The Making Of A Poem By Eavan Boland Summary

When reading The Making of a Poem one thing that really intrigued me was the beginning. Right away we get to see how Eavan Boland fell in love with poetry and it's very significant to put it there at the start before getting to know anything else about her. As readers, we never really get to hear how a writer picks up their talent but rather little snippets of their life if you will, it's about more of where they come from and their life experiences, then the craft itself. We don't see what really moves them to write and where their reasoning comes from so I think it is very clever to open the book with that and allows us to get to know where the writer's passion lies. It comes as no surprise to me that she grew a love for poetry from her father,

I didn't quite get it until I looked at the poems of villanelles to get the rhyme scheme and rules down. A villanelle has a sort of "circular refrain" that repeats lines and rhythm through stanzas, a total of 19 lines broken up into five three-line stanzas and a refrain of four lines. Within the poem the first and second line of the first stanza become the last line in the second and fourth stanza and the third line of the first stanza becomes the last line in the third and fourth stanza, confusing to read but much easier to visualize when looking at the poem. With a rhyme scheme of aba and the last line of the first and second stanza become the last line of the refrain makes it for what sounds like a twisty poem. One line that I found interesting, "Figural development in a poem is possible in a villanelle. But the form refuses to tell a story. It circles around and around, refusing to go forward…" (Strand, Boland 8) At first I found this hard to believe and still have to ponder it more, that a poem can't tell a story, but if you look at it less figuratively you realize what the authors are trying to prove because the rules of writing a villanelle restrict it to be repetitive and looping the lines