Eavan Boland
Aeneas trying and failing to properly communicate with his comrades: ‘and when the hero/ was hailed by his comrades in hell/ their mouths opened and their voices failed and/ there is no knowing what they would have asked/ about a life they had shared and lost.’ This is one of the reasons the Aeneid remains so popular today. Although we may not journey to the underworld as Aeneas does, many of us can relate to the desire to have one last conversation with a family member or a friend we have lost.
The fourth stanza explains where Boland and her husband, Kevin, are in their relationship in this present moment. They are still married, still in love, and even with the demands of everyday life, they still communicate well and listen to one another: ‘I am your wife./ It was years ago./ Our child is healed. We love each other still./ Across our day-to-day and ordinary distances/ we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly.’ The short staccato sentences force the reader to pause and give us the sense that Boland is speaking the truth, and that all is well in her marriage.
The title of this poem is ‘Love’, and there is nothing more complicated than love. Love married, but it is his younger self she yearns for. Probably, if she is being honest, it is her own younger self that she really wishes back. She depicts her young husband so vividly, it is easy for us to picture the scene: ‘And yet I want to return to you/ on the bridge of the Iowa river as you were,/ with snow on the shoulders of your coat/ and a car passing with its headlights on’.
In the sixth stanza Boland admits that this picture of her husband running through the snow with their child in his arms is the most heroic thing she can ever imagine. He is more of a hero to her than Aeneas or Odysseus or any other hero that you might read about: ‘I see you as a hero in a text –/ the image blazing and the edges gilded’. She longs to ask him a question, which she describes as epic, not because it is a long, heroic question, but because it is so important. Sometimes it takes just one question to make or break a relationship, and that fact makes this question serious: ‘and I long to cry out the epic question/ my dear companion:// Will we ever live so intensely again?’ The word ‘companion’ has connotations of safety and security, but not necessarily passion. The speaker wonders if she will ever experience the intense feelings of her younger life and new love again.
She returns to the idea of love being a majestic bird, and asks if it will return to them: ‘Will love come to us again and be/ so formidable at rest it offered us ascension/ even to look at him?’ ‘Formidable’ means powerful and intense, while ‘ascension’ means to rise to a higher level. Their love has raised them up and made them both better. The poet is not ready to say goodbye to this, yet she longs for the intensity of new love again. Even though she and her husband still love each other, it is in a different way.
The poem ends on a sad note. Boland is asking her young husband, who now belongs to the past, a question he cannot possibly answer, because he is no longer there. She remembers him so vividly that she feels she can reach down through the years and connect with him, but she cannot. The past can be seductive. It can be easier to live there than in the present, but, no matter how much you want to return there, you cannot: ‘But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me./ You walk away and I cannot follow.’ The poet’s young husband walks away from her, back into the past, where he belongs, with his young wife and infant daughters.
LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL
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