Eavan Boland - The Famine Road Flashcards
What is a famine road
A road with a pointless or redundant end
Thw two types of history in the poem
Political- famine
Social -treatment of women
Government classes being typically dismissive and cold blooded
Attitude of politicians
Treatment of Irish
these Irish, give them no coins at all
Quotes about famine roads
“Roads to force from nowhere, going nowhere of course”
“Directionless they worked’
They don’t even have basic tools
They had to use their bare hands
“Fork, stick were iron years away”
Turns from sympathetic to harsh
“After all” suggests what more damage could it do?
“After all could they not blood their knuckles on rock”
Horrible reality
Horrible treatment of Irish
Famine
Suck on April hailstones for water and for food
They need to look upon each other as sources of food
Boland evokes the dehumanisation of a race of people reduced to beasts
Human standards have been lost
Cunning as housewives, each eyed - as if at a corner butcher - the others buttock
Like snowflakes the people will keep falling (dying)
They don’t wait for the last to melt before falling again
Metaphor
Body count keeps rising, piling
No more than snow attend its own flakes where they settle and melt
Smugly triumphant
Killed two birds with one stone
Purpose of famine roads to government
Sedition, idleness, cured in one
Rot by their work
If the famine isn’t killing them then the work will
They are bones now
Work till they are quite worn, then fester by their work
Uncaring and detached just like government
Impersonal
Why is she inferirle
These mysteries
The woman remains anonymous - she has no voice
Blunt, insensitive, dismissive
Role of a woman at the time
Garden =symbol of fertility
But take it well woman, grow your garden, keep house, good-bye
The poem ends on a great note of repair
Outdated
What is your body now or not a famine road?
Themes
Remembering histories victims
The oppression of women
