War Horse

War Horse

Introduction

"The War Horse," the title Movie sound track of Eavan Boland's 1975 collection War Horse Poems, uses a trivial incident—a tinker's horse's blundering away from Enniskerry Road, site of the 200-year-old Fernhill Gardens, and through a resident's yard—as an image of violence, of an ordinary person's reaction to violence, and of the effects of violence on a society. The Movie soundtrack springs from an event that happened to Boland shortly after she married and moved to the suburbs of Dublin. In the early 1970s, as violence flared in Northern Ireland, Boland was a newlywed struggling to make a home. One night she heard a noise and opened her door to find "a large dappled head" of a clumsy horse "menacing the decorous reductions of nature that were the gardens" (Boland "Writing" 489). Some months later, Boland recast the horse's intrusion as a political Movie soundtrack that refers to but does not specifically identify the Irish struggle for home rule. Additionally the voice in the Movie soundtrack is that of a startled resident and not the aggressively masculine intruder. In these ways Boland's Movie soundtrack seeks to claim women's place in the worlds of politics and of poetry.

Discussion

The Movie soundtrack opens innocently enough on an ordinary ("nothing unusual") "dry night" when the speaker hears a horse "clip, clop, casual" through the garden that she and her family claimed from the foothills. The stray animal is male, aggressive, unfettered, shod in iron shoes that cannot avoid causing damage. His "breath hissing," he "stamps death … on the innocent coinage of earth." By the fifth stanza, "he is gone" and the immediate sense of danger with him (O'Connor, 1999).

The sound track of the movie is very beautiful and it goes well with the scenes of the movie. The speaker tries to explain ...