This week I have picked number 58 from the top 100 Irish poems list. It is a beautiful Irish poem about a new mother getting up in the middle of the night to feed her baby. This is a poem that I am sure all new parents will relate to. What I like about the poem Night Feed is that it doesn’t try to have a hidden meaning; Boland is just expressing in words what that moment is like.
And she does so with fantastic imagery and description, as you will see in my notes below.nbsp;
Night Feed
This is your season, little daughter:
Night Feed follows a mother through one early morning feed, from the moment she creeps into the nursery to the moment she settles her baby back down. Outside, the garden and the sky are waking up. Inside, the whole world has shrunk to a bottle, a small warm body and the quiet between them.
Boland sets tender images beside sharper ones. There are daisies, sparrows and rainwater, but also a sense of time passing and innocence slipping away, and a wry look at the word housewife. The short lines and chiming rhymes give the poem the gentle rhythm of a lullaby.
The poem gave its name to Boland’s 1982 collection Night Feed, the book that made her name as a poet of women’s everyday lives. Back then few Irish poets treated a mother feeding her child at dawn as a fit subject for serious poetry, and Boland set out to change that.
Read the full poem: you will find Night Feed in Eavan Boland’s collection Night Feed (first published 1982, reissued by Carcanet Press) and in her New Collected Poems (Carcanet Press).