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  • Writing within a Zone of Grace:Eavan Boland, Sacred Space, and the Redemption of Representation
  • Bethany Bear (bio)

Scribbled in the margin of an eighth-century New Testament, the poem "Myself and Pangur Ban" compares the work of a medieval Irish scholar to the prowling delight of his cat. As the cat hunts for mice, the monk seeks the perfect word for his theological work, successfully "Turning darkness into light." Centuries later, the analogy between hunting mice and stalking holy words continues to attract Irish poets. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes include Robin Flower's translation of "Myself and Pangur Ban" in a recent edition of their acclaimed anthology The Rattle Bag and Heaney published his own translation in a 2006 issue of Poetry, while Paul Muldoon includes a translation of the poem in his collection Hay (1998). Somewhat surprisingly, Eavan Boland, who often emphasizes her displacement from the male Irish poetic tradition, submits her own version, "From the Irish of Pangur Ban," in The War Horse (1975). By including this ancient poem in collections of their own work, all three poets acknowledge a link, if not a lineage, between the work of the monk and their own poetic endeavors.

The enduring popularity of "Myself and Pangur Ban" could be linked to a number of concerns within contemporary Irish poetry, including the question of a distinctively Irish poetic tradition, intertextuality, Irish multilingualism, and the profound delight of poetic wordplay. Not least of all, the association between a contemporary Irish poet and a medieval cleric suggests that Irish poets both sustain and interrogate the relationship [End Page 76] between their literary and religious traditions. They must confront the ancient bond between Irish culture and religious identity, as well as the English Romantic sense of poetry as an analogue to, or even a replacement for, orthodox faith. Among contemporary Irish poets, Heaney extends the affiliation between religion and poetry most dramatically. In "The Government of the Tongue," for example, he audaciously appropriates the language of John 8, comparing poetry to Christ's "writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed" (207). In order to sustain this transformative power, Heaney argues, poetry must not be subject to the "government" of religious or political ideologies that would impose a particular message on a poem. Boland makes a similar comparison in "Envoi," from The Journey and Other Poems (1987), in which the doubting speaker calls on her muse in explicitly biblical language, asking to "put my hand in her side" (New Collected 151), just as the disciple Thomas refuses to believe in Christ's resurrection until he can "thrust my hand into [Christ's] side" (John 20.25). However, the conflation of religion and poetry raises a number of problems for poets who insist on the autonomy of their art; when using the language of religion, a poet runs the risk of either subordinating the poem to the doctrines such language implies or setting up poetry itself as an object of worship. Boland recognizes these problems to a greater extent, perhaps, than does Heaney in "The Government of the Tongue." As Boland comes to terms with her anxieties about representation in poems from The Journey and Outside History (1990), she rejects "heretical" Romantic conceptions of a sacramental imagination even as she presents her poetry as a product of grace, capable of creating sacred spaces in which the objects she represents can move from myth into history.

As she narrates her displacement from both Irish and English poetic traditions, Boland realizes that she must confront the nineteenth-century construction of a religion of poetry that affects her own sense of vocation. In Object Lessons (1995), a memoir of her poetic development, Boland quotes the famous opening paragraph of Matthew Arnold's "The Study of Poetry" (1880), in which Arnold argues that an enlightened culture, faced with disintegrating [End Page 78] creeds and crumbling dogmas, must turn to poetry as a bulwark against despair and anarchy (Arnold 306; qtd. in Boland, Object Lessons 83). By attaching emotion to ideas rather than to facts, poetry provides a "surer stay" than religion, which fails when the facts supporting its doctrines...

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