White Hawthorn of the West of Ireland by Eavan Boland

Selected Text

All I wanted then was to fill my arms with
sharp flowers,
to seem, from a distance, to be part of
that ivory, downhill rush. But I knew,

I had always known
the custom was
not to touch hawthorn.
Not to bring it indoors for the sake of

the luck
such constraint would forfeit —
a child might die, perhaps, or an unexplained
fever speckle heifers. So I left it

About the Author

She was born in Dublin in 1944 but as a child moved around to London and New York, but eventually returned to Dublin. When she was married in 1969 she moved to a suburb of Dublin, Dundrum (perhaps this is the journey from the poem). Her poems are mostly about the views of a woman about motherhood and family and Irish myth and history.

I don't write a poem to express an experience. I write it to experience the experience. -Eavan Boland

Talking Points

• Her journey from Dublin to the countryside
• Her desire to be a part of the flowers
• Mystery behind the nature
  • child might die the superstitious, forces of nature
• Myths
  • Thomas the Rhymer, the famous thirteenth century Scottish mystic and poet, once met the Fairy Queen by a hawthorn bush from which a cuckoo was calling. She led him into the Fairy Underworld for a brief time, but when he returned to the human world he saw that he had been gone for seven years.

Questions

• How does this poem relate to our first thoughts about how Ireland looks?
• How does this poem relate to other poems about nature we have read?
• What do you think the Hawthorn represents?