Spy Poetry: Lines Written for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary by Eavan Boland

Editor’s Note: Greetings to my new readers in Chestertown, Cambridge, and Centreville. I look forward to sharing the poems I love with you. The poem below is by one of Ireland’s best. There are many things to appreciate here: how the title does so much work to explain the true subject of the poem; how line 8 underscores the perpetual nature of the stone-water relationship; how her skillful use of the word “under” in line 15 makes a clever association with the expression “under our noses;” and especially, how she uses the image of the stone to represent her long marriage, and the action of the water on the stone to represent the many events that have shaped the relationship over time.

Lines Written for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary

Somewhere up in the eaves it began:
high in the roof – in a sort of vault
between the slates and the gutter – a small leak.
Through it, rain which came from the east,
in from the lights and foghorns of the coast –
water with a ghost of ocean salt in it –
spilled down on the path below.
Over and over and over
years stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought, of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.
It happened under our lives: the rain,
the stone. We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder:
all those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures.

Eavan Boland (1944-2020) was a prominent Irish poet, author, and professor known for her exploration of Irish national identity, women’s roles in history, and the domestic sphere. Her work often addressed the intersection of personal experience and national narratives, particularly focusing on the experiences of women in Ireland. Boland’s poetry collections include A Poet’s Dublin (Carcanet Press, 2014); A Woman Without a Country (W. W. Norton, 2014); New Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2008); An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987 (W. W. Norton, 1996); and In Her Own Image (Arien House, 1980). This poem is from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 2001 by Eavan Boland. Posted here with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.