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Hannah Way
Literary Criticism
Dr. Auge
21 November, 2013
Silent Suffering in “The Journey”

Poetry “offers us textual pleasure in its formal qualities—a pleasure in the grace, vigor, or

ingenuity of the language itself—but it also offers us expressive pleasure, in that it articulates our

concerns and our situations” (Scholes 1). That is to say, it “speaks for us as well as to us”

(Scholes 1). Yet, for this to become a reality, the reader of poetry must confront each

“ungrammaticality,” each frustrating phrase, each gap of understanding. It is in confronting

these deviances that the reader of poetry is able to combine a “strong concern for prosaic

meaning…with a readiness to push beyond to generate new meanings” (“Semiotics of the Poetic

Text” 43). In this way, poetry becomes a journey, a process for the reader. For a poem like

“The Journey” by Eavan Boland, uncovering these ungrammaticalities brings forth a deeper

insight into the intended message. Boland utilizes the archetypal descent into the underworld in

order to develop a poem which highlights those that are so often ignored. She creates a poem

which works in the liminal, in the margins, in order to articulate the suffering of those who have

been ignored and silenced. However, any attempt to speak for those who have no voice is

frustrated. Boland’s poetry offers little use in the fight to give voice to the perpetually silenced.

For Boland—and for the reader—the inability to give voice or to explain that which “is beyond

speech,/beyond song” ends with disillusionment and hopelessness. Yet, in this sense of

hopelessness, Boland is able to express love and articulate awareness of the problem.

In a sense, Boland’s “The Journey” is her version of the epic poem. Like Homer’s

Odyssey or Virgil’s Aeneid, she creates a lengthy poem recounting a personal journey. In fact,

Boland directly adopts Aeneas’ descent into the underworld in book VI as a foundation for her
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own epic journey. Led by a muse, Boland encounters the suffering of the dead in the underworld

but ultimately must reemerge out of the depths back into reality. This idea becomes important

for any further analysis of the poem. Understood in this context, Boland’s poem begins to take

on a universal quality, becoming the foundation for her ability to work in and for society’s

silenced.

Like many of Boland’s poems, the speaking voice is both autobiographical and personal.

The speaker is situated in her bedroom in Suburbia which “was a mess --// the usual hardcovers,

half-finished cups,/clothes piled up on an old chair.” As the “dark fell” she finds herself with a

book of poetry by Sappho, the early female poet, open next to her. But Boland does not appear

to be reading; instead, she is speaking aloud to herself, lamenting the tendency for poets to focus

on “emblem stead of the real thing.” This intimate moment of reflection in the quiet of the night

is addressed to “Elizabeth Ryle,” a specific woman, presumably a close friend. However,

between the address to Elizabeth and the introduction of herself as the speaker, she opens the

poem with an excerpt from the Aeneid which immediately introduces the stark imagery of a

“loud wailing of infant souls weeping…the dark day had stolen them from their mothers’ breasts

and plunged them to a death before their time.” These opening lines create an interesting

situation regarding to whom she addresses the poem. The poem is certainly for Elizabeth Ryle,

but by introducing the poem with lines from the epic Aeneid and building this poem into an epic

in itself, it begins to serve a larger purpose. One of the primary purposes of the ancient epic was

to relay a message or lesson relevant to an entire community or culture. Thus, if “The Journey”

is taken as an epic, it can be understood to have a much wider intent, namely, to address her own

culture and society.

However, in order to understand the message that Boland attempts to convey to her

society, it becomes necessary to move to the poem and glean meaning from it. This is not a

simple task, for “poems often want to slow up the process of comprehension a bit. They want to

encourage second and third readings. They want to stick in your head, to stimulate thoughts and

feelings” (Scholes 8). One way the poet looks to do this is by frustrating attempts to understand

the poem at a basic prosaic level. Thus, just as Aeneas had to descend into the underworld in

order to learn the wisdom and prophetic message from his father, so too must the reader of

poetry delve into the depths of the poem in order to uncover the meaning.

This tendency for a poem to frustrate the reader becomes apparent from the very

beginning of “The Journey.” Boland begins the poem lamenting the fact that “’there has never’/

I said ‘been a poem to an antibiotic.” She continues to meditate on this fact which seems to

frustrate her so acutely that after she finishes speaking aloud she finds that her “anger faded.”

Centering the opening of this poem on the absence of poetry to antibiotics seems utterly unusual,

if not unremarkable. However, as she continues to develop this idea in subsequent stanzas, it

becomes more apparent what she actually laments. Her frustration lies in the fact that

“somewhere a poet is wasting/ his sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious/ ‘emblem instead of

the real thing.” This emphasis on the waste of some poetry—of most poetry—implies that some

poetry can and should have a utility, a purpose. This seems to directly undermine an entire

portion of the poetic cannon: all those poets who understood the function of poetry to be nothing

more than emotional niceties. Further, she claims that “every day the language gets less/ ‘for the

task and we are less with the language.” It seems unusual to speak of language as a “task”; it

resists understanding. Yet, the medicinal imagery from the previous stanzas illuminates the

question of what the task of poetry and language is. It seems that, like medicine, poetry can
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serve to anesthetize or heal; yet, instead of poetry that serves a purpose, society is flooded with

nothing but symbols, nothing but “hyssop dipped in the wild blood of the unblemished lamb.”

What is not clear initially though is why this aspect of poetic reality so upsets Boland, and this

question will frustrate the reader until the end of her epic.

As the poem continues, the concrete, physical reality of her bedroom slowly fades into

the liminal between “not sleep, but nearly sleep, not dreaming really/ but as ready to believe and

still/ unfevered.” It is in this liminal state “when she came and stood beside me.” Boland spends

the next three stanzas repeating this ambiguous pronoun, concealing the identity of this

mysterious guide until it is finally revealed that “it was she, misshapen, musical --/ Sappho – the

scholiast’s nightingale.” By keeping the identity of the woman hidden for a significant amount

of time, Boland forces the reader to seek, to continue the search in the depths of the poem.

However, perhaps more importantly, she exaggerates the tension felt by the reader. This tension

culminates with the realization that the woman standing next to her bed is a long-deceased Greek

lyric poet, the same poet whose book lies open. With this realization, the poem no longer can be

understood to focus on the reality of Boland’s room. Suddenly, the poem focused on the

concrete has moved into mythic, epic form. Thus, the subsequent descent and journey can be

understood to take place in this liminal state, on a metaphorical level. It allows a fluidity

between reality and fantasy.

This fluidity accounts for some of the synthesis that seemingly occurs between Boland’s

world and the underworld of the Aeneid. The sense of going “down down down without so

much as/ ever touching down” draws the mind towards a fantastic, never-ending falling; yet, this

dream-like language is juxtaposed immediately with the more concrete sensation “of mulch

beneath us,/ the way of stairs winding down to a river.” These seemingly contradictory ideas can
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only be understood as working in the union between physical reality and mythic fantasy. This

play in the liminal is most evident in Boland’s description of her destination: “an oppressive

suburb of the dawn.” At first read, this description seems inconsistent with her journey into

fantasy, so it seems that she may be making the surface-level connection between hell and

suburbia. However, this description is more than just a metaphor; it continues the synthesis

between reality and myth, for it implies that Boland is not just entering into Aeneas’ underworld:

she is having her own journey. She cannot escape suburbia even in her archetypal journey.

Here in her underworld, Boland encounters women and children cut down by the plague

and sickness; yet Sappho tells Boland:

Do not define these women by their work:/…

Through this language, Sappho attempts to reveal to Boland just how similar they all are, united

in their common womanhood and their shared experiences as mother. Yet, following this

passage, Boland recognizes that “I could not reach or speak to them./ Between us was the

melancholy river,/ the dream water, the narcotic crossing.” These unconventional descriptions

immediately subvert the notion of being able to identify with the suffering women. This imagery

of a river cutting between the two groups of women becomes a metaphorical barrier, a

disconnect. The “melancholy river” that separates the pilgrims from the suffering is tainted with

a prolonged and habitual mournfulness. It appears that Boland is unable to ford the river—the

distance—because she cannot fully identify with the sorrow from which each woman suffers.

Thus, keeping and respecting the distance serves as a “dream” and a “narcotic,” assuaging the

pain that Boland should feel. She has not felt the pain of these women, nor can she.
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This insight offers a foundation from which Sappho’s claim can be understood, her claim

that “I have brought you here so you will know forever/ the silences in which are our

beginnings,/ in which we have an origin like water.” This seems like an odd claim, but it is in

these “silences” that Boland is able to convey the true reason why these women suffer. Unlike

her counterpart Aeneas, Boland encounters not heroes in the underworld, but the marginalized.

Further, the despair Boland feels is a direct result of her inability to “be their witness” for “what

you have seen is beyond speech,/ beyond song, only not beyond love.” Boland recognizes that

even through poetry she cannot give voice to these silences that are so foundational to the

suffering. Her poetry offers no utility. It seems that this silencing will forever be unceasing, that

being woman implies being silenced. Just as earth was drawn out of the water when the world

was created, so too do “we”—the women—find origin in suffering.

Ultimately, Boland reemerges from this dreamscape disheartened. Not only that, but

there is a deep sorrow at the incompetency of her poetry to act as that “antibiotic” that she so

longed for at the outset of her journey. This helplessness is characterized in the rain that “was

grief in arrears.” The rain on her window only served to remind her of the accumulation of

sorrow that those women experience day by day. By calling forth the language of grief as unpaid

debts, Boland emphasizes the depravity of all those suffering in silence. There is a sense that not

only is the grief accumulating and growing, but that Boland is unable to do anything about it.

All her poetry can do is point to the debt; it cannot atone for it.

Yet, for someone like Robert Scholes and those who advocate for a reader response

method, it is not enough to just work through the oftentimes frustrating language of poetry; the

reader of poetry must also attempt “to connect poetry with life again”— and not just life, but the

reader’s own life (Scholes 2). The reader must make poetry personal. In Boland’s “The
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Journey,” the intense longing to connect with and give voice to those who suffer silently in the

margins of society strongly resonates with me. Boland wants so strongly to do this through her

poetry. She wants her words to have the power not only to articulate the problems, but to solve

the problems. I can identify with the sense of hopelessness that overwhelms her when she

recognizes the futility of this desire. While I was in high school, my mother worked for an

organization that offered perinatal bereavement and hospice services. What I witnessed growing

up was families torn apart from the loss of a child. These families oftentimes became a part of

my family, and I grew to share in their suffering. Just like the children in Boland’s poems, these

children lost their voice before they even had one. Further, so often the mothers and fathers felt

silenced in their suffering, unable to explain their grief and connect with others, even their loved

ones. As much as we want something like bereavement care—or for Boland, poetry—to be able

to comfort and heal these families, it always falls short. No amount of pictures or keepsakes is

able to replace a lost child.

However, despite poetry’s inability to do something about silent suffering, it can act as a

manifestation of love for those who suffer. Boland’s poem becomes a sort of monument to those

whose suffering is ignored by society. Similarly, offering support and services to a family that

lost a child cannot heal all pain, but it does represent an act of love, of compassion. In this way,

Boland’s poem offers us a use. Although it cannot act as “medicine,” it can act as a

manifestation, a sign of love. And it is in generating a sense of hopelessness and despair that

Boland’s poem is able to become so effective as this sort of monument. The pervading sense of

frustrated desire to do something more than just love emphasizes the sincerity of the message.

The reader of “The Journey” is left with a profound sadness at Boland’s journey back from the

underworld. Because Boland emphasizes the hopelessness of the situation, the reader is left
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wanting to do something but accepting the grief that accompanies the inability to do so. Boland

wants this poem to be a lament; she wants to make the suffering personal, and although she

cannot do this, she creates a poem that evokes the same sense of despair and loss.

What is interesting about this poem is that it emphasizes not what poetry can do but what

it fails to do. “The Journey” does not discredit the value of poetry, but Boland does highlight

poetry’s inability to do all. Thus, it challenges my most basic understanding of poetry. That is to

say, I believed poetry was the thing that gave voice to those who suffered, but what Boland

emphasizes is that it cannot give voice to the sufferings of others. This is especially true when

the others are those on the margins. Poetry—and all those areas of life which are often reserved

for the socially elite—many times ignores those who need a voice the most. In this way, “The

Journey” has forced me to look at poetry as a valuable tool, but a tool that becomes most

valuable when placed in the hands of those who are often silenced.

This is certainly not the only legitimate response to Boland’s “The Journey.” For Tyler

Vatcoskay, this poem seemed to be focused on trying to bridge the distance between different

women. This becomes especially poignant when the reader embraces the pervasive use of water-

imagery. The frustration then comes not from the inability to speak for those suffering women

but from Boland’s inability to connect with them. The use of the poem is her attempt to reach

out in solidarity even though she cannot do so physically. Similarly, Desiree Tamez focuses on

the stagnancy of the roles in which women live. Just like the women in the underworld, it

appears that Boland may be destined to silent suffering. Not even poetry can save her from this

destiny. The poem becomes a means to both show her love for those women of ages past and a

cry for help to overcome this destiny. Although these three readings are different in some sense,

they also share a common thread. Each turns towards the disillusionment and despair that
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Boland experiences at the end of the poem in order to build an interpretation. Particularly

important was the final image of unpaid debts raining down on the window. By leaving the

reader with this odd image, Boland frustrates any attempt to leave this poem with a passive

attitude. Instead, all three interpretations cue in on the idea that the reader must respond to the

sufferings of those in the underworld. In this way, the poem acts as a catalyst—albeit a subtle

catalyst—for action of some sort: a demand to connect, to overcome, to love.

Works Cited

Boland, Eavan. New Collected Poems. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Print.

Scholes, Robert. “Reading Poetry: A Lost Craft.” The Crafty Reader. Kindle Edition.

Scholes, Robert. "Semiotics of the Poetic Text." Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale

UP, 1982. 37-56. Print.