Eavan Boland’s 1987-collected poem, “Mise Éire” [1], has become a focus point of the unsettled reputation of one of Ireland’s most senior poets. It is telling that specific commentary on this poem is so frequently found in critical analyses of Irish poetry, while the text itself is rarely anthologized. As an artefact centrally invested in the politics of both woman and nation, it stands as touchstone for the by-now established truism in Irish studies, that at the heart of gender’s centrality in historical understanding is the pervasive use of female figures to defend the essence of Irish identity and of the national project - this at the price of attending to the agency of living Irish women. However, this touchstone is itself far from secure: the present essay sets out to explore the insecurity pertaining to “Mise Éire” in terms both of the poem’s mixed reception and of its own complex processes. The precariousness of this poem directly signals the continuing contentiousness of the larger issue of gender and nation in the Irish context, as weh as the complexity of this debate and the need for its ongoing development.

The title of “Mise Éire”, which translates as ‘I am Ireland’, directly references two major, inter-related iconic artefacts of Irish nationalist witness of the same name that also are founded on the woman-land connection: the dual-language Padraig Pearse poem of 1916 and the Sean O’Riada suite of music for the 1966 film commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. [2] The female I in Boland’s poem is both this poem’s speaker and the two women invoked therein are alternatives to the traditional Cailleach Bhearra figure associated with its title - the garrison prostitute and the emigrant mother who jointly symbolize the speaker’s ‘brutal’ roots in suffered history. The starting point for most discussions of Boland’s poem is the fact that this female ‘I’ is ‘presented as resisting assimilation to the official version of Irish history guaranteed by the mythic totality of Mother Ireland’. [3] Debate on “Mise Éire” has centred on whether such assimilation is actually resisted in the poem, or whether it may instead be under replication there. This latter position is argued on the basis of the apparently direct and simple terms in which the real woman is opposed to the mythical woman in this text, [4] and on the basis that, as John Goodby puts it, ‘Boland’s aim is not the overthrow of the existing Irish poetic tradition; far from it; [...] rather, [it] is to make the figure of the woman more representative, and in a complexly human rather than in a demeaningly emblematic way’. For Goodby, however, this approach invites the danger of ‘female experience merely bolstering established stereotypes of femaleness and/or the nation by adding verisimilitude to them’. [5] The composite ‘historical’ female figure who is set against the traditional icon of Mother Ireland in this poem - the colonial garrison prostitute and the emigrating poverty-striken mother - have indeed been read as ’shocking in their stereotyping’. [6] Asa result they are seen as compromising the ‘new language’ famously spoken by the female I understood as ‘an idiom that represents a process of healing of ‘the wounds of patriarchy"’. [7]

However, the fact that the poem insists that this new language is ‘a kind of scar’ that ‘heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before’, directs us to understand that “Mise Éire” itself wants us to see that such resistance to patriarchy can readily be incorporated within and contribute to patriarchy’s terms. Anne Fogarty correctly has argued for Boland’s awareness that the ‘capacity of language to revive [...] female biographies obscured by the apathy of documentary record’ so as to address ‘the urgent necessity of tracking down the silenced, female ghosts of Irish history’, can lead to ‘acts of poetic conjuration [that] are in false faith’. Poets run this risk ‘if they assume the power to appropriate meaning or to restore a sense of completion to a history which is defined by loss and fracture’. [8] I would argue that “Mise Éire” extends the exploration of false faith it invites, by pointing to its readers’ powers of conjuration as equally answerable. To the extent that the scar which signifies the presence of a ‘new language’ for gendered experience, is read either as a sign of ‘the damage done to women by the archetypical feminine image of nationalist texts’ [9] (in which category of injurious writings, certain critics argue, can be counted the poem under discussion here), or alternatively, is read as a triumphant proof of victory over this same damage, Boland’s poem is hoisted with its own petard: it itself becomes one of those appropriative and distorting texts. But “Mise Éire” eludes this danger by confounding such over-direct interpretations.

On what basis does it so elude self-cancellation? Sarah Broom reminds us with regard to the issue of replicated stereotype in this text, that the significant dichotomy explored by Boland is not that between myth and history, but between real and false myth, the former being ‘not opposed to history but expressive of its truths’. [10] The truth under representation by the replacement female icon, the conjoined figure of the garrison prostitute and emigrant mother in “Mise Éire”, is the fact that women’s lived experience in Ireland has been forced into the deterministic mould of Mother Ireland with the effect of falsely simplifying it, notwithstanding the complexity that actually pertains to this mould. In order to dramatize this condition the composite prostitute-mother female figure as found in this poem constitutes a representation that marks its own failure to represent. [11] It does more than this, however - the potential for historical witness, which is under dissolution in “Mise Éire”, is reconvened through this process of recognizing the poem’s failure to give reliable testimony to history. In other words, if the new language of Boland’s ‘real’ female so devolves into the suffered scar of this poem’s replicated misrepresentation of Irish womanhood, the poem also insists that this very scar of ongoing damage can become the ‘new language’ for the possibility of healing of this same injury. The poem thus holds in symbiotic relation these options for wounding and healing as an outcome of the process of representation, by directing us to awareness of the simultaneous hazard and opportunity of their conflation . As at once problem and possibility, then, this text signals a far more complex meaning for the imitative scar of the link between ‘Mise’ and ‘Éire’ at its heart, than is usually allowed.

Critics of this poem have held that one or other pole of the woman-Ireland binary is privileged by Boland to the point of falsely stabilizing it, while the other is held up for (thereby ineffectual) interrogation. Edna Longley contends that Boland ‘destabilizes Mise but not Éire’, using this poem as an example of what she regards as Irish feminism’s propensity to ‘largely avoid[...] ‘nation"’. [12] Clair Wills alternately argues that Boland fails in her effort to amend the simplifications that have characterized nationalism’s deployment of female figures, because this poet does not confront the instabilities inherent in ‘Mise’ - that is, in the project of identity politics as focused in the poet’s representation of woman as an autonomous historical subject who, by means of her personal ‘experiential testimony’, can act as a ‘corrective’ to ‘the falsification and abstraction of the motherland myth’. [13] For Wills (curiously) this poem signals an awareness not shared by its maker, that personal ‘real-life’ experience is always ‘already public’, since the domestic is ‘a social institution with genres, codes and semantics’, and since, in any case, ‘a myth cannot be undone by reality’. [14] Wills extrapolates from this insight the conclusion that the real message of “Mise Éire” is not that ‘the personal is political’, but that ‘the personal [...] is a chimera’. [15] Her analysis suggests that the poem invalidates the ‘I’ it ostensibly enables. In so doing, it challenges the author’s delimited conception of the aim of the Irish woman poet ‘to ‘modif[y] [national] tradition to fit changing social circumstance by setting up ‘a trope of privacy [..] in place of the motherland trope, the function of which is to allow women to accede to the role of poet’. [16] Wills indicates that “Mise Éire” signals this substitution asa severely self-limiting project, since such work can only reconfirm that separation between the realms of the private domestic and the public political, on which the mythic simplifications were originally founded.

A clear implication of Wills’s position in this 1993-published argument is that what we might term Boland’s revisionist aim of challenging restrictive Irish political mythology by way of empirical inclusiveness, directed towards loosening the bonds of the past in order to allow the country to enter modernity, is doomed to failure. Gerardine Meaney, also in 1993, said likewise. On the basis of her reading of “Mise Éire” as valorizing a reactively monolithic female subjectivity which rejects representation as an inherently corrupting force, Meaney argued that ‘an easy opposition between feminism and nation serves as an evasive strategy [which] makes feminism prey to assimilation into an anti-nationalist, but economically right-wing rhetoric of ‘modernization’, which is no less likely than nationalism to exploit and submerge feminism in the pursuit of its own agendas’. [17] However, Boland in “Mise Éire” is well aware that ‘the transcendentally useful object of woman’ [18] guarantees the authority of conceptions of Irishness, oriented not only towards tradition - that which Boland in this poem calls the ‘old dactyls’ that sanctify ’scalded memory’ - but also towards modernity. In other words, “Mise Éire” recognizes that the female can be deployed asa representative figure just as reductively in the discourse of revisionist scepticism as in that of nationalist faith.

As example, in an essay upholding what Wills parodies as the Bolandesque ideal of inclusivity (’"no taxation without representation’") [19], Jonathan Allison examines the relationship of tradition to modernity in Irish poetry since 1949 in which he highlights poet Michael O’ Loughlin’s deployment of a woman who is the logical hÉiress of Boland’s garrison prostitute and emigrant mother in “Mise Éire”, as read in that recuperative revisionist frame. [20] In O’Loughlin’s poem “Cuchulainn”, [21] this is the figure of ‘the housewife adrift in the Shopping Centre / At eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday morning’ to whom the name of the epic mythological hero Cuchulainn, long co-opted within nationalist self-fashioning, ‘means less than nothing’. For Allison, this poem ‘embraces modernity by invoking a traditional icon [Cuchulainn] and claims, in tones of bewilderment, if not of near-contempt, that the icon is redundant’. [22] But clearly, the traditional icon, far more passively invoked here in both the poem and its reading, is the lost woman needing rescue by those who should be open to the cause she represents - in this case, the claims of ‘real’ contemporary Ireland. (This recycling of the cliche of Kathleen Ni Houlihan is conducted here notwithstanding Allison’s awareness of the forced nature of O’Loughlin’s ‘youthful’ rhetoric - his ‘disillusioned but determined tone’). [23] In such usages, the woman’s own complex lived reality is subsumed once again to her role as a gesture against the forces of the State, this time - as in Boland’s poem - those of hegemonic nationalism.

However, in contrast to O’Loughlin’s housewife, Boland’s self-aware stereotyped female icon of resistance to the ideology of nation, the composite garrison prostitute-cum-emigrant famine mother figure in “Mise Éire”, is one who literally moves beyond this trap. As Wills has accurately noted, her enfigurement in this poem (and in the language of modernity more generally) throws light backwards on the continued dependence of forms of resistance to hegemony and on the falsity they condemn in establishment speech: this representation is at pains to show ‘that // a new language / is a kind of scar / and heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before’. But herein is found the dilemma of “Mise Éire”: the nation which its woman speaker as poet-historian needs to reject - that nation which has traditionally been ‘displaced / into old dactyls // [...] the songs / that bandage up the history, / the words / that make a rhythm of the crime // where time is time past’, or in other words, the version of nation which refuses the ‘brute’ reality of compromised identity which Irish women intimately know, is also the nation she finds in that same act of disavowal . The word ‘history’ itself is dactylic in metre, and (as already argued), this poem knows even as it enacts how the determinism of history’s old forms can only be replicated by their outright refusal.

For Gerardine Meaney, this repetition holds possibilities: it can be converted productively into a version of what theorist Luce Irigaray calls mimesis, by which ‘the artificiality of language and, in particular, of representations of women, provide the opportunity for subversive play capable of releasing [woman’s] ‘irreducible identity’ as one ‘exploded, plural, fluid [and] non-identical’. This is a process which would ‘recover[s] a possible operation of the feminine in language’, reinstating women’s engagement with the symbolic. For Meaney, however, Boland misses this opportunity because this poet rejects the symbolic as inherently corrupt, replacing it with ‘the silences in which are our beginnings’, a procedure which nevertheless hosts in her work a continued search for ‘the real thing’ of both woman and nation. This is a search which ‘keep[s] each in place asa homogeneous and self-contained entity’, denying ‘the differences [that womanhood and nationhood] each conceal[s] beneath the mask of identity’. [24]

One way in which “Mise Éire” can be defended from this charge is through analyzing its links with Paul Muldoon’s poem from the same early 1980s period, “Aisling” [25] - a piece which also focuses on the figure of woman-as-nation as purveyor of the conflicting concerns of nationhood and historical suffering. Both are distorted-aisling pieces that set out to reject Mother Ireland. In the process, both endorse but also call into question the breakdown of that distinction between reality and fantasy which, in his translation of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem on woman-as-Ireland, ‘Caitlin’, Muldoon names ‘the ghostly demarcation, the eternal buffer-zone’ between this world and the next. [26] In “Aisling”, when the poem’s speaker seeks the true identity of woman-as-Ireland, the bliss of plenitude promised by this venture of converting fantasy into reality turns to the horror of lack: ‘Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora, / Artemidora, or Venus Bright, / or Anorexia, who left / a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?’. Muldoon’s Anorexia correlates in Boland’s poem to the traditional woman-as-nation figure whose legacy is likewise ‘A palsy of regrets’. But also, crucially, she correlates to the revised composite woman-as-nation figure who is the speaking I of “Mise Éire” - a woman who, in exposing the political determinism that she herself also embodies, like Anorexia abandons the scene leaving behind her a different ‘palsy of regrets’ - this time, mourning for the failure of representation. In Boland’s poem this revised Aisling figure is presented as ‘neither know[ing] nor car[ing]’ about the double failure of representation she symbolizes, even though the poem’s speaker who is also herself (’I am the woman [...]’) clearly does so know and care. This contradiction is resolved in Boland’s intimation that such indifference is highly productive (as we shall shortly see).

Both of these post-hunger-strike poems identify an erosion of the possibility of a third way of exchange between reality and fantasy in Irish culture, which failure results in the Irish political propensity to ‘stagger [...] / into a snow drift’ in the middle of summer (“Aisling”) through reliance on ‘words / that make a rhythm of the crime // where time is time past’ (“Mise Éire”). The apparently unlikely overtaking of summer by winter, as of time present by time past, configures the takeover of reason by fantasy in Irish political life. This is a collapse of distinction facilitated by the required stand-off between these realms within the conventional discourses both of modernity and anti-modernity - a stand-off which these poems dramatize, so that it may be interrogated intimately. As a large number of critics of Irish culture now contend, the refusal to recognize an existing and valid relationship between reason and fantasy in the Irish context, leaves the door open to an unhealthy union between the two. [27] This result is configured in the speaker’s choice in “Aisling” to actually copulate rather than just converse with the dream vision of the poem’s title - the same woman who, in Boland’s poem, practices ‘a sort of dove strut / in the precincts of the garrison’ or of critics’ vigilance of the Mother Ireland function, tempting them to illicit congress with her. That choice, as these critics have recognized, results in the infection by venereal disease of the national body politic (the disease whose sign is the ‘lemon stain’ left by the aisling female on the speaker’s homely ‘flannel sheet’). [28] What these critics have not sufficiently recognized is that they themselves, form part of that body politic so infected: Boland’s reconvened woman-as-nation threatens to leave them, sceptical as they are of both of the representative functions of both mythology and realism, in the dead-end, anorexic state of ‘A palsy of regrets’ over the failure of representation which many diagnose as a willed condition in Boland’s work.

Both Wills and Meaney, in their important critical interventions on this poet from the early 1990s, are susceptible to this infection insofar as their work fails to see that Boland’s composite iconoclastic ’real’ female in “Mise Éire” points to a space outside the circular relation with Mother Ireland that this figure also enacts. This is the space from which that figure can declare she ‘neither knows nor cares’ that, as a trope of privacy asserting realism and modernity through her refusal to ‘go back’ to the symbolic, she functions to reconvene the terms of a public world safeguarding myth and tradition. The qualification here of her condition of not knowing, by her not caring, is crucial. If ignorance were this woman’s only fault, it would only confirm the operation of the ideology of Mother Ireland she serves, whether or not she tried to resist it. But her indifference as an added response suggests that if even she did know of her two-way usage as iconic figure in the manner outlined above, such awareness would have little impact, either on that doubly objectified position in culture, or on her detached attitude to it, as here proclaimed. The basis upon which such a disinterested response might be validated, then enters the frame of the poem’s enquiry. This basis, I would argue, is not the speaker’s collapse of faith in the possibility of an alternative to Mother Ireland; neither is it her subversive mimesis of that faith directed towards making visible the void (as Wills would argue) or the irreducibility (as Meaney would hold) of subjectivity at its core. That justification is instead this female figure’s capacity to signal that her double inter-penetrating role as Mother Ireland and as illicitly sexual mother in Ireland, speaks not only over the heads of Irish women’s lived experience as subjects in history, but also out of that real life experience. In other words, the traditional construct of the Cailleach Bhearra to which she remains assimilable, whether as old or new iconic woman, also addresses Irish woman’s reality.

This construct can only so configure this reality, however, because it can be broken down to its component, equally stereotyped, albeit culturally less sanctioned parts. Here these are the garrison prostitute and emigrant mother, who together anticipate R. F. Foster’s Micks on the Make [29] in the way they highlight the fact that Irish people responded pragmatically rather than idealistically to their political and economic situation under colonialism. However, the differences between the prostitute and the emigrant mother figure, as well as their sameness, in Boland’s alternate iconography are vital. Boland deconstructs the stereotype of Mother Ireland to her ‘brutal roots’ in these two mutually contradictory yet powerfully established configurations of the Irish female. Meaney has argued that ‘the feminine ‘I"’ in the poem ’speaks from either side of [this] Madonna-whore dichotomy’ so that ‘The more general western myth of femininity is set against its specific Irish variant’. [30] She intimates that this contrast offers a prime opportunity for that subversive mimesis which Boland neglects because this poet wrongly understands ‘the category of womanhood [to] occup[y] a space outside representation and socialization’. [31] I would argue, however, that Boland references the western version of the myth of femininity as already uneasily integrated in its Irish political variant, in the form of the whore and the victim-survivor constituents of Kathleen Ni Houlihan’s identity. These polarized aspects of Mother Ireland become visible as furtively shadowing each other in their joint function as representative template for understandings both of Irish colonialism and the struggle against it, [32] as it becomes clear that neither of these female figures alone can accurately represent the state of the nation. Tension is inevitable between these affiliated aspects of Mother Ireland (her prostitute and her maternal nurturing functions), raising as they do key questions about the relation between purity and contamination, loyalty and betrayal, in the Irish body politic. This tension points to the fact that instability is an inherent feature of Mother Ireland. As such, this overarching mythic construct always already performs subversive mimesis of her own representative function in Irish culture. If this is the case, then Boland’s task in “Mise Éire” is more to showup as already operative, rather than to instigate as new, that saving inconstancy at the heart of woman-as-nation. Necessarily, then, the stereotyped garrison prostitute and the emigrating mother remain con-joined in the voice of the I of the poem as the utterance of a living, though incompletely autonomous, subject in history. It is exactly by means of their conjunction in this compromised yet still self-determining voice, that these constituents can fulfil their remit to deliver Irish women into history.

Both Muldoon’s “Aisling” and Boland’s “Mise Éire” intimate the value of a discontinuous, hence sustainable, holding line between the two opposed states of reality and fantasy, truth and falsity, which define established understandings of Irish culture. Through this broken yet still operative dividing line, these opposed elements can at last enter relations of strategic exchange rather than of mutual substitution. It is by focusing on questions of voice and language as a means of validating this third way, that the distorted dream vision at the centre of the poems by both Muldoon and Boland can point towards as well as away from the possibility of inclusive national healing. In To Ireland, I, Muldoon translates ‘aisling’ as a ‘vision voyage’ which ‘coincides with a delight in ventriloquism, or voice throwing’. (33) His association of the aisling genre with ventriloquism signals the constructed or ‘thrown’ nature of the voice attributed to woman-as-Ireland in nationalist tradition. As such, it connects to Boland’s self-consciously artificial ‘new language’ spoken by her faux-alternatives to Mother Ireland whose mark in “Mise Éire” is the scar. This ‘new language’ of scar in Boland, is that spoken by the two alternate Mother Ireland figures, who like their idealized antecedent in the poetry tradition, are capable of registering reality through a broken speech that both can and cannot be taken as their own. Boland’s poem thus acts as a successful aisling ventriloquism, one that realizes the subversive nature of Mother Ireland: in this text, a reliable basis for truth is provided in a voice thrown through the fictional female as an utterance at pains to signal its own ambiguity, collusiveness, and materiality.

Crucially, the voice that so hosts this possibility of truth is itself positioned both outside and inside the symbolic. This composite woman’s speech is comprised of a ‘mingling [of] the immigrant / guttural with the vowels / of homesickness’. Her speech therefore combines the two opposed normative categories of its own reception: her speech here on the one hand is alien (from the point of view of the inhabitants of her adopted homeland who, viewing her as an immigrant, are likely only to hear her voice as indecipherable ‘guttural’), and on the other hand is fully recognizable (from the point of view of the natives of her original homeland, for whom she will always be an emigrant rather than an immigrant - one who leaves rather than one who arrives - and thus for whom her ‘vowels of homesickness’ become necessary to confirm her continued membership of the tribe). This duality of the provenance of her speech in turn suggests that in this woman’s configuration, an invitation is issued to Irish people to know as irretrievably mixed, our concepts, on the one hand, of the foreignness and unacceptability of the construct of Mother Ireland, and on the other, of its familiarity and usefulness. Only in this way can Mother Ireland speak to the reality that Irish women have been abused by the distorted representation this figure itself has purveyed. In other words, its false logic is at once highlighted as dangerous and shown forth as a form of truth. Boland’s reconstructed woman-as-nation thus confounds perspectives that would place her either outside or inside history: the composite female figure in “Mise Éire” challenges the conclusion that she properly functions in one or the other place, through one or the other language, or with one or the other understanding - the new or the old - of her capacity to ground Irish women in history. As a ‘passable imitation’ (my emphasis) of antecedent determinisms, this female speaker therefore calls attention to the interdependence of states of falsity and truth, as of woundedness and healing, in the processes of growth of the Irish body politic.

A more confident, because more directly self-aware, healing of this body politic is promised by the composite garrison prostitute-cumemigrant mother figure in Boland’s “Mise Éire”, than the ‘lick and a promise’ cure promised by her counterpart in Muldoon’s poem - the breezily-confident Dr Maw who prematurely clears the speaker of the possibility of having contracted venereal disease through sleeping with the dream vision of an Ireland where the project of identity politics is complete. As Boland likewise suggests in relation to her garrison prostitute and emigrant mother, Muldoon posits Dr Maw as society’s ‘real-life’ equivalent of the voracious Anorexia, even though such a ‘historical’ female figure would normally be understood as Mother Ireland’s de-mythologizing opponent. Muldoon, like Boland, calls for a healing of the body politic through the very threat these female alternatives offer of re-authorizing the confusion of states of health and illness in Irish political life. Boland’s composite prostitute mother does so by holding up for question, Dr Maw’s blithe "All Clear’: the presence of this Bolandesque figure is implied in Muldoon’s poem, in the way that piece challenges this doctor of Irish aesthetics who unreliably declares the poet uninfected (or ‘without issue’) by his or her copulation with the dream-vision of nation. In the light of “Mise Éire”, Dr Maw’s premature declaration of safety is held up for serious questioning in the many stain-encrypted texts of the Irish political, historical, and literary traditions that she still patrols.

Muldoon’s text highlights how in Boland’s lyric the body markings, emissions, and absorptions of poetry can re-inscript the missing broken lines of difference between fantasy and reality on the too-smooth surface of established territorial and cultural identity in Ireland. “Mise Éire” attests to the fact that poems function at their best, as two-way signs to innocence and experience, healing and suffering, revolution and betrayal. Subversive in their role as ‘passable imitation[s] / of what went before’, or (in “Aisling”s’ related terms of relieving like with like) in their operation as a life-saving but bitter ’saline / drip into [the] bag of brine’ of the Irish body politic (figured in Muldoon’s poem as ‘the latest hunger-striker / to have called off his fast’ as the cost of political absolutism on both sides begins to register), such poems with their broken body lines, are artifices of change vitally signalled through the dead-skin codes of changelessness in (post)colonial power relations. Not least of these codes is the aisling tradition in Irish poetry, turned inside out as we here have found it to be in Eavan Boland’s “Mise Éire”.

§

“Mise Éire” is included in the following books by Eavan Boland: The Journey and Other Poems (Manchester: Carcanet 1987); Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet 1989); Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet 1995); New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet 2005); Eavan Boland: A Sourcebook: Poems, Prose, Interviews, Reviews, Criticism, edited by Jody Allen Randolph (Manchester: Carcanet 2007). It is anthologized in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume V: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, edited by Angela Burke, Siobhan Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Gerardine Meaney et al. (Cork: Cork University Press, in association with Field Day 2002).

Notes
1. Eavan Boland, “Mise Eire”, The Journey and Other Poems (Manchester: Carcanet 1987), pp.10-11 (first published in The Irish Times, 16 June 1984). In titling this poem, Boland has used the spelling ‘Eire’ rather than ‘Éire’ throughout. The text has undergone no significant revisions in later publications. The text of “Mise Éire” used in this essay is that found in Boland, New Collected Poems, pp.128-9.
2. Padraig Pearse, “Mise Éire” / ‘I Am Ireland’, Rogha Danta / Selected Poems, edited by Dermot Bolger (Dublin: New Island Books 1993), pp.46-7.
3. Gerardine Meaney, ‘Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity: Eavan Boland and Irish Women’s Writing’, in Women: A Cultural Review, 4, 3 (Autumn 1993), pp.136-53 (p.146).
4. These terms of directness and simplicity are ascribed to Boland’s poem in Robert Faggen, ‘Irish Poets and the World’, in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), pp.229-249 (p.232).
5. John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness Into History (Manchester: Manchester University press 2000), p.232.
6. Meaney, ‘Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity’, p.146.
7. Pilar Villar-Argaiz, The Poetry of Eavan Boland: A Postcolonial Reading (Dublin: Maunsel and Company [an imprint of Acadmica Press] 2008), p.127.
8. Anne Fogarty, ‘The Influence of Absences’: Eavan Boland and the Silenced History of Irish Women’s Poetry’, in Colby Quarterly, XXXV.4 (December 1999), 256-74 (p. 271).
9. Villar-Argaiz, The Poetry of Eavan Boland, p.127.
10. Sarah Broom, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006), p.117.
11. See Catriona Clutterbuck, ‘Irish Women’s Poetry and the Republic of Ireland: Formalism as Form’, in Writing In the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics 1949-1999, edited by Ray Ryan (Basingstoke: Macmillan 2000), pp.17-43; p.31.
12. Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Tarset: Bloodaxe 1994), p.173.
13. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993), p.58.
14. Wills, Improprieties, p.60.
15. Wills, Improprieties, p.60.
16. Wills, Improprieties, p.61.
17. Meaney, ‘Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity’, pp.152-3.
18. Moynagh Sullivan, ‘Feminism, Postmodernism and the Subjects of Irish and Women’s Studies’, in New Voices in Irish Criticism, edited by P. J. Mathews (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000), pp.243-251, (p.250).
19. Wills, Improprieties, p.59.
20. Jonathan Allison, ‘Acts of Memory: Poetry and the Republic of Ireland since 1949’, in Writing In the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics 1949-1999, pp.44-63.
21. Michael O’Loughlin, “Cuchulainn”, The Inherited Boundaries: Younger Poets of the Republic of Ireland, edited by Thomas McCarthy (Dublin: Dolmen 1986), p.122.
22. Allison, ‘Poetry and the Republic of Ireland’, pp.54-6.
23. Allison, ‘Poetry and the Republic of Ireland’, p.55.
24. Meaney, ‘Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity’, pp.147-8.
25. Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998 (London: Faber and Faber 2001), pp.126-7.
26. Paul Muldoon, ‘Cathleen’, translation of ‘Caitlin’ by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, The Astrakhan Cloak (Oldcastle: Gallery 1992), pp.39-40.
27. Richard Kearney offered a foundational argument in this regard. See Richard Kearney, ‘Myth and Motherland’, in Ireland’s Field Day (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1986), pp.59-80.
28. In relation to Muldoon’s “Aisling”, this reading is offered in Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Serren 1996), p.95 and in Longley, The Living Stream, p.173.
29. R.F. Foster, ‘Micks on the Make: The Uses of Irish Exile, c. 1840-1922’, in Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin Books 1995), pp.281-305.
30. Meaney, ‘Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity’, p146.
31. Meaney, ‘Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity’, p147.
32. See Sabina Sharkey, ‘Frontier Issues: Irish Women’s Texts and Contexts’, Women: A Cultural Review, 4.2 (1993), 125-35 (p.126); Sabina Sharkey, Ireland and the Iconography of Rape [Irish Studies Centre Occasional Paper Series, No. 5] (London: Polytechnic of North London 1992); and C. L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880-1935 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993).
33. Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), p.73.