Similarities and Differences in the Poems of Boland, Yeats, and Heaney
Ipatia K. Apostolides
June 2020
The female Irish poet Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland, on September 24, 1944. Her father was the Irish Ambassador to Britain and then to the United Nations, and her mother was an artist. Boland began writing poetry at a young age and published her first poetry book while in college (Randolph xxii). Before her time, women poets were excluded from history books (Cousy 4). Irish history rarely addressed women’s experiences, and in its poetry, women’s daily, domestic lives were kept from view (Burns 217). Boland was acutely aware of this, and her poetry book, A Woman Without a Country resulted from the feeling that she had no connection to the women in Ireland’s past, because nothing had been written about them or by them (Randolph). Ireland’s history and poetry had been dominated by men.
Two of Boland’s male predecessors, Irish poets W.B.Yeats and Seamus Heaney, concentrated on Irish identity, mythology, love, and loss, in their poetry. Boland’s poetry also encompassed these themes. However, she approached her poems through the eyes and heart of a woman. Sheila Conbay believes that as a female poet, Boland’s strategy was not to abandon the existing structures, but to transfigure the traditional poetic images so that they accommodated the female experience (qtd. in Cousy 5).
In Boland’s poem “Eurydice Speaks” from her book A Woman Without a Country, she touches upon the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, the son of Apollo, who is a poet and musician (Boland 18-19). The seven-stanza poem is written in verse and is told through Eurydice’s perspective. The myth is about Orpheus, her beloved, and she dies and goes to the underworld. Orpheus, out of his love for her, tries to bring her back to earth through his music. The condition by Hades is not met, where Orpheus is told not to look back at Eurydice during the journey, and he loses her again. The underlying themes in Orpheus and Eurydice’s story are love, death, and the loss of love.
In the poem, “Eurydice Speaks,” the speaker begins with “How will I know you in the underworld?/How will we find each other? (lines 1-2). The title alerts the reader that Eurydice is speaking to Orpheus; she is in the underworld and wonders how she will find him. The speaker then takes the reader through Eurydice’s experience in the physical world as she recounts living this earthly life by using concrete images such as “skies,” “stars”, “tides,” “ditches,” “river,” “frost,” and “dusk.” These are not available in the underworld.
A sense of nostalgia creeps into the poem when the speaker says, “On the shore of a river written and rewritten/As elegy, epic, epode.” (lines 9-10). The “river” is a topic that has been written about many times throughout the ages; it is constant, and has been used as an elegy, an epic, or an epode. These three “e” words also form an alliteration in the poem.
In the physical earth, the speaker says, “Our skies littered with actual stars/Practical tides in our bay-” (lines 4-5). Comparing these earthly images to that of the underworld, or death, the speaker asks the question, “What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical?” (line 6). There are no skies or stars in the underworld, nor rivers or ditches, and it is lonely there. Also, the speaker is lonely without her love. The reference to Orpheus’s music is shown clearly in the fifth stanza, “The plainspoken music of recognition” (line 17). In this line, Orpheus’s music in the underworld would be a way of identifying Orpheus’s presence. In addition, recognition in the poem could also mean recognition of a person, a thing, or a season.
Love is laced throughout the poem, and the speaker talks as if she is having a conversation with her love interest. The reader sees this through the speaker’s questions: “How will we find each other?” (line 2), and “Remember the thin air of our earthly winters?” (line 11). She is waiting for Orpheus to come and get her. In the last line, “I would know you anywhere” (line 22), the speaker’s words convince the reader that she is in love with Orpheus, no matter what form he takes, as seen here, “As a shadow became a stride/And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight,” (lines 20-21). This poem gives the reader a sense of hope, showing us how Eurydice believes that Orpheus will succeed in taking her back to earth. This poem also symbolizes Boland’s love for her spouse as well as her faith in his love for her.
Boland isn’t the only one writing about the underworld, love, and Orpheus. According to Dr. Frazier’s June 1, 2020 lecture, the four-stanza poem “The Underground” by Seamus Heaney, is about his honeymoon with Marie, his wife; and it comes from Heaney’s book 100 Poems (Heaney 78). The title “The Underground” denotes something more sinister than a honeymoon, and is a reference to the underworld, or death, with mythical nuances. The poem begins with the speaker saying, “There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, / You in your going-away coat speeding ahead” (lines 1-2). The tunnel denotes the underground, which is associated with death, or Hades. The underground can also refer to Ireland’s dark past. Then the speaker brings in the love interest. He is chasing a woman, “And me, me then like a fleet god gaining/Upon you before you turned to a reed” (line 3). This reference to a “god” hints at Greek mythology where Pan chased the nymph Syrinx before she became a reed. In the third stanza, the speaker reveals the true love interest: “Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms” (line 9). This poem is about Heaney’s honeymoon with his wife Marie, and their “mooning around” (line 9), or playing around, caused them to be late for the concert at Albert Hall, as seen here, “Between the Underground and the Albert Hall” (line 8).
This poem also symbolizes the loss of love as seen in the Orpheus story, where Orpheus’s rescue of his wife Eurydice from Hades, fails after he looks back, and she returns to Hades never to be seen again. It ends with, “For your step following and damned if I look back” (line 16), and signifies that the speaker is not looking back like Orpheus did, because he does not want to lose his wife. This poem is written from Heaney’s point-of-view as a man, as compared to Boland’s point-of-view as a woman in her poem “Eurydice Speaks.” The focus here is on Heaney’s love for his wife, Marie.
Another poem by Heaney that refers to the myth of Orpheus and the underworld is “District and Circle,” which was written in 2006 after a terrorist attack in the London transport system (Heaney 144-146). In this eight-stanza poem with five parts, the speaker begins with “Tunes from a tin whistle underground” (line 1) which refers to the underground tunnel in London. The juxtaposition of music and underground hints at Orpheus’s descent to the underworld with his music. Eurydice is not mentioned, however.
Both Boland and Heaney have used the underworld, love, and Greek mythology (Orpheus and Eurydice) in some of their poems. W.B. Yeats also used Greek mythology and love, particularly in his early poems. One difference, however, between his early poems and Boland’s and Heaney’s poems were that they were written in the traditional form that employed rhyme and metric patterns; both Boland and Heaney, born decades later, wrote modern poetry that did not include these rhyming patterns. Another difference between Yeats and Boland and Heaney was that Yeats did not write about the underground or Orpheus. Instead, he concentrated on Homer’s Helen of Troy, as seen in his Green Helmet and Other Poems, “A Woman Homer sung,” and “No Second Troy” (Finneran 10-11). To Yeats, Maud Gonne’s beauty could only be compared to Helen of Troy.
Yeats’s poem “A Woman Homer sung” referred to Helen of Troy in Homer’s Iliad. In Greek mythology, Helen was said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world. The daughter of Zeus and Leda, Helen married King Menelaus of Sparta, but was abducted by Paris of Troy when Menelaus was away. The Trojan War and Paris’s death reunited her with her husband.
In “A Woman Homer sung,” the speaker begins by describing the men that drew near her, just as they did in Homer’s time, and as a result, the speaker “shook with hate and fear,” (line 4) if any of these men held her dear (Finneran 10). This showed how deep his feelings were for her. The fear of losing her is the undercurrent here, just like in the story of Orpheus losing Eurydice. This fear of losing love is also witnessed in Boland’s “Eurydice Speaks” and Heaney’s “The Underground.”
At the same time, the speaker says that it is wrong if men pass her by “with an indifferent eye.” (line 7), because he has validated her beauty in his mind, and feels she is too beautiful for people to ignore her or be indifferent to her. The speaker refers to Maud Gonne by saying, “For she had fiery blood / When I was young” (lines 15-16), and he continues with “And trod so sweetly proud / As ‘twere upon a cloud” (lines 17-18) . These are contrasting images, where she first has “fiery blood” (line 15), which denotes a tempestuous woman who speaks her mind, and then she is “sweetly proud” (line 17), walking upon “a cloud” (18) which reveals her varying moods and how difficult it is to really know and love her. This idealistic and romantic point-of-view places her on a pedestal. The speaker ends the poem with, “A woman Homer sang / That life and letters seem / But a heroic dream.” (lines 19-21). Here, the speaker makes it obvious that this is about Homer’s Helen of Troy. The words “life and letters” (line 20) denote the speaker’s mortality and his writing, which could be beneath Helen’s status of a “demigod.” Thus, Maud Gonne becomes unattainable just like “a heroic dream” (line 21).
Maud Gonne is also alluded to in Yeats’s “No Second Troy.” In this poem, the speaker begins with “Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery…” (lines 1-2). Here, the speaker refers to his relationship with Maude Gonne being miserable. Yet her rare beauty is discussed later, “With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind / That is not natural in an age like this,” (lines 8-9). In this poem, Yeats focuses mainly on her beauty and her moods. The reader knows nothing else about her life as a woman, but only how Yeats sees her. This is where he differs from Boland; he writes from a man’s-point-of view, but Boland writes from a woman’s point-of-view. The speaker ends the poem with a cynical twist, “Was there another Troy for her to burn?” (line 12). Here, he accuses Helen for the burning of Troy.
Similarities observed in Boland’s, Heaney’s and Yeats’s poems in this paper show the contextual themes of mythology, love, and loss. The underground and mythical themes in Boland’s and Heaney’s poems could also be a connection between Ireland’s past and its present. However, in Boland’s poem “Eurydice Speaks,” the point-of-view is that of a woman (Eurydice), whereas Yeats’s and Heaney’s poems are written from a point-of-view of a man. This difference is subtle and yet notable. Boland had adapted her writing to the canonical Irish poems of the past, but in her own way, had paved the way for women poets.
Works Cited
Boland, Eavan. “Eurydice Speaks.” A Woman Without a Country. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014, pp. 18-19.
Burns, Christy. “Beautiful Labors: Lyricism and Feminist Revisions in Eavan Boland’s Poetry.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol.20, no.2, Autumn, 2001, pp. 217-236. https://jstor.org/stable/464484
Cousy, Alexandra. The Descent into Hell in the Poetry of Eavan Boland. Dissertation, Ghent University, August 2011.
Finneran, Richard J., editor. The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose. By W.B. Yeats. 2nd ed., Scribner, 2002, p.10-11.
Heaney, Seamus. 100 Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008, pp 78, 144-146.
Randolph, Jody Allen. Eavan Boland. Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2014.
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