. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
Eavan BolandRead
I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the struggle of reconciling personal identity with national heritage.
Eavan Boland explores the complex relationship between one's national identity and personal belonging. While studying Irish history and its rich cultural legacy, she realizes that this connection can sometimes lead to a sense of alienation rather than inclusion, highlighting the paradox of national tradition and the individual's search for belonging in that context.
Themes
IdentityBelongingHistoryTraditionNationalism
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on cultural identity, I quoted Boland to illustrate the tension between personal and national narratives.
More from Eavan Boland
All quotes →Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
Eavan BolandRead
When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?
Eavan BolandRead
There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.
Eavan BolandRead
If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it, and human griefs ordained by it.
Eavan BolandRead
Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.
Eavan BolandRead
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