Reframing women’s war poetry

Abstract

In her 1975 poem ‘The War Horse’ (1975), Irish poet Eavan Boland (b. 1944) turns the destructive incursions of a traveller’s horse blundering through a suburban garden near Dublin into a meditation on war in late twentieth-century Ireland. The horse brings ‘rumour of war’ into the seemingly safe world of the suburb. ‘No great harm is done. / Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn – / Of distant interest like a maimed limb’, yet the poet’s home is momentarily reframed by a violence both historical and contemporary as ‘[t]hat rose he smashed frays / Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days / Of burned countryside. . .’. Twenty years later Boland condemned her own poem for being ‘public’ rather than ‘political’. As a public poem, Boland argued that it had acquired an unearned force, since its ‘private emblems. . .almost immediately took on a communal reference against a background of communal suffering’. Notably, Boland describes her poem not as a ‘war poem’ or even as about ‘war’, but as a poem about ‘an intrusion of nature – the horse – menacing the decorous reductions of nature which were the gardens. And of the failure of language to describe such violence and resist it.’ Yet Boland puts the word ‘war’ in its title, and uses the poem to name the collection in which it appears. Her marked ambivalence about the act of writing a war poem tells us much about the position of the woman poet writing about war in the twentieth century. The poem, with Boland’s reflection, points to ways in which women’s poetry about war can expose the erasures and distortions produced by the category of war poetry itself, as well as make visible the role of war poetry as support for a specifically British history of the twentieth century organised around the First and Second World Wars.