wal(king)”. The two unaccented syllables come first with “of the” and “in the” and “he was”, then the accented, longer syllables follow. Boland does not strictly stick to this metric form but has it move in and out of her language. The flow of the syllables in the first line really exaggerates the word “worst” setting the scene as a miserable, depressing time that seemed impossible to escape. Also found in the first stanza, is a caesura. The ominous pause occurs in the middle of the last line, with “they were both walking”. It is there to remind the reader that a couple walked, two people together, supporting each other. In the video clip Boland describes how this poem is her way of explaining the difference between the past and history. She says history is stoic and about heroes and great successes but that the past is the unornamented truth and has pain, suffering, and ordinary people. This poem is not about a man's bravery or a famine but about two people who loved each other and a husband who died expressing his love for his wife.

Domestic Interior (please comment on this one)

The woman is as round 
as the new ring 
ambering her finger. 
The mirror weds her. 
She has long since been bedded. 

There is 
about it all 
a quiet search for attention, 
like the unexpected shine 
of a despised utensil. 

The oils, 
the varnishes, 
the cracked light, 
the worm of permanence – 
all of them supplied by Van Eyck – 

by whose edict she will stay 
burnished, fertile, 
on her wedding day, 
interred in her joy. 
Love, turn. 

The convex of your eye 
that is so loving, bright 
and constant yet shows 
only this woman in her varnishes, 
who won’t improve in the light. 

But there’s a way of life 
that is its own witness: 
Put the kettle on, shut the blind. 
Home is a sleeping child, 
an open mind 

and our effects, 
shrugged and settled 
in the sort of light 
jugs and kettles 
grow important by. 

This is the poem that first brought Eavan Boland to my attention. I had heard of Boland in class and I had casually read through some of her poems online. But it was when I found “Domestic Interior” that Boland’s writing became much more personal and relatable to me. In this poem she is again writing about a woman, but Boland brings up thought-provoking issues that I myself have pondered on.  Specifically, this poem makes me think about my future and how I want to be a wife but that a wife and mother seems to be a boring, thankless job most of the time.

In this poem Boland highlights the simple beauty of common objects and events like a kettle, shutting the blinds, or a sleeping child. She manipulates the common phrase ‘to see something in a new light’ as she describes how everyday objects like a kettle or jug can gain value in a different light. This is also emphasized by her repetition of the word light, which appears three times in the poem. She relates her poem’s idea of light to how an artist uses light to focus in on different objects in his work. This poem is in fact based off of the painting the “Arnolfini Wedding” by Jan Van Eyck. Boland utilizes this allusion to the painting to give the reader a new interpretation- a woman’s interpretation- of Van Eyck's famous work. Van Eyck chose the light in which he would paint the picture (placing an open window as the source) but Boland creates a slightly different way of viewing the painting by figuratively putting it in new light. One line that shows this is line 19 with “interred in her joy”; interred is usually an ominous, depressing word that means to bury someone in their grave. Interred in her joy is a paradox. The woman is interred because she is stuck in the painting forever but Boland might also be saying that the young woman is stuck in her marriage forever. Boland’s poem also contains a lot of assonance especially in the second and sixth stanzas. The second stanza repeats the “eh” sound a lot with the words quiet, attention, unexpected, despised, and utensil. This causes the reader to notice these verbs more and it gives the stanza a sort of plinking sound like rain drops, with each word subtly emphasized. The sixth stanza’s assonance is found in the words life, blind, child, and mind. Another key literary device found in “Domestic Interior” is the personification of the mirror, in line 4, and the ring, in line 3. "The new ring/ambering her finger": amber is a sticky substance that can be very beautiful when it hardens. Sometimes flecks of wood or small bugs get caught in amber and are forever trapped there. The beautiful ring ambering the woman’s finger binds her to her husband in marriage. "The mirror weds her" is a more complicated line. I believe it is a reference to the painting, which has a mirror hanging on the wall behind the couple. The mirror gives another point of view because it is a reflection of the couple's backs and also what is in front of them (which is otherwise invisible to the painting’s viewer). The mirror reveals another person in the painting which I assume is the preacher who will wed the couple. At first Boland appears to be showing the confines of marriage but then I believe she describes how a person’s outlook changes when they are married and how little things that seem boring and trivial at first become special and valued.

This Moment

A neighbourhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.

            This poem was selected for the Library of Congress Poetry 180 project, which encourages students to read poetry by providing a poem for everyday of the school year. When I initially read “This Moment” it reminded me of the introduction to Einstein’s Dreams when the narrator briefly describes different scenes happening on a given day. I decided to begin my blog with this poem because it enforces what I said about Boland’s propensity to describe and reflect on simple, everyday activities in her poems, as she writes about this moment. 

            Boland uses open form in this poem with her absence of rhyme scheme, line length, and metrical pattern. The entire poem is characterized by its imagery especially in line 11 when a mother lovingly catches her child. In line 10 there is a simile comparing a window’s color to butter. Butter is warm and soft and comparing the window to butter adds to the cozy, nostalgic feel of the poem. In the second stanza two enjambments occur. Grammatical and logical sense run from the end of one line to the beginning of a second. When Boland cut up the sentence like this, the poem becomes slightly dark. The enjambment makes the line read as though “to happen” and “out of sight” are afterthoughts. “Things are getting ready” is exciting but “to happen” seems almost foreboding and “out of sight” is sinister. Finally, the poem’s tone is significant because Boland’s message is conveyed through her tone. She sets the scene with a neighborhood at dusk. Dusk has the connotation of being a strange and sleepy time between two very different phases- day and night. Her tone continues as nostalgic and thoughtful as though the narrator is a person sitting on a porch in this neighborhood looking around herself. The poem ends with the tone reminding the reader that it was all about a simple, fleeting moment that passes just as the moths fly away and the fruit gets a little riper with every passing second.

Eavan Boland's life laid out for you.

Eavan Boland is considered by many to be Ireland's greatest modern poet and its preeminent female poet.

In my opinion she is the most relatable poet I have ever read. I first discovered her when I read A Woman's World. I like her work because she does not write about flowery stuff like love and nature. When I read her poems I think about the women in my life and what she is saying about them. She has strong feminist tones in her poetry but she brings up new issues and insights. I like that she writes about everyday activities because that is my life and she makes these simple, daily interactions valuable through her poetry.

Eavan Boland was born the youngest of five in Dublin in 1944. Her father was a diplomat and her mother was an artist. In 1951, her family moved to England because of her father's job. This was a difficult time to be Irish in England, as England and Ireland had a long-term dispute over the six counties that made up Northern Ireland. An Irish civil rights movement grew in the 1960s and turned violent in the 70s. The English saw the Irish as terrorists, and the Irish saw the English as bloody oppressors. Eavan Boland's writing reflects growing up in this time as she depicts the violence that tore apart her beloved country. She also draws on her childhood experiences in England to depict the issues of alienation and exile in many of her poems.

In 1969, Boland married Kevin Casey and they had two daughters, one in 1976 and one in 1978. These events affected her poetry and she has written multiple poems to and about her daughters. She uses her poetry to analyze the role of women in society as mothers and wives. Her poems describe the beauty but also the isolation of women.

Eavan Boland writes about domestic life for women and has said that she believes it is harder to capture a simple, everyday moment than a dramatic event. Boland is both criticized and praised for her choice of themes: some believe that Boland writes about bland and worthless topics and that this is what results from a female poet while other readers find her somewhat controversial subject insightful. She has writes about topics such as child abuse, violence against women, self-esteem, and eating disorders.  She herself has said "I think feminism has real power and authority as an ethic, but none at all as an aesthetic." What she meant was that her feminism influences her poetry but it is not her goal to promote feminism or write about it.

In recent years Boland has worked as an English professor at Irish and American colleges. She is currently the director of Stanford University’s creative writing program and has been a tenured English professor at Stanford since 1996. Boland has published ten volumes of poetry, her most recent being New Collected Poems in 2008. The most distinguished awards she has received are the Lannan Foundation Award in poetry and the American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Her influences are said to be W.B. Yeats and Adrienne Rich.

Brief Bio & Overview: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/153

Her current employer’s bio: http://english.stanford.edu/bio.php?name_id=27

Common criticism: http://www.enotes.com/eavan-boland-criticism/boland-eavan-79006

An interview: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15939

A Q&A session with readers: http://www.smartishpace.com/pqa/eavan_boland/