The Wild Dog Rose

What does Montague say about the poem?
“Ireland has often been seen as feminine,…and her colonisation has aspects of rape – becoming even more complicated when colonial England became Protestant and Ireland remained Roman Catholic, attached to the medieval ethos of the Virgin Mary.”
“In ‘The Wild Dog Rose’, as she is being almost raped the woman prays to the Blessed Virgin. The Blessed Virgin is symbolised for her by the wild dog rose, but the end of the poem describes it as a ‘weak flower’. This is her comfort. The poem doesn’t say that it accepts that comfort, just that she has been able to draw strength from it as people do from whatever they can manage to believe in.”

§ Description of old woman – contrasts past and present – childhood view – mature view – two descriptions – hag, sinister creature – child’s imagination – lonely suffering human being harshly treated – circumstances
§ Parallels between woman and cottage – rough, untended, misshapen
§ Evokes sympathy – how he greets her – learns of her isolation
§ Montague mentions the flower – frames the story of the attempted rape – violent intrusion by powerful figure, who is heedless of the victim – suggestions that he sympathises with both of them “two creatures crazed with loneliness” – language used to describe the struggle from diction of war – implied revulsion at her body
§ Dog rose symbol of and emblem of Virgin Mary, i.e. the old woman’s Catholic faith – helps her endure the harshness and loneliness – language suggests weakness and endurance – it is incapable of causing harm
§ Perhaps read the poem as metaphor to describe the colonisation of Ireland which deprives native Irish of land, language, heritage and identity