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Additional Interpretations of Eavan Boland's “I Remember” and “In Her Own Image”

“I Remember” (1986) and “In Her Own Image” (1980) are two fairly well-known poems by Eavan Boland, and critics have arrived at some generally accepted interpretations of these poems. However, other interpretations are possible that can happily coexist with those that are generally accepted. “I Remember” emerges as a dark poem about the death of an artist and its chilling effects on her young daughter; “In Her Own Image” takes on additional meaning as a poem about spousal abuse once it is analyzed in close conjunction with its partner poem, “In His Own Image.” Patricia Haberstroh argues that “I Remember” “depicts a significant moment in [Boland’s] own childhood when the ‘mystery’ of the artist’s imagemaking first struck her” (77), and the poem recalls the speaker’s “wonder at the [incomplete] image still there after the [model] had gone” and her need to “understand the relationship between the person she had seen and the image [being] composed on canvas” (78). However, the number and poignancy of death images in the poem and its somber mood are likely to lead many readers in a different direction—many will conclude that the speaker, who does not represent a young Boland herself but another persona instead, is trying to understand the “mystery” of the much more important relationship between life and death. “I Remember” suggests death in a number of ways. In a 1990 interview, Boland says, “as a lyric poet, you’re always working with time and perceptions of loss and just common down-to-earth disappointments or irretrievable segments of human experience” (Somerville-Arjat and Wilson 80). This description fits perfectly in the case of a young girl trying to deal with the death of her mother as the experience is recalled by a now-adult speaker. The portrait in the poem is incomplete, not merely because the mother is done for the day, but because she has died before completing her self-portrait. That is why “in the brute quiet and aftermath” (3), the girl finds an “eyebrow wait[ing] helplessly to be composed” (4). The suggestion is strong that the death has understandably traumatized the girl and that the portrait will never be completed. That “brute quiet” will probably never be interrupted, nor will the death’s sorrowful “aftermath.” The poem’s setting itself also suggests death in “the ruined evenings of / bombed-out, postwar London” (7–8); adding to the somber atmosphere is the fact that the poem takes place during “winter” (2), the dead season, and at “dusk” (6), when the day itself is dying. Moreover, the word “darks” (2) adds to the moodiness of the scene and of the painting itself. The oil paint on the abandoned palette is shaped in “scarabs” (5), the Egyptian symbol of the soul after death. The fact that the model for the portrait is “now gone” (16) reinforces the reality of the mother’s death. Seeing herself as “the interloper who knows both love and fear / who comes near and draws back” (17–18), she wants vitally to understand the reality not only of her mother’s private