An Origin Like Water Read online

  AN

  ORIGIN

  LIKE

  WATER

  COLLECTED POEMS 1967–1987

  EAVAN BOLAND

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY / NEW YORK / LONDON

  Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.

  For my daughters,

  Sarah and Eavan Frances

  Contents

  Preface

  From New Territory 1967

  Athene’s Song

  From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin

  New Territory

  After the Irish of Aodghan O’Rathaille

  The Flight of the Earls

  A Cynic at Kilmainham Jail

  Belfast vs. Dublin

  Yeats in Civil War

  The Poets

  Mirages

  The Pilgrim

  Migration

  Three Songs for a Legend

  1. A Lullaby for Lir’s Son

  2. The Malediction

  3. Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan

  The King and the Troubadour

  Requiem for a Personal Friend

  The Winning of Etain

  From The War Horse 1975

  I Dedication: The Other Woman and the Novelist

  The War Horse

  The Famine Road

  Child of Our Time

  The Hanging Judge

  A Soldier’s Son

  The Greek Experience

  The Laws of Love

  Sisters

  II O Fons Bandusiae

  Chorus of the Shadows

  From the Irish of Pangur Ban

  The Atlantic Ocean

  Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes about Poetry

  III Ode to Suburbia

  Naoise at Four

  Cyclist with Cut Branches

  Song

  The Botanic Gardens

  Prisoners

  Ready for Flight

  Anon

  Suburban Woman

  From In Her Own Image 1980

  Tirade for the Mimic Muse

  In Her Own Image

  In His Own Image

  Anorexic

  Mastectomy

  Solitary

  Menses

  Witching

  Exhibitionist

  Making Up

  From Night Feed 1982

  Degas’s Laundresses

  Woman in Kitchen

  A Ballad of Beauty and Time

  It’s a Woman’s World

  Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark

  The New Pastoral

  The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish

  The Woman Changes Her Skin

  Pose

  Patchwork

  Lights

  Domestic Interior

  1. Night Feed

  2. Monotony

  3. Hymn

  4. Partings

  5. Energies

  6. The Muse Mother

  7. Endings

  8. In the Garden

  9. After a Childhood Away from Ireland

  10. Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray

  11. Domestic Interior

  From The Journey 1987

  I Remember

  Mise Eire

  Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening

  The Oral Tradition

  Fever

  The Unlived Life

  Lace

  The Bottle Garden

  Suburban Woman: A Detail

  The Briar Rose

  The Women

  Nocturne

  The Fire in Our Neighborhood

  On Holiday

  Growing Up

  There and Back

  The Wild Spray

  The Journey

  Envoi

  Listen. This Is the Noise of Myth

  An Irish Childhood in England: 1951

  Fond Memory

  Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland

  The Emigrant Irish

  Tirade for the Lyric Muse

  The Woman Takes Her Revenge on the Moon

  The Glass King

  Index

  Preface

  The first poems here were written when I was nineteen. Altogether, this book consists of five collections, published over twenty years, from New Territory in 1967 to The Journey in 1987. I have revised some poems, but not many. I have tried to leave intact the untidy and telling shape which is the truth of any poet’s work, and I have avoided as much as I could the temptation to make any of it look more achieved and symmetrical than it was.

  In a certain sense, I began in a city and a poetic world where the choices and assumptions were near to those of a nineteenth-century poet. The formal poem was respected. The wit of the stanza was admired more than its drama. Most importantly, the poet’s life—in the small circle I knew and even beyond it in the culture—was exalted in ways that were poignant and suspect at the same time.

  In my first collection, published when I was twenty-two years of age, those features of my environment showed up in poems that described a safe and well-lighted circle, that struggled for skill and avoided risk. Looking back at them now, I can see myself as I was then trying to get cadences right and counting out stresses on a table. The poems are the visible evidence. What is not visible is the growing confusion and anxiety I felt, my inability to be sure that I would continue to be a poet when I left the lighted circle and moved out into the shadow of what I had learned to think of as an ordinary life—that is, a life not to be found in the approved versions I had encountered. Above all I had no clear sense of how my womanhood could connect with my life as a poet, or what claims each would make on the other.

  These poems are a record of the claims. By and large, I have left them as they are, with their failures, their awkwardness, because although the connection was often flawed and painful, it remains central: The truth is that I came to know history as a woman and a poet when I apparently left the site of it. I came to know my country when I went to live at its margin. I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile within it.

  These are small paradoxes. They are reflected here in the poems I began to write when I left an eloquent literary city and went to live in a suburb only four miles from the city’s center in actual distance, but unmapped and unvisited in any literary sense I knew. Once I began to live my own life—a life with a husband, a home, and small children— I could see firsthand how remote it was from the life of the poet as I had understood it. I began to realize that a subtle oppression could result from this fracture between the instinctive but unexpressed life I lived every day and the expressive poetic manners I had inherited that might easily—as manners often do—render it merely as decorum. I was grateful for the instruction of an historic poetic culture and I still relished craft and hard work. But increasingly I came to regard each poem not as a series of technical strategies, but as a forceful engagement between a life and a language.

  It was never predictable. I could never count on the outcome. The language remained partially inherited: resistant and engrossing. But the life at least was wholly mine. It took place in a house, in a garden, with a child in my arms, on summer afternoons, in winter dusks, and with eventual confidence that however formidable a poetic tradition might be, however assured its inherited language, its ethical survival still depended on the allowance it provided for a single life to make—in the ironic and historic sense—a new name for itself and commend it to all the old ones.

  I am not suggesting that this assurance is clearly present in these poems. It could not be. It is retrospective: I only found it by writing them. In the earliest work here I was often too young, too puzzled, too clumsy as a technician to compose my intuitions into forms
and therefore trapped them into patterns. Even later, when I found my voice, I was still capable of drowning it out with a finished poem. But occasionally— and these are the poems I am glad to have included here—the life beckoned to the language and the language followed.

  EAVAN BOLAND

  Dublin 1995

  from

  New Territory

  1967

  Athene’s Song

  From my father’s head I sprung

  Goddess of the war, created

  Partisan and soldiers’ physic,

  My symbols boast and brazen gong,

  Until I made in Athens wood

  Upon my knees a new music.

  When I played my pipe of bone,

  Robbed and whittled from a stag,

  Every bird became a lover,

  Every lover to its tone

  Found the truth of song and brag.

  Fish sprung in the full river.

  Peace became the toy of power

  When other noises broke my sleep.

  Like dreams I saw the hot ranks

  And heroes in another flower

  Than any there. I dropped my pipe

  Remembering their shouts, their thanks.

  Beside the water, lost and mute,

  Lies my pipe and, like my mind,

  Remains unknown, remains unknown.

  And in some hollow, taking part

  With my heart against my hand,

  Holds its peace and holds its own.

  From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin

  Dressed in the colors of a country day—

  Gray-blue, blue-gray, the white of seagulls’ bodies—

  Chardin’s peasant woman

  Is to be found at all times in her short delay

  Of dreams, her eyes mixed

  Between love and market, empty flagons of wine

  At her feet, bread under her arm. He has fixed

  Her limbs in color and her heart in line.

  In her right hand the hindlegs of a hare

  Peep from a cloth sack. Through the door

  Another woman moves

  In painted daylight. Nothing in this bare

  Closet has been lost

  Or changed. I think of what great art removes:

  Hazard and death. The future and the past.

  A woman’s secret history and her loves—

  And even the dawn market from whose bargaining

  She has just come back, where men and women

  Congregate and go

  Among the produce, learning to live from morning

  To next day, linked

  By a common impulse to survive although

  In surging light they are single and distinct

  Like birds in the accumulating snow.

  New Territory

  Several things announced the fact to us:

  The captain’s Spanish tears

  Falling like doubloons in the headstrong light

  And then of course the fuss—

  The crew jostling and interspersing cheers

  With wagers. Overnight

  As we went down to our cabins, nursing the last

  Of the grog, talking as usual of conquest,

  Land hove into sight.

  Frail compasses and trenchant constellations

  Brought us as far as this.

  And now air and water, fire and earth

  Stand at their given stations

  Out there and are ready to replace

  This single desperate width

  Of ocean.

  Why do we hesitate?

  Water and air

  And fire and earth, and therefore life, are here.

  And therefore death.

  Out of the dark man comes to life and into it

  He goes and loves and dies

  (His element being the dark and not the light of day)

  So the ambitious wit

  Of poets and exploring ships have been his eyes—

  Riding the dark for joy—

  And so Isaiah of the sacred text is eagle-eyed because

  By peering down the unlit centuries

  He glimpsed the holy boy.

  After the Irish of Aodghan O’Rathaille

  Without flocks or cattle or the curved horns

  Of cattle, in a drenching night without sleep

  My five wits on the famous uproar

  Oft the waves, toss like ships,

  And I cry for boyhood, long before

  Winkle and dogfish had defiled my lips.

  O if he lived the prince who sheltered me,

  And his company who gave me entry

  On the river of the Laune,

  Whose royalty stood sentry

  Over intricate harbors, I and my own

  Would not be desolate in Diarmuid’s country.

  Fierce McCarthy Mor whose friends were welcome,

  McCarthy of the Lee, a slave of late,

  McCarthy of Kanturk whose blood

  Has dried underfoot:

  Of all my princes not a single word—

  Irrevocable silence ails my heart.

  My heart shrinks in me, my heart ails

  That every hawk and royal hawk is lost.

  From Cashel to the far sea

  Their birthright is dispersed

  Far and near, night and day, by robbery

  And ransack, every town oppressed.

  Take warning wave, take warning crown of the sea,

  I O’Rathaille—witless from your discords—

  Were Spanish sails again afloat

  And rescue on your tides

  Would force this outcry down your wild throat,

  Would make you swallow these Atlantic words.

  The Flight of the Earls

  Princes, it seems, are seldom wise.

  Most of them fall for a woman’s tears

  Or else her laughter—think of Paris

  Whose decision stretched to ten alarming years.

  Nothing would suit

  Until he’d brought

  The kingdom down around his ears.

  Now in the Middle Ages see

  The legendary boy of king and queen:

  A peacock of all chivalry

  He dies at twenty on some battle-green

  And ever since

  The good Black Prince

  Rides to the land of might-have-been.

  Whether our own were foolish or wise

  Hardly concerns us: death ran away with our chances

  Of a meeting. Yet we strain our eyes

  Hoping perhaps just one with his golden flounces

  Has outwitted theft.

  So are we left

  Writing to headstones and forgotten princes.

  A Cynic at Kilmainham Jail

  There is nowhere that the gimlet twilight has not

  Entered, not a thing indeed to see

  But it is excellent abroad for ghosts:

  A gaslamp in the dark seems to make sea

  Water in the rising fog—maybe

  For those imprisoned here this was a small

  Consoling inland symbol—

  how could their way be

  Otherwise discovered back to the western seaboard?

  How could they otherwise be free in prison

  Who for more than forty years have been shot through

  To their Atlantic hearts?

  But in this wizened

  Autumn dark, no worship, mine or yours,

  Can resurrect the sixteen minds. O those

  Perhaps (Godspeed them) saw the guns with dual

  Sight—seeing from one eye with the tears they chose

  Themselves the magic, tragic town, the broken

  Countryside, the huge ungenerous tribe

  Of cowards and the one eye laughing saw

  (God help them) growing from their own graves to jibe

  At death, a better future, neither tear nor flaw.

  Belfast vs. Dublin

  I
nto this city of largesse

  You carried clever discontent,

  And now, the budget of your time here spent,

  Let us not mince words: This is no less

  Than halfway towards the end. Gathering

  In a rag tied to a stick, all in confusion,

  Dublin reverence and Belfast irony—

  Now hoist with your confusion.

  Cut by the throats before we spoke

  One to another, yet we breast

  The dour line of North and South, pressed

  Into action by the clock. Here we renounce

  All dividend except the brilliant quarrel

  Of our towns: mine sports immoral

  Courtiers in unholy waste, but your unwitty,

  Secret love for it is Belfast city.

  We have had time to talk and strongly

  Disagree about the living out

  Of life. There was no need to shout.

  Rightly or else quite wrongly

  We have run out of time, if not of talk.

  Let us then cavalierly fork

  Our ways since we, and all unknown,

  Have called into question one another’s own.

  Yeats in Civil War

  In middle age you exchanged the sandals

  Of a pilgrim for a Norman keep

  in Galway. Civil war started. Vandals

  Sacked your country, made off with your sleep.

  Somehow you arranged your escape

  Aboard a spirit ship which every day

  Hoisted sail out of fire and rape.

  On that ship your mind was stowaway.

  The sun mounted on a wasted place.

  But the wind at every door and turn

  Blew the smell of honey in your face

  Where there was none.

  Whatever I may learn

  You are its sum, struggling to survive—

  A fantasy of honey your reprieve.

  The Poets

  They like all creatures, being made

  For the shovel and worm,

  Ransacked their perishable minds and found

  Pattern and form

  And with their own hands quarried from hard words

  A figure in which secret things confide.

  They are abroad. Their spirits like a pride

  Of lions circulate.

  Are desperate. Just as the jeweled beast,

  That lion constellate,

  Whose scenery is Betelgeuse and Mars,