Innocence Lost: The Poetry Of Eavan Boland Essay, Research Paper

Nowhere can be found a land without violence. But nowhere but Ireland can be found a land with more violence. Eavan Boland uses the theme of violence in many of the poems that she writes. In some way, shape, or form, violence is incorporated and used to explain loss, grief, or exploitation. But it is when Boland contrasts this violence with another aspect of human life that we find the true meaning of the word, and the truly devastating results it can wreak on all existence. By contrasting the themes of violence and innocence in her poems The Dolls Museum in Dublin and Inscriptions, and then a loss of innocence by other means in the poem That the Science of Cartography is Limited , Boland not only portrays important aspects of Ireland s history, but also the consequences it had on individual lives of the times, and continues to have today.

Recall the Quadrille. Hum the Waltz./ Promenade on the yachtclub terraces. (Boland 14) The tone of this second stanza of the poem The Dolls Museum of Dublin outlines the sense of innocence. These are the days of women in big dresses, dancing to orchestras playing at balls, and men in smashing tuxedos with sashes of patriotic loyalty across their chests. These are vivid memories of good times and lavish parties. But there is another side to it all.

And recreate Easter in Dublin. (Boland 14) The Easter uprising of April 24, 1916 in Dublin proved to be a turning point in the fight of the Irish for their freedom from Britain s rule. The uprising took a group of about 150 Irish Citizen Army soldiers and Irish Volunteers from Liberty Hall to the General Post Office in Dublin (Document 2). An Irish poet by the name of Patrick Pearce was instrumental in the revolt, when he stopped en route to read the group s manifesto Proclamation of the Irish Republic, or Poblacht Na h Eireann (Document 1). In the days that followed, literal chaos broke loose. Between the Irish offense and the British retaliation, buildings were burned, people were killed, and the city was damaged severely. In the end, the leaders of the uprising were court marshaled, and one by one, were executed. But the end result was that people were made aware, at the cost of many lives, and a door was opened to freedom for the Irish, a door that could never be closed again. (Document 1)

In Boland s poem, this impending violence is contrasted with the soft ritual of Easter services in a Catholic church. While Booted Officers (Boland 14) storm through the city, there is still a sense of calm and routine in the church. Easter remains the same sacred holiday, The altars mannerly with linen./ The lilies are whiter than surplices. (Boland 14) But there is also a sense of foreboding in this seeming innocence: The candles are burning and warning:/ Rejoice, they whisper. After sacrifice. (Boland 14) This particular line has a double meaning. It refers to the celebration of the holiday Easter in itself. After 40 days of waiting and mourning, then the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, Easter day celebrates the resurrection of the man who died just three days before, Rejoice After sacrifice. (Boland 14) But it also refers to the happenings of that specific Easter of April 24, 1916. These burning candles are alluding to the fact that the sacrifice of the men and women who put their lives on the line to free Ireland will produce rejoicing when their dream of a free country comes to fruition.

Meanwhile, people are still unaware, innocent. The Green is vivid with parasols./ Sunlight is pastel and windless./ The bar of the Shelbourne is full./ Laughter and gossip on the terraces./ Rumour and alarm at the barracks. (Boland 14-15) There is something that is known by some that is not known by all. But it is seen first hand by the dolls in the museum that can never speak of what they have witnessed. Their eyes are wide. They cannot address/ the helplessness which has lingered in/ the airless peace of each glass case:/ To have survived. To have been stronger than/ a moment. (Boland 15) This museum may have been a headquarters, probably burned by the furies of two countries at battle with each other. But these dolls lived to tell their silent tale of terror and wrath, wreaked suddenly on a single day that seemed no different than any other, although terribly symbolic. But though first hand victims, these dolls have the unique privilege and punishment To be the hostages ignorance/ takes from time and ornament from destiny. Both./ To be the present of the past. To infer the difference/ with a terrible stare. But not feel it. And not know it. (Boland 15)

the air gets/ a dry rustle of excitement/ the way a new dress comes out of tissue paper,/ up and out of it, and/ the girl watching this thinks: Where will I wear it? Who will kiss me in it? (Boland 16) Boland produces here innocence in its finest form in this first part of her poem Inscriptions. Party dresses and beaus are the only things occupying this innocent young girl s mind, while outside her placid world, her countrymen are being killed and the individual lives in two nations are being turned upside down. She never questions her own mortality, and she never considers a death that seems so out of scope that she cannot possible foresee it.

Peter/ was the name on the cot. (Boland 16) The name of this boy is not of any importance to the reader. But it was important to someone once, someone closer to Peter, someone who loved him, Someone knew/ the importance of giving him a name. (Boland 17) Peter s label on his cot, in his room painted blue, perhaps his favorite color, proves that it was his once. He was once an innocent sleeping child, unaware of any troubles in the world outside his boyhood bedroom.

But futures are certain to an extent. For years I have known/ how important it is/ not to name/ the coffins, the murdered in them,/ the deaths in alleyways and on doorsteps–/ in case they rise out of their names/ and I recognize/ the child who slept peacefully/ and the girl who guessed at her future in/ the dress as it came out of its box/ falling free in/ kick pleats of silk. (Boland 17) Separate lives, separate stories, yet the same destiny, same fate. This small sleeping boy and this young dreaming girl both fall victims to a violence that could never have been guessed at, as the girl tried so vainly to do.

The names that seemed so important to those who gave them mean nothing in the end. And what comfort can there be/ in knowing that/ in a distant room/ his sign is safe tonight/ and reposes its modest blues in darkness? (Boland 17) For the future is determined. Outside his window there are name-eating elements. (Boland 17) These bitter elements do nothing more but destroy and take away with the insatiable hunger for violence and death, and they must find/ headstones to feed their hunger . (Boland 17)

Eavan Boland changes her focus of the theme of loss of innocence in a third poem, That the Science of Cartography is Limited. Here, she examines her own loss of innocence, rather than those of lives of past. When you and I were first in love we drove/ to the borders of Connacht/ and entered a wood there. (Boland 7) Here, she set the scene, of two young lovers out for a drive through the woods. She was innocent, innocent in love, and not seeing fully the land in which she was raised.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road. (Boland 7) Suddenly, the scene changes. No longer is she just on a carefree ride with her love, but he wants her to know something, something not only about them. He wants her to know something about history, something about pain. This is something that is real, that cannot be changed, although its memory has been diminished by time. you told/ me in the second winter of their ordeal, in/ 1847, when the crop had failed twice,/ Relief Committees gave/ the starving Irish roads to build./ Where they died, there the road ended (Boland 7) There is that moment in a person s life where she stops to think about truth and reality, inside and out. In Boland s other poems, this time came with force, with harsh brutality and violence that gave those people no choice but to face the facts. But this in this poem, Boland takes a different approach and examines the idea that just a word, an idea, a story can tell so much more than violence ever will. Her world is changed, just by seeing those famine roads, roads that are never recognized on any map, roads that lead to nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. She has lost her innocence, but gained an insight that those victims of violence in her other poems did not have, not until it was too late.

What kind of violence can be avoided? What kind of violence can be foreseen? Hindsight is twenty twenty, as the saying goes. Boland takes her task of recreating history very seriously. The tales that she weaves of violence and suffering are as much a part of Irish history and folklore as Saint Patrick and leprechauns. For freedom to be won, for justice to be done, lives must be lost, and sacrifices must be made. But in the eyes of a child, in the eyes of people celebrating the holiest day in the Catholic year, and the eyes of a young lover on a drive, these are trivialities. Better to be innocent and carefree than fearful and downtrodden, and ignorance is bliss. But reality, as it always does, catches up to these of little worry. Violence strikes the ones who least expect it, and death is always waiting right outside the door to take those who remain innocent until the end. Even in the language of a history nearly forgotten, of cruelties committed so long ago, does violence take control and change the minds of so in the dark.

Boland, Eavan. In a Time of Violence. W. W. Norton and Company: London; 1994.

(Document 1) A Terrible Beauty is Born The Easter Rising of 1916. (http://www.free-eire.org/Free-Eire/easter/) 1998.

(Document 2) Easter 1916: The Fight for Irish Freedom. (http://goireland.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa041398.htm) 1998.