Brief Praise for the Poem "Quarantine" by Eavan Boland
"Let no love poem come to this threshold."
Week 3. I’m moving back to Long Island this week, so I’m writing this intro up on Thursday afternoon, still in Indiana. Have this short and lightly-revised meditation on Eavan Boland’s great poem, “Quarantine.”
An old professor (some of you might have a clue who I’m talking about, lol) asked me to write up some thoughts on this poem in the summer of 2020 before he taught an Irish lit course. I think the free-write stands up. In any case, wow, I fucking love this poem, and I always will. Eavan Boland was a master and a gift. Check out her book A Woman Without a Country?
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First, “Quarantine” in full, and also a video of Boland reading it:
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: Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved.
What strikes me most about this poem is its delicate balancing act between sweeping statements—the opening line, three “worsts” for “a whole people”—and the absolute specificity necessary for a “great love poem,” whatever that means.
“But her feet were held against his breastbone. / The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.” This poem allows room for this personal moment within the greater national and intergenerational tragedy/trauma of the Irish potato famine—An Gorta Mór. The Great Hunger. “The toxins of a whole history.”
Almost like the dreaded five-paragraph essay, the poem moves from the general to the specific to the general again, but I think it’s this weaving of the specific and the abstractly national that makes it not only a beautiful love poem, but a distinctly Irish poem. And not just because it’s about the famine! But because Boland understands how “the toxins of a whole history” linger between and within personal interactions.
How, to quote Adrienne Rich, “the personal is political,” and so how the political is always personal. How love is “proved” both because of and despite national traumas.
And still we come to my favorite line, and I think the line that allows the poem to transcend its bounds of “great Irish poem” and “good love poem” to become just a great goddamn poem: “Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.” Here the poet steps into the situation—she moves beyond narration and into an imperative plea. If this is an Irish poem because it is a poem aware of history’s effect on the personal, then Boland is a poet who also wants (even while maybe knowing better) to live in a world without such darkness.
And still she writes to that threshold. Knows, maybe, that it’s the poet’s job—the Irish poet’s job—to look into that darkness and report back. Auden wrote of Yeats “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” I have to wonder if the same is true for many, if not all, Irish writers writing about Ireland.
Which brings me to the title—what’s a quarantine but a period of isolation? In this poem, for Ireland as a whole, an island nation suffers in isolation from a colonial disease.
But, read more hopefully, I see two people quarantining together in their last moments, sharing their body heat, their last gifts to each other. “How they lived,” despite the cold and hunger and toxins. I’m wary of nationalism, even in the face of colonialism, but reading this poem, I can see the appeal of banding together when you’ve been cut off from the rest of the world. The couple becomes the nation, and the nation becomes the couple.
A quick note on craft elements, because this is a beautifully wrought poem:
There’s the simple anaphora in a few spots, of course, and the fairly simple syntax, which I think gives the poem its somber feel. But notice, first, that most of the lines are end-stopped instead of enjambed, and that each stanza is an even four lines.
This poem is steady, even-keeled, and one might even say terse. There’s energy here, but it’s not frenetic or disjointed. The lines aren’t long, per se, but neither are they short. The form tells me that the poem knows what it wants to say and that it wants to be trusted, to be listened to. There are no fancy tricks, no clever line breaks (except maybe “There is no place here for the inexact,” but I’ll forgive her, because that’s a killer standalone line).
The poem itself, as a thing, is plain. And all the more arresting because it is so.
I could say more about how these formal choices affect the content, but I didn’t set out to write a full essay. I just love this poem, this poet, and I’m happy to share my thoughts on it.