That the Science of Cartography Is Limited by Eavan Boland
- marychristinedelea
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
That the Science of Cartography Is Limited
by Eavan Boland
--and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
This poem is from Eavan Boland's 1994 poetry collection from Norton, entitled In a Time of Violence. The poems in this book explore violence of all kinds, interpreting the word "violence" in a variety of ways. There is not a bad or weak poem in the book.
I love how the poem starts with a positive image, and the limits of maps. That scent of balsam is powerful in a forest full of those trees-maps cannot convey that scent.
The speaker connects those woods to where she and the "you" of the poem went when they were first in love. Connacht is a province (like an American state) and it includes counties that many of us with Irish ancestry can trace our roots: Sligo, Galway, Mayo, and Roscommon.
The speaker responded in that past time as they went into the forest that they were walking on a famine road. The stone road was covered in the now of the poem, and the "you" explains to the speaker (and to us).
These roads went nowhere, and were built by desperate starving people throughout the Great Hunger of the mid-1800s. (Please keep in mind that there was enough food in Ireland to feed the people. As with all famines, it is politics and policies that keep food from people. Our planet creates more than enough food for every person. In Ireland at this time, starving people were offered backbreaking work in exchange for food that barely--and often did not--kept them alive. Over 1 million Irish people died and over 2 million left to make new lives in other countries; they often found themselves the victims of discrimination.)
"Where they died, the road ended" is one of 3 lines set off by itself. It is a line laying out a horrific fact of Irish history, and Boland forces us to really consider it by placing it on its own.
The next stanza, the longest in this poem, returns us to the speaker who considers a map of Irealnd--"this island"--and focuses on the design until the stanza's last line. The speaker reminds herself that the map's boundary line marked "woodland" cannot convey the horror of what happened there. No map tells us history--the shaded areas that designate a forest on a map are just that: shading. We must go elsewhere to learn about the suffering and to smell the trees.
I love maps, any kind of map that shows any place at any time. I have written a number of poems that are about maps or have something about a map or maps in them. Like all things, they do their job. They do not teach history, however, and cannot tell us what has happened in the places they show. Sometimes, historical places have markers--museums, plagues, statues, etc. But other times, as with these famine roads, they have become overgrown and buried, making this part of history easier to whitewash, ignore, and gloss over. If a person is on one, they might not know anything about them (unless, like our speaker, they are accompanied by a person who knows what they are and shares that information).
As with all historic events, the true nature of the Irish Famine has made its way into the mainstream thanks to researchers, writers, and journalists, not to mention those who lived through it. Boland herself wrote of it in many of her poems. Below are a few links if you would like more information.
If you Google NPR Irish Famine, you will pull up a variety of stories spanning decades, all of them well worth the read or listen.
As far as Eavan Boland, she was born in Dublin in 1944 and died in 2020 at 75. She taught at Stanford University. She was a poet, a writer of prose, a feminist, an historian, an academic, a reviewer, and an award winner for her writing. Her first poetry collection was published in 1967 and her last was published after her death.
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