by Meaghan Latella
If you are of complete or at least partial Irish descent: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! And if you are not Irish, I might as well wish you a happy holiday too. This holiday may have begun in Ireland as a religious homage to Ireland’s patron saint (St. Patrick), but it is now a widespread phenomenon that has breached Ireland’s borders and infiltrated many other cultures, most notably in the United States. Every March 17th, people around the world celebrate this holiday by attending parades, wearing green, and feasting on traditional Irish food—and beverage.
Like any holiday, St. Patrick’s Day has become commercialized over the years, and most people probably don’t even know why it began. It’s funny how initial purpose can be lost over time. Take Christmas for example. When you ask someone what their favorite part of the Christmas season is, most people would say something about spending time with their families, or singing Christmas carols, or baking pies and decorating cookies. Rare is it for someone to say that they most look forward to celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. And yet, this is technically the sole purpose of Christmas.
We are all guilty of losing sight of our ancestry. It is not something you think about on a daily basis. Even though nearly one third of Americans can trace its lineage back to someone who migrated from Europe and went through Ellis Island, we do not spend loads of time looking into our family histories.
Today, I’d like to reference a poem written by Eavan Boland. Boland is often referred to as “Ireland’s greatest female poet.” Her work addresses a variety of topics, but it heavily focuses on the oppression of Irish women, and on the impact of the Famine. One of Boland’s more famous poems—“The Achill Woman”—recounts the story of when Boland met an old Irishwoman on Achill Island.
On its surface, the poem doesn’t appear to be about much of anything. The speaker—a young college girl, who we presume is Boland—meets the Achill woman one evening when she carries a bucket of water up to the cottage that Boland is renting. The poem characterizes a young Boland as ignorant and slightly dismissive of the old woman’s hardships. In the poem, Boland laments how “nothing now can change the way I went / indoors, chilled by the wind / and made a fire / and took down my book / and opened it and failed to comprehend / the harmonies of servitude…”
In an essay about the poem, Boland elaborates on the details of the conversation she had with the woman from Achill:
“She was the first person to talk to me about the famine. The first person, in fact, to speak to me with any force about the terrible parish of survival and death which the event had 
been in those regions. She kept repeating to me that they were great people, the people in the famine. Great people. I had never heard that before. She pointed out the beauties of the place. But they themselves, I see now, were a subtext. On the eastern side of Keel, the cliffs of Menawn rose sheer out of the water. And here was Keel itself, with its blond strand and broken stone, where the villagers in the famine, she told me, had moved closer to the shore, the better to eat the seaweed.” (Stef Crap, 2009).
Boland reveals that she was blind in her youth to the weight that this meeting carried. I’m sure Boland would now call her brief meeting with this woman a truly humbling experience.
After reading this poem, I’ve been forced to do a bit of self-reflection of my own. I am a quarter Irish, and my grandmother is of complete Irish descent. Her mother immigrated to the United States from her home country and settled in Staten Island, N.Y. in the early 1900s. I must confess that I know very little about my great-grandmother. I am one of those people who indulges in St. Paddy’s day celebrations every year, yet I’m guilty of not recognizing the roots of this holiday and my family’s relationship to it.
We as a society may not be the best at paying our respects to the past. In this fast paced world we live in, it’s hard not to devote all of our energies to keeping up with the present and gazing forward toward the future. But I can promise you one thing. Before today is over, I plan on calling my grandmother. After the mandatory greetings of “how are you” and “what’s new,” I want to ask her if she’ll tell me a story about her mother. It may not be a monumental gesture, but it will be my way of lending some authenticity to the green shirt that I’m wearing today.
For reference, here is “The Achill Woman” in its entirety:
THE ACHILL WOMAN
She came up the hill carrying water.
She wore a half-buttoned, wool cardigan,
a tea-towel round her waist.
She pushed the hair out of her eyes with
her free hand and put the bucket down.
The zinc-music of the handle on the rim
tuned the evening. An Easter moon rose.
In the next-door field a stream was
a fluid sunset; and then, stars.
I remember the cold rosiness of her hands.
She bent down and blew them like broth.
And round her waist, on a white background,
in coarse, woven letters, the words “glass cloth.”
And she was nearly finished for the day.
And I was all talk, raw from college —
weekending at a friend’s cottage
with one suitcase and the set text
of the Court poets of the Silver Age.
We stayed putting down time until
the evening turned cold without warning.
She said goodnight and started down the hill.
The grass changed from lavender to black.
The trees turned back to cold outlines.
You could taste frost
but nothing now can change the way I went
indoors, chilled by the wind
and made a fire
and took down my book
and opened it and failed to comprehend
the harmonies of servitude,
the grace music gives to flattery
and language borrows from ambition —
and how I fell asleep
oblivious to
the planets clouding over in the skies,
the slow decline of the spring moon,
the songs crying out their ironies.
–Eavan Boland
Sources:
http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.wlu.edu/docview/1305129367?pq-origsite=summon