Relevant Background | Summary | Themes | Style

Child Of Our Time - Eavan Boland [1944]

Relevant Background

• Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944 and lived in Ireland until she was six years old. Her father worked as a diplomat, which meant working in embassies in various countries. Her mother was an artist.
• At the age of six, she and her family moved to London, where she felt people disliked her for being Irish. This deepened her sense of Irishness.
• She later returned to Dublin to attend school and graduated from Trinity College in 1966.
• She worked as a teacher briefly and since 1967 has been a full-time writer and mother.
• Boland married a writer in 1969 and has two children. Her experiences as a wife and mother have influenced what she writes about.
• She has found beauty and importance in the common daily experience of family life in a small house. This experience has influenced her poetry.
• She values childhood highly.
• The poem ‘Child Of Our Time’ was Boland’s response to a press photo of the Dublin Bombings of 1974.
• A photo of a dead child being lifted from the scene by a fireman moved her to compose this poem.
• The tender and shocked feelings on the face of the fireman prompted her to write the poem.

Summary

• The title suggests that the death of an innocent child is typical of the times people are living in.
• In the first stanza, Boland claims she knew no lullaby or song to help put a child asleep before the terrible event of the day before.
• Boland writes a six-line sentence that explains why she has to write this poem.
• She wants to compose a lullaby as a tribute to the child and to express the lessons that have to be learned.
• The sight of the dead child and the thought of his final death-cry inspire her to write this poem as a lullaby.
• This lullaby takes its tune from the bombed child’s final cry.
• The reason for writing this poem or lullaby is the unreasonable death of the child.
• Boland claims that this poem’s rhythm comes from the violence or discord of the child’s death.
• The very cause for writing this poem is that the dead child can’t hear it.
• In the second stanza, Boland begins a long sentence that ends eleven lines later in the second last line of the poem.
• She thinks about the songs and games the child should be playing.
• Boland knows that childhood songs instruct the young child about life.
• She mentions toys and animals the young child should be playing with.
• She refers to the tales with moral lessons and legends with important learning points that the young child should be hearing.
• She mentions the wise sayings like proverbs or idioms that parents give young children to help them survive in the future.
• At the end of the stanza Boland comments on a reversal of the normal order of parents teaching children.
• Instead, she and adults have to learn from this dead child’s death.
• The explosion has shattered normal parents’ image of a peaceful life.
• The dead child will have to be at the centre of the lessons that adults need to learn.
• Adults in general are responsible for the Dublin Bombings. Political slogans and the general language of politics have led to this tragedy.
• Now, by thinking of the broken body of the young bomb victim, adults need to learn a new language without hatred.
• In a sense, instead of rocking the young child’s cradle, society had robbed his cradle through killing him.
• In the final one line sentence, Boland urges the child to sleep his sleep of death. But he sleeps in a world that has been rudely awakened by the bomb which killed an innocent child.

Themes

Political Violence
Political violence leads to the needless death of innocent life. Political violence has broken the ‘image’ of innocence. Society needs to learn a new language if it is to change the minds of people like the killers who set the bombs in Dublin. Political beliefs about Ireland are based on violence. It is obvious that the ‘legends’ that the bombers believe in do not ‘protect’ the innocent. Boland regards these beliefs as evil, as causes of the ‘murder’ of the child. The bomb led to a child’s death for no reason. Now society must learn from the death of this innocent child. Society must wake up to what it has done or allowed happen. Boland doesn’t say we need new laws or more police. She says we need to get rid of stupid political slogans and ideas. We need to get rid of our ‘idle talk’, our false ‘idioms’ [Perhaps she is thinking of phrases like ‘up the RA’ and ‘Brits Out’]. She realises that we have all made the bomber who he is, with our attitudes and our talk. The dead child is the ‘cost’, the price paid for such idle talk. We need fundamental change. She doesn’t talk of punishment. We need to think out new political ideas, based on caring for children, not killing them in the name of a political slogan or belief. We need to wake up and build new images to inspire us. Perhaps our images from history are the ‘broken images’ we need to re-make in a new way.

Motherhood
The poem explores the feelings of caring and guiding that a natural mother feels for a child. The poem speaks of instructing, distracting and protecting a child from evil. But the child in this poem is a victim of evil. The motherly side of the poet is horrified to her soul about the sudden violent death of the child. Her feelings tell her not just to complain but to learn from the child’s death. She wants to build a better society as a result of the ‘discord’ or violence that broke his life. It is worth noting that Eavan Boland dedicated this poem to the memory of another child, Aengus, who had died a cot death. Thus the positive life giving instinct of a mother comes across very clearly in this poem. Eavan Boland thinks of the cradle, not the bomb or bomber. She feels and thinks as a mother, a giver of life.

How To Deal With Evil
Boland uses the word ‘rebuild’. She wants to take the ‘image’ or photo of the dead child and use it to build a better society. She wants lessons, not punishment. Boland believes society has created the bombers through the idle talk of the old politics. The death is ‘murder’. But Boland feels the victim can instruct us. She wants to build a new future from the broken limbs of the dead child. Her poem is an example of the ‘new language’ of caring. The new language will focus on healing and the protection of life. Boland wants to write a song for the future. The child has ‘taught’ her to order this song, written in the new language of healing.

Style

• Repetition Some words like ‘time’ and ‘learn’ are repeated for emphasis. A very important repetition is the word ‘rhythm’. The bomb broke the rhythm of life. The poem suggests a new rhythm needs to be invented. The repetition of the word ‘learn’ also emphasises a key point of the poet. Many of the word repetitions contain assonance, alliteration and internal rhyme. These contribute immensely to the musical nature of the ‘song’ that Boland is writing in memory of the child.
• Imagery There a number references to song: ‘lullaby’, ‘this song’, ‘tune’, ‘rhythm’ and rhyme’. There are many references to ways of using language: ‘song’, ‘cry’, ‘instruct’, ‘tales’, ‘legends’, ‘idiom’, ‘idle talk’, ‘new language’. The most memorable image is of the broken body of a child. In the second stanza there are many images from a child’s nursery. But in the final stanza there is the horrible image of an empty cradle.
• Metaphor The ‘new language’ is a metaphor meaning fresh ideas, free of violence. Another metaphor combines our icons from history and the victim: we must rebuild our broken images around the limbs of the dead child.
• Personification The idea that our times have robbed the child’s cradle of his living presence is a striking metaphor. Boland personifies the times she lives in and calls it a robber.
• Language Boland addresses the poem in a tender way to the dead child. She speaks to him openly, for all to hear her points. She uses a lot of repetition [See notes on repetition and imagery above]
• Contrast There is a sharp contrast between ‘tune’ and ‘final cry’. There is a contrast between the final sleep [death] of the child and the idea that this death has awakened the world. ‘Rhythm’ is contrasted to ‘discord’.
• Tone Overall the tone is shocked, but with a sense that we have to do something about it. There is a sense of deep hurt conveyed in the last line of the second stanza: ‘you dead’. The first stanza has a sad, regretful tone. There is anger in the use of the word ‘murder’. There is a tone of deep bafflement in the final line of the first stanza. The images of caring for a child in the second stanza are conveyed in a tone of tenderness. The second stanza contains a sense of urgency about learning from the devastating atrocity. In the final stanza, the tone is pleading and positive. The poet accuses us all of robbing his cradle, but speaks softly of healing. Yet the repetition of the word ‘broken’ seems to carry an immense amount of grief.
  The six ‘l’ sounds of the first stanza emphasise the flowing or liquid movement of the silk dress.
• Atmosphere The mood created by this poem is extremely sad, respectful and yet hopeful. We share the poet’s urgency: ‘living, learn, must learn from you dead’.
• Paradox [apparent contradiction] We must learn from the dead child, even though in a proper world we should be teaching this child lessons about life. Boland has written a ‘lullaby’ to wake up the world to the truth [see last line].
• Pun ‘Order this song’ means to request it from her imagination, but it also means to put order on her and our emotions of grief and anger through song.
• Alliteration One example is the three ‘l’ sounds in ‘Living, learn, must learn from you dead’. Alliteration helps create the music of lullaby.
• Rhyme There is a lot of internal rhyme [see note above on repetition]. Many of the end sounds rhyme: ‘y’, ‘der’, ‘y’, ‘n’, ‘er’, ‘n’ in the first stanza. Thus the first rhymes with the third, the second with the fifth and the fourth with the sixth. The rhyming in the second stanza is similar, but the lines correspond in a different way: the first with the fourth, the second with the fifth and third with the sixth. There is also rhyming in the third, but the end sounds match differently again. Therefore the rhyme scheme is a blend of rhyme and discord, like an image from the fifth line of the poem. It links with the theme that out of violence we must build healing and new harmony, not anarchy.
• Form The poem is a lyric, an emotional response to a death. The poem is also a lament. But it is above all a carefully crafted argument in three stanzas.