Boland: "Atlantis -- A Lost Sonnet"

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.

--Eavan Boland

Thanks, EHS, for sharing.

Boland's Mythic Craft

LISTEN.  THIS IS THE NOISE OF MYTH

This is the story of a man and woman
under a willow and beside a weir 
near a river in a wooded clearing. 
They are fugitives. Intimates of myth.

Fictions of my purpose. I suppose 
I shouldn't say that yet or at least 
before I break their hearts or save their lives
I ought to tell their story and I will.

When they went first it was winter; cold,
cold through the Midlands and as far West 
as they could go. They knew they had to go-
through Meath, Westmeath, Longford,

their lives unravelling like the hours of light-
and then there were lambs under the snow 
and it was January, aconite and jasmine 
and the hazel yellowing and puce berries on the ivy.

They could not eat where they had cooked, 
nor sleep where they had eaten 
nor at dawn rest where they had slept.
They shunned the densities

of trees with one trunk of caves 
with one dark and the dangerous embrace 
of islands with a single landing place. 
And all the time it was cold, cold:

the fields still gardened by their ice, 
the trees stitched the snow overnight, 
the ditches full; frost toughening lichen,
darning lace into rock crevices.

And then the woods flooded and buds 
blunted from the chestnut and the foxglove 
put its big leaves out and chaffinches 
chinked and flirted in the branches of the ash.

And here we are where we started from-
under a willow and beside a weir
near a river in a wooded clearing. 
the woman and the man have come to rest.

Look how light is coming through the ash. 
The weir sluices kingfisher blues. 
The woman and the willow tree lean forward, forward.
Something is near; something is about to happen;

something more than Spring 
and less than history. Will we see 
hungers eased after months of hiding? 
Is there a touch of heat in that light?

If they stay here soon it will be summer; things
returning, sunlight fingering minnowy deeps, 
seedy greens, reeds, electing lights 
and edges from the river. Consider

legend, self-deception, sin, the sum 
of human purposes and its end; remember 
how our poetry depends on distance, 
aspect: gravity will bend starlight.

Forgive me if I set the truth to rights. 
Bear with me if I put an end to this: 
She never turned to him; she never leaned 
under the sallow-willow over to him.

They never made love; not there; not here; 
not anywhere; there was no winter journey; 
no aconite, no birdsong and no jasmine, 
no woodland and no river and no weir.

Listen. This is the noise of myth. It makes 
the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it? 
Daylight greys in the preceptories. 
Her head begins to shine

pivoting the planets of a harsh nativity. 
They were never mine. This is mine. 
This sequence of evicted possibilities. 
Displaced facts. Tricks of light. Reflections.

Invention. Legend. Myth. What you will.
The shifts and fluencies are infinite. 
The moving parts are marvellous. Consider 
how the bereavements of the definite

are easily lifted from our heroine. 
She may or she may not. She was or wasn't 
by the water at his side as dark 
waited above the Western countryside.

O consolations of the craft. 
How we put 
the old poultices on the old sores,
the same mirrors to the old magic. Look.

The scene returns. the willow sees itself 
drowning in the weir and the woman 
gives the kiss of myth her human heat. 
Reflections. Reflections. He becomes her lover.

The old romances make no bones about it. 
The long and short of it. The end and the beginning. 
The glories and the ornaments are muted. 
And when the story ends the song is over.

--Eavan Boland

Passages: Boland's "Daphne" and Mythic Art

Mythic literature--I've always loved it, from the translations of the Greek, Roman, and Germanic classics to the retellings and adaptations by contemporary writers. And, by mythic literature, I don't just mean the sorts of things Robert Graves or Mary Renault have done with Classical figures and beliefs, but also the sorts of things Charles de Lint or Robert Holdstock have done with Celtic, Indo-European, Amerindian, and other figures and beliefs.

Poetry is rife with mythic borrowings and mythic intonations from the earliest days. I almost wrote "from the days of belief," but who says belief doesn't exist now, exist in ways that matter most, figuratively, metamorphically (and that's not a misspelling for "metaphorically"). Right now, I'm thinking of Gluck's "Gretel in Darkness" (folklore counting as mythic, to me); Yeats' "Leda and the Swan"; Kizer's "Hera, Hung From the Sky"; Graves' "Ulysses"; and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt.

I could--and will--quote half a hundred good poems that use mythic material, but here's the first, the one that held me fast today when I was just reading around, open-eyed, not a care in the world, for that half hour I try to devote to the practice each day. Dangerous habit, that reading around, that openness; I recommend it.

Here's Eavan Boland and her poignant contemporary take on the myth of Daphne, a mortal woman transformed into a tree to escape the lust of the pursuing god Apollo.

DAPHNE WITH HER THIGHS IN BARK

I have written this

so that,

in the next myth,

my sister will be wiser.

Let her learn from me:

the opposite of passion

is not virtue

but routine.

Look at me.

I can be cooking,

making coffee,

scrubbing wood, perhaps,

and back it comes:

the crystalline, the otherwhere,

the wood

where I was

when he began the chase.

And how I ran from him!

Pan-thighed,

satyr-faced he was.

The trees reached out to me.

I silvered and

I quivered. I shook out

my foil of quick leaves.

He snouted past.

What a fool I was!

I shall be here forever,

setting out the tea,

among the coppers and the branching alloys and

the tin shine of this kitchen;

laying saucers on the pine table.

Save face, sister.

Fall. Stumble.

Rut with him.

His rough heat will keep you warm and

you will be better off than me,

with your memories

down the garden,

at the start of March,

unable to keep your eyes

off the chestnut tree—

just the way

it thrusts and hardens.

--Eavan Boland

An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987. W. W. Norton @ Co. New York & London: 1996.