The Pomegranate
The Pomegranate by Eavan Boland
Themes:
Loss: This theme is signalled in the 2nd line as she taps into the Ceres/Persephone myth: “the story of a daughter lost in hell”. At one stage the poet sees herself as the child : “ a child in exile”. and later she is the mother (“I was Ceres then”) concerned about losing her daughter - in a less serious way when she goes “searching for my daughter at bed-time”, and in a more serious way when she fears the loss of her daughter to adulthood: “She will enter it ... She will wake up”.
Relationship - mother/daughter: There is the universal tension between her desire as mother to be protective (“I was ready to make any bargain to keep her”), and her realisation that she ought to let her go so that …show more content…
It is in a double way this time as she can relate to both daughter and mother in this story at different times in her life. (“I can enter it anywhere” - line 7). Both Love and The Pomegranate feature a journey to the underworld. As in Love, Child of Our Time and This Moment, there is concern for a child - in Love the danger of loss through a near brush with death, in Child of Our Time the child’s life is lost, in The Pomegranate it’s the threat of loss through the child’s growing into adulthood. In This Moment the mother is proctective (“A woman leans down to catch a child who has run into her arms”. This is echoed in a very similar line in The Pomegranate – (“…searching for my daughter at bed-time”). The relationship with the child is central in The Pomegranate, and in This Moment to a lesser extent, while the relationship with the husband is central in Love. There’s a fear of loss in some of the poems: in Love loss of the husband in some way, either through death, eventually, or through deterioration in passion (“Will we ever love so intensely again?”) and communication (“You walk away and I cannot follow”), and in Pomegranate fear of losing the daughter to the adult world (“a child in exile”). Child of Our Time features a very tragic loss, though it’s not as personal, more about a public rather than private
Themes:
Loss: This theme is signalled in the 2nd line as she taps into the Ceres/Persephone myth: “the story of a daughter lost in hell”. At one stage the poet sees herself as the child : “ a child in exile”. and later she is the mother (“I was Ceres then”) concerned about losing her daughter - in a less serious way when she goes “searching for my daughter at bed-time”, and in a more serious way when she fears the loss of her daughter to adulthood: “She will enter it ... She will wake up”.
Relationship - mother/daughter: There is the universal tension between her desire as mother to be protective (“I was ready to make any bargain to keep her”), and her realisation that she ought to let her go so that …show more content…
It is in a double way this time as she can relate to both daughter and mother in this story at different times in her life. (“I can enter it anywhere” - line 7). Both Love and The Pomegranate feature a journey to the underworld. As in Love, Child of Our Time and This Moment, there is concern for a child - in Love the danger of loss through a near brush with death, in Child of Our Time the child’s life is lost, in The Pomegranate it’s the threat of loss through the child’s growing into adulthood. In This Moment the mother is proctective (“A woman leans down to catch a child who has run into her arms”. This is echoed in a very similar line in The Pomegranate – (“…searching for my daughter at bed-time”). The relationship with the child is central in The Pomegranate, and in This Moment to a lesser extent, while the relationship with the husband is central in Love. There’s a fear of loss in some of the poems: in Love loss of the husband in some way, either through death, eventually, or through deterioration in passion (“Will we ever love so intensely again?”) and communication (“You walk away and I cannot follow”), and in Pomegranate fear of losing the daughter to the adult world (“a child in exile”). Child of Our Time features a very tragic loss, though it’s not as personal, more about a public rather than private