Eavan Boland's poetry
...d will teach them something. ‘Find for your sake…a new language’ I think the idea of violence comes from the early days in history; she refers to the famine in Ireland as an example of brutal and inhuman treatment of people. ‘After all could they not bleed their knuckles on rock, suck April hailstones for and for food?’ I think the poem shows that violence makes people to look at each as a source of food. ‘Each eyed – as if at a corner butcher – the other’s buttock’. I think she shows the indifferent attitude of the lords towards people who suffer from their violent and pointless orders. ‘This Tuesday I saw bones out of my carriage window. Your servant Jones’ I admire the way Evan Boland expresses her issues in life through myths, like in ‘pomegranate’ where she is afraid to lose her daughter and compares her situation to the one in the myth of Ceres and Persephone. However she has no choice but to let the time win. ‘But what can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time?’ She is also jubilant of being a mother and shares her joy, although still it has an element of sadness as the years go by. ‘As a woman leans down to catch a child who runs into her arms this moment’ I think she brings the message of time across when using apples sweetening in the dark as children growing up. ‘Apples sweeten in the dark’. Also I like the way she shares the hard times about being a mother, for example loss of the child in ‘the child of our time’. She shows how cruel life is and she, even being a mother, has no control over it. ‘Yesterday I knew no lullaby’. ‘Child of our time, our times have robbed your cradle’ I like the way Boland links myths to real life, showing that what was happening years ago is also happening now, life goes in circles, it repeats itself and we go through the same experiences but just at different times. For example her view of her husband being a hero from the legend. ‘I see as a hero in a text – The image blazing and the edges gilded’ Also, I think, she uses the myth of Ceres and Persephone to express her fear of her daughter growing up. ‘But I was Ceres’ Also the legend will move on, her daughter will be able to enter it like she did. ‘The legend will hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have.’ Evan Boland shows ...