'Mise Eire', Eavan Boland (Critical Essay‪)‬

Eavan Boland's 1987-collected poem, 'Mise Eire',' 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 Eire' 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 Eire', 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 T 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 Eire' 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 T understood as 'an idiom that represents a process of healing of "the wounds of patriarchy"'. (7)