Boland - Outside history

History, Myth, Eire, and Language

• -Boland rejects myth in favour of real history as the proper authority for her poetry and her idea of nation
• - The stars are symbolic of outsiders, remote and unreal "whose light happened thousands of years before our pain did". she also uses natural imagery
• - Boland expresses the exlusion of voiceless and forgotten people, in particular the women of the past. Hence we can see the feminism being expressed in a dramatic and imaginative manner and she uses originative metaphors to convey their coldness and remoteness. The speaker, who is very representitive of Boland's views, exclaims "whose light happened thousands of years before our pain did". Showing us that history will always be changing, unlike the stars. Boland wants to claim her place in history rather than remain in the traditional mythic role hitherto assigned to women "Out of myth in history i move to be part of that ordeal"
• - Boland shows a world where women were marginalised from the past "silence is....part of her tradition". the language she uses is beautiful; the start are emblems of these "outsiders", and they symbolise natural history untouched by human hands. As the poem progresses, the stars are transformed into darkness, which remind us of the pain and suffering of the irish. The "ordeal" alludes to the Great Famine in "the famine road" evokes a continuity of the past.

Quotes

• "outsiders"
• "iron inklings of an Irish January whose light happened thousands of years before our pain did; they are, they have always been outside history. they keep their distance"
• "a landscape in which you were mortal"
• "I have chosen: out of myth in history i move to be part of that ordeal"
• "darkness"
• "those roads clotted as firmaments with the dead"
• "how slowly they die"
• "we are always too late"