Eavan Boland’s mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted painter, specializing in still life, a genre sliding out of fashion in the 1940s and 50s when she worked. The children, Boland and her siblings, were not allowed into their mother’s atélier during her working hours and were cared for after school by a nanny until her mother descended to the family’s living quarters in the evening. As an adult Boland reflected on her childhood anxiety about being shut out of her mother’s workspace, but also on how she made the same decision with her own children, relying on nannies so that she could carve out time for her poetry.

 “The Last Discipline” presents an image of the poet’s mother at work: the attic space, the tools, the ritual. There is also an intrusion into that space and praxis: the presence of a child, an uninvited witness to the creation of art. The first stanza is presented from the perspective of the child whom we do not yet know is in the room:

In the evening

after a whole day at the easel

my mother would put down her brush,

pour turpentine into a glass jar,

and walk to the table.

The important detail is the length of time and its repetition. The modal auxiliary verb “would” allows us to understand the ritual quality of this action in the past. There is no description of the painting; it is less relevant to the speaker than is the easel, presumably because the painting always changes but the easel is a fixture of the artist’s life.

In the second stanza, the verbs move to the simple past tense; a habitual pattern of movement has now been condensed down to a single instance of that pattern:

Then she took a mirror,

hand-sized, enamelled in green,

and turned her back to the canvas.

And stood there.

And looked in it.

Boland’s use of assonance in the verbs (took, stood, looked) links them together and emphasizes the tense change. The mirror is the only object in the poem described in detail; it is an artisanal product, with its decorative enameling and distinctive color (green), the only color mentioned in the poem. The enameller’s art is the second one named in the poem, after painting. The third art form, unnamed, is of course poetry itself. The mirror will reflect a copy of the painting, in miniature, but also the child, a miniature artist, learning, perhaps against her will, to copy the mother’s self-discipline. The etymology of the word mirror, from “mirare,” to look, reminds us that the painting is a reflective surface, now imitated in another reflective surface, the mirror, which itself is reflected in the child’s gaze and again in the adult speaker’s memory of the event. The polysyndetic coordination (and, And, And) appears to build towards something: Revelation? Epiphany? Will the painting be revealed as finished? Rather than answering, stanza three will flatten back again into observations of time and space.

It was dusk.

The sheets were ghostly.

The canvas was almost not there.

In the end all I could see was her hand

closed around the handle.

The canvas is again treated dismissively; what matters is what the mother will see when she looks in the mirror. The child, not yet formally observed by readers of the poem, but predicted by the appearance of the first person “I,” is present only as her memory of this moment. The word “hand” predicts the poem’s pivot in stanza four, when the speaker’s view of the mother dissolves into bodily fragments, or more accurately, memories of bodily fragments. The tense shifts yet again, this time to the present, and the scene is conclusively presented as a memory:

All I can see now

Is her hand, her head.

Her back is turned to what she has made.

The mirror shows her

what is over her shoulder.

While the mother is reduced by falling darkness into body parts (hand, head, back, shoulder), the child begins to materialize: “what she has made,” the reader knows will include not just the canvas, but the painter’s child. The child, behind her, over her shoulder, is similar to the painting (both made by her) and yet not similar: the painting done or nearly so; the child has years of formation ahead of her still.

The final stanzas return yet again to time and space, this time from the mother’s perspective, with the list of what she sees in the mirror:

A room in winter.

A window with fog outside it.

A painting she sees is not finished.

A child: her face round with impatience,

who will return,

who has returned,

who only knows now that she has seen

the rare and necessary—

usually unobservable—

last discipline.

The child is now clearly present—“visible”—in the poem for the first time. She is young, impatient with a process that the adult speaker’s tone tells us she must come to appreciate and understand, because in her future life as an artist, a poet, she must learn a discipline that she does not yet possess.

The enjambment of the fifth and sixth stanzas move us forward in time, from a predictive future tense “who will return” with the modal auxiliary “will” linking to the “would” of stanza one. The present perfect verb phrase “who has returned” in stanza six brings the prediction of stanza five to completion and is the final turn in the poem. The next verb, “knows,” represents a much-delayed epiphany. The child was too young to know what she has seen, but the adult artist does: it is not just the last part of a ritual; not just the final step in a praxis.

The phrase “the rare and necessary” invites the reader to reflect on its meaning. Among things that are rare for an artist who is also a woman: the time in which to develop as an artist, within a discipline. Breathing space away from family life. A room of one’s own. “Necessary” comes from the Latin negation “ne” and the verb “cedare,” to cede or give ground. When a praxis is necessary there is no making of concessions, no backing down, no yielding ground.

The final two words frame the poem together with the title, as a picture is framed. They are not, however, unambiguous, and that very ambiguity is at the heart of the poem. There are at least a half dozen answers to the question, “what is the last discipline to which the title refers?” They are not mutually exclusive; the title rich is in connotation. Obviously, (this is the most literal reading) the last discipline is the self-discipline of looking objectively at the work of art to judge whether it is finished or needs further refinement. But also, painting is the last discipline the child will witness after a day at school that has been filled with other disciplines: mathematics, literature, language acquisition, and history. Boland has spoken frequently about her mother’s chosen discipline, the still life, falling from favor. Is this an oblique commentary on her mother’s choice, as one of the last practitioners of this discipline?

Boland has also indicated that the family’s children were firmly enjoined from entering the atélier. One of the oldest meanings of the word disciplineinvolves the mortification of the flesh by self-discipline in religious vocations. Will the child be disciplined for intruding into the painter’s inviolate space? Will it be the last or only the most recent instance of such discipline? But also, the mother’s decision to routinely place her children at a distance for the space of an entire day also requires a mortification of the flesh—her bond to her children must be temporarily severed, and later this will be true of the adult daughter’s bond to her own children.

It is worth remembering that the child here is a budding artist, and rooted in the word discipline, is disciple. Is the mother teaching the child what it means to have discipline, to be disciplined in one’s work? By extension it is worth noting that the child will be a poet, has in fact, already begun writing, and buried in the word discipline is the basic unit of the poem, the line. This poem of unvarying stanza lengths is unusual for Boland, in that she prefers an uneven stanza length, normally varying from four to seven lines. This poem demonstrates a kind of formal discipline of stanza structure, visible on its surface.

The final stanza juxtaposes seeing with reflecting in the two adult artists: the one remembered and the one now speaking. In the room, the mirror reflects but does not see. The child watches but does not reflect. The speaker remembers watching and now reflects. Is the last discipline the coming to a moment of insight? Of clarity? In the dying light does she now see clearly her own future as both an artist and a mother?





Notes

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Boland, Eavan. “The Last Discipline.” The Lost Land. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.