'Boland’s carefully judged use of language aids the reader to uncover the intensity of feeling in her poetry' by Christine Costello

Boland’s unique use of language helps the reader to comprehend the variety of feeling in her poetry. She uses poetic techniques such as imagery, symbolism and metaphors to convey the intense emotions found in her sometimes personal experiences to the reader. The poems where I find this most evident are The F amine Road, Child of our Time, Love and The Pomegranate. These poems showcase both Boland’s style of language and the strong emotions which it portrays. 

In the poem, ‘Love’, Boland uses strong imagery to convey the intensity of her feelings towards her husband. Boland begins the poem with the image of an old apartment in which she used to live with her husband. Her use of language to describe the apartment creates a vivid image in the mind of the reader, “We had a kitchen and an Amish table. We had a view”.  The language Boland uses makes it clear that she is recalling a happy time in her life, “ We discovered there that love had the feather and muscle of wings and had come to live with us”. The poet remembers a time in her life when she and her husband were deeply in love, before their love diminished.

Boland creates a sombre and longing tone throughout the poem “Love”. This tone is created through the careful use of language. Boland presents this sombre tone when remembering the time when her daughter was extremely ill, “ We had two infant children one of whom was touched by death in this town and spared”. It is evident that this was a devastating time in Boland’s. A longing tone is established when the poet says, “ And yet I want to return to you on the bridge of Iowa river as you were”. Boland longs to return to simpler times when she lived in the old apartment with her husband and their love was still blossoming. Through her unique use of language, her desire to restore the love she once shared with her husband is portrayed to us.

In ‘The Famine Road’, Eavan Boland’s particular use of language exposes her passionate feelings towards the horror that was the Famine, ‘ they will work tomorrow without him. They know it and walk clear’, Boland simply highlights how prevalent and rampant dying of hunger or disease was during this deplorable time in history. Her use of broad vowels throughout the poem slows the pace and in turn, creates a monotonous and lifeless tone, ‘iron years away’. The stagnant rhythm throughout the poem reflects the hopeless suffering the Irish experienced during the Famine. The incessant and miserable feeling and sympathy encouraged while reading the poem was shrewdly used to expose the feelings of the Irish people during the Famine years.

The imagery described in ‘T he Famine Road’ aided me in uncovering the intensity of her emotions toward the Famine and also gave me an insight into her feelings regarding infertility in women, through how the doctor’s dismissive attitude. In the final stanza of the poem, Jones is insensitive towards the dead and his main concern is pleasing his boss at the expense of the Irish people, ‘... this Tuesday I saw bones out of my carriage window, your servant Jones’. Boland creates a very strong image of Jones viewing the disease ­ ridden, dead bones of the Irish from his carriage. This image highlights the suffering the Irish went through and Boland contrasts this to the doctor’s dismissive manner when dealing with the infertile woman. The poem ends with the voice of the woman thinking, “never to know the load of his child in you, what is your body now if not a famine road?” The woman sees her life as a famine road,­ a long life of hard work that in the end leads nowhere. Boland uses both images here to highlight the contrast in the suffering of the Irish in the famine, and the suffering of the woman. Both doctor and Jones are dismissive of the suffering of others, allowing Boland to comment on these two contrasting topics in one work, and make the reader question each.

In her poem ‘The Pomegranate’, Boland's running theme of Greek mythology and the story of Ceres and Persephone acts as a metaphor for her protective nature over her own daughter. Boland is forced to come to terms with the fact that her once child, now teenager’s free will can no longer be controlled by her mother. Much like Ceres could not prevent Persephone from eating the pomegranate, Boland cannot stop her daughter from making bad choices in life. This metaphor helps Boland understand that like everyone else, her daughter must live and learn. This powerful metaphor gives us, the reader, an insightful view into Boland's mothering, and the true intensity of the emotions involved.

Another technique used by Boland to convey these feelings is imagery, a central element of her style. As a poet, Boland is renowned for her use of descriptive metaphors and similes referencing nature, “I carried her past whitebeams and wasps, and honey­scented buddleias”.. This is a key description in her poem, T he Pomegranate, and highlights both her fond love for her child and the beauty of our world, something Boland always puts emphasis on when dealing with heavy topics such as innocence, war and maturity. While these topics are all stressed during the poem, the key themes and emotions portrayed by Boland through her descriptive, engaging language are those of loss and change as she accepts the inevitable change of her young girl growing up into an independent teenager, whom she can no longer protect from the dangers of life.

Boland expresses a statement of outrage in her poem,‘Child of Our Time’. This poem deals with the futility of the child’s death, accepts collective responsibility and emphasises how urgent it is that a lesson be learned from this tragedy. The language and form of the poem make the two qualities of tenderness and outrage evident from the beginning. The formal elegy starts in the first stanza as a ‘lullaby’ suitable for a child. Musical imagery and language, ­‘song’, ‘tune’, ‘rhythm’, ‘discord,’­ makes us realise the horrific contrast between what should have been a harmonious childhood and its cruel reality. The child should have learned the ‘idiom’ of his people, his relatives and friends. Boland portrays the horror that she felt by insisting that the only hope in the poem is that the adults in society will find a ‘new language’ of peace in the future.

By using rhyme the poet helps to make the poem more formal in its expression of grief. She varies her techniques between half rhymes, ‘instruct/protect’, and full rhyme ‘lullaby / cry’ and sibilance, ‘sleep in a world your final sleep has woken’ add to the musical effect of the poem. Repetition highlights the sense of grief, ‘broken images’. These elements create an inharmonious rhythm and showcase the poet's strong feelings.

In conclusion, Boland’s use of language contributes to the diverse range of emotions expressed in her poetry. Throughout the poems, ‘Love’, ‘The Famine Road’, ‘ The Pomegranate’ and ‘‘Child of our Time’, her use of various poetic techniques and distinct language convey her palette of intense feelings to the reader and helps communicate her interesting perspective on diverse issues.