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.