Role of The Speaker in The Pomegranate by Eavan Boland (Poem Analysis)

The role of the speaker in Eavan Boland’s narrative poem “The Pomegranate”  develops the theme of struggling with how much to protect your children from. The story is about a mother recalling the story of Persephone and Ceres from Roman mythology. The speaker has a very active role in this poem by describing everything and creating an emotional connection with the audience. She relates the myth of Ceres and Persephone to her own experiences as a mother. While it is her responsibility as a mother to protect her child, she should not protect her child to the point of sheltering because she had no protection growing up, her daughter already at a young age makes her feel like Ceres, and one day she will not have her mother to bail her out of everything. 

The speaker of this poem conveys that she did not necessarily grow up in a peaceful home. In the first 5 lines the speaker talks about her love for the myth and how she feels it is related to her life. In lines six through twelve she talks about how she used the myth as an escape from her life. Through this it can be inferred that she did not have the best childhood. The speaker states “And the best thing about the legend is/ I can enter it anywhere” (Boland 6-7). The speaker illustrates how she more than likely did not have a parental figure that was always there to protect her so she hid in the security of books and stories. Her poor experiences as a child have led to how she chooses to parent her daughter.  

Even though the speaker's daughter is still young she makes her worry. When she goes outside to call her daughter for bedtime she initially cannot find her which causes her to start to feel like she imagined that Ceres did when Persephone was taken. She then goes on to talk about how when she looked at her daughter running out of the woods she put herself in Ceres’ shoes and said that she would do anything to protect her daughter (Boland 15-16). At this stage of life she is more than likely still very sweet and innocent to her mother, so she wants to protect her from anything that she can, unlike Ceres was able to do when Persephone was kidnapped. She talks about how the winter, which is representative of Ceres sadness, is inescapable (Boland 20-22), symbolizing that no matter how much she wants to protect her child, she cannot do so forever and how her sadness is bound to happen. 

Teenagers naturally get into some troubled positions, but it is a parents' role to figure out what the teenagers have to get themselves out of rather than being coddled any more. This is shown to be true when she starts talking about her teenager and how she could stop her from making mistakes but then when she succeeds it will not mean as much to her. The speaker expresses that when she says “If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift” (Boland 48).  If the speaker stops her daughter from making mistakes and she is just handed things, success will not be exciting nor as important to her so she will not be motivated to try and do things in the real world eventually. There is also the possibility that when she gets older she will get into a situation in which her mother cannot get her out of, but she will not know what to do if she does not have the experiences from her teenage years. The speaker questions what kind of mother she would be to take that away from her. This is illustrated when she declares “The legend will be hers as well as mine. /She will enter it. As I have” (Boland 49-50) showing that she will give her daughter the opportunity to escape into the piece of literature just like she did as a child. 

The Myth of Persephone and her mother Ceres can be related to the struggles of mother daughter relationships. Through the second half of the poem she talks about Persephone’s mistake of falling for temptation by eating the pomegranate seeds, cursing her to spend approximately six months with Pluto, before she can go back and spend six months with her mother. The speaker relates this to her own problems as a mother of how far she should protect her daughter because she has an opportunity to stop her daughter from making a similar mistake but she understands that she cannot do that for her daughter's benefit. She talks about how it is a different world from back when Persephone experienced this, and even different from when the speaker was a child. However She still wants to give her daughter those experiences from the past even if things are not the same because it creates a sense of cohesion and connectedness between them. At the end of the poem the speaker decides that she must let her daughter make her own mistakes so that she will be strong enough to face reality when she becomes an adult.(Boland 51-53)

This poem shows the relationship between a mother and a daughter using the Roman myth of Ceres and Persephone as a comparison.  The speaker feels that she was made strong by her mistakes and she wants her daughter to have the strength, experience, and resilience that she has.  Even if that breaks the speaker’s heart she knows that, that is what she has to do. So while it is a mother’s responsibility to protect her daughter from the evils of the world, she should not protect her daughter to the point of her having a cloistered upbringing.