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Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained | |||
"Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet" by Eavan Boland is an evocative piece that blends the historical and mythological with personal reflection, embodying a sense of loss and the ineffable nature of absence. The poem invokes the legend of Atlantis—a city said to have disappeared into the sea—as a metaphor for the things that are lost to time and memory, including the tangible and the emotional. Boland begins with a contemplative musing, a question that ponders the plausibility of an entire city vanishing without a trace. This rhetorical inquiry sets the stage for a meditation on the nature of loss and the human desire to hold onto the past. The mention of "arches, pillars, colonnades" conjures images of grandeur and civilization, juxtaposed against their sudden and complete obliteration. The poet then turns inward, reflecting on a personal sense of missing "our old city," a place filled with intimate details and shared experiences, including "white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting / under fanlights and low skies to go home in it." This shift from the grand mythical to the intimately personal underscores the universal experience of nostalgia and the longing for what was once familiar and comforting. Boland suggests that the true calamity of Atlantis is not just the loss of a physical place but the absence of language adequate to express the finality of such a loss. The "old fable-makers" in their quest for a word to capture the essence of irretrievable loss ultimately "gave their sorrow a name / and drowned it." This drowning is both literal and figurative, representing the submergence of Atlantis and the sublimation of grief into narrative. The sonnet form, traditionally associated with love and often with loss, serves as the perfect vessel for Boland's themes. The title itself, "Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet," suggests a missing piece, a work that is both about the lost and is itself an artifact of loss. Boland's use of the sonnet speaks to the enduring power of poetic form to give shape to the shapeless and to offer containment for the uncontainable. In "Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet," Boland engages with the mythic to speak to the deeply personal, bridging the gap between collective history and individual memory. The poem is a reflection on the ephemeral nature of all things and the enduring human need to remember, to mourn, and to name our sorrows in the hope of keeping them, if not the things themselves, afloat in the sea of time.
| Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE BRIDGE: 8. ATLANTIS by HAROLD HART CRANE THE LOST ATLANTIS by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON LOST LANDS by CHARLES HENRY MACKINTOSH POSEIDON'S BRIDE by ELIOT KAYS STONE |
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