Mother Ireland by Eavan Boland

First published: 1995; collected in The Lost Land, 1998

Type of poem: Dramatic monologue

The Poem

“Mother Ireland” is a short poem in free verse in which the speaker is Mother Ireland. The poem repeatedly reminds the reader of the speaker’s presence: every sixth word, on average, is a first-person pronoun (“I,” “me,” “my”). The poem is difficult to classify. It has some qualities of the lyric, with the author speaking through a persona. It sketches the outlines of a story (hence is a narrative), and the story’s scale has epic proportions, though the poem (at only thirty-six lines, 142 words) is obviously not an epic. It might be considered a parable, but that term identifies a type of story, not a type of poem.

Mother Ireland tells her story: Once passive, unself-conscious, blind, and voiceless, she became active, self-conscious, sighted, and articulate. At first, she says, she was the land [of Ireland] itself, unable to see, only seen by others. The season early in the poem is winter: “I was a hill/ under freezing stars.”

The transformation began because “words fell on me” continually, she says. They were others’ words (she calls them by different names: “Seeds. Raindrops./ Chips of frost.”), and she was but their passive recipient. From one of these words, in the poem’s pivotal lines, she says,

   I learned my name.     I rose up. I remembered it.Now I could tell my story.  It was different   from the story told about me.

Knowing her own name empowers her, and the change in her is immediately followed by a change of seasons, to spring. Having arisen, Mother Ireland distances herself from and gains perspective on the physical landscape. Once she “was land”; now, having “travelled west,” she looks lovingly “at every field// and at the gorse-/ bright distances.” However, she “looked with so much love” that those things she gazed upon “misunderstood me./ Come back to us/ they said/ Trust me I whispered. Thus the poem ends with what appear to be Mother Ireland’s first words spoken aloud. The reader, trusting Mother Ireland, has faith that the change, though wrenching, is for the good.

Certain puzzles remain in this enigmatic poem. Were the words that fell on passive Mother Ireland those of generations of Irish bards and poets (mostly male)? May one assume that the “wound…left/ in the land by [Mother Ireland’s] leaving it” is not a physical, but a psychic, wound? Is Mother Ireland’s journey west a movement toward roots, toward an older, truer, Irish-speaking (and possibly less patriarchal) Ireland? What, crucially, does the transformation which Mother Ireland undergoes represent? If this is a parable, its lesson seems mysterious.

Forms and Devices

“Mother Ireland” is not divided into stanzas, as most of Boland’s poems are; it is, however, broken up on the page, its lines indented irregularly. The lines of no other Boland poem are so scattered across the page, and their scattered appearance reinforces a reader’s sense of the disruption caused by Mother Ireland’s separation from the land.

The poem has no regular rhyme scheme, yet patterns of consonant and vowel sounds resonate in it. The last syllable in three-fourths of the lines, for example, contains at least one (and often more than one) of the following sounds: d, r, s, and t. Lines vary in length, unpredictably, between two and nine syllables; meter is irregular, but 80 percent of the poem’s metrical feet are anapests or (more often) iambs. If free verse, as Robert Frost said, is like playing tennis with the net down, this is carefully controlled free verse: The ball is as precisely stroked, so to speak, as if the net were still there.

Beginning with inarticulateness and ending with Mother Ireland’s first whispered words, the poem also progresses from simple to more complex, verbally and syntactically. The first six lines contain only words of one syllable, twenty-four of them in a row, and almost all words of more than one syllable come after Mother Ireland has learned her name and arisen. Similarly, sentences in the first half of the poem are much shorter, on average, than those in the second. Early sentences tend to be terse (“I did not see./ I was seen.”), but the speaker’s voice grows relaxed, even faintly eloquent, especially in its second to last sentence, which stretches unhurriedly for one-fourth of the poem’s length.

Throughout, the language of the poem tends to be basic, elemental. “Yes,” a reader thinks, “this is how the land would sound if it (she) could speak.” One of every four words in the poem is a verb or verb form—a high proportion. (In language, nothing is more basic than verbs.) Another one of every four words is a pronoun. There are only the simplest adverbs (now, also, so) and few adjectives, especially in the first half of the poem. In the long sentence toward the end, a phrase such as “the gorse-/ bright distances” stands out by contrast. The elemental quality of the language seems appropriate to the epic scope of the poem’s story.

The poem’s basic figure of speech is Ireland personified as a woman. The image does not originate with Eavan Boland but has a long history in the literature of Ireland. In her prose book, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995), Boland is highly critical of what she calls “The nationalization of the feminine, the feminization of the national,” by male Irish writers, traditionally. Boland’s use of the figure is original in several respects. Her Mother Ireland is not merely a representation of Ireland in female form; she is the land itself, its very topography (Mother Earth/Ireland), as well as the spirit or personality which, acquiring name and self-awareness, emerges from the land. This emergence represents Boland’s boldest innovation: the liberation of Mother Ireland.