While Boland herself was happily married for many years, it is natural to feel nervous about spending the rest of your life with someone, no matter how much you love them, and she explores these feelings of anxiety with characteristic honesty.


Boland does not pretend that complete honesty is always possible, or even appropriate, when it comes to romantic love. While the shadow doll, echoing the Victorian bride, is naturally ‘discreet about/ visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts’, the poet is also circumspect about her own parents’ love affair in ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’: ‘And no way to know what happened then –/ none at all – unless, of course, you improvise’. Sometimes the best way to explore romantic love, a tactile and sensuous experience that can never really be put into words, is through the lens of nature:  As Boland shows us here, there is nothing more natural than falling in love.


‘Love’ is one of a series of poems in which Boland uses ancient myths and legends as a  love in this poem – ‘But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me./ You walk away and I cannot follow’ – but the twist is that the person she is pining for is her husband, not as he is in the present, but as he was in the early and most intense years of their marriage: ‘And yet I want to return to you/ on the bridge of the Iowa river as you were’. Boland acknowledges that their married love has endured – ‘We love each other still’ – and that they can still communicate with each other: ‘Across our day-to- day and ordinary distances/ we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly.’ This side of love is rarely explored in literature. Most explorations of love focus on the passionate beginnings, and not on love that has changed, evolved and lessened in intensity as the years have gone by. Boland is honest enough to admit that she misses those days, and brave enough to ask if they will ever return: ‘Will we ever live so intensely again?’ ‘Love’ explores the theme of love in a very profound way, and is one of the few poems that deals with the changing nature of this most complex of emotions.


54 VERSE 2025


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