How we cite our quotes: (Line)
Quote #1
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.Look down you said: this was once a famine road. (5-8)
In the middle of a lovely countryside vacation, the speaker and her lover run smack dab into a famine road. They're just two young'uns sharing a noodle of spaghetti (figuratively, of course), but they can't escape this trace of Ireland's tragic past. Cue the creepy music: this countryside is haunted by the past.
Quote #2
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build. (9-15)
The speaker takes in the famine road with her senses, while her beloved rattles off factoids about it. And those factoids are pretty devastating. We basically learn, right along with the speaker, how horrible the so-called "Relief Committees" treated the starving Irish people. Not cool, dudes. These famine roads are a mark of human cruelty that still scars Ireland's beautiful landscape.
Quote #3
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still (16-17)
In this quote, we see the past intersect with the present: the road is still exactly where it was over a century ago. And it's haunted by the memory of those who died right "there." That "there" makes us feel like we're present with the speaker, like we're looking at the famine road alongside her and her lover. Kinda gives you the chills, eh?
Quote #4
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizonwill not be there. (24-28)
Oh, the pathos of these final lines. The speaker has had a profound experience of understanding and mourning for those who died in the potato famine, but she knows that this tragedy will not be represented on the maps of Ireland. The famine road—"the line"—is personified; it takes on the voices of those who died building it. But they will not be remembered by cartography. Instead, Boland gives them a chance to speak through this poem.