The women of Irish myth

Eavan Boland's critical essays react directly to three nineteenth-century texts that collapse women with Irish nationhood.

• Cathleen ni Houlihan is the title of a play by W. B. Yeats, taken from an extant myth of an old woman who wanders the dirt paths of Ireland, looking for young men to fight for their country. To the young man who will one day save Ireland, she will appear as a young woman of extraordinary beauty.
• "An Old Woman of the Roads," a poem by Padraic Colum, might remind you more than a little of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."
• "Dark Rosaleen," by James Mangan, is a lightly-coded call to Catholic Europe to act against the British.