#eavan boland

National Poetry Month 2026

Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades, not to mention vehicles and animals—had all one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then. Surely a great city must have been missed? I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it.

when the wild ladder of a winter scarf is stored away in a drawer eased by candle-grease and lemon balm is shaken out from the linen press.

Those are afternoons when the Dublin hills are so close, so mauve and blue, we can be certain dark will bring rain and it does to

the borrowed shears and the love-seat in the garden where a sparrow hawk was seen through the opal- white of apple trees after Easter. And

I want to know how it happened that those days of bloom when rumours of wings and sightings—always seen by someone else, somewhere else— filled the air,

together with a citrus drizzle of petals and clematis opening, and shadows waiting on a gradual lengthening in the light our children stayed up

later by, over pages of wolves and dragons and learned to measure the sanctuary of darkness by a small danger—how and why they have chilled

into these April nights I lie awake listening for wings I will never see above the cold frames and last frosts of our back gardens.

My muse must be better than those of men who made theirs in the image of their myth. The work is half-finished and I have nothing but the crudest measures to complete it with.

Under the street lamps the dustbins brighten. The winter-flowering jasmine casts a shadow outside my window in my neighbor's garden. These are things my muse must know.

She must come to me. Let her come to be among the donnee, the given. I need her to remain with me until the day is over and the song is proven.

Surely she comes, surely she comes to me— no lizard skin, no paps, no podded womb about her but a brightening and the consequences of an April tomb.

What I have done I have done alone. What I have seen is unverified. I have the truth and I need the faith. It is time I put my hand in her side.

If she will not bless the ordinary, if she will not sanctify the common, then here I am and here I stay and then am I the most miserable of women.

by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking — they were both walking — north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory:

A staff to walk fields with as they vanished

Underfoot into memory.”

Title: In a Time of Violence Author: Eavan Boland Publication Year: 1995 (first published in 1994) Publisher: W.W. Norton Genre: poetry

Something I always loved about Boland’s poems is how she captures history and humanity in such poignant ways, very often in relation to Ireland. I felt that in this collection, Boland was interested in women—aging women in particular—and their place in history and the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of these poems were filled with grief, which almost seems like an inevitable thread the reader may find when dealing with Irish history and memory. These poems haunted, but it was never in a way that seemed excessively sentimental or anything.

I admit In a Time of Violence isn’t my favorite collection by Boland, but I still found it to be thought-provoking (which is usually the case when it comes to her poems, in my opinion).

Some favorites: “This Moment,” “The Pomegranate,” “Moths,” “A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs,” “Legends,” “Anna Liffey,” and “What Language Did”