35:3 Spring 1986

EAVAN BOLAND

The Journey

Eavan Boland’s most recent books are Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Her Time and An Origin like Water: Poems 1967-87, both with W.W. Norton.  She was recently poet-in-residence at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, during its centenary year.  She is Professor of English at Stanford University and teaches there one quarter a year.

Jane Hoogestraat was on the poetry board when the editors were preparing the Spring 1986 issue of the Chicago Review, in which Boland’s “The Journey” would appear.  She remembers: “When the Chicago Review received Eavan Boland’s ‘The Journey,’ Paul Baker immediately called my attention to the poem.  After I too glibly said, ‘No, this had been done before and is too easy,’ Paul replied, with classic decorum, ‘Read it again.’  The poem later appeared in the Spring 1986 issue and, a short while later, in Boland’s The Journey.”

Eavan Boland recently wrote to us about how she came to write this poem:

“The Journey” emerged from a complex and painful event.  When our daughters were very small, my husband and I went as Fellows to the International Writing Program in Iowa City.  It was my first exposure to an intellectual and analytic approach to poetry and I was very taken with the discussions, arguments and emphases on the future and present of the form.  Then our smallest daughter, only a year old, got ill with meningitis.  She made a full recovery.  But the sense of an abyss opening in front of us, which suddenly closed, remained with me for a long time.  And with that sense came an increasing impatience on my part for the actions and events which poetry refuses to name and record.  I deliberately cast this poem in the elite form of the dream convention: where the poet descends to hell with another poet and comes back wiser.  I descent with Sappho and come back no wiser.  If anything, the poem records my longing to witness something which we were spared but others were not.  After the poem was finished I submitted it to the Chicago Review and was delighted and honored when it was accepted.

[DN, 1996]

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