by Eavan Boland
Ornaments which he, when night came,
Unbound again with all a lover’s care,
But in another royal life, of
Which nothing remained only love.
“O world,” cried Aengus, “I have found again
My only love restored to loveliness
For whom I interwove, to catch the sun,
A bower of every blossom, fruit and grass
In each material, from every season
When she was changed by a Druid’s malice
And watched her drink its dew and suck
Its honey, and never realized our luck.
“How can I kiss those red forgetful lips
This unfamiliar hand, or take this body
Which has traveled through so many shapes
Of magic to my side? Can an unready
Girl give back a woman? Can green pips
Sweeten the tongue like fruit? Or seedy
Grain be wholesome wheat overnight?
And will I ever find again delight
Which I have searched for in a thousand years?
Invisible but none the less in pain
And none the less a creature of my tears
Crying at corners of the world ‘Etain’
Without an answer? And now for all my loss
I must begin to woo my love again.
No arms await me and no recognition
Only the chance to win again what’s mine.”
Day by summer day Aengus stayed
Beside the cool lake and watched his love
Grow graceful as the forest deer which wade
And drink at dawn, and saw her beauty thrive
And knew she fretted. “She will be a bride
Before the winter. She for whom I wove
A shelter out of flowers will shelter now
In other arms, and I have lost my labor.”
Out of the south one day a horseman rode,
His head the color of the harvest corn,
His cloak full, jeweled and embroidered,
A sword weighing at his side, a horn
Curving at his shoulder. There he wooed
Etain while Aengus watched, his heart torn
In two, hearing his love say “Yes I will
Give you love for love upon that hill.”
Dawn broke after a fevered night
In cold waves, wide as the sea is deep,
Capsizing the half moon in tidal light,
But Aengus threw his rival into a sleep
As blind as death and by the dreadful right
Of love, disguised himself within that shape
And climbed the hill alone and there appeared
To Etain as the lover she desired.
All about them acorns and dried leaves
Lay close as gold and silver at a feast,
Friendly trees shaded them in groves
And the sun rising was their priest—
And even by the hours, usual thieves
Of love, they knew that their embrace was blessed.
And Aengus wept, half for simple joy,
Half to be within another body.
Knowing it as the necessary price
Of his possession, yet he felt despair
Because he spoke within another voice
And kissed with strange lips Etain’s fair
Lips. And knew that they were loving twice
In two forms, yet with a single fire.
“What would you say Etain if you should know
I loved another woman long ago?”
“My only love,” said Etain, “overhead
Autumn is decking out the chestnut tree
With embers. Our cheeks are pressed against dead
Flowers and we have been lovers in a chilly
Womb of snow. But spring will fling a vivid
Color on this tree and make ready
The world and with a same difference
The heart can love again and yet love once.
“Are buds less welcome to the April bough
Because they open where all others have?
Is snow less white, the wingspan of the crow
Less black because their purities survive
From past to future and from then to now?
And so is any love not every love?”
And with her words Aengus came to rest
At last and slept safely on her breast.
With many a trumpet, many a bell’s mouth
Opened like a bird’s under the sun,
Etain married Conor, King of the South,
Imagining him the lover who had lain
With her, ignorant of the strange truth.
But very soon discovered to her pain
Her heart was cold, pressed beneath a weight
Like ice while her love turned to hate.
Bitter words were woven into the stuff
Of disappointment. “How can I say,” she cried,
“Where love has gone. I loved you well enough
That bold autumn morning on the hillside.”
Then Conor turned to her, his speech rough:
“I slept that dawn as though I had been dead.”
And Etain’s heart stirred, her tears
Fell on the stiff frost of a thousand years.
The weather changed. Winter with its harsh
Colors became spring. Flowers grew.
A stilted crane waded in the marsh,
An argosy of summer fruits blew
Inland on the winds, wild and fresh.
Etain only was unstirred by the view
Of the earth waking, but sat alone sewing
Always at her window, always waiting.
Like January’s rose to one of June
Her scarlet cheeks dwindled into white.
Her round flesh almost into bone,
The brilliance of her eye became a twilight.
And as the green earth swelled great
With child she sickened, separate and thin.
May came and the trees were stirred
By blossoms tumbling from their brief stations,
Wrapping the flamboyant earth in a shroud
Like snow, when Etain, sick with long patience
Saw a figure like a far bird
Enlarge at last and block the summer distance,
And saw a horseman in a rich dress
Drumming across the drawbridge of the palace.
And he was armoured in a suit of seasons:
Flowers of spring adorned his iron greaves;
The icy evergreen, the berry’s poisons
Enameled his wintry visor. Flushed leaves
Of autumn inflamed his breast like suns
And summer was imprinted on his sleeves
And what with berry, leaf, tree and flower
He seemed no horseman but a human bower.
And where his lady’s token should have been
A scarf of silk, marked in brilliant paints,
Flapped wildly to the wind’s motion,
On which a dragonfly, seeming at once
To light on every flower, had been drawn.
And Etain from her window knew the prince
Was Aengus. And ran to him and took his arm
And mounting up, rode away with him.
I
from
The War Horse
1975
Dedication: The Other Woman and the Novelist
(FOR KEVIN)
I know you have a world I cannot share
Where a woman waits for you, beautiful,
Young no doubt, protected in your care
From stiffening and wrinkling, not mortal
Not shy of her own mirror. How can I rival
Her when like another wife she waits
To come into the pages of your novel,
Obediently, as if to your bed on nights
She is invited nor, as in your other life
I do, reminds you dail
y of the defeat
Of time nor, as does your other wife,
Binds you to the married state?
She is the other woman. I must share
You with her time and time again,
Book after book. Yet I am aware,
Love, that I may have the better bargain:
I imagine she has grown strange
To you among the syntax and the sentences
By which you distance her. And would exchange
Her speaking part for any of our silences.
The War Horse
This dry night, nothing unusual
About the clip, clop, casual
Iron of his shoes as he stamps death
Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth.
I lift the window, watch the ambling feather
Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether
In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,
Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head
Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.
Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn
Of distant interest like a maimed limb,
Only a rose which now will never climb
The stone of our house, expendable, a mere
Line of defense against him, a volunteer
You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head
Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead.
But we, we are safe, our unformed fear
Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care
If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted
Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?
He stumbles on like a rumor of war, huge
Threatening. Neighbors use the subterfuge
Of curtains. He stumbles down our short street
Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait,
Then to breathe relief lean on the sill
And for a second only my blood is still
With atavism. That rose he smashed frays
Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days
Of burned countryside, illicit braid:
A cause ruined before, a world betrayed.
The Famine Road
“Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones
these Irish, give them no coins at all; their bones
need toil, their characters no less.” Trevelyan’s
seal blooded the deal table. The Relief
Committee deliberated: “Might it be safe,
Colonel, to give them roads, roads to force
from nowhere, going nowhere of course?”
one out of every ten and then
another third of those again
women—in a case like yours.
Sick, directionless they worked. Fork, stick
were iron years away; after all could
they not blood their knuckles on rock, suck
April hailstones for water and for food?
Why for that, cunning as housewives, each eyed—
as if at a corner butcher—the other’s buttock.
anything may have caused it, spores,
a childhood accident; one sees
day after day these mysteries.
Dusk: they will work tomorrow without him.
They know it and walk clear. He has become
a typhoid pariah, his blood tainted, although
he shares it with some there. No more than snow
attends its own flakes where they settle
and melt, will they pray by his death rattle.
You never will, never you know
but take it well woman, grow
your garden, keep house, good-bye.
“It has gone better than we expected,Lord
Trevelyan, sedition, idleness, cured
in one. From parish to parish, field to field;
the wretches work till they are quite worn,
then fester by their work. We march the corn
to the ships in peace. This Tuesday I saw bones
out of my carriage window. Your servant Jones.”
Barren, never to know the load
of his child in you, what is your body
now if not a famine road?
Child of Our Time
(FOR AENGUS)
Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry
Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason;
Its rhythm from the discord of your murder
Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.
We who should have known how to instruct
With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep,
Names for the animals you took to bed,
Tales to distract, legends to protect
Later an idiom for you to keep
And living, learn, must learn from you dead,
To make our broken images rebuild
Themselves around your limbs, your broken
Image, find for your sake whose life our idle
Talk has cost, a new language. Child
Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.
Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.
17 May 1974
On a child killed in the Dublin bombing
The Hanging Judge
Come to the country where justice is seen to be done.
Done daily. Come to the country where
Sentence is passed by word of mouth and raw
Boys are killed for it. Look, here
We hanged our son. Our only son.
And hang him still. And still we call it law.
James Lynch Fitzstephen. Magistrate.
First Citizen of Galway. 1493.
Spanish merchant trader, his horror
Of deceit a byword. A pillar of society.
With one weakness, Walter, whose every trait
Reversed his like a signature in a mirror.
Torches splutter. The dancing, supple,
Spanish-taught, starts. James Lynch Fitzstephen
May disapprove but he, a man of principle,
Recalls young Gomez is a guest in town,
And the girl beside him, his son’s choice, may restore
A new name and honor to his heir.
Dawn. Gomez dead, in a wood. The Spanish heart
Which softened to her rigid with the steel
Of Walter Lynch’s blade. Wild justice there—
Now to its restraint, but not repeal,
He returns to Galway, friendless, to be met,
In the city, by his father. In the stare
Which passed slowly between them, a history
Pauses: repression and rebellion, the scaffold
And its songs, the principle unsung
Are clues in this narration to a mystery
Even now unsolved, and only to be told
As a ghost story against a haunting—
As you, father, haunt me. The rope trails
From your fingers. Below you the abyss.
Your arms balanced as the scales of justice,
You tie the blindfold. Then from your own eyes fall scales.
But too late. Tears of doubt. Tears of remorse.
Dropping on your own neck like a noose.
A Soldier’s Son
A young man’s war it is, a young man’s war,
Or so they say and so they go to wage
This struggle where, armored only in nightmare,
Every warrior is under age—
A son seeing each night leave, as father,
A man who may become the ancestor
In a backstreet stabbing, at a ghetto corner
Of future wars and further fratricide.
Son of a soldier who saw war on the ground,
Now cross the peace lines I have made for you
To find on this side if not peace then honor,
Your heritage, knowing as I do
&
nbsp; That in the cross-hairs of his gun he found
You his only son, and when he aimed
And when the bullet cracked, the only sound
Was of his son rifling his heart. You twist
That heart today. You are his killed, his maimed.
He is your war. You are his pacifist.
The Greek Experience
Until that night, the night I lost my wonder,
He was my deity. First of my mentors.
Master craftsman he; mere apprentice
I, hearing how Croesus, to entice
The priestess predators
Wooed a false oracle. But mine the truth
I thought, marveling at Cyrus tuned to plunder
By oboes, playing on Persia. But who cares now?
My name means nothing here. His, Herodotus,
Towers in Babylon, salts the Aegean
Is silted into each Ionic ear.
Only I know the charlatan
The mountebank who tongued
Day slyly to night
To suit his purpose. Prepared to be harangued
And angled by his anecdotes, his school
Of stories, instead I found that night
A mind incapable of insight as a mule
Of generation. “The times need iron men,
Pragmatists,” he said, “who can devise
For those problems which arise
So frequently, a swift solution.
A man such as this:
He is a soldier, able to lead, to train.
His stallion where the Gyndes finds the Tigris
And those two rivers join in dissolution
In the Gulf, drowned. The waters combed its mane.
“Now he was leading Persian against Mede
But called a truce, cut his troops in two
And swore revenge upon the water.
He was the first to take his blade,
The first to teach the lesson
With stabs and thrusts. He prolonged the slaughter
All summer long. The river now is channeled.
Those are the men we need.” I listened, chilled.
“A soldier is lost to us. Now a deadly assassin
“Lies in wait for us all,” was my recourse.
“Nonsense,” he said. But I was trying to live
The ambush, the sudden fever,
The assault of a single force—
An instant, the divider
Of a man from his own mind, his mythic source,
His origin in animal and primative,
Which changes centaur into horse and rider—
