In Memory: Eavan Boland

I write as the light falls after a gorgeous sunny spring day in a Dublin suburb a mile or so away from the neighbourhood Eavan Boland wrote about so memorably in her poetry. The unexpected news this afternoon of her passing felt just like hearing of Seamus Heaney’s death : a sharp, dismayed ‘Ah no. No.’ Losing great writers leaves us bereft, even if we didn’t know them personally (I met her a couple of times). The words of a great poet with a long career like Boland or Heaney seep into us over decades. They become part of what we are.

Below is the text of a commentary I wrote some years ago for a podcast. ‘This Moment’, seemingly slender, is about so many things, but right now it’s about what truly matters: love, family, what binds us as humans. It’s what we need. It’s about ‘magic and ordinariness.’

Now it’s 9pm. I can look down towards Dundrum as the evening closes over it.

May 20th: the talk in the podcast player at the top is based on this post.

‘This Moment’, by Eavan Boland

There could be no better person to introduce this poem than Eavan Boland herself.

 ‘This Moment’ is about a time in my life when my children were very young. We lived in a suburb which faced the Dublin hills and where the summer light lasted a long time into the evening. When I went out to call in my daughter she would run into my arms, just as the light was going.

This poem remembers that time, but in an impressionistic way. I wanted to convey the stillness, the waiting, the about-to-happen feeling of summer light going. Most of those details in the poem are taken from my life at that time: the moths of late summer always caught my eye as they banged against our kitchen window, and the first house lights through the summer twilight were always an evocative sight to me.

But it’s the mother and child who are the focus of the poem. It’s as if the child’s reunion with the mother makes the summer twilight shift and stumble into real night. The stars, the moths, the sweetening of the apples all happen as a result of the encounter.

 Looking at the poem on the page is a different experience to reading it. On the page the lines are short and spare – indeed, it starts with just two words in each of the first two lines:

A neighbourhood.

At dusk. 

The sentences are also (with one, maybe two exceptions) also short and spare. Or rather, I should say that many of them aren’t even, grammatically, sentences, such as those first two lines, or lines 6, 7, 8. The effect of all this is to slow the poem down, to recreate the moment, this moment, in anticipation of the critical lines:

A woman leans down to catch a child

who has run into her arms

this moment.

This is a poem both ‘in the moment’ (written in the present tense) and yet also very much one of any such moments in history.

Boland is very conscious about her place in history, as a woman, and a poet, and both a poet and woman. In her book Object Lessons : the life of the woman and the poet in our Time, she wrote 

Occasionally I would feel an older and less temporary connection to the moment. Then I would feel all the sweet, unliterate melancholy of women who must have stood as I did, throughout continents and centuries, feeling the timelessness of that particular instant and the cruel time beneath its surface. They must have measured their children, as I did, against the seasons and looked at the hedges and rowan trees, their height and the colour of their berries, as an index of the coming loss.

This poem too has that awareness – it’s about the immense significance and importance of a totally commonplace act – a child running into its mother’s arms.  In many other poems (like ‘The War Horse’ and ‘The Pomegranate’) she examines the domestic life of the suburb, a largely unexplored subject in the past. Again, she writes in Object Lessons: 

A suburb is composed of lives in a state of process … It waxes and wanes on christenings, weddings, birthdays. In one year it can seem a whole road is full of bicycles, roller skates, jumble sales. Garages will be wide open, with children selling comics and stale raisin buns. There will be shouting and calling far into the summer night. Almost as soon, it seems, the same road will be quiet. The bicycles will be gone. The shouting and laughing will be replaced by one or two dogs barking in back gardens. Curtains will be drawn till late morning, and doors will stay closed.

The fact is that this is, all across the world and throughout history, a place of great importance. It’s where many of the most significant acts of our lives take place, and ‘This Moment’ celebrates such an act, the love between a parent and a child.

The lines are short. So are the stanzas, with three of just three lines, three of two, and, in the geographical middle of the poem, a single-line fragment, ‘But not yet’. Again, this structure builds a tension, a sense of something about to happen, that is finally fulfilled in line thirteen with the words of the title. And these are followed in the final stanza with three lines that expand in length as their shape enacts the sense of life, blossoming, plenitude:

Stars rise.

Moths flutter.

Apples sweeten in the dark.

In Boland’s words,

The form of the poem is fairly open. The short lines helped me create a sort of staccato effect. Small as the space was, I wanted a hint of drama, of an event getting ready to happen.

One last point about the way the poem is written: its vocabulary is entirely straight-forward. There is nothing complicated here. And in this sense again it enacts its own meaning – a poem about the most simple, ordinary and common scene is itself utterly accessible. There’s just a single figurative moment in it, when she uses imagery in the form of a simile, in line 10: ‘One window is yellow as butter.’ Again, this image is appropriate; she reaches for a domestic thing, a thing undoubtedly in the kitchen of that house.  She writes that this is 

if not the soul then the centre of the action, the most deliberate and intent image in the poem.  I have a clear memory of hesitating before I used it. But I went ahead anyway. This is a very short poem. Its space is limited. If I wanted to convey both magic and ordinariness, and I did, I needed an image which would put the light of that first window into the context of the downright and plainspoken image of yellow butter. The effect of the first needed the solidity of the second. So I went ahead and did it, and it’s still the part of this poem I remain most satisfied with.

 Magic and ordinariness.