Anna Girgenti

Dr. Auge
ENG 468
10 October 2016

Making the Distances Fiction: Intimacy in Bolands Distances

Twentieth century critic Cleanth Brooks promoted a method of poetic interpretation

heavily influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridges idea of organic form. Organic form in poetry

suggests that all parts of the poem mutually support each other and cannot be separated without

disrupting the poems meaning. In other words, the poems content and form are in a state of

dynamic interaction. Like Coleridge, Brooks emphasizes the importance of context and form

while discouraging paraphrase as a form of interpretation. According to this view, poetry is too

complex to be reduced to a concise prose summary; rather, meaning manifests itself in the

poems techniques, formal elements, and strong synthesis of opposing forces.

Brooks also compares poetry to a mini drama in which the speaker, the audience, and the

speaking situation are intrinsic to the meaning. In her poem Distances, Eavan Boland adheres

to Brooks standards of organic form. In this case, the speaker is the singular first person I, an

identity that we may easily associate with the identity of Boland. It is important to note,

however, that the I figure takes no name or gender and is characterized only by its own

thoughts and emotions, inviting the reader to become the speaker in the world of the poem.

Although the speaker is separate from the audience, you, the two share an intimate connection.

The poem emphasizes the physical location of the speaker and the audience and the consistent

distance between them. In the first stanza, the speaker is upstairs; in the second stanza the you

is headed down the stairs; by the fourth stanza, the front door bangs and the you figure is

gone. The rest of the poem is the speakers daydream, an imaginative scenario triggered by a
song, the memory of a specific place and an intense desire for intimacy. The speaker rejects the

temptation of nostalgia, recognizing that intimacy, however rare and fleeting it may be, can only

exist in present time.

The world of the poem consists almost entirely of concrete imagery, most of which the

speaker constructs through her own daydream. Wordsworths Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

discusses the effect of such imagery from common life in poetry. He argues that ordinary images

arouse the imagination without the use of gross or violent stimulants; they produce an emotional

reaction to the familiar or mundane. Distances is composed almost entirely of images and

situations from common life, either in the speakers reality or her daydream. The poems opening

line presents a simple image: The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen. Likewise, the

poems last line talks of apples and spectacles out of focus in the speakers imaginative

memory, so that from start to finish, the poem never moves away from lifes common imagery.

Bolands placement and manipulation of these images makes them significant; for example, the

description of the tacky apples and the spectacles in stanza four shifts in stanza eight when the

apples are revealed to be mush inside the crisp sugar/ shell and the spectacles out of focus.

Bolands use of imagery from common life in Distances not only aligns with

Wordworths description of poetry but also serves as the foundation of the poems emotional

content. The poem is an indictment of nostalgia as the human tendency to glorify distant times

and places. The poems meaning is ironic that the longing for a previous intimacy only

perpetuates a feeling of distance. The distance that the speaker struggles with stems from a

physical distance from the you figure, but the poem also deals with the idea of distance in

every sense, examining the whole meaning of the word as it entails emotional distance between

two people, distance from ones own past, and mental distance from reality through daydream.
Bolands examines the complex concept of distance through the use of various formal elements.

For example, the stanzaic structure of the poem contributes to its meaning as the form and the

content depend on one another. In a poem about distance, of course, stanza separation can be

particularly significant because it not only represents a shift in feeling or thought but also creates

a literal distance between words.

Distances is separated into eight triplets, and the break between each stanza is

deliberate, creating a specific effect. The break between stanzas two and three, for example,

separates the trigger of memory from the memory itself:

You call it back to me from the stairs

I Wish I Was In Carrickfergus

and the words open out with emigrant grief the way the streets
of a small town open out in
memory: salt-loving fuchsias to one side

The title of the song triggers the ensuing memory of a place, a memory separate, or distant,

from the speakers reality. The literal separation between stanzas on the page enhances the

separation of the speakers two worlds: the actual and the remembered. Similarly, the break

between stanza four and five is a movement away from the remembered world and back into

reality:

The front door bangs

and youre gone. I will think of it all morning while a fine

drizzle closes in, making the distances
fiction: not of that place but this and of how

The sound of the door brings the speaker out of her memory and back into reality, where she

rejects the nostalgia of the previous stanza, choosing to focus instead on her current location in

time and space. This stanza break emphasizes the distance between reality and daydream, present

and past, and presents a shift in thought.

 Like the stanza breaks, the images throughout the poem enhance its meaning and

emotional effect. The first stanza alone uses simple imagery to introduce a specific feeling of

emotional distance, the sadness associated with longing for intimacy:

The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen.

The clock says eight and the light says
winter. You are pulling up your hood against a bad morning.

Immediately, distance exists between the speaker and radio while it plays familiar music out of

sight. The clock and the light speak in different languages, one of numbers and one of seasons.

Then the image of pulling up a hood invokes the idea of distance as it involves closing oneself

off from the elements as well as preparing to leave. The bad morning seems to refer at first to

the bad weather, but it may also refer to the current relationship between the two people. Perhaps

a negative interaction or a lack of interaction altogether has resulted in a bad morning which

the you figure chooses to escape from. The images are simple but constructed carefully to

produce a desire for connection, a feeling of distance that continues in the following stanzas.

In stanza four, the image of linen, tacky apples, and a glass and wire hill of spectacles on

a tray first appears, as the speaker calls to mind the memory of a market in a small town. The

same objects appear again in stanza eight, but here the speaker presents them differently. In their

second appearance, the objects are not glorified or sentimentalized; theyre real. The linen

scraped your face and left your tears falling, and the apples were mush inside the crisp sugar

shell and the spectacles out of focus. The two presentations of the images illuminate the

difference between memory and reality and the two alternate lenses through which the speaker

may choose to view the world. The spectacles in the daydream town are literally out of focus,

but the entire memory itself is also unfocused, a distortion of reality that only heightens the

speakers longing for intimacy. She rejects this glorified daydream: I will think of it all
morning not of that place but this. The speaker reaches the profound understanding that

intimacy is only possible in reality where it is always juxtaposed by distance. She says, I will

think of it all morning while a fine/ drizzle closes in, making the distances/ fiction. The image

of rain, or the current unfortunate state of reality, is still more desirable and comforting than the

unattainable daydream of a distant place and time, a fictional place where real intimacy cannot

exist.

The auditory image of music repeats in the poem alongside the visual images of the

daydream and the speakers reality. In the first two stanzas, the radio plays a familiar song,

which triggers the speakers daydream of small town. Later, in stanza six, the speaker

acknowledges that you and I would be restless inside the perfect music of that basalt and

sandstone coastal town. In this case, the music provides no joy or relief. Ironically, it is

perfect but still cannot cause an emotional effect the way the radio music in the first stanza

does. The image of perfect music continues in the seventh stanza; The scentless afternoon of

a ballad measure holds little joy for the speaker and her loved one who long to communicate in

this imagined world but cannot. Much like the linen, apples, and spectacles, the music of the

daydream is not as desirable as reality. It is an illusion; it holds the false promise of perfection

but only amplifies the distance the speaker feels.

This distinction between reality and illusion also manifests itself in the poems lineation.

Boland uses free verse in and varies the line lengths throughout the poem. Variations in line

length and line breaks draw attention to specific words or groups of words. The first line of

stanza one, for example, is end stopped: The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen, and the

following line is enjambed: The clock says eight and the light says/ winter. The enjambment in

this line draws attention to the word winter and its emotional connotation. The speaker and her
loved one are in a season of winter, literally and emotionally, and the you figure pulls up a

hood against a bad morning, which reinforces the alignment of the bad weather with the

speakers current emotional state dormant, nostalgic, gloomy. The enjambment in the fifth

stanza has a similar and arguably even more powerful effect as it is accompanied by the

assonance of the short i sound:

And youre gone. I will think of it all morning while a fine

drizzle closes in, making the distances
fiction: not of that place but this and of how

Several factors signal the significance of this stanza. First, it contains the title of the

poem. Second, the enjambment between distances and fiction draws attention to the peculiar

pairing of the two words. The idea that distances can be made fictional requires pause and

contemplation. This stanza also makes much heavier use of sound, particularly assonance, than

any other stanza in the poem. Each word in the stanza with the i sound, such as drizzle, in,

distances, fiction, and this, carries meaning in the context of the poems position on

reality, intimacy, and illusion. The image of the drizzle closing in suggests intimacy while the

speaker thinks of reality, and either reality itself or her decision to stay present in it makes the

feeling of distance illusory. The poem proceeds to describe the illusionary daydream world as a

place where the speaker and her loved one would be restless, longing for communication.

Boland taps into an important paradox: Dwelling in the past as a way of escaping

loneliness only makes us lonelier by distancing us further from reality and other people.

The opposing forces at work in the poem are intimacy and distance. In the speakers reality, she

is never physically close to her loved one, as the you figure rushes out the door and calls to her

hurriedly from the stairs. In her daydream, they walk the streets of a coastal town together but

are emotionally distant, unable to communicate. More intimacy exists in the speakers reality
than in her daydream, even though reality requires her to endure a physical distance from her

loved one. The speaker chooses not to dwell in her illusion because physical distance, however

painful, is preferable to emotional distance. Boland bridges the opposition between intimacy and

distance by implying that they may exist simultaneously, and according to Coleridge and Brooks,

this balancing of opposites is a central criterion of poetic excellence.