Eavan Boland: The Latin Lesson

Length / Form Nine stanzas. Initially the lines are short, detached and formal, but as the dreamlike, mythological imagery develops, lines to flow into one another with increasing speed and fluidity.

Allusion to Classical figure The poem imagines the ghosts of Virgil's underworld and the 'dark boatman' of the Styx , Charon. Boland's younger self assumes the role of the hero Aeneas, in navigating a course between two worlds.

Allusion to Classical place The text of Aenied VI becomes a 'pathway to hell', leading the poet into the underworld.

Relationship to Classical text The ‘lesson' of the title implies the discipline and orthodoxy which determine Boland's access to the literary work, yet her journey into the text offers a sense of liberation from which she is reluctantly recalled. Here the strangeness of the Latin and the liberation it offers, accentuates Boland's sense of alienation from the expectancies of Irish culture and literary tradition, whilst 'displacing the centre' of the postcolonial authority within the poem (Boland, in Villar 2006:56. See also York 2007:210ff). Interestingly, cultural remove from the classical text also enables Boland to explore its aesthetic potential, whilst disregarding the socio-political and propagandist underpinnings, crucial to her understanding of Irish mythology in literature.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts The 'black keel' and the 'dark boatman' allude to Virgil's ferruginea cymba (303) andterribili squalore Charon (299). The crowded rhythms describing the shades on the far shore 'chittering and mobbing' clearly evoke the alliterative, jostling lines devoted to the animae frequentes of the Trojans (486), and the trembling Greeks (ingenti trepidare metu, 491).

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Boland's education in a Dublin convent school frames this poem of descent and emergence from the world of the dead; it is therefore the Christian formulation of resurrection which lends an 'Easter light' throughout, making Boland's journey into the pagan underworld a double transgression. Other poems such as ‘The Bottle Garden' and ‘A False Spring' also couple the imagery of AeneidVI with this academic setting (Outside History, 1990).

Comment As in ‘The Pomegranate' and ‘Love' (In a Time of Violence, 1994), Boland establishes a dual perspective, which destabilises a static view of the classical myth. The structure of the poem creates a tunnel of doubling imagery, with Boland herself twice journeying back into a dead world, the second time to witness her former self. This, effectively, binds the text to specific cultural associations and adds depth to the manipulation of myth, allowing Boland to explore the social agendas determining her access to Irish literary tradition (see Villar 2006:67). As a model of classical reception the poem illustrates the continually evolving two-way interchange between texts and the inevitable role of context in shaping modern understandings of ancient works, yet whilst this reinforces the vitality of Virgil's epic, Boland, nevertheless, recognises its elusive, ghostly qualities.