Quote Of The Day By Eavan Boland: 'I Do Not Want Us To Be Immortal Or...'

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Eavan Boland is a writer, known by many as "Ireland's premier woman poet," according to Smith College. Boland was born in Dublin in 1944. She grew up in New York and London, but went back to Ireland for secondary school and attended university at Trinity College in Dublin. From there, Boland worked as a journalist and became a critic for The Irish Times. Her first full-length poetry collection, "New Territory," was published 1967. Boland went on to write 12 volumes of poetry. 

In 1995, her prose book, "Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time," was published. Her work earned her many honors, including the Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the Jacob's Award. Much of Boland's writing revolved around themes of womanhood. 

While speaking with A Smartish Pace, Boland explained, "I began to write in an Ireland where the word 'woman' and the word 'poet' seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other... I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman's life. And I couldn't accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation" (via Poetry Foundation). That's why one of Boland's many powerful quotes is today's quote of the day.

"I do not want us to be immortal or unlucky. To listen for our own death in the distance. Take my hand. Stand by the window. I want to show you what is hidden in this ordinary, ageing human love." 

This line comes from Eavan Boland's poem "Once," which appeared in her 2001 poetry collection, "Against Love Poetry." The line acts as a reminder that mortality makes life and love more special.

It's easy to view awareness that we will all die one day as a sad or scary thought. Yet, Eavan Boland's quote asserts that while we have a finite amount of time on earth and with our loved ones, this actually makes love more profound. Knowing that death will eventually come can make us especially grateful for each passing moment and the people with whom we spend them. Eavan Boland married novelist Kevin Casey in 1969, and they remained married until her death in 2020. Being with someone as long as Boland was with Casey surely puts a particular spin on thinking about mortality. For many, losing your longtime partner can be an even more painful thought than the idea of dying. Evidently, though, Boland believed knowledge of your own immortality can make growing old with someone and having ordinary days together feel extraordinary and precious.

We all know we will die one day, but for most of us, the inevitability doesn't make the thought any easier to sit with. It's easy, particularly in this day and age, to combat this by trying to distract ourselves 24/7. Instead of trying to avoid the thought of mortality, though, Boland instead invites us to let the thought in and allow it to make the mundanity of our lives and relationships feel even more special and sacred.

• "Change depends on the questions we ask. Always providing we are willing to ask them. And at a certain point, I set out to find those questions."
• "Child of our time, our times have robbed your cradle. Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken."
• "Love will heal / What language fails to know"
• "Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life."
• "This is what language is: / a habitable grief. A turn of speech / for the everyday and ordinary abrasion / of losses such as this / which hurts / just enough to be a scar. / And heals just enough to be a nation"