Irish poet Eavan Boland passed away on April 27, 2020. She will be remembered for her finely wrought lyric meditations on womanhood, domesticity, and Ireland’s colonial history.
This poem, “Irish Women Explorers of the Nineteenth Century,” published by the Columbia Journal in 2004, exemplifies what I love about Boland’s work: her simple diction so often builds into a moment of emotional intensity, in this case “the heat and secrecy” of estrangement from one’s home.
Irish Women Explorers of the Nineteenth Century
Eavan Boland
No I knew. No one I ever met.
Or was descended from.
Daughters of parsons and of army men.
Daughters of younger sons of younger sons —
They left for somewhere else from Kingston harbour.
They took their journals and their steamer trunks.
They took their sketching books. They carried hats
made out of local straw
dried in an Irish field beside a river which
flowed to a town they had known in childhood and
had watched forever from a bedroom window
framed in the clouds and cloud-shadows,
the blotchy cattle and
the scattered window lamps of a flat landscape
they could not enter
had never entered and try to enter now
as they glide upstream
into the heat and secrecy
of their estrangement,
into darknesses no one knew how to mark on
the parchments creaking in one hand
as they put the other up to
shield their eyes and pulled the straw down and
for a moment only
they covered their faces with home.
