THE IMAGINATIVE ALTERNATIVE A Study of the Plays of John Millington Synge

by

CAROLYN SALLY JONES B.A., Swansea university, 1968

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

in the Department of English

&CAROLYN SALLY JONES 19 70 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

JULY, 1970 APPROVAL

Name: Sally Jones

Degree: Master of Arts

Title of Thesis: The Imaginative Alternative: A study of the plays of John Millington Synge

Examining Committee:

(John Mills) Senior Supervisor

(Gerald Newman) Examining Committee

- - - - (Jerald ~as1ove)-p Examining Committee

. ------(~a'EherineStockholder) External Examiner

DATE APPROVED: August 4, 1970 iii

ABSTRACT

The thesis explores the plays of John Millington Synge as works of literature, possessing an artistic com- plexity which demands an appropriate complexity of response from the reader (as opposed to the immediate audience reaction). It suggests that the critical interpretation which deduces that the conflict in the dramas is between dream and reality is limited; but the intention is to offer an alternative reading rather than to argue against the validity of this approach. The view of the plays which is presented defines the tension as derived from the choice open to the characters of formulating their own imaginative rites in life or of acceptmg the already structured cere- monies and rituals of society. The formulation of these rites is dependent upon the power of the imagination to reveal, and eventually realize, a significant pattern in external reality, and specifically in the apparently meaningless destructiveness of the natural world. The imaginative participation of the character in the processes of this world, through his selection of the images which translate and enrich his own human emotions of fear and loneliness and love, constitute his freedom to see, not the illusion but the illusive quality in reality. Riders to the Sea is approached through an examin- ation of the ability of each character to perceive a meaning- ful pattern in an essentially unheroic cycle of loss; the of mourning (pagan and Catholic) provide a definition of loss and extend its significance, but the equation of death by sea with "the life of a young man" is the source of the transformation of suffering into a willed necessity. The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker's Wedding and The Well of the Saints show Synge's increasing concern with the savage as well as the lyrical rites of the imagination for the central characters are propelled toQards the assertion of their individuality by the force of their own rage. In the last-mentioned play the imagination extends to include the perception of the animal indignity of the human predicament, as the Douls turn on each other to vent their frustrations; but the inclusion of the brutality of nature in their vision leads them to a more splendid and all-encompassing transfor- mation of the knowledge provided by their senses.

The Playboy of the Western World most fully explores the realization of the imaginative alternative in a three- dimensional reality. By the inflation of their emotions through the exaggerative tendencies of their language, the characters seek to make a "wonder" of death. Christy Mahon, the focus for the imagination of the community, having learned to include all the images ofmortality in his linguis- tic range, refuses to die; he -dli_scovers in mutability the source of his poetic energy and becomes the shaper of his own image. In this play the imagination is the force which precipates the experience which initially it had only envisaged. In Synge's unfinished work Deidre of the Sorrows, the legend, and its re-creation in terms of the inevitabilities of the natural world, provide the heroine with the promise of eternal youth. Through her perfect commitment to her destiny, Deidre exalts even fear and folly and the ignominy of death, since they form one part of an imaginatively perceived pattern of existence. ~ynge'slast tragedy includes within its vision the triumphant assertion of the imaginative alternative in the face of the "untidy death", which is its consequence. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 I1 . THE PATTERNS OF LOSS ...... 10 I11 . THE IMAGINATIVE ALTERNATIVE ...... 39 IV. THE BREAKING OF THE CIRCLE ...... 78

V . THE PERFECT COMMITMENT .....me...... 102 VI. CONCLUSION ...... 135 WORKS CONSULTED ...... 136 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The main purpose of this thesis is to provide an alternative to the categorical interpretation of the plays of John Millington Synge that defines their development as directed by the conflict between illusion and reality. The "dream world," and the "world of illusiont" have become key terms in the language of many critical approaches to Synge's work. The fullest application of this interpretation is given by Alan Price in Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama. He posits the thesis that, in order to come to a fuller under- standing of the playwright's genius, it is important to examine one aspect of his work: "This aspect is the tension between dream and actuality, and it is central in Synge. I, 1 Price's conclusion rests on the argument that the dream is one of escape from a mundane reality into a world which does not, and cannot, incorporate the harsher aspects of the natural world :

All the sympathetic characters in Synge's plays are driven by an impossible dream; each with a single-minded, intense, almost child-like longing to become 'a wonder', is continually reaching out for a finer and fuller life. Imagination is creative in each of them, and it gives them a vision of some good beyond the poverty or drabness or terror which surrounds them; towards that vision, that dream, they strive . . . . 2 I contend, on the other hand, that the movement of the plays is always towards a point where the most forceful characters, the artists of the imagination, recognize the illusive world as being not true but necessary, so that at this moment it becomes their own vital reality. Within the limitations which the cycle of destiny imposes on them they are free to make their "choice of lives," however bleak the alternatives may seem. Only their recognition of the savage moods of the natural world, together with their de- light in its beauty, makes the choice possible. Through encompassing the violence within their vision, they achieve a measure of freedom and invulnerability to external events and actions. The "choice of lives," consequently, is not between an oppressive or mundane reality and an illusive dream of happiness, but between accepting the reassurance of the rites of a routine existence and of an "Almighty God" whose will is interpreted by the priest, \ or of formulating their own life style from the richness of the imagination. I have called these self-formulated rites, the imaginative ~Zternative (for the sake of clarity, rather from a desire to categorize Synge's work) for they involve a recognition of the validity of the imagination to intensify and also to precipitate experience. In the vision to which the irreverent poets come at the end of the plays, the imagin- ation does not exalt or distort reality into the realm of illusion, but it transforms it into something more intense and widely significant, and enriches it by placing it in relationship with the past and the future. Synge had said that he looked on life "as only a play, a dream scened for

my single delectation. lt3 It is the dream quality within experience, rather than the escape from experience into the dream, which his plays celebrate. .In exploring the process by which Synge's heroes and heroines formulate their own imaginative rites, it is neces- sary to employ the term myth. I intend to apply it, in my thesis, to the characters' selection of the images and cadences which assure them of their significance and individ- uality in the context of a natural world which threatens to deny them both. The emphasis in plays such as Riders to the

Sea, and Deidre of the Sorrows, is not so much on the mythic proportions of the struggle or on the destiny which has already been foretold in legend (although these aspects are undeniably present and enrich our sense of the implications of the conflict) but the concern is always with the particular and personal creation of the myth. In an important sense, it is what Deidre creates from the legend rather than the legend's direction of Dedre's fate, that precipitates the action of the play. The movement of Synge's plays therefore, depends heavily on the potential of language to provide the characters 4 with the images for the transformation of themselves and the world around them. The imaginative inclusiveness they attain indicates their capacity to intensify and extend the significance of their experience in terms of the natural, supernatural, pagan and animal worlds. The imagination becomes the force which envisages a human connection with the more vivid and evocative life of these worlds, and becomes too the means of defining the qualities of the altern- atives which are open to the individual within the circle of mutability.( The responses to the moods and movements of the natural world, the chief source of their inspiration, con- stitute a poetic and dramatic projection of the longing and the rage which the rituals of an over-organized and traditionalized society only frustrate. In his Autobiography, Synge defines explicitly the unsophistication of the relationship of the Irish peasant (and of all primitive societies) to their natural environment, and the kind of fulfillment they seek within it:

I think the consciousness of beauty is awakened in persons as in peoples by a prolonged desire . . . . Perhaps the modern feeling for the beauty of nature as a particular quality--an expression of divine ecstasy rather than a mere decoration of the world-- arose when men began to look on everything about them with the unsatisfied longing which has its proper analogue in puberty . . . . The feeling of primitive people is still everywhere the feeling of the child; an adoration that has never been learned or wished to admire its divinity. 5 5

In Synge's plays, the individual establishes the growing significance of his own personality, not through the con- scious contemplation of the self but through the capacity to evoke the beauty of the world external to the self, through a selection of those images which directly realize the connection between the human and the natural. The experience of the poet-peasants is enriched initially through this imaginative participation in the events of the natural world. However, in the terms which the plays set up, their imaginations must extend to include the destructive processes of nature so that they come to a "natural understanding" of the mortality of their own flesh. It is not until they admit their animal state that they achieve that alignment with the natural world which can provide them with the terms and the rites for their self-assertion, and for the trans- lation of the image into its appropriate action. The poetic faculty does not provide them with a purely lyrical re- assurance of the existence of beauty in the world but awakens

them to the knowledge of all their senses; in the cadences and the imagery of the language of characters such as Deidre

and Christy, the movement towards an exaltation of the personality is kept in constant touch with a sense of the

animal indignity of death.

The "natural understanding" of the inevitable pro-

cesses of life is placed in direct antithesis with the rituals

of church and cottage and shebeen, which can provide only a doubtful assurance of a well-ordered universe. Towards the end of his life Synge wrote the following passage in one of his notebooks:

The religious art is a thing of the past only--a vain and foolish regret--and its place has been taken by our quite modern feeling for the beauty and the mystery (of) nature, an emotion that has gradually risen up as religion in the dogmatic sense has gradually died. Our pilgrimages are not to Canterbury or Jerusalem, but to Killarney and Cumberland and the Alps. 6

The mystical closeness to nature, which informs the imagistic structure of the plays and determines the development of the characters, has been dealt with in some detail by Una Ellis-Fermor in The Irish Dramatic Movement. She connects Synge's "nature mysticism" with the feeling that is expressed in ancient Irish poetry, particularly in those poems which have been translated by Kuno Meyert7 where there is the same "familiar intimacy with nature, particularly that phase which sees animals and men as creatures separated by no barrier, sharing their experience and their sympathy . . . ." However, she does not define this experience as being essentially Irish:

. . . it is shared at different points by nature poets of all time. It is an essential part of Synge's objective and dramatic nature that he makes no philosophic inferences from it. Indeed it is . . . the particular characteristic of Synge that he is at once a nature-mystic and a dramatist, that the two things are one in him as in no other poet before him, that each that is re- vealed in terms of the other, nature in terms of man's character, thought and fate, and man himself in great part in terms of his relations with nature. 8 7 Synge, the nature-poet and dramatist, gave the central roles in his plays to the nature-poets who themselves rarely draw philosophic inferences from their experience of the natural world, for their understanding of its necessities is implicit in the very concrete evocativeness of their language. The language of the plays possesses for us, the literary audience, the rich suggestiveness of poetry. That Synge intended his work for a literary audience seems clear from a letter he wrote to Frank Fay in which he expressed his ideals for the Irish dramatic movement:

. . . most of our recent London critics have spoken well of the two plays we gave them that were per- fectly obvious--1 mean 'Riders to the Sea' and the 'Pot of Broth', but most of them failed to grasp 'Semcha~'{Pests' 'The Ri~g's Threshslii') an2 'The Shadow of the Glen', both of which demand an in- tellectual effort to make them comprehensible, or at least a repeated hearing . . . . The whole inter- est of our movement is that our little plays try to be literature first--i.e. to be personal, sincere, and beautiful--and drama afterwards. 9

In exploring Synge's plays as poetic dramas and taking into account the complex interaction of imagery and cadence, it becomes apparent that it is too great a simplification to call his characters' imaginative realization of themselves in terms of the natural world4 the escape into the world of illusion, It represents a journey to a more selective and self-willed participation in events, since they must perceive the significant implications of their experience of the exter- nal world through the creative richness of their own imaginations. FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER I

'~lan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama, (London, Methuen, 19611, p. 1.

2~lanPrice, 9.-cit., p. 216. In a later passage, Price defines the causes of the dream's defeat: "The reason for this defeat of dream and spirit by the inhumanity of the universe and time is that all Synge's figures are very closely linked to the world around them. There is little that is ideal or transcendent in their dreams, they have no religious vision of a new Jerusalem nor any political vision of an earthly Utopia; they are truly children of Nature and the love and happiness and beauty of which they dream is in terms of this world, and particularly of the natural world, here and now . . . . But Nature is not God; she may lead to God and she is a source of loveliness and solace for human beings but she is also harsh and ugly, and Synge's figures in staking all on her are bound to lose in the end . . . . [p. 2171." Such an interpretation underestimates the 'other worldnessl of the nature experience in Synge's plays, by positing a higher spiritual power who alone can endow life with the "ideal or transcendent." As I shall attempt to show in the following chapters of my thesis, Synge's central characters have to be broken by the harsher forces of nature ia urcler iilcii; these more savage rhythms may be incorporated into their final imaginative vision. In the terms which the plays give us, "love and happiness and beauty," can only be perpetuated when the character comes to a mature aware- ness of all the forces which threaten them. Hugh I'A. Fausset, in an essay entitled "Synge and Tragedy," (The- Fortnightly Review, 1924), expresses an even more extreme view of Synge's characters as distinctly ethereal dreamers: " . . . they stand as it were, for the grace of Nature, and like Nature's own flowers they are mangled and tossed aside, but not before they have expressed the tragedy of illusions shattered by realism, of beauty buried in the mire from which it aspired . . . . [p. 2661 .I1

3~assagecited by Anne Saddlemyer , in -The World --of W.B. Yeats, ed. Robin Skelton and Anne Saddlemyer, (1965; rev. ed. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1967), p. 208.

40wen Barfield, in a work entitled Poetic Diction, (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), discusses the qualities of metaphor- ical description in the language of primitive man. Although Synge's characters employ simile rather than metaphor, there is a very clear sense in which their references to the natural world form an overall Footnotes (continued) is a metaphor for the projection of human emotions. Mr. Bar- field's comments are therefore helpful in clarifying the way in which the poetic faculty "reveals" the external world: "Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects and feelings or ideas which it is the function of poetry to reveal. These relations exist indepen- dently, not indeed of Thought, but of any individual thinker . . . . The language of primitive man reports them as direct perceptual experience. The speaker has observed a unity, and is not therefore himself conscious of relation. But we, in the development of consciousness, have lost the power to see this one as one . . . ." [pp. 86-78] Synge warned his early critics not to discount the 'serious sides' of his comedies; I would suggest that this view of the Irish dialect as a poetic language, still capable because of its un-selfconsciousness of realizing these natural re- lationships, is one of the serious propositions of his work.

5~.~.Synge, "Collected Works 11; Prose," ed. Alan Price, (London, Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 13.

7~issFermor cites the titles of these poems -- "King and Hermit, " "Summer has Come, " "Arrantu "The Blackbird, I' etc. She points out the similarity between the awareness of the violence and remorseless bleakness of nature which such poems express, and the spirit which informs Synge's portrayal of nature.

*~naEllis-fermor, "The Irish Dramatic ~ovement," (1939; rept. London, Methuen, l964), p. 174.

'~etter from J.M. Synge to Frank fay, dated April 4, 1904. THE PATTERNS OF LOSS

W.B. Yeats remembers how Synge once said to him, "Is not this style born out of the shock of new material?" It is certain that this was a rhetorical question, for Synge had found the focus for his own dramatic style when he began his most unsentimental love affair with the Aran islands.

In exchange for the abstract theorizing, the melancholy and decadence of his European studies he discovered a way of life which was affected only by the ideologies which the rocks and the sea dictated.' What he found there was a people whose only choice was between transforming the inevit- ability of death by sea into a significant pattern of loss, or of growing old on an island which denied them youth, just as the sea denied them age. In his portrayal of a family caught between these two alternatives, Synge does present us with a particular image of the mythical struggle against the inevitable rhythms of life. But the energy in the play comes from another struggle which is enacted in its language: the attempt to incorporate the rhythms and demands of a hostile natural world into the human cycle, so that that cycle might be given a more significant pattern, and the characters who suffer its fall may find a more vital defin- ition of their loss. The pagan, the supernatural, and 11 finally the Catholic worlds, which are all present in the language of the play, offer the rituals and the rites to achieve this definition. They also offer the imaginative outlet which alone can make of despair a regenerative force.

In relation to Synge9s more mature plays, the language of Riders to the Sea is not rich in imagery. The extreme starkness of the environment of the islanders limits the range of imaginative reference in their speeches. But the fact that only a very few images dominate the talk, gives to those few an evocative power which links speech to speech and reinforces our sense of the movement of the play as being reiteration with variations, a pattern which its theme and structure complement. The "green sea" with the

"black hags" flying above it, filters through the walls of the cottage through the references constantly made to it in the speeches of the characters. The door of the hut which swings shut in the wind, does not allow us any view of the physical landscape of the island, but as the play progresses the sea becomes more ominous in its "felt presence" within the walls. In the opening lines it is described by Nora as being "middling bad," but by the end of the play, Maurya and the keening women refer to "the great surf on the white rocks," and the crashing roar of the surf in the east and the surf in the west as they meet. The sea seems to inspire a more imaginative response in the watchers as it becomes more demonic. The "organization" of the lives and speech patterns of the Aran fishermen into dramatic form was no easy operation

for Synge. His moulding of nature into an art form which would yet retain the effect of nature required painstaking

effort. There are many drafts of the play in existence which show the meticulous care with which he selected each word

and cadence. They reveal a movement in his work always

towards a verbal economy which is characteristic of the finest

poetry. By examining a brief example from the early version of the play it is possible to see his concern with making

the words "run". In his earliest draft, Patch, who is to

become Bartley in the final version, takes his leave in these

words :

I'ii nave time now 12 I go quickly. I'll ride down on the mare and the other horses will follow me. 2

This is re-organized into:

I must go now quickly. I'll ride down on the red mare, and the grey pony'll run behind me.. 3

In the first version, the words merely state the facts of

the situation, and the structure of the dialogue overwhelms

any significance there might be in the content. The second version, however, has the rhythms of poetry while still

maintaining the appearance of natural expression. The awkward "if" clause has been eliminated and the emphasis is now placed on the "must", as if Bartley had an immediate commitment to fulfill with the sea. There is another important alteration in the fact that he is now made to define the colour of the ponies, for it is these colours which are to play such a significant part in ~aurya'svision. It was through this kind of alteration that Synge was able to refine the functional statement of the dialect into a poetic medium, so that words echo each other and foreshadow events. Even in the brief extract I have quoted it is appar- ent that the emphasis of Bartley's language is on the verbs. He has little time for metaphors in his coming and going and riding. Synge's choice of "run," instead of the more lethargic "follow," gives a faster movement to the speech at the same time as it endows the grey pony with its own volition. It is always towards a more perfect fusion of medium and theme that Synge moves in his refinement on the first draft of the play. The starkest of languages has to be made to speak through all its voices, and Synge utilizes every pause and every modulation of tone. 4 The play's energy stems from a sifting of the differing attitudes to this last fatal ride to the sea. And as the attitudes vary, so the language enacts the degree of fear, resistance or acceptance in each character. The language of the women is freer in its use of imagery 14

than is Bartley's, for their whole lives revolve around the "watching out" and the waiting to hear that the inevitable has happened. However, the images that they use in their

talk are restricted to their awareness of the presence of the sea, so that these very images become more like the

bleak "foci" of their fear rather than the moments when

their language is heightened. It is on commonplace words

that they rely to the greatest extent to keep their fear at some distance. But in the context of the play, these

common-places become uncommon, for they are made taut by

the emotion which impels the characters to express them- selves in this way.

When the weather is talked about in Riders to the

Sea it is no polite subject of conversation. It is inti- mately connected with the rhythms of the sea and therefore with the rhythms of their lives. Nora and Cathleen discuss

conditions before Bartley sets out for the horse fair in Connemara:

Cathleen: Is the sea bad by the white rocks, Nora? Nora: Middling bad, God help us. There's a great roaring in the west, and it's worse it'll be getting when the tide's turned to the wind. tpp* 3-41

"Middling bad," the absurd, but so definitive phrase of peasant speech, requires no connecting expression to link it

to "God help us." In lesser things too the weather is a condition for the way life can be carried on. This is the way Bartley gives his last instructions to Nora and Cathleen:

If the west wind holds with the last bit of the moon let you and Nora get up weed enough for another cock for the kelp. [p. 51

The moon and the west wind are not nature images which are used in their speeches to make their talk vivid, but are themselves some of the hard conditions of these lives. There is no time to respond to the nature experience imaginatively as Deidre and Christy are to do. In this play Synge is portraying Nautre solely in its destructive mood, and the only compensations that are drawn from it are extracted by ritual rather than by lyricism. Part of the comfort for the islanders seems to stern from the very act of naming these oppressive natural forces which overwhelm them. Synge found another medium for the dramatization of emotions which are suggested rather than stated, by showing the way in which inanimate objects were considered by the islanders as almost an extension of the personality of the

owners. In his collection of essays, entitled The Aran Islanders, he comments on the individual quality of each article:

Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of mediaeval life. The curaghs and spinning wheels, the tiny wooden barrels that are still used in the place of earthenware, the homemade cradles, churns, and baskets, are all full of individuality, and being made from materials that are common here, yet to some extent peculiar to the island, they seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them. 5

His awareness of the significance which was attached to these articles enabled Synge to make them very concrete symbols of the way in which life is constantly permeated by death in the islanders' life cycle. In Deidre of the Sorrows, he is able to make the imagery itself create a sense of tragic foreboding and ironically darken Deidre and Naisi's moments of clear-eyed happiness. But in Riders to the Sea, life and death are merged in this much more concrete and physical way as we see the way in which the living and the dead share their p~~cs~i~i-is.i4ic;ildeif~ stic~ becomes Maurya's walking stick, and this simple transference of objects becomes significant of the way in which the young bequeath their possessions to the old on this island. Bartley, about to make his fateful journey to the sea, puts on Michael's shirt because his own is "wet and heavy with the salt in it."

This shirt too is soon to be wet and heavy. The rope which was to lower Michael's coffin into the grave, now acts as

Bartley's halter for the pony. It seems ominously as if the dead help those about to die to join them in the grave,

a feeling which is reinforced by the fact that it is

Michael's pony that knocks Bartley into the surf and Maurya 17

swears that she saw Michael riding it. It is Synge's power to give an uncommon intensity to the commonplace world, which is one of the major strengths of the play. The concentration by the main characters on details

and practicalities appears as a protective barrier against

the sense they all share of the inevitable outcome of this

last expedition to the sea. Bartley argues in terms of practical necessity when he insists that he should make the

journey, and the only way Maurya has to answer him is through

thinking of greater practicalities. She demands to know

How Nora will get a good price for the pig with the black feet, and how they will manage when there is no man to make

the coffin for Michael. Through the concerns which each

expresses at this particular moment, it becomes apparent that there is a significant difference between the way Maurya thinks about Michael's death and Bartley's reaction to it.

Maurya thinks of the way they will bury him while Bartley is concerned about the adjustments that will have to be made

in the life continuing after him, for there will only be

one man left to manage the kelp. Maurya is obviously pre-

possessed with the death ritual, for it is she who must perform it endlessly, not the men who choose to go to the

sea and so participate in it only once. In her final

desperate plea, however, she almost abandons practicalities

when she cries:

What way will I live and the girls with me, and I an old woman looking for the grave? [p. 63 This has the richness of ambiguity for it talks through the functional but appears to include the emotional. It has some of the passion of Deidre's exclamation after Naisi's death :

To what place would I go away from Naisi? What are the woods without Naisi, or the seashore? 1111. 2083

Again and again in Synge's plays, the women ask "What way would I live?" Nora Burke, in The Shadow of the Glen, asks the question twice, the first time in order to justify her choice of security:

What way would I live and I an old woman if I didn't marry a man with a bit of farm, and cows on it, and sheep on the back hills? [p. 251

But in her final question, she demands a different interpre- tation for "live":

What way would a woman live in a lonesome place the like of this place, and she not making a talk with the men passing? [p. 291

Maurya's last plea to Bartley includes both senses, the emo- tional need of the mother for her one remaining son and the practical need to provide for the family's existence. How- ever, she does not seem to be aware that Bartley could ask the same question: what way would he live if he did not go down to the sea, for coffin-making hardly constitutes a vital mode of existence. Even in this, the most fatalistic of Synge's plays, there is a "choice of lives" for the young. Nora and Cathleen are more capable of accepting the hard conditions imposed on youth than is their mother, and they are able to respond to Bartley's attempt to control the grief which is occasioned by his departure by a concen- tration on the details of preparation. In this scene there is the perfect dramatic portrayal of characters who are unable to make their grief articulate. This control of emotions through the rituals of day to day routine makes the moments of breaking more powerful. Bartley hesitates over his leave-taking; standing in the doorway he lengthens out the time of his absence further and further:

. . . and you'll see me coming again in two days, or in three days, or maybe in four days if the wind is bad. [p. 61

His sisters criticize Maurya's continual fretting, for her vociferously uttered complaints about the darkness of the future only make the present moment more unbearable. Cathleen cries :

Isn't it sorrow enough is on every one in this house without you sending him out with an un- lucky word behind him, and a hard word in his ear? [p. 61

But when the girls are alone and have time to count the stitches of the stocking and so ascertain whether it comes from the body of their dead brother, their control breaks for a short while. Michael is no longer an hypothetical floating body for they have before them very intimate means of identification. Nora remembers the stitches she had dropped when she was knitting the stocking, and at this moment the sea seems to mock even their domesticity. Nora exclaims against the irreverence it shows towards its adversaries:

And isn't it a pitiful thing when there is nothing left of a man who was a great rower and fisher, but a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking? tp* 91

This is more powerful than any wild laments, for the speech focusses on a way of representing the magnitude of their

loss by concentrating on the ludicrous nature of what remains behind. The rhythms of the talk of Nora and Cathleen, as well as the very functional matters with which it is concerned, also constitute the tragic medium for conveying their sorrow and their fear. They do not elaborate on their emotions for the danger is an accepted fact between them; but this very abruptness of their dialogue, the questions which are mostly rhetorical because they have already been answered in their own minds, as well as the anecdotal quality of their talk, perfectly convey their apprehensions. The moments when they identify ~ichael'sclothing exemplify this: Cathleen: Give me a knife, Nora, the string's perished with the salt water, and there's a black knot on it you wouldn't loosen in a week.

Nora: I've heard tell it was a long way to Donegal.

Cathleen: It is surely. There was a man in here a while ago--the man sold us that knife --and he said if you set off walking from the rocks beyond, it would be in seven days you'd be in Donegal. Nora: And what time would a man take, and he floating? [p. 81

All the things left unsaid here give what is said its partic- ular power. The speech that Synge found on the Aran islands was already pared down to its bare essentials, and in the language of Nora and Cathleen even the elaborations which are made are tersely compressed. This is apparent in

Cathleen's brief indication of which man she is talking about,

"the man sold us that knife," when the seemingly irrelevant detail in the speech indicates their desire to postpone the moment of certainty a little longer. Padraic Colum responds to this quality in the scene in a letter he wrote to Synge praising the play. He points out that this dialogue between the sisters should be played with great intensity, for the words are:

. . .commonplaces, people would use that they might keep in the commonplace world a little longer, for the sense of tragedy is upon them. 6 22 In the expression of grief after the body is defin- itely identified as Michael's, however, the language of Nora and Cathleen becomes freer and more flexible as the power of the sea is now reflected directly in their imagery:

Ah, Nora, isn't a bitter thing to think of him floating that way to the far north, and no one to keen him but the black hags that do be flying on the sea. [p. 91

It is important that the focus of the language is on the mourning; the assonantal inflections of the language of these speeches are to culminate at the end of the play in the in- articulate lamenting of the "caoine," which becomes finally the only appropriate response to the inarticulate voice of the sea. Part of Cathleen's grief is centred in the fact that there will be no one to mourn her brother, for the action of the play revolves around the significance which is attached to the rites of burial. The girls' awareness of the waste and pity of the lives of the fishermen makes their acceptance of these rituals something much harder won. Although the language of the functional world acts at least as one linguistic barrier against the demands of the sea, its effectiveness begins to weaken as the play progresses. The language of the women begins now to place their protagonist in worlds other than the natural. As they attempt to express the power of the sea over their lives a pattern of imagery emerges which connects it with the pagan, the mythical and the supernatural; and these worlds provide the imaginative colouring which can transform, t~

some extent, the bleakness of the cycle of loss. One part of this pattern is made manifest in the

"black hags", which brood over the play and over the deaths

of the menfolk. In the first version of Riders to the Sea,

the cormorants were called the "black birdsr" but in his revisions Synge weights the play more heavily towards the mythical and the supernatural. In the first version too

the cormorants had a functional part to play, for they were instrumental in the death of Patch as it is described by one

of the men who bear in his body:

They were going after the hooker and he and another man leaned out to hit at them black birds wliil his oar, and when he did it a wave came behind them and upset them and it took Patch and washed him back by the rocks and he was drowned there. [p. 2481

The picture is too realistic and limited in its inference,

for the black birds remain black birds despite the obvious intention to make them emblems of death. In detaching them

from the actual incident of Bartley's death, as Synge does

in the final version, and transforming them into "black

hags," he gives them a more all pervasive importance. By providing them with a more distant sky he makes them more

symbolically powerful, for they become almost the embodiment

of pagan deities. 24 In his study of the play, Denis Donoghue points out that one of the main tensions in the play is the one between the pagan and the Catholic worlds.' It is the pagan world which is most visually present in the language of the characters, for it has so many visual manifestations. Its chief manifestation, the sea, encircles them and demands an answer to its challenge; the black cormorants fly overhead; they know of the "black rocks" in the north through which the dead bodies float, following their ritual journey which the sea will now assist. Robin Skelton comments on the signifi- cance of the constant references to the points of the compass in the play:

The points of the compass are used to emphasize the island nature of the locale, but also for other reasons. Michael has been found in 'the far North', the wind is 'rising in the south and west'. In the east, however, where the mainland lies, there may be hope for 'the tide's turning at the green head, and the hooker's tacking from the east' and it is from this direction that Maurya believes Michael's body will come, rather than from the North. This emphasis upon the dominance of the sea makes the sea itself a power, and a god. 8

The very nature of death by sea, the fact that a man can disappear without trace, or that he can be disfigured so that:

. . . it's hard set his own mother would be to say what man was in it. [p. 121 reinforces the suggestion of the sea as a supernatural power. Invocations to the "Almighty God" and his mercy fade before have their importance at the close of the action, for they offer at least the promise of the "deep grave" and some sort of end to suffering.

It is Maurya who appears most open to the pagan and supernatural worlds because her false hope that Bartley will not go down to the sea makes her vulnerable. She is horrified by her ghostly vision of Michael riding the pony which is following Bartley. She describes it as being the

"fearfullest thing," to be remembered along with the time

"Bride Dara seen the dead man with the child in his arms." In this way Barley's death is linked in Maurya's language with the supernatural. It almost seems as if the mischievous

Shee are at work, for they were believed to steal the human children, having first branded them or shown them in the company of dead spirits. Yet despite the fear which the supernatural inspires, it does enable the characters to endow an essentially unheroic death with more meaning as well as more terror.

In her description of the deaths of her sons, Maurya's language takes on an hallucinatory quality:

There was Sheamus and his father, and his own father again, were lost in a dark night, and not a stick or sign was seen of them when the sun went up. There was Patch after was drowned out of a curagh that turned over. I was sitting here with Bartley, and he a baby, lying on my two knees, and I seen two women, and three women, and four women coming in, and they crossing themselves, and not saying a word. I looked out then, and there were men coming after them, and they holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it--it was a dry day, Nora--and leaving a track to the door. [p. 111

There is a "see-saw" emphasis on number here, "two women, and three women and four women coming in," which echoes the rhythms of the ballad. There is a concentration too on getting the details of the picture right, and we are made aware of the awful clarity of Maurya's memory, "it was a dry day, Nora . . . ," which makes horrific the vagueness of the "thing" in the red sail. Maurya's vision of the past is now acted out again as Bartley's body is carried in, heralded by

Nora's words which echo her mother's like the chorus of a ballad:

They're carrying a thing among them and there's water dripping out of it and leaving a track by the big stones. [p. 121

Maurya herself no longer remembers which son they are bring- ing in, "is it Patch, or Michael, or what is it at all?" [p. 111 The deaths of all her menfolk find their focus in this moment. There is a strange sense in which there is no history on the island, for the past is constantly being re- enacted in the present and gives its dark colouring to the

future. Maurya seeks to seize the present moment and per- petuate it in the future, but the present is already past before she has any time to live it in any active sense. It is Maurya's daughters who seem to partake of an age-old wisdom, while their mother complains constantly

against the inevitable. It is not till the tremendous re-

lease of her last speeches that she reaches a stage of resignation to the rhythms of the sea. There is a formal,

controlled quality about her grief, as she carries out the Catholic rituals for the dead. She sprinkles the body with

the last of the Holy water and lays the empty cup upon it,

emblem of the fact that she has now no more grief or keening r left for her sons. There is a merging of all the past deaths

into one, as she paradoxically celebrates this ultimate

loss :

It's a great rest I'll have now, and great sleep- ing in the long nights after Samhain, if its only h4& -F ..-&,=-I --.. - Mrb W~~ LAVUL wc dij liave iw edt, and maybe fish that would be stinking. [p. 131

The wet flour and the fish represent part of the way Maurya will live now. She resigns her part in the life and death

rituals of going down to the sea, and there is an awareness in her final speeches that her husbands and sons have ful- filled their destinies, a fact which she can now passively

recognize:

Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely . . . . What more can we want than that? . . . No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied. [p. 141 It is the abstract "grace of God" which is the potent influence in Maurya's final speeches. The world of the pagan deity and the "black hags ," seems to recede, and there is the comfort of knowing that even in the "far North

Michael will receive a "clean burial." Now that there is nothing more to lose Maurya seems to be in sympathy with the

moods of the sea. It is significant that she can now bless

Bartley while before she had stumbled over the words. She

relates earlier in the play how she was struck by a strange

I dumbness as he went by:

Bartley came-first on the red mare; and I tried to say 'God speed you1, but something choked the words in my throat. He went by quickly; and 'the blessing of God on you1, says he, and I could say nothing. I looked up then, and I crying, at the grey pony, and there was Michael upon it-- with fine clothes on him, and new shoes on his feet. [p. 101

Maurya, who is so full of words throughout the play, "could

say nothing" at this crucial moment. It is as if Bartley

had already entered a world in which she had no part; she

could not hold him with words before he left the cottage, and he is even further away from her on this journey. But in her final speeches we are conscious that, like Christy

Mahon and Deidre, she has come to a stage where she is able

to bless all the forces which caused her suffering. She

has reached a point where it is doubtful if she counts her- self amongst those "left living in the worldIt8 and is able to accept dispassionately the last revolution of the cycle in which she is involved. Throughout the play, Maurya's dream has been to hold back the young from the sea, to preserve the unity of the

family, and to keep her last son within the slender security of the commonplace world. This, by its very nature is a negative dream, which does not answer the sea in its own voice. Nora and Cathleen are better able to answer it be-

cause they accept the ride to the sea as a willed necessity. The journey to the sea, in fact, becomes equated in the

language of the play with "the life of a young man," [p. 61

and much of the tragic energy of the action stems from the tension between those who are able to accept this, and

Maurya, whose simple desire is that life, whatever its quality, should continue. There is a struggle, not between the losers and the agent of their loss, but within the ranks of the losers themselves. Bartley, Nora and Cathleen know how to lose because they demand more than a functional inter- pretation for "live." There is a deeper desire behind Bartley's going to the horse fair in Connemara than the

purely practical consideration that there won't be another

one for an inconveniently long time. Denis Donoghue stresses this in his essay on the play by referring to a passage from

Suzanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key: Men who follow the sea have often a deep love for that hard life, which no catalogue of its practical virutes can account for. But in their dangerous calling they feel secure . . . . Waters and ships, heaven and storm and harbour, somehow contain the symbols through which they see meaning and sense in the world, a justification as we call it of trouble, a unified conception of life whereby it can be rationally lived. 9

Mr. Donoghue goes on to comment:

. . . to stay at home, to side with Maurya would be for Bartley the yielding up of the sources of meaningful living. 10

This seems an apposite and illuminating comment, for in the terms which the play sets up there is no life for Bartley on the bleak island. The only other men who appear in the play are the silent ones who bear in the dead body, and the old man who is to make the coffin. It is through the portrayal of this struggle to impose a meaningful pattern on events that Synge avoids informing his image of the islanders' life style with a purely Greek spirit of inevitability. Stephen

Mackenna's comment seems lust when he says it is "Gaellic-

Greek, of the kind(1) have always thought should come out of

Ireland. ,I 11

Despite the inerradicable darkness of the image with which Synge presents us therefore, his power to convey the uniqueness of the islanders' response to the inevitability of the ride to the sea brings us close to the characters, despite thek.fact that they only seem to draw breath between

each crash of the waves. The rhythm of the play never rises 31

and falls as it does in The PZayboy of the Western World, but its whole movement seems to follow the withdrawing ebb tide which only grates in passing on the pebbles of resistance which are offered it. But when Syngets focus turns from the inevitability of the process to the ways in which witness is born to the inevitability, he achieves that quality of artistic formality which moves our admiration, rather than our despair. The artistic formality derives from his dramatiz- ation of the convergence of the rituals of four worlds in the consciousness of the islanders, the human, the natural, the Catholic and the pagan. Each of them offers a way of imposing some sort of meaningful pattern on a meaningless and essentially unheroic sacrifice of life; and the imagery and cadence of the language of each character enacts before us the extent to which they are orientated to each world.

Bartley, who is to be the almost active participant in the events, is essentially concerned with the functional, for the language of the other worlds is orientated towards the rituals of mourning for which he has no time. The hardness of his control is shown to be broken momentarily when the pauses in the cadences of his speech, as he leaves the shelter of the cottage, lengthen out further and further. This hesitancy in the rhythm seems to make articulate his own awareness of his "unfunctional" determination to reject the island security for the sea danger, which at least provides terms against which he may define his youth. Nora

and Cathleen speak in terms of everyday practicalities but their language is also coloured by the rituals of the Catholic, pagan, and supernatural worlds, for they are the

mourners who must seek the sources of significance outside

the event itself. They have yet to complete the cycle of

loss in which they will lose their own sons. It is Maurya

who is the unaccepting witness at the ceremony, for in this

last losing she has to come to terms with all the past deaths of her menfolk. Discounting this past experience,

she seeks a11 ways of defiance, blaming the heavens and her

son, and the pagan powers, which seem to break the maternal

and the family influence. It is not until her final speeches

that her complaining is changed to an almost passionless

mourning :

They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me . . . . I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south . . . . 1'11 have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening . . . . It isn't that I haven't prayed for you Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn't that I haven't said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn't know what I'd be saying; but it's great rest I'll have now, and it's time surely. [p. 131

Here she moves towards a stage of contemplation where the past deaths become memory, and no longer actively dictate 33

the pattern of the life that is left to her in the future. 12 In the language of the women the pagan world seems to overshadow the other three for much of the brief space

that the play occupies, finally finding its expression in the "caione" . But the sea is not wholly a pagan deity in this drama. It is also the natural force which teaches the precious-

ness of the little it leaves behind. Maurya endows Bartley with heroic proporties:

If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only. [p* 51

Maurya desires life at all costs for the sea has taught her

I,,

its value. For Nora, Cathleen, and Bartley, however, the 1, ~eddicidtes the meaningful rituals of life even as lt dic-

tates the rituals of death. The play does not finally

resolve itself into an acceptance of any one of the rituals

which have been explored in its duration, for at the end,

although the Catholic world directs the actions of Maurya

as she performs the last ceremonies for her dead son, it is

the pagan despair of the "caione" which provides the

rhythmical background to these rites. The religious rituals,

however, do provide some sense of order in life and a refuge

from (or is it a reconciliation with?) death by sea. Robin Skelton emphasizes the desperation of the

characters in the play and the "unselectivityn of their imagin-

ative rites: He (~ynge)was . . . portraying a world in which people, insecure and desperate for help against the forces of death and the tyranny of the natural world, seized upon any belief or superstition that might give them comfort and help. That Maurya finds no comfort or hope for all her observances is the dark message of the play,- - which ends on a cry, not against God, but against the principle of Mortality. 13

Such a conclusion seems to me to ignore the language in which

the cry is expresses. For the cadences and the colours of the dialect in the play are nourished by the need to make

\ despair a place which is not only habitable but valuable, because it can define that which we possess as being possible to be lost in many ways. In the terms with which the play presents us, the overwhelming consciousness of the inevit-

ability of death demands the most intense assertion of the

personality of the characters. Bartley; Ncra 1n2 Cathlzm,

find in the catastrophe of death by sea a more fitting ex-

pression for "the life of a young man" than could be provided

by the bleak confines of the island. Maurya alone suffers the extremes of despair and progresses from pathos to contem-

plation. In her last speeches she reaches out towards all

the past deaths, and includes this final one in their number

till all are fused into memory; it is in her memory that death is given its formal, controlled pattern, so that the

play comes to rest in this sense of a measure of significant

order in existence. Riders to the Sea realizes T.S. Eliot's

ideal for poetic drama: We can never emulate music, because to arrive at the condition of music would be the annhilation of poetry, and especially of dramatic poetry. Never- theless I have before my eyes a kind of mirage of the perfection of verse drama, which would be a design of human action and of words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and of musical order . . . . To go as far in that direction as it is possible to go, without losing that contact with the ordinary everyday world with which the drama must come to terms, seems to me the proper aim of dramatic poetry. For it is ulti- mately the function of art, in imposing an incredible order upon ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness and recon- ciliation; and then leave us as Virgil left Dante, to proceed towards a region where that guide can avail us no longer. 14 FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER I1

l~homasR. Whitaker, in his introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'Playboy of the Western World', (New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1969)) points out that both his experimentation in his European stuhies, and his absorption with the dialect and the life style of the Aran islanders, were directed by the same impulse; the need to find a dramatic medium which would most perfectly provide him with a measure of 'heuristic self-projection'; "Two early 'imaginary portraits1--'Vita Becchia' and 'Etude Morbide' --indicate his understanding of romantic projection in art and life, as partly shaped by the styles of Huysmans, Pater and Wilde. The Aran Islands and the later travel-sketches are informed by a much quieter and more profound awareness of how the natural scene and its inhabitants may focus and articulate the impulses of the observer's own depths." [P. 81

'J.M. Synge, Collected Works 111, gen. ed. Robin Skelton, Plays 1, ed. Anne Saddlemyer (London, Oxford University Press, l968), p. 236.

University Press, 1969), p. 11. All subsequent references to this edition will be included in the text.

4 It is most appropriate, in fact, to talk about the rhythm of Synge's dialect and the movement of the play in directly musical terms. Anne Saddlemyer, in a chapter on Synge's aesthetic theories in The World of W.B. Yeats, (ed. R. Skelton and A. Saddlemyer 1965; rev. ed., University of Washington Press, 1967), cites an entry in one of his diaries during his first visit to Aran in 1898; "When the sun is covered six distinct and beautiful shades still blend in one another--the limestone, the sea leaden at my feet and with a steel tinge far away, the mountains on the coast of Clare and then the clouds transparent and opaque . . . no pictorial wording can express these movements peculiar to our humid insularity unknown in the more radiant South--today three delicious movements differ only from a symphony in that the finale is always the opening of a new design. There are these--the dim adagio in six tones, the presto of the quick colourless rain followed by a glorious allegro con brio where sun and clouds unite in brilliant joy." [p. 2101. This musical response to the locality finds expression in Riders to the Sea, but it is in his later plays that the finale, unlike the finale of the symphony, does provide us with "the opening of a new design". Footnotes (continued)

'~ohn Millington Synge, Plays, Poems and Prose, (1941; reprint- New York Dent, 1968), p. 254.

6~npublishedletter, dated 29, Feb. 1904, in the L.M. Wilson Collection, at Trinity College, Dublin, (presented November-December, 1958).

7~enisDonoghue, " 'Riders to the Sea' : a Study", Univer- sity Revue, Vol. 1, No. 5 (Summer, l955), p. 97.

'~obin Skelton, introd., to Riders to the Sea, Dolman Editions VIII, ed. R. Skelton (London, Oxford University Press, l969), p. 25.

'~uzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: a study in the symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, (~arvardand Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 288.

1•‹Donoghue, Riders to the Sea, 2.-cit., p. 99.

T.R. Henn, in his introduction and notes to The Plays and Poetry, (London, Methuen, 1963), explores the way in which the pathetic is communicated in such speeches of Maurya's: "The element of the pathetic in tragic communica- tion can be considered as among the minute particulars. It appears to deal with a type of response that is valuable as sensitizing certain accessible but superficial layers of emotion. As such, it may be thought to have two objects; the establishment of a rapid pitiful relationship with day to day or 'domestic experience', and the establishment of sympathetic links with the physical side of pity as perceived in day to day aspects of living." Referring specifically to the speech which begins "There was Sheamus and his father, and his own father again, were lost in a dark night, and not a stick or sign was seen of them when the sun went up . . . . I was sitting here with Bartley, and he a baby, lying on my two knees . . . ." [p. 111, he comments "The tragedy of the spirit is balanced against the tragedy of the body to remind us, whether in a mood of morbidity, cynicism or tenderness, of these antimonies. " [p. 123 ] - Footnotes (continued)

13pobin Skelton, introd. , to Dolman Edition of Riders to the Sea, 2.-cit., p. 31.

14~.S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama, (Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 43-44. CHAPTER I11

THE IMAGINATIVE ALTERNATIVE

After his portrayal of one family's attempts to find a positive acceptance of the limits which the sea imposed upon them, Synge found a new impetus for his imagination in his travels through the counties of Wicklow and West Kerry.

Here he was intrigued by the contrast between the apparently shapeless lives of the wayfarers who travelled the roads of this country, and the seemingly more secure lives of the dwellers in the cabins and shebeens. It is on the tramps and tinkers and beggers that Synge focusses, as he explores their capacity to survive "the oppression of the hills," and to exorcise their loneliness through an imaginative re- sponse to the natural world. Nature still sets its limits upon man in The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker's Wedding and

We22 of the Saints, but it is the wild irreverence for these

limits that the language of the plays celebrates. The rituals of the supernatural, the commonplace and the func- tional worlds, which gave colour and significance to the

Aran islanders' apparently meaningless cycle of loss, are

also in operation to vary and intensify the patterns of the

peasants of the west of Ireland. But for the central figures

in these plays ritual becomes something much more flexible, for their most energetic creed appears to be a response to all the rhythms of nature, so that they are able to meet her more brutal demands with an equal savagery. The "caoine" with which Maurya laments the deaths of all her sons, and which Synge describes as the expression of "the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island," is translated into highly articulate rage, as the mourners of his first play are replaced by Dionysiac revellers.

Two of the three qualities, austerity and stoicism, which

Synge himself defined as being necessary to great drama, were present in Riders to the Sea, but the third quality, which he said was ecstasy, finds its outlet in these later 2 plays.

It is from the varying attitudes towards the marriage ceremony, rather than to the funeral rites, that these plays derive much of their half-comic, half-tragic impetus. The restless women in The Shadow of the GZen, and The Tinker's

Wedding, seek to find in marriage the security which is the right of "any speckled female does be sleeping in the black hovels above and more significantly, the antidote to

"getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you, and the light of your eyes." [p. 293. Their awareness of the winter images which surround them, embodied in the human world in such figures as the senile Dan Burke, Peggy Cavanagh and Mary Byrne, and the reminders from the natural world that they will soon feel the cold night air in their own bones, makes more desperate their attempt to perpetuate the spring time through a marriage license and the blessing of the church.

In the terms which the plays set up, however, these rituals are seen as a dubious alternative to the inevitable processes of mutability for they do not constitute a coming to terms with its demands. The whole action of these dramas is centered finally in the imaginations of those characters who have evolved more personal and more natural rites in response to the patterns of seasonal and human change. The rhythms of their talk is informed always by the vitality of

their sensuous response to Nature. They become, in a sense, the Pied Pipers who encourage the characters caught between security and a desire for a more vivid life, towards the imaginative release which the wider horizons of the roads and ditches can offer.

But implicit in this freedom which they are to find

in the world outside the cabins, is the knowledge that the

Pied Piper and his followers are also subject to decay.

Sarah will move inevitably towards Mary's condition, and

Nora towards Peggy Cavanagh's. The important distinction is

that in choosing to follow the impulses of their own natures,

they will "not be thinking of it." A marriage license and

the shelter of the grey farm houses provide them with some sort of protection but cannot adequately counteract the psychic oppression of the hills. The characters who direct the action of the plays, therefore, are those who recognize that fear and loneliness are more humanly contestable when they are experienced in terms of a natural world which can offer a point of continual return to the regenerative images of spring. There are risks involved in abandoning the tenuous physical shelter, for men such as Patch Darcy, in The Shadow of the Glen, have been reduced by the mists that covered the glen to "a thing talking-queer talk, you wouldn't believe at all . . . . [p. 203 In this case, mutability has taken a more violent form, for the changes he undergoes range from the fine talker who whiled away some of Nora's hours, to the maniac in the fog, to the corpse on the hills where he had once been such a renowned herder. Such stories,related in the speeches of the characters, re-inforce our sense of the penalties they risk in their choice of an existence defined only by the patterns of the fine morning and the cold night. On the other side of the balance, however, is the image of Peggy Cavanagh and her falling hair, the represen- tative of the state to which youth and beauty are finally ground down. It is this state which Nora and Sarah fear above all, and it is only through a richlysensuous response to the natural world that they find some means of reconciling the two visions. Anne Saddlemyer comments in Synge and

Modern Comedu: For these strong, simple people, whose wisdom reaches back into the folk imagination of the past, and yet whose emotions are almost child- like in their spontaneity, Nature is the one dependable reality, in a world which restlessly hovers between the ecstasy of fulfillment and the tragedy of oblivion. 4

For these very flesh and blood Pied Pipers the possibilities of the ecstasy outweigh the passive world of security, where the patterns of life are dictated by the number of sheep a man has to his name, or the coming of "his holiness the bishop. " In The Shadow of the Glen, the focus is on the strain- ing after other realities rather than on "the ecstasy of fulfillment," which accompanies the characters1 recognition, in the later plays, of their own alignment with the animal as well as the natural world. Nora's language expresses all the melancholy which is the inevitable consequence of a mind which has too much time to brood over the bleakness of the future and the boredom and frustration of the present. The rhythms of her talk weigh nothing against nothing with a desolate awareness of inevitability. She welcomes the Tramp within her doors without trepidation, and dismisses his startled reactions to the sight of Dan's corpse with indifference: "It doesn't matter anyway, stranger, come in out of the rain." [p. 171 It is not humankind or human action which possesses the power to terrify her: I'm thinking many would be afeard, but I never knew what way I'd be afeard of beggar or bishop or any man of you at all. It's other things than the like of you, stranger, would make a person afeard. [p. 191

Later she tells the Tramp that even a dead body is company against the amorphous threats which wait outside in the mists that cover the glen.

We are aware that Nora is already existing in the world outside the cottage, at least in terms of fear, for only the stories of those who have ventured out into it, and her ever present awareness of its effect upon herself, produce some spark of animation in her speeches. Even her troublesome and senile husband acquires some measure of mystery when she places him in the mist-filled landscape outside :

He was an old man, and an odd man, stranger, and its always up on the hills he was, thinking thoughts in the dark mist. [p. 181

But each response to the humans who weakly animate her past and her present is finally negated with a phrase. She talks of her brief happiness with Darcy and then qualifies it with

"if it's ever happy we are, stranger." The Tramp's intrus- ion into the cottage is no intrusion, for there is "No offence in life, stranger," and her rage at Dan's accusations is swiftly deflated by her awareness of their shared pre- dicament--"Yet, if it is itself, Daniel Burke, who can help it at all . . . ." All her emotions are diluted by her awareness of their insignificance in the face of loneliness and old age. The rhythms and images of her speeches indicate that her final acceptance of the Tramp's invitation is an appropriate response to her predicament for it is taZking, not "a bit of a farm, and cows on it, and sheep on the back hills," that she wants. The Tramp alone, because of the flexibility of his response to the natural world, can open up for her the possibility that "a fine bit of talk," possesses its own validity, and can be the means of shaping the external world into a more intense and a more colourful reality. I

The imagery of her speeches, as I have pointed out, I is already orientated towards the natural world, but for a large part of the play's duration her evocation of nature serves to accentuate rather than to alleviate her gloom. She describes Peggy Cavanagh's transition from the woman who 1 had "the lightest hand at milking a cow that wouldn't be easy," to the old crone who now has:

. . . no teeth in her mouth, and no sense, and no more hair than you'd see on a bit of a hill and they after burning the furze from it. [p. 261

When she turns on Michael, as she realizes the inadequacy of what he offers her, nature again becomes a point of reference to make more vivid her perception of the coming of old age:

. . . and in a little while, I'm telling you, you'll be sitting up in your bed--the way himself was sitting--with a shake in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking out round you like an old bush where sheep do be leap- ing a gap. [p. 261 In her description of the death of Dan she also brought together the world of sheep and humankind:

. . he made a great lep, and let a great cry out of him, and stiffened himself out the like of a dead sheep. [p. 181

Her imagery, in fact, is limited to the mists and the rain and the herds of sheep which roam the glen, the world which she can see from the windows of the cottage but in which she does not participate in any active sense. Within the cottage the possibilities for love and anger are negated by her awareness of the "queer thing," which comes to all alike and contorts them into the form of animals.

It is not love, therefore, that the Tramp-poet offers

Nora when she decides to travel the roads with him, hnt his own more vital response to nature which can open up wider vistas beyond her own melancholy and grotesque images of a hostile natural world. We live through a complete seasonal cycle as he shows her what she will find with him:

. . . . We'll be going now, I'm telling you, and the time you'll be feeling the cold and the frost, and the great rain, and the sun again, and the south wind blowing in the glens, you'll not be sitting up on a wet ditch the way you're after sitting in this place, making yourself old with looking on each day and it passing you by. You'll be saying one time, 'It's a grand evening by the grace of God,' and another time, 'It's a wild night, God help us, but it'll pass surely' . . . . IP. 291 His imaginative response to nature takes into account the "wild night," because it is held in tension by the grand evening," and he opens up for her too the possibility of forgetting the human image of old age through an awareness of sounds that will obliterate the coughing of sheep:

Come along with me now, lady of the house, and it's not by blather you'll be hearing only, but you'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm, and it's not from the like of them you'll be hearing talk of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you, and the light of your eyes, but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there'll be no old fellow wheez- ing the like of a sick sheep close to your ear. [p. 291

He offers her participation in this more animated landscape through a sharing of his own poetic perceptions. There is no suggestion of any other facet to their relationship for, as they leave, they address each other with the same formality that they used when they first met; at the end of the play, they are still "stranger," and "lady of the house."

Ironically, it is Michael Dara and Dan who appear to have more human warmth between them as they turn to each other for comfort over a glass of porter.

The action comes to rest in a state of irresolution which surely reflects the ambiguity of all human experience; for the slow oblivion which the rituals of security provide possess valid possibilities for those characters who do not demand the risk-filled freedom which comes from their aban- donment. Synge is not asking us for a judgement on either alternative but our interest and sympathy must surely follow those who have chosen the wayfaring of the roads, the imaginative alternative, rather than settle with those who remain within the shelter of the cottage.

In The Tinker's Wedding, Synge's focus shifts to those who are already participating in the natural and animal worlds. There are no mists obscuring the landscape of this play, and the wider imagistic reference of the language reflects the more vivid persepctive of life viewed from the roadside and the ditch. Yet despite the more flexible rhythms of the tinkers' lives, Sarah's yearning is as great as Nora's, though expressed in angrier and more energetic terms. It is the spring time which initiates her "queer thoughts" of marriage to the man she has lived with and whose children she has born in their years on the roads.

Just as the mists over the glen set Nora brooding on her

loneliness, so the movements of the moon direct Sarah's thoughts toward acquiring the respectability which belongs

to the women who live in the cabins. But this sudden social consciousness in the tinker woman is soon shown to be cover-

ing a more urgent fear. In her first speeches, as she goads

the reluctant Michael into marriage, she dwells constantly on the title of the "Beauty of Balincree," which has been given to her by her admirers: . . . . Didn't you ever hear tell of the peelers followed me ten miles along the Glen Malure, and they talking love to me in the dark night, or of the children you'll meet coming from school and they saying one to the other, 'It's this day we seen Sarah Casey, the Beauty of Ballincree, a great sight surely.' [p. 371

It is already necessary for Sarah to remind Michael of her beauty, and it becomes clear that it is her fear that a time I will come when there will be no one "talking love to (me) in

the dark night," which causes her to want her relationship

I with Michael to be made more solid through the blessings of the Church.

Although Sarah's need to align herself with the rituals

of the Church is the force which precipitates the action of

the play, it is the talk of Mary Byrne which gives it its

impetus and definition. lt is she who responds most tully to

the patterns of the natural world, measuring the times when they should be thinking of love or drinking or work with refer-

ence to the spring time or the "grand morning," or the "rains

falling." Consequently, she can sympathize with Sarah's spring

time fever, but not with her remedy. Sarah is introducing.alien

rituals into the patterns of their existence, and Mary's great

travelling has brought her knowledge of their impotency:

. . . . Is it putting that ring on your finger will keep you from getting an aged woman and losing the fine face you have, or be easing your pains, when it's the grand ladies do be married in silk dresses, with rings of gold, that do pass any woman with their share of torment in the hour of birth, and do be paying the doctors in the city of Dublin a great price at that time, the like of what you'd pay for a good ass and a cart? [p. 501 50

Her speech brings into sharp contrast the gold ring and the ass and cart; the former is the very unfunctional symbol of the marriage ceremony, whereas the latter is the very flesh and blood representation of the tinkers1 world.

In Mary's speeches, animals are most intimately connected with the tinkers for they provide her with surer terms of reference than the humans who get such "queer notions" in their heads. She compares the perfection of the animal world with the imperfections of her own son:

You'll breed asses, I've heard them say, and poaching dogs, and horses'd go licking the wind, but it's a hard thing, God help me, to breed sense in a son. [p. 491

Animals also signify for her the "grand morning," which she can view from her vantage point in the ditch. The "cuckoos singing and crying out on the tops of the hills," as well as the "kind air," are her signals to wake, and also provide her with the promise of new energy. Against the animation of the fine morning, however, are get the sounds of the previous night, the "dogs barking and the bats squeaking," which intensify her awareness of her own forlorn and decrepid image. The animal world also demands that each stage of the natural cycle be recognized before there can be a return to the regenerative images of the spring time. Both Mary and Sarah are troubled in their different ways by the image of old age, but neither of them respond to it with the brooding melancholy which characterized the speech 51 of Nora Burke. Sarah rages, while Mary talks and sings her songs of "The night Larry was stretched." Mary possesses a measure of freedom in her knowledge that old age is the only unhallowed state to be feared so that there is no necessity to keep faith with any code other than that dictated by her own nature, while Sarah has the energy of her frustrations to propel her from moment to moment. Caught between these two imaginative women, Michael appears like a beast of burden, making cans, stealing chickens and harnessing the mule. But in the final scene he becomes once again the man who "fetched"

Sarah "a clout on the lug," on the slopes of Rathvanna, when she expressed perverse desires to return to her mother, and he expertly bundles the priest into the bog-hole beyond the ditch. It is clear that Michael is at home with action rather than with words. In the course of the play, the new word categories which Sarah's dabbling in the sphere of ceremonies and vow-takings have introduced into the tinkers' world emasculate his own control of the situation. Through his brutal treatment of the priest he re-asserts his dominance in his relationship with Sarah and his confidence in his own chaotic life style.

Much of the comedy of this drama of the roads results from the deflation of Sarah's romantic notions and occasional bouts of histrionics by old Mary's clear-sighted perception of what is valuable in their lives, and by Michael's highly unromantic notions of a woman's worth. In Mary's vivid language, a value system is set up where "drouth," rather than irreverence for the "Almighty God," can cause a man's destruc- tion. Ironically, the Almighty God figures more often in the

I language of the tinkers than in the speeches of the priest, for in their world he becomes an infinitely flexible spirit who can be called on in grief or rage or ecstasy.

The last scene of the play erupts into a brutality

which would have seemed more appropriate as the resolution of the essentially more melodramatic situation of The Shadow of the Glen, but there the fatalistic rhythms of Nora's talk

deflect the build up of dramatic energy. In The Tinker's

Wedding, Sarah's frustrations find their outlet in more asser-

tive rhythms and a wider spectrum of imagery. Her fear of

losing Michael when her beauty fades also gives an impetus

to the action, while Nora, who has not yet been taught by

nature that she has anything to lose, is guided only by her frustrations.

Before the release of energy in the final scene,

however, Sarah has to recognize her own position as a tinker-

woman, rather than an inhabitant of the cabins above the road.

The language of The Tinker's Wedding already shows Synge's

ability to utilize the tendency of the peasant dialect not only towards lyricism, but towards the self-exaggeration

through which a character can create a sense of his own sig-

nificance, and recognize his own implication with all the

forms of life that he can encompass within his imagery. So

it is, that when Sarah whines and whispers to the priest as , she tries to persuade him to accept the tin can as payment for the performance of the ceremony, she is reduced in stature

to a very unconvincing "Beauty of ~alincree,"who is only

capable of connecting old age with poverty:

It's two years we are getting that bit, your rever- ence, with our pence and our halfpence and an odd threepenny bit; and if you don't marry us now, him- self and the old woman, who has a great drouth, will be drinking it to-morrow in the fair, and then I won't be married any time, and I'll be saying till I'm an old woman: 'It's a cruel and wicked thing to be bred poor. ' [p. 391

The exaggeration is here, but the self-pity excludes Sarah

from an association of herself with any rich imagistic source.

Her last speeches contrast vividly with the self- effacement of her early speeches with the priest; here we

see her dramatizing her situation with all the splendour

which results from her rejection of the rituals which would

have forced her to limit her perceptions and her impulses:

There's the ring, holy father, to keep you minding of your oath until the end of time; for my heart's scalded with your fooling; and it'll be a long day till I go making talk of marriage or the like of that. [p. 561

She has regained the energy to assert the validity of the rituals of the tinkers' world, and threatens the priest with the consequences of informing the peelers about their

exploits: If you do, you'll be getting all the tinkers from Wicklow and Wexford, and the County Meath, to put up block tin in the place of glass to shield your windows where you do be looking out and blink- ing at the girls. It's hard set you'll be that time, I'm telling you, to fill the depth of your belly the long days of Lent; for we wouldn't leave a laying pullet in your yard at all. [p. 541

At this point there is a sense of the tinkers as a unified, though chaotic community, who have their own codes of love and work and revenge. Denis Donoghue, in his essay on the play, points out the importance of the tinkers' sense of community:

The tinkers as a tribe with their 'natural' life, form a self -reliant world, complete in itself, which offers no incentive to feelings of resentment, reaction or divergence from a higher more respectable norm. In fact, the whole action of the play derives from the 'unnatural' hankering of Sarah, one of the tribe, after such respectability . . . . 5

The alternative to the respectability of the wedding ceremony, is the "fooling" of the tinkers1 gold which is to take place at the fair of Clash. References to Clash or Ballinaclash echo through the play, and the activities of drinking and festivity which it promises provide perhaps the Dionysiac answer to the movements of the moon and coming of spring. It was at these festivals too that the tinkers chose or bartered for the women who would accompany them on their travels, so offering them their own colourful wedding ceremony. Yet the unceremonious trussing of the priest as if he were one of their horses, and the choice of the bog hole 55 rather than the ditch as his fit resting place, does not constitute a victory for the tinkers. The priest, having sworn not to call the peelers to punish them, makes use of his power as the agent of an inflexible deity and scatters them towards Clash with a Latin malediction ringing in their ears. The fact that the oath is in Latin reinforces our sense of the sharpness of the collision between the rituals of the Church, and the thinkers' life style. The Latin oath, in this context, is almost the comic equivalent of the "caoine" in Riders to the Sea, for it has behind it all the weighty oppressiveness which the Catholic church has exerted over the faith and superstitions of the Irish peasants. In the ears of the tinkers it is the inarticulate expression of wrath and vengeance, just as the "caoine" was the inarticulate expression of despair for the islanders. The "caoine," however drew its strength from the pagan world whereas the priest's oath is backed by the Catholic ritual. It is significant that after the exploration of a life style which has an intensity and richness which negates the validity of externally imposed rituals, the play ends in the age old rite of malediction, with the priest as "master of the situation." Synge does not resolve anything for us but he presents us with the alternatives; the promise of the ecstasy, which is surely the offspring of the imagination, rather than of an already formulated ritual, is held against ance that the universe is ordered and orninscientlycontrolled.

The We22 of the Saints brings to a climax the note of straining towards the release that accompanies a self- formulated life style. The conflict between the characters who desire to choose the landscape they will see, and those who demand that they limit the knowledge given to them by their senses to the purely visual or the purely spiritual, is more savage in this play, while the defiance of those limitations is more desperate. At the opening of the play the Douls exist in a world of security which is as vulnerable as the one inhabited by Nora Burke, but in contrast to hers, the Douls' landscape is irradiated by the illusive images which their blindness allows them to use freely. It is Martin who most vociferously desires his sight, and his straining towards vision is met by the "miracle" of the Saint which is to release the blind couple, not 'into the brilliant sunshine, but into the bleak half-light of the "seeing world." The community who had originally nurtured the illus- ions of the Douls, now goads them into their visual awareness of each other's wrinkled flesh, while the Saint recommends that they should "not be minding the faces of men." [l. p. 741 But, forced to recognize his own alignment with a11 the grotesque and absurd forms of life--the senile, the animal and the vegetable--Martin finds the energy which enables him to exorcise the "seeing warld." His poetic capacity to en- 57 compass all its images within his imaginative range brings him finally to a stage where he is able to demand his right to make a "choice of lives." The Douls' first blindness not only provides them with the freedom to spin their endless illusive fantasies of each other's beauty and "wonder," but also gives them the leisure time to enjoy the warm autumn sunshine and the rest- ful task of shredding rushes. They respond only to the sounds and smells of the natural world, with a sensitivity which is heightened by their sightlessness. They exist in the splendour of their isolation, but it becomes significant at this point that their fantasies, since they receive no stimuli from their visual senses, revolve around an ideal conception of human beauty. Martin complains affectionately about the time Mary takes to plait her "yellow hair," while Mary dwells delightedly on thoughts of her aristocratic complexion. She is sure that this fine skin compensates for the "queer cracked voice," which is slightly undermining Martin's illusions:

Who wouldn't have a cracked voice sitting out all the year in the rain falling? It's a bad life for the voice, Martin Doul, though I've heard tell there isn't anything like the wet south wind does be blowing upon us, for keeping a white beautiful skin--the like of my skin--on your neck and on your brows, and there isn't anything at all like a fine skin for putting splendour on a woman. [l, p. 591 Their visual imaginations create their own physical appear- ance with perfect fluency, but Martin, whom Stephen Mackenna described in a letter to Synge as "that dark lustful brooder," is curious to understand the disparity between the "sweet beautiful voice" of Molly Byrne and Mary's cracked tones.

He is already tempted towards the visual world by his heightened sense of hearing:

If it's lies she does be telling she's a sweet beautiful voice you'd never tire to be hearing, if it was only the pig she'd be calling, or crying out in the long grass, maybe, after her hens . . . . It should be a fine soft, rounded woman, I'm thinking, would have a voice the like of that. [lt p- 601

Martin most obviously has all the lusts of youth, without the image of his own old age to curb his appetite.

At this stage in the play, Mary can counter such "blasphemies" against the security of their world by associ- ation Molly's laugh with "braying." She goes on to comment on the shameless lasciviousness of the "seeing world,"

I'm not the like of the girls do be running round on the roads, swinging their legs, and they with their necks out looking on the men . . . . Ah, there's a power of villainy walking the world, Martin Doul, among them that do be gadding around, with their sweet words, and they with no sense in them at all. [l, p. 611

In Mary's talk, the sense of sight begins to be associated with lustfulness. She is content to remain within the se- cure intricacy of their illusions and seeks to restrain 59 Martin's desire for wider horizons. At this point in the play, the comedy arises from the incongruity between the grand illusion and the wrinkled image which we see before us. Their imaginative rites do not stem from a knowledge which includes all the forms of the natural world for the Saint's miracle has still to plunge them into an awareness of their own relationship with the animals. From the safety of their blindness, they can associate the animals which go squealing by on the way to the fair at Clash with the mundane activities of those who comply with the routine activities of a world lacking wonders. The Saint, who is to be the instrument of the Doulst initiation into sight, emerges in the play as a strangely disembodied figure. He appears to be neither quite human not quite divine. To the villagers who greet him as an exciting interruption of their day to day activities, his function seems to consist of bell ringing and fasting. With the perceptiveness which accompanies their blindness, Mary and Martin pass an early judgement upon him. Mary says quizzically in response to the report that the Saint thinks that young girls are "the cleanest holy people you'd see walking the world": "Well, the saint's a simple fellow, and it's no lie." 11. p. 651 Martin evaluates his way of life: " . . . and if bell-ringing is a fine life, yet I'm thinking, maybe, it's better I am wedded with the beautiful 60 dark woman of Ballinatone." [l. p. 671 The Saint who would have been "a fine brave man, if it wasn't for the fasting," has obviously tried to forget his body according to the strictures of his vocation. Before he performs his "miracle," he warns the villagers to limit the knowledge which their own flesh gives them:

. . . you'd do well to be thinking on the way sin has brought blindness to the world, and to be saying a prayer for your own sakes against false prophets and heathens, and the words of women and smiths, and all knowledge that would soil the soul or the body of a man. [l. p. 691

The immaterial Saint, whose blessing is to prove a curse, represents a "Lord of the world" who is very much out of the world, for there is little left alive in the play if "false p~upheisan6 heathens, ana tne words ot women and smiths" are excluded.

The Saint indeed exists in a world of illusion which is as detached from actuality as that occupied by the Douls in their blindness. Through his prayers and his bell-ringing and his fasting, he comes to a state where:

. . . you'll not be minding the faces of men, but you'll be saying prayers and great praises, till you'll be living the way the great saints do be living, with little but old sacks and skin cover- ing their bones . . . . [l. p. 741

His power to cure blindness and deformity with the holy water, opens up the world of all the five senses to those , whom he touches, but he then demands that they limit their responses to this new knowledge to a purely spiritual

thankfulness. Yet it is in his speeches that nature images appear in their most lyrical form as he talks of the "grand glittering seas and the furze," and the "big hill, and steep

stream falling to the sea." [I. p. 741 Alan Price, main-

taining that the Saint, "with his simple piety and kindliness

is the most sympathetic character in the play," claims that he represents the power of ultimate goodness:

. . . he believes that there is a supernatural reality, wholly good, which more than compensates for all human anguish. It is this supreme benign power, whose glory may be seen shining through the natural world, and to the piety and the holy works of the religious orders, that the Saint would constantly direct the villagers' attention. He does not have much success in this difficult mission; he is able to convince him- 3~~~,--1c bui 11ut the others; and so although the villagers, apparently fulfil their religious observances, the reality of the Saint's God has little effect on their minds and behaviour. The day-to-day living hides them from awareness of the terror of God and from knowing fully his love and mercy . . . . 6

Mr. price's claim that the Saint's vision is the ideal from

which all the other visions in the play fall short, does not take into account the fact that there is no opportunity

for human participation in his world. By turning from the

faces of men and from all that would soil his soul, he provides no means of reconciling the horror with the beauty

but explains it instead in of sin and redemption. I terms ! 1 Despite the lyrical beauty he perceives in the natural world, E I i , his landscapes are uninhabited by humans and animals; it is from the "bare starving rock," the fit home for the saints of the Lord, that these images draw their life-denying

impetus.

If the Saint is the lyrical poet of the spirit in The We22 of the Saints, Martin Doul is most certainly the C poet of the flesh. Martin's "explosion" into his body is

reflected in a language which possesses all the regenerative I rage of disillusionment, and none of the melancholy which comes from having no illusions at all. Molly Byrne, who I extracts her own delight from life by goading the men she attracts, initiates the descent into the animal images with I which Martin and Mary are to flay each other. She exclaims bitchily to Mary: "What is it you think of himself, with

the fat legs on him, and the little neck like a ram?"

[I. p. 721 Mary, who had always had her suspicions about

the "seeing world," clings tenaciously to the thought of

her fine hair, big eyes and white skin, but Martin immediately

distorts them out of all recognition:

Your hair, and your big eyes, is it? . . . I'm telling you there isn't a wisp on any grey mare on the ridge of the world isn't finer than the dirty twist on your head. There isn't two eyes in any starving sow, isn't finer than the eyes you were calling blue like the sea. [I. p. 721

Synge skilfully entwines the poignant memory of the old image of Mary with this new relation of her to the animal world, as the two-dimensional world of the illusion is now being expanded into a bleak but solid reality. After they have regained their sight the Douls' first impulse is to beat each other blind again. But, as

Anne Saddlemyer comments with reference to The Shadow of the Glen, the darkness or oppression of the situation "cannot be reversed by human action" ,' and the couple find their only release in the vituperative words which they hurl at one another. They are as bitterly vigorous in their per- ception of their own ugliness as they were lyrically ener- getic in the evocation of the beauty they had seen only with their minds. The transition from "wonders" to "fright" is conducted in the life-giving language of exaggeration:

Mary Doul: It's the devil cured you this day with your talking of sows; it's the devil cured you this day, I'm saying, and drove you crazy with lies. Martin Doul: Isn't it yourself is after playing lies on me, ten years, in the day, and in the night, but what is that to you now the Lord has given eyes to me, the way I see you an old, wizendy hag, was never fit to rear a child to me itself. Mary Doul: I wouldn't rear a crumpled whelp the like of you. It's many a woman is married with finer than yourself should be praising God if she's no child, and isn't loading the earth would make the heavens lonesome above, and they scaring the larks, and the crows, and the angels passing in the sky. Martin Doul: Go on now to be seeking a lonesome place where the earth can hide you away, go on now, I'm saying, or you'll be having men and women with their knees bled, and they screaming to God for a holy water would darken their sight, for there's no man but would liefer be blind a hun- dred years, or a thousand itself, than to be look- ing on your like. [I. p. 731

Their language is inspired by the exaggeration of their dis- illusion, and a rage which enables them to extend their imagery outwards to include "the larks and the crows and the angels", which have now become a means of measuring their ugliness, in one all-encompassing category. Their sight has also taught them another means of measuring time, for Martin insists on its qualitative extent when he claims that "a hundred years, or a thousand itself" of blindness are preferable to one moment of looking on the grotesque form of Mary. In this play as in Riders to the Sea, a grim reality teaches the preciousness of even the briefest and most tremulous joys that it leaves to man.

It is in the second act of the play that Synge explores the interaction between the newly awakened dreamers and the community who had nourished the myth of the Douls' beauty to provide themselves with a callous sort of amusement. The security of the villagers' routine existence begins to be threatened by the insistence of the Douls that they too should have a first time of seeing each other. Familiarity and the re-assurance of a constantly repeated routine had previously provided them with a not too demanding pattern of existence. Now, however, they are infected by the terrible clarity of Martin's vision and become conscious of an all 1 65

too solid flesh. The Saint has the rituals of bell-ringing and fasting to protect him from the faces of men, but the community becomes obsessed with the presence or the lack of

fine feature in each other's faces. Timmy the smith, who had been confident that Molly had " . . . no call to mind what way I look, and I after building a house with four rooms in it above on the hill . . . ." [II. p. 793 is now made uncomfortably aware of his own "bleary eyes" and "big

nose the like of a scarecrow stuck down upon the road";

security begins to seem an inadequate offering for a

lover.

It is apparent that Mary and Martin are opening up

a black world of seeing for those who had existed in a com-

fnrkah1.e half-light. Timmy remarks upon the strange disease

of "looking" which seems to have come amongst them all:

But it's a queer thing the way yourself and Mary Doul are after setting every person in this place, and uprbeyond to Rathvanna, talking of nothing, and thinking of nothing, but the way they do be looking in the face. It's the devil's work you're after doing with your talk of fine looks, and I'd do right, maybe, to step in and wash the blackness from my eyes. 111. p. 791

Eyes and their expressions begin to be endued with strange

magical powers as the villagers shrink from the darkness of

Martin's vision. But Martin himself perceives in their reactions to him a means of establishing his own virility.

He tells a mesmerized Molly why his wife has turned away

from him : But there's one thing I'm telling you, if she walked off away from me, it wasn't because of seeing me, and I no more than I am, but because I was looking on her with my two eyes, and she getting up, and combing her hair, and lying down for her sleep. [II. p. 811

The rhythm of his language rises as he becomes intoxicated with this new possibility: "I'm thinking by the mercy of

God it's few sees any thing but them is blind for a space."

[II. p. 821 His talk becomes increasingly lyrical as he associates Molly with the "fine light" and the "warm sun"; his world has been suddenly illuminated, not by the "Spirit of God," but by the physical beauty of the girl. But Martin's lyricism is doomed to failure because he has not yet accepted his own grotesque physical image and so is vulner- able to Molly's mocking deflation of his dream.

At this stage in the drama Martin is the poet "manq&. " Ann Saddlemyer comments: "Like the poet, he strives to endow the world about him, strongly rooted as it is in the clay and the worms, with the exaltation of the dream. lt8 But before he can transform the natural world and its inhabitants into a more imaginative reality he has to recognize his own involvement with all its savage and grotesque elements. In many ways Martin is the forerunner of Christy Mahon; Christy has to discard the criteria for heroism which the community imposes on him before he can gain the confidence in his own variegated personality to go "romancing through a romping 67 lifetime." Martin, on the other hand, has to find new criteria f~rbeauty, and a new basis for the romantic ritual he weaves with Mary so that it may include a recognition of his own relationship with the external world. By the end of the scene with Molly, Martin is re- duced once more to impotency. He cries out, like a grotesque shadow of Samson Agonistes, against the weakness of his own body which prevents him from getting his revenge. But having lost his heaven, he sees a way of making a heaven of hell, delighting in the malignity of his energetic cursing of the "seeing world":

Yet if I've no strength in me I've a voice left for my prayers, and may God blight them this day, and my own soul the same hour with them, the way I'll see them after, Molly Byrne and Timmy the smith, the two of them on a high bed, and they screeching in hell . . . . It'll be a grand thing that time to look on the two of them; and they twisting and roaring out, and twisting and roaring again, one day and the next day, and each day always and ever. It's not blind I'll be that time, and it won't be hell to me I'm thinking, but the like of heaven itself, and it's fine care I'll be taking the Lord Almighty doesn't know. [II. p. 851

Here Martin formulates his own rites of cursing which possess an energy, and certainly a vividness of scene creation, which would be lacking in any Latin malediction. W.B. Yeats, in

an essay entitled J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time, emphasizes the delight of the Irish in: . . . mischievous extravagance, like that of the Gaelic poet's curse upon his children: 'There are three things that I hate: the Devil that is waiting for my soul; the worms which are waiting and care neither for my body nor my soul: 0. Christ hang all in the same noose!' I think those words were spoken with a delight in their vehemence that took out of anger half the bitterness with all the gloom. 9

It is surely this same feeling and effect which character- izes Martin's speech, as he draws new momentum from his diabolic vision. The very act of creating his own imagin- ative form of cursing exorcises much of the blackness of the picture he conjures.

The action of the play has revolved around the re- actions of the Douls to the visual image of the decrepitude of their old age. Their responses to their predicament are markedly different, for Martin seeks at first to regain his own youthful flesh while Mary swiftly reduces her rivals to her own wrinkled state. By the end of the second act she is employing the images which she has gained from the visual world to transform Molly's beauty into future decrepitude:

It's them that's fat and flabby do be wrinkled young, and that whitish yellowy hair she has does be soon turning the like of a hindful of thin grass you'd see rotting, where the wet lies, at the north of a sty. [II. p. 841

Mary is already well on the way towards reconciling the images with which her sight has presented her with the cre- ation of a new self-regenerative ritual. The last act of the play explores the processes by which Mary and Martin 69 evolve these surer and more appropriate rites. Their particular transformation of reality involves a taking into account of the external world so that the grotesque and the absurd, as well as the lyrical, provide the impetus for creation. In coming to 'know' each other again, the couple associate themselves with all the forms of life which their vision has imposed upon them. Martin's first consciousness of Mary's presence in the landscape is as a "thing": I' . . . till you'd take your dying oath on sun and moon a thing was breathing on the stones." [III. p. 871 When he draws closer and fearfully unites his sense of hearing with his sense of touch he becomes more sure of the term he has chosen: "There's a thing with a cold living hand on it sitting up at my side." [III. p. 871 It is almost as a vegetable that he discovers Mary again, and she is quick to answer in the same terms when she calls him: "a little dark stump of a fellow . . ." [III. p. 871 Mary, who was least anxious to regain her sight but adjusted more successfully to the visual image of herself, is now the first to exercise her creative powers on their new state. The new ritual is to revolve around the fine hair that Mary will grow on her head and Martin upon his chin.

At first, however, Mary denies Martin participation in the rites and swiftly returns him to the vegetable world when he hesitatingly demands whether he too would have fine white hair: On you, God help you? . . . In a short while you'll have a head on you as bald as an old turnip you'd see rolling round in the muck . . . . [III. p. 881

It seems as if the Douls must pass from animal to vegetable before they can inflate themselves to super-human

proportions.

There is an infinite difference between this second entry into an imaginative sphere and the first spinning of

fantasies, for the sources for the creativity have been

multiplied and the second spinning of fantasies is based on

the recognition of the necessity for "cute thinking. It 10 They constantly remind each other of their grotesque images

in the visual world, but can now take delight in creating

a new wonder out of such unprepossessing flesh. The movement

of all Synge's plays, in fact, is towards this point where the central characters, having acquired knowledge of the

savagery of the natural world, are able to incorporate it

into their romancing; they make their lyricism valid by

connecting it with what Synge described as "the clay and the worms." In The Shadow of the Glen, Nora expresses in her

final speech her recognition that the Tramp's "fine bit of

talking," won't change the cold and the rain and the mists but will at least intensify them into a pattern in which

they are related to the warmer and more vibrant aspects of

nature. Part of the reason for Pegeen's exclusion from Christy's "romping life time" is reflected in her inability to accept words as being powerful if they are unsupported by actions. The transformation of the natural world through the vitality of the imagination demands its own act of faith, one which is made in full sight of both the horror and the beauty.

Only when the validity of the imaginative world is recognized is the character able to make a choice of lives. Martin demands this right when it seems as if he is to be forced once again to undergo a cure for his blindness. He now makes his claim to select his own reality:

We're going surely, for if it's a right some of you have to be working and sweating the like of Timmy the smith, and a right some of you have to be fasting and praying and talking holy talk the like of yourself, I'm thinking it's a good right ourselves have to be sitting blind, hearing a soft wind turning round the little leaves of the spring and feeling the sun, and we not tormenting our souls with the sight of the grey days, and the holy men, and the dirty feet is trampling the world. [III. p. 991

His choice is based on the knowledge given to him by all five of his senses and is, in an important sense, not an escape but the insistence on the right of each individual to select the reality he will inhabit; what Timmy the smith calls a "wilful blindness." Martin chooses to hear the "soft wind turning round the little leaves of spring" in the warm sunshine, rather than to torment his soul with the sight of "the roads when the north winds would be driving and the skies would be harsh, and you'd see the horses and the asses and the dogs itself maybe with their heads hang-

ing and they closing their eyes--" [III. p. 941

His final rejection of the "seeing world" is ex- pressed in terms which its inhabitants will understand. He dashes the can of holy water, the symbol of a ritual which allows him no freedom, to the ground and for that second denies the power of language as an effective force; earlier he

says to Mary as she urges him to find the "big terrible word" that would prevent the undesirable miracle:

What way would I find a big terrible word, and I shook with the fear, and if I did itself, who'd know rightly if it's good words or bad would save us this day from himself? [III. p. 911

Martin finally finds action an appropriate response to those

- -7. - WLLU are orientated to a world of deeds and activities. In the terms which the play sets up action cannot reverse the oppressiveness of the external world, but it can be effec- tive in protecting the rights of the individual to choose his own life style.

Despite the fact that The WeZZ of the Saints, in its exploration of the possibilities which savage energy provides to perpetuate lyricism in a landscape made common-place by the rhythms of mutability, does foreshadm the concerns of the PZayboy, the final imaginative release of its protagon- ists is much more limited than the one enjoyed by Christy

Mahon. All the characters in the play indeed, come to terms 73 with the natural world by restricting their knowledge of its forms. The Saint limits himself to the rituals of "fasting and praying and talking holy talk," rituals which also serve to counteract the mundanity of the life of the community. Timmy the smith takes comfort from his prowess in the func- tional world and depends upon the operation of his forge to amass enough security to win Molly, and to distract both of them from his "bleary" physical image. It seems as if Molly herself will retreat into the security and inevitable bore- dom of her life with Tirnmy where at least she may grow old in comfort. The Douls alone consciously reject the visual world after a recognition of all the winter images they find within it, which served to accentuate their consciousness of their own state of physical decay. But although their world, imaginatively perceived through the senses of touch 11 and smell and hearing, is richer and more expansive than that occupied by the community, it is still limited by the fact that blindness is necessary for its perpetuation. We are left with an uncomfortable sense of their pathos as they depart to make their unsteady way along the path which has "a slough of wet on the one side and a slough of wet on the other . . . ." [III. p. 991 One of the most telling images which reflects the mood of the play comes from Martin as he expresses a rather patronizing sympathy for the predicament of the "Almighty God": . . . and I do be thinking it should be a hard thing for the Almighty God to be looking on the world bad days, and on men the like of yourself walking around on it, and they slipping each way in the muck. [II. p. 761

It is this movement of "slipping each way" which seems to most appropriately convey the actions of the characters as they seek to find some stability in an absurd universe.

All, like the High King of Ulster in Deidre of the Sorrows, seek a place which is safe if not splendid. Only Mary and Martin find the splendid place in the vitality of an

imagination which has fed upon the flesh; but even their release is qualified by our sense that it is also a

also in The WeZZ of the Saints, as we fear for the wanderers even as our imaginations surely reject the alternative of the Saint's blessing and the retreat into the church for the wedding of Timmy and Molly which the community chooses. The

imaginative world possesses its own life-giving ecstasy in

comparison, despite its risks. Synge's own attitude to his wayfarers is indicated in his narration of a chance meeting with a Tramp; he had watched him washing his shirt in a stream, and had observed the alacrity of his departure as

the villagers appeared from mass: I could not pity him. The cottage men with their humour and simplicity and the grey farm-houses they live in have gained in a real sense--'Infinite riches in a little room'; while the tramp has chosen a life of penury with a world for habitation.ll

Synge's sympathy extends to both, but the buoyant extrav- agance of his dramas stems from his delight in the limitless- ness which characterizes the existence of the wanderers.

In the savage extravagance of The We22 of the Saints, Synge brought to a climax the note of straining after the ecstasy of life which ran through his two preceding dramas. The straining began in the rather tremulous reaching out of Nora towards a life where she might participate in all the rhythms of the natural world, found expression in Mary Byrne's Rabelaisian delight in all that lives, and becomes most truiy flesh in this final exorcism of the oppressiveness of the "seeing world" through the savage as well as the lyrical rites of the imagination. '/ FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER I11

'J.M. Synge, Plays, Poems and Prose, (1941; rept. London, Dent, 1968), p. 254.

'~ecalled by Yeats in Autobiographies, (London, Macmillan, l955), pp. 346-509.

3~.M. Synge , Plays, ed . Anne Saddlemyer , (London, Oxf ord University Press, 1969), p. 49. All subsequent references to this edition will be in the body of the text.

4~nneSaddlemyer, J.M. Synge and Modern Comedy, (Dublin, Dolman Press, 1968), p. 13.

5~enisDonoghue, "Too Immoral for Dublin: Synge's 'The ~inker's~edding'", Irish Writinq 30 (1955), p. 59.

6~lanPrice, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama, ondo don , Methuen , l96l), p. 157.

7~addlemyer,J.M. Synge and Modern Comedy, op. cit. , p. 12.

8~addlemyer,op. cit., p. 22.

'w.B. Yeats, The Cutting of an Aqate, essay entitled "J.M., Synge and the Ireland of his Time," (London, Macmillan, 1919), pp. 169-170.

"E.A. Boyd in The Contemporary Drama of Ireland, (Dublin, Talbot Press, 1918), sees Martin's choice of a second blindness as a return to the first dream world and claims that: "'The Well of the Saints' is the only occasion in Synge's career where he appears to express the traditional revolt of the Celtic mind against the despotism of fact. The refusal of the blind beggars to accept reality in place of their dreams is an almost Yeatsian treatment of a situation which lends itself to his symbolical interpretation." [p. 1001 This interpretation does not take into account the difference in the quality and inspiration of the second illusion, which incorporates reality even as it rejects it.

"J.M. Synge, In Wicklow and West Kerry and Connemara, (London, Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 236. CHAPTER IV

THE BREAKING OF THE CIRCLE

The quality which marks The Playboy of the Western World as a progressive rather than a repetitive stage in Synge's artistic development is the life-giving extravagance of its language. The speeches of the characters move through a world of superlatives as "the wonder of the western world" is created, while the action mounts to increasingly momentous climaxes, till the last climax explodes the hero out of the circle of external limitations. It is in this play that Synge shows the most perfect control of his dramatic medium, so that he is able to immerse us in all forms of the grotesque and the absurd and the savage, and make the journey a vital and celebratory experience. The energy which was released in The We22 of the Saints by the Douls' recognition of their alignment with the animal world finds its most assertive expression in the rhythms of the language of the

Playboy. The earlier comedy slips at times into pathos as we become too painfully aware of the characters' physical state of blindness, and realize too that their final escape is into a landscape where "There's a power of deep rivers with floods in them where you do have to be lepping the

1 stones . . . ."I Their turning from the visual world renders them more vulnerable to its physical threats. The ,ironic vision which illuminates the Playboy, on the other hand, controls the heights and depths of the situations,

while Christy's coming to terms with all his senses brings him to a point where he can look fully into the faces of all the inhabitants of the western world. 1t.wasthe animal savagery of the play which upset its most vituperative early critics. They could accept the image of Irish stoicism which he had given to them in

Riders to the Sea, for there the austerity of religious ritual offered a way of controlling the extremes of human

emotion. In The PZayboy of the Western World, however, the rites of the imagination launch the characters into excesses which the nationalistically biased critics felt should be alien to the Irish temperament. In fact they vigilantly mistook the Dionysiac forces which are released by the language of the drama, for an exclusively Irish variety.

In a letter to the Evening Telegraph, an English woman who had been present at the first production of the play praised it, most perceptively, for the very reasons for which it had been attacked:

The people depicted in the play were undoubtedly uncivilized, untamed--one might almost call them savages, but this only shows that the Irish are still a strong people, who have retained some of their primitive instincts, and who are not yet tainted by the mawkish sentimentality which is gaining the over-civilized world. 2 It is amusing to note that the imaginative caption for this letter reads "Irish Portrayed as Savages!" The critics saw it only as a distortion of Irish reality as they knew it, and proceeded to judge the Playboy as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform. "3 The play's qualities as an extravaganza escaped them completely. It must be admitted, however, that the actors of the Abbey Theatre company aggra- vated the situation by misunderstanding Synge's intention and presenting the drama in an essentially naturalistic manner. 4 Synge himself described his play as an "extravaganza," for he is examining the dramatic tendency of the peasant dialect to transform mediocrity and the inevitable processes of mi~tahili ty; info a snilrw of "wonder" and glory. He delights in the powers of linguistic inflation which enable the Mayoites to transform a stuttering farm boy who believes he has killed his father, into the poet-hero who could "capsize the stars." He organizes the ever-repetitive phrases of peasant speech, which are always orientated towards the melodramatic "and he destroyed with the cold" "get your death with the drouth,""and in the end of allw--so that they become the basic poetic notes for the expression of this energetic concern with mutability. But always undermining the commun- ity's poetic variation on the unexciting patterns of their lives is their consciousness of the oppressiveness of their environment, and the necessity they feel that actions should 80 finally support words. It is these limitations which send them scurrying back into the safety of the shebeen at the end of the play, with a relief which is expressed by Michael when he says, "By the will of God, we'll have peace now for our drinks." [III. p. 1631 It is this dichotomy between extravagant words and deflating action which constitutes the ironic vision of the Playboy. Christy alon&comes to trust the power of his own metaphors so that he becomes finally independent of action and its consequences, but also capable of performing it when it constitutes an appropriate pro- jection of the new image of himself, an image created and made vigorous by a poetic imagination which intensifies and reports the senses' perception of the external world.' In the Playboy, the imaqination is the force which extends the significance of human experience by imaging it in terms of the natural, the animal and the supernatural worlds. Christy's discovery of the multiplicity of the ways in which he may express his own nature enables him to animate a mundane re- ality. The mood which renders the Mayo community particularly susceptible to associating violent deeds with glory and wonder is perfectly conveyed through the images and cadences of the first scene, even before the entry of the man who is to be the source of their inspiration. The night which is descend- ing on the shebeen is going to be a long and lonely one, and 81 it is an awareness of this loneliness which dominates the speeches of Pegeen. She exclaims against her father's thought- lessness in leaving her to go to the festivities of Kate Cassidy's "wake":

Isn't it long the nights are now, Shawn Keogh, to be leaving a poor girl with her own self counting the hours to the dawn of day? [I. p. 1081

Even the "fat and fair" Shawn Keogh offers some sort of dis- traction from the oppressiveness of the natural world on this particular night. References to the darkness occur over and over again; Shawn says tremulously that he'd "not be walking off to wakes and weddings in the darkness of the night," while Pegeen wonders how she'll "pass these twelve hours of

dark and not take my death with the fe3-r;" It is as if Pqea~ I' and Shawn enjoy titillating each other's fearful imaginations L since there is certainly no love talk in which they might , indulge. Through their constant use of the prefix "the," they tend to personify fear so that it takes its place with "the drought" and "the cold"; it is these silent natural presences which are more ominous to them than any violent human action. 81Lonesome"echoes like a softly vibrating chord through this first scene, and Michael James applies it finally to their whole environment, "the lonesome west." This lone- someness is accentuated by the sounds and movements of the animal world; Shawn talks of the cows which he hears "breath- ing and sighing in the stillness of the air," which accen- 82 tuates rather than alleviates the stillness; and the barking of dogs which we might expect to suggest the reassuring sounds of the farmyard, become intimately associated in the speeches of the characters with "teeth rattling with the fear." Their language is already beginning to create, in the comic world, the same kind of supernatural presences which inhabited the bleak landscape of Riders to the Sea, but since death is not an immediate reality in their lives, their imagination is channelled into a riotious exploration of its most sensational forms. They are always protected by the fact that the deed which they come to glorify has been committed on "the high windy corner of a distant hill," so that their powers of in- flation are unlimited by contact with immediate reality.

---After --- the hesitant ~nfryof Christy onto the scene the language begins to merge the distinctions between the animal and the human world, as animal images become the more vivid means of measuring an experience. Shawn's whole terrified observation of the rise and fall and rise again of Christy, begins and ends with the image of the mad dog. When Christy is first mentioned in the play and is described as that amorphous thing, "a kind of fellow," Shawn gives him the first of the many similes which are to be applied to him in the course of his metamorphosis, 11 ... . t I'm after feeling a kind of fellow above in the furzy ditch, groaning wicked like a maddening dog the way it's good cause you have, maybe, to be fearing now." [I. p. 1091 Shawn still finds the simile appropriate in the final scene of hero-baiting, "My leg's bit on me! He's the like of a mad dog, I'm thinking, the way I will surely die." [III, p. 1621 The flexibility and extravagance of the imagery of the characters becomes an indication of the growth and develop- ment of the speaker, since the play revolves around the possibility that a man may become everything he says he is. It is significant, therefore, of Shawn's passive role as the God-fearing man that his similes have not changed by the end of the action. Old Mahon also uses dog images to describe Christy's inauspicious future; but ones which exhibit his habitual energy and his ability to vividly reconstruct a scene in his imagination:

Didn't you hear me say he was the fool of men, the way from this out he'll know the orphan's lot with old and young making game of him and they swearing, raging, kicking at him like a mangy cur. [III. p. 1471

It is in the language of Christy, however, that a11 the images of the community seem to come together into one gigantic melting pot, so that "hog, dog, and divil," are placed in one all-inclusive hostile category. He expresses, in his growing eloquence, the "lonesomeness" of the whole community as he animates their fears by giving them supernatural and animal forms. The possibility to "animalize" and to glorify the various ways of dying provides the community with a more flesh and blood alternative to their superstitious dread; although superstition too is more attractive than the mundanity of their day to day existence. The distinctions between the carcase and the corpse begins to diminish as the characters expend their energies in exploring all the ramifications of Christy's deed. The language which Pegeen uses to describe the tinker ' s hanging of his I' and screeching and wriggl- ing at the butt of a string . . . ." is just as appropriate when applied to the hanging of a man, "swaying and swiggling at the butt of a rope . . . ." [11, p. 1331 In her efforts to frighten Christy into staying by her side she explores the rituals which accompany such a hanging in even more detail:

. . . and when it's dead he is, they'd put him in a narrow grave, with cheap sacking wrapping him round, and pour down quicklime on his head, the way you'd see a woman pouring any frish-frash from a cup. [II. p. 1321

By this time the corpse has been reduced to a de-humanized parcel of rubbish, for Pegeen is concerned to point out that ignominy as well as glory can result from Christy's deed. In her language, however, even the ignominious forms of death take on exciting connotations for they too are a variation on the routine aspects of her existence. It becomes apparent, through the pattern of imagery which is emerging in the play, that the characters are attempting to change death into an exciting entity. J.J. Frese, ti in a thesie entitled The CoaZescence of l'heme and Language in Synge's PZays, comments on the impulse behind this preoccupation:

They are afraid of the 'walking dead', and there- fore concentrate on details of violent death as protection against quiescent death, which by its silence is more ominous for them. . . . The gro- tesque humour therefore shouldn't disturb us; it is not a sickness but a protective mechanism of self-defence. 5

It is significant in this connection, that Michael James will I not return at night through the "~tooksof the Dead Woman" *

but riotiously goes to celebrate Kate Cassidy's "wake," and I welcomes with pbrter and admiration the parricide who struck a murderous blow with the loy.

The talk of violent hut glnrini~sCieath; nf split

heads and the rottenness of corpses, finds its most imagin- ative and exhilryating focus at the opening of the final act

of the play. The tremendous scene between Jimmy and Philly

as they compare their experience of skeletons, acts as a

prelude to the violence which is soon to erupt when the

community recognizes a walking corpse in the figure of Old

Mahon. The size and splendour of the skulls they remember

comfort Jimmy and Philly in their thoughts of mortality. The scene begins with their complaints about the noticeable

< absence of liquor in the shebeen, for Pegeen has abandoned it to go to the sports on the shore. Their thoughts turn 86 naturally to the playboy and his deed, and they proceed to conduct an alcohol-free "wake" in honour of all the great and grotesque skeletons of those "who were once walking the world."

Here, the grotesque and the absurd mingle in one sweeping comment on man's mortality, as Philly and Jimmy outdo each other in that very Celtic past-time of "capping" stories:

Jimmy: . . . . Did you never hear tell of the skulls they have in the city of Dublin, ranged out like blue jugs in a cabin in Connaught? Philly: And you believe it? Jimmy: Didn't a lad see them and he after coming from harvesting in the Liverpool boar? 'They have them theretlsays he, 'making a show of the great pwple there was one time walking the world. White skulls and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some with full teeth and some haven't only but one. '

Philly: It was no lie, maybe, for when I was a young lad, there was a graveyard beyond the house with the remnants of a man who had thighs as long as your arm. He was a horrid man, I'm telling you, and there was many a fine Sunday I'd put him to- gether for fun, and he with shiny bones you wouln't meet the like of these days in the city of the world. [III. p. 1451

In the days viewed from the safety of their memories even the skeletons were bigger and livelier and more colourful, and the very fact of their heroic splendour enables Jimmy and

Philly to talk about them without feeling too many winds whistling through their own.bones. It is through this imaginative exorcism of death through talking of it in terms of grotesque, but also chivalric, splendour that the Mayoites 87 keep it at a comfortable and controlled distance. The comic energy of these "grave-yard speeches" stems from Synge's juxtaposition of the commonplace and the surreal. The specific detail which is given about the lad who told the story--"and he after coming from harvesting in the Liver- pool boarN--suddenly explodes into the description of the black and white and yellow, toothed and toothless skulls.

Whereas in Riders to the Sea, the commonplace detail was broken by an overwhelming consciousness of the inevitability of death, in the PZayboy such seemingly irrelevant details rise buoyantly into absurdity. Synge uses the same technique in a later speech when Jimmy is relating his own story of the \ extremes to which a man can be driven by madness:

Jimmy: It's a fright surely. I knew a party was kicked in the head by a red mare, and he went killing horses a great while, till he eat the insides of a clock and died after. [III. p. 1471

The matter-of-fact tone of the opening almost skims us over the perfect absurdity of the ending. It is in these ways that Synge, delighting in the extravagance of the language of his Mayo community, transforms the essentially morbid preoccupation into an exhilsarating assertion of life. It is a healthy trait of country people that they can always tell of someone who has died in a more interesting and unusual fashion than his neighbour, and it is ~ynge'sgenius which enables him to make this turn of mind the very fabric of his drama. 88 The fact that death is no sure entity in the play is another source of its comic energy. The flights of extrav- aganza of both Christy and the myth-making Mayoites, are constantly undermined by the appearance of the man who, according to Christy, has been dealt a blow which has "split him to the gullet." According to Irish folklore, the soul 6 of a man was believed to escape through his skull so, by re-appearing, Old Mahon defies both their superstitions and their eloquence, and deflates the brutal battering into "a soft blow with the loy." By the last scene in the play, how- ever, there is a subtle reversal of this movement of defla- tion,for the characters resort to actions and find that they prove abortive in the face of the linguistic extravagance which they had come to mistrust. Old Mahon is constantly appearing and disappearing; Christy "kills" him a second time and he crawls in to be killed again; Christy himself is tied up in preparation for his hanging, but is quickly released. Each attempted action is immediately undermined, an appropriate sequence of events in a play which has revolved around a &; deed which was no deed. Christy's final successful entry into " $ I a world where he is strong enough to resist the deflations of ; his own imag has to be by a means which is independent of , the performance of any action whatsoever. It is Christy's initial equation of his action with his glorification which makes him vulnerable to external events and renders his flights of lyricism impotent. It is 89 noticeable that in the first act, when the new image of him- self is in embryo form, the knock at the door which sounds to him like the "polis," immediately sends him shivering to clutch at Pegeen for protection; and each reversal after this reduces him to pathos. But accompanying his growing love for Pegeen a new note is struck in his language. We are given I indications of a more assertive chord when the energy that is damned up by the negative answers he has to give to the wild guesses of the Mayoites about the nature of his deed, is finally all channelled into converting his crime into a feat worthy of surpassing their petty suggestions. They give him something against which to define his deed, and the pattern is repeated in the next act when the re-appearance of his Phoenix-like father makes him aware of all he stands to lose.) - i His pathetic queries about Pegeen's possible reactions to

1 the new situation are converted into rage against Old

Mahon :

To be letting on he was dead, and coming back to life, and following me like an old weazel tracing a rat, and coming in here laying desolation between my own self and the fine women of Ireland, and he a kind of carcase that you'd fling upon the sea . . . . [II. p. 1411

Here we become aware of the newly assertive note in his language as his "own self" begins to become more precious to him, His flamboyant raging is juxtaposed against the lyrical expression of love: Amn't I after seeinq the love- light of the star of knowledge shining •’;om her brow, and hearing words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant saints, and now she'll be turning again, and speaking hard words to me, like an old woman with a spavindy ass she'd have, urging on a hill. [II. p. 1421

\' In this speech, images of the world of mundane reality and of

the sphere where such reality is lyrically transformed, are held in a proximity which heightens the intensity of both.

Through this capacity to endow even his fall from glory with

its own energetic images, Christy is already beginning to

exercise some controlling force over the course of events. But before the "miracle" of the imagination can be performed

in a natural world which demands the recognition of its winter

as well as its spring time rhythms, Christy must find the roots fw his own multi-faceted image in an earth which in-

cl,udes all realities.

Christy reaches the heights of his lyrical powers rin the scenes of wooing, when he extracts the terms for his love-making from a benign and sunny natural world. Yet the

ironic vision of the play is most strongly in force in these

J I speeches, and curtails the ecstasy even as it allows us to delight in its extravagance and beauty. At the heights of his iromantic transformation of Pegeen, Christy exclaims: . - J "I, If the mitred bishops saw you that time, they'd 1 'A t be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad pacing back and forward with a nosegay in her golden shawl. [III. p. 1521

Christy's exaltation at this point leads him towards making love to "the Lady Helen of Troy" rather than to Pegeen Mike, as he creates an image which the slightest tremor of reality will shatter. Synge is in fact pointing to the dangers of the poetic imagination if it does not have its roots in the "heart scalding" of a more flesh and blood reality. 7 In this scene Christy is exploring the rituals of romance as a means of realizing the poetic potential of his developing personality. When his lyricism reaches such heights that it translates Pegeen into a sphere where she is associated I eroines of the past he is creating a very ut when he talks of their love in terms orld he finds surer grounds for his poeticiz- ing. He enters into sensuous descriptions of the walks which he and Pegeen will take on Neifin, "in the dews of night, the time sweet smell do be rising, and you'd see a little shiney moon maybe sinking on the hills." [III. p. 1511 At these times it seems as if he is making love to the landscape rather than the girl, an indication of his final independence from limiting the source of his inspiration to one person. The "dews of night" and the "shiney moon" are the forces which are to make him more potent than any image the Mayoites could provide for him, for he is finding a way to intensify the rhythms of the natural world, the one dependable and regener- ative source of reference.8 His sexual prowess is always envisaged in terms of this natural setting where all love-making is sanctioned and blessed. Finally Christy can boast, enamoured with his own virility:

It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's or an earl's itself when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips till I'd feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair. [III. p. 1511

The water from the mountain streams in which Pegeen is to rinse her ankles, and from the wells of Erris which will wet their mouths before kissing, is to sanctify their love. Jronically, however, it is to be consummated in the fire of the lighted turf which Pegeen brings to scorch Christy as she becomes once again the woman who is "the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue." [III. p. 1531 The love of Christy and Pegeen can be carried to no other consummation for it is based, for Pegeen, on a false sense of Christy's heroism in terms of action. It is important to understand the qualities which exclude Pegeen from participation in the imaginative ritual,

and doom her to living with melancholy , . and possibly Shawn, on "the scruff of the hill." Her last words, "Oh my grief, 93

1 I I've lost him surely. I've lost the only playboy of the i western world," are certainly desolate enough to move our t I sympathy. The emptiness conveyed by the assonance, the repetition of "lost," the breathy softness which the Celtic tongue gives to "grief," does endow this speech with all the qualities which cause T.R. Henn to describe it as a "Didoesque lament. " Yet what must surely qualify the pity which he claims is due to Pegeen, is the fact that Christy was no Aeneas, and it was this type of old world hero, in addition to the poet, that she had sought to find in him. Consequently, she can make no connection with the Christy who is the type of our modern anti-hero, concerned with the dis- covery of his own personality rather than with deeds; his power rests in his ability to make miracles out of the commonplace, not the commonplace out of miracles. Since he is undergoing the trials of the imagination, not the tests of his physical prowess, it is unnecessary for him to have committed the archetypal mistake of killing the father who was forcing him to marry the woman who had suckled him. lo Pegeen and the Mayo community, however, desire a hero whose deeds are synonymous with his words, although the deed itself must not be committed before their eyes but must gain its potential for heroic glory from distance. If Christy will not embody the mythical

< hero they require, they are prepared for him to personify the "divil," that amorphous presence in their environment, so that they may bait and hang the scapegoat of their fears. In the course of the play Christy becomes all the shapes which each character sees in him. In the past he had

been the "looney of Mahonts":

. . . the laughing joke of every female woman where four baronies meet, the way the girls would stop their weeding if they seen him coming the road to let a roar at him, and call him, the looney of Mahon's. [II. p. 1401

For the other characters he is the most perfect embodiment of all the "queer folk" who have made their world more extrava-

gantly colourful. They have their own criteria for "wonders,"

and in Pegeen's folk lore, deformed characters merit only a

minor place :

. . . you'll meet none but Red Linahan, has a squint in his eye, and Patcheen is lame in his heel, or the ma6 Muirannies were driven from California and they lost in their wits . . . . [I. p. 1081

The award for bravery is given to a different variety of

"queer folk":

Where now will you meet the like of Daneen Sullivan knocked the eye from a peeler, or Marcus Quin, God rest him, got six months for maiming ewes, and he a great warrant to tell stories of holy Ireland till he'd have the old women shedding down tears about their feet. Where will you find the like of them I'm saying? [I. p. 1081

These are the breed of people who inspire their imaginations < and prepare the way for the adulation of Christy. The Widow

Quin, however, warns Old Mahon of the reactions of the Mayo-

ites if the "raging" gets out of hand: If you're a wonder itself, you'd best be hasty, for them lads caught a maniac one time and pelted the poor creature till. he ran out raving and foaming and was drowned in the sea. 1111. p. 1501

Christy combines for them all the qualities of these characters in one"persona" but he eventually absorbs enough of each role to be able to choose the final one himself. In the last scene Christy erupts into a savagery of / language which is to provide the roots for his lyricism. Having discovered that he cannot return himself to his past glory by performing the deed on which his reputation had been founded, he turns on the community with a rage that belongs at once to the maniac and the poet. At one point he and his father face each other on all fours, a comic reflection of their newly discovered animal state, and an indication of the bond that is beginning to be established between them. Old Mahon was the first to recognize that the "divil" could enter his own skull, "It's true mankind is the divil when your head's astray." [III. p.1501 He recognizes the fact that his own craziness conjures the devil in the external world, whereas the Mayoites attribute "devilishness" to ,f

causes outside themselves. In his final speeches Old Mahon f, takes delight in his entry into such a sphere of craziness; "Glory be to God, I'm crazy again," he cries as Christy establishes himself as the dominant figure in their re- i lationship, for through metaphysical madness he can reconcile

i all the strangeness and perversity of human kind. Christy, however, finds a more satisfactory means of entry into a world illuminated by his own image. At first he too desires the irresponsibility of madness:

Cut the rope, Pegeen, and I'll quit the lot of you and live from this out like the madmen of keel, eating muck and green weeds on the faces of the cliffs. [III. p. 1611

Even in this speech it is apparent that he is discovering the power of his own metaphors as he meets the savagery of action with the savagery of words, for he has encountered the scorch- ing which is the necessary opposite side of romance. In a very significant sense, Christy releases himself from his

literal and figurative ropes through the all-encompassing

imagery of his language. The speeches in which he abandons the community to their routine existence includes all reali- ties; the "horny-fingered hangman, hitching his bloddy knots," the gallows, "hell's flags," and "muck and green weeds" are

the images which dominate his talk. It is no morbid obsession that the playboy expresses for, with the instincts of a

Jacobean dramatist, he is determined that his death shall be the most colourful and bloody occasion that the Mayoites have

ever seen. He directs the performance in his imagination,

and joyfully positions his audience: .. If I can wring a neck among you, I'll have a royal judgement looking on the trembling jury in the courts of law. And won't there be crying out in Mayo the day I'm stretched upon the rope with ladies in their silks and satins snivelling in their lacy kerchiefs, and they rhyming songs and ballads on the terror of my fate? [III. p.1621 97

It is impossible for reality to shatter such a vision for it has already been incorporated in its most grotesque form. Christy has discovered the roots of his imagination amongst the "clay and the worms ," and is already free of the ropes before his father loosens them from his shoulders. He has come from the "butt" of the ditch to the "butt" of the hang- man's rope, and in the course of the journey he discovers his freedom from both but also the necessity to include both in his vision.

The community who nurtured him are left wondering at the monster they have produced. They retreat into the shebeen for the porter which lubricates their talk and will no doubt aid them to once more conjure the "divil," who alleviates their boredom and their awareness of the loneli- ness of their environment. The Mayoites, however, require that the spirits and raging folk who people their imagina- tions should manifest themselves in the external world. They limit the sources of their inspiration to physical presences and a physical locality. They have no powers to shape reality in any active sense therefore, for it constantly explodes the glorious figures they create as the flesh and blood counter- parts intrude upon the scene. Through an exploration of all the images which per- tain to his deed and a recognition of the power which his own "fine talking" can give to him, Christy has discovered the strength of his own "lonesomeness" in comparison with the "foolishness" of the community. His delight in his ability to create his own image transforms even the commonplace world with which he and the Mayoites are so familiar. He boisterously describes his new relationship with his father:

Go with you, is it! I will then, like a gallant captain with his heathen slave. Go on now and I'll see you from his day stewing my oatmeal and I'm master of all fights saying. [III. p. 1631

It is not lyricism but a new quality of "romantic savagery" which now informs his imagination, and translates the routine occupations of stewing oatmeal and washing spuds into an exciting and dramatic sphere. When he is able to control a bleak external reality through the power of his own poetic

imagination, the playboy comes nearest to incorporating all the rhythms of the human, the natural and the animal worlds. The Mayoites are able to find only brief escapes

from the monotony of their life style, on the other hand, for the "queer folk" whom they adulate and bait are human

enough to either die or leave them.

In The Playboy of the Western World, Synge's

characteristic concern with mutability is expressed in terms which transform it into a joyful absurdity. One of his

poems, entitled A word on the Life Force, most appropriately

conveys the mood of the play:

You squirrel angel eel and bat You seal, sea-serpent water-hen You badger cur-dog mule and cat You player with the shapes of men. 11 There is much here perhaps of Hardy's inexorable "Immanent Will," but Synge's verse displays a delight merely in the sound and colour of words as they fuse together into one long word play. It seems as if it is possible, by making the Life Force into all shapes--angel and eel and sea-serpent-- to transform this abstract entity into a force which is humanly contestable and becomes ultimately a source of creativity. In The Playboy of the Western World, where Synge strikes a more positive and assertive note than in any of his preceding plays, Christy finds his own answer to the Life Force by becoming too a "player with the shapes of men." Through the richness of his imaginative rites he breaks through the limitations of the external world into a dimension where he can delight in his own shapelessness and is so assured of the powers of constant self-regeneration. FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER IV

'J.M. Synge , Plays, ed. Anne Saddlemyer , (London, Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 99. All subsequent references to this edition will be included in the text.

'unsigned letter in the "Evening Telegraph," dated 3rd, February, 1907.

3~rthurGrif fith, article published in "The United Irish- man," 31st, January, 1907.

4~deasuggested by Dr. Anne Saddlemyer in a conversation which took place on February 27th, 1970.

5~ would suggest that this concept of the imagination as a creative principle in the world of reality is essentially Platonic. In his study of The Myths of Plato, (London, Centaur Press Limited, 1960), J.A. Stewart comments: "What is peculiar to Plato is the method of salvation by imaginative participation in the world of Forms, or Ideas; the method at work in all the great Myths except the Vision of Er, which is more directly concerned with Fate and Freewill. It's earthly insfri~m~nt M~mnryI This vhprp the rlezrrzge sppe;~~.~ between the Platonic and Indian systems whose conception of world of Forms the physical world is no mere illusion. The two great Myths of The Republic show the contemplation of reality, whether in life or death, as man's preparation for self-conquest in the world of action . . . . But man, we may suppose, differs from the lower animals in remembering his dreams--And he can tell them, and improve upon them in the telling, whether they be dreams of sleep or waking dreams-- indeed he must tell them . . . ." [pp. 14 & 281

6~.Jerome Frese, The Coalescence of Theme and Language in the Comedies of J.M. Synge, unpublished M.A. thesis, (~rinity College, Dublin, 1961), p. 108.

I Sean 0. Suillebhain, Irish Folk Custom and Belief, (Dublin Cultural c elations Committee of Ireland, 1967) , p.51 .

8~anielCorkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin, Cork University Press, 1931), p. 96, criticizes these lyrical scenes of wooing on grounds which do not take into account Synge's controlling ironic vision: "At such times Synge is , Footnotes (continued)

attempting the impossible: he will have the intensity of de- light, the ecstasy, but he will also have the copiousness and lusciousness of language, forgetting that ecstasy is spare of speech. Against these two loves of his, colour and sentence patterns, the dramatic sense has often to struggle violently."

'~tis interesting in this connection to note the sentiments Synge expressed in a letter to Molly Allgood (Maire O'Neill), written on the morninq after the first turbulent production of the Playboy: "Now that I have you I don't care twopence for what anyone else in the world may say or do. You are my whole world to me now, you that is, an2 the little shiny new moon and the flowers of the earth . . . ." [quoted in full by D.H. Greene and E.M. Stephens in J.M. Synge 1871-1909, (New York, Collier, 1961), p. 2411. Here he makes a gentle qualification of the extent to which Molly is his "whole world" by mentioning the equal necessity he feels for the images of a natural land- scape. Synge's playboy has still to recognize that these are the sources of his own strength.

"T.R. Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy, (London, Methuen, 1956) , p. 205.

'l~here are several readings of the Playboy which rather rigorously interpret it in terms of the archetypal patterning of its structure. Norman Podhoretz, "Synge's Playboy: Morality and the Heron (Essays in Criticism, 111, July, 1953), pp. 337- 344, traces the sources of the play's power back to its connection with myth and folk tale, emphasizing the general myth of rebellion against the father which he claims is basic to its movement.

"J.M. Synge, Collected Works, I: Poems, ed. Robin Skelton, (London, Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 65. CHAPTER V

THE PERFECT COMMITMENT

Synge's choice of the legendary tale of Deidre of the Sorrows as the material for his last play does not con- stitute a safe retreat into heroic abstractions, after the outrage which his PZayboy of the Western World had occasioned amongst the nationalistically biased critics. It possesses indeed, a quality of exaltation which does not have its basis in the world of heroic deeds and ideals as they would be defined by those who wished to inflate Ireland's pride in her national heritage. Its dignity stems instead from Synge's celebration of the richness of the world of the imag- ination which, as in all of his plays, provides his characters with their "choice of lives." The choice he presents in the play is as limited as that offered in Riders to the Sea, for there is no place for Deidre to go away from Naisi, except to retreat to the empty halls of Conchubor's palace. But the intensity of the happiness she enjoys in Alban irradiates the brink of the "deep grave" to which they inevitably come.

Her final triumph lies in the uniqueness of the cycle of destiny to which she commits herself, so that she is assured of her own immortality, whereas Riders to the Sea portrays a cycle of loss which is to be constantly repeated. Bartley's only reaffirms the inevitability of future losses. The life- reaffirming energy of Deidre of the Sorroos comes from the way in which the play faces the inevitability of a destiny which has already been foretold in legend and the more universal destiny of the falling cycle of life, and celebrates the capacity of the human imagination to make a vital choice in the face of this double necessity.

The legend of Deidre of the Sorrows was already familiar to Irish audiences in the work of Samuel Ferguson, Lady Gregory, A.E. and Yeats, so that no tension can be generated in Synge's play by the element of surprise. The individual interpretation of the legend varied radically as each writer placed different emphasis on the pattern of triumph through loss which it presented. In A.E.'s version of the tale, Deidre is sentimentalized into the blushing enchantress who has also the high flown dignity of a woodland princess. She responds to the spring with formality:

Now the winter's sleep is over, and the spring flows from the lips of the harp. Do you not feel the thrill of the wind--a joy answering the tremb- ling strings? Dear foster-mother, the spring and the music are in my heart. 1

A.E. endows his Deidre with regal dignity through the expres- sion of regal sentiments, rather than through human passion. Against Deidre's strivings for happiness is set the figure of Conchubor who is portrayed as the rather melodramatic 104 villain of the piece, a "stony-faced king" with "implacable eyes." Naisi is finally destroyed by the magic of Cathvah the druid, for A.E. is emphasizing the mystical power of the prophecy to control the lives of the characters. Yeats limits the scope of his interpretation of the legend to the final scene of the tragedy and formalizes the responses of the lovers to their fate in the game of chess I I which they play before the arrival of Conchubor and his I soldiers. In Yeat's version, it is Naisi who has the control to finish the game even at the brink of the grave, whereas I Deidre longs for that one moment of high passion through which she may obliterate her consciousness of what is to

come :

Zen6 arid kiss me now, For it may be the last before our death, And when that's over, we'll be different Imperishable things, a cloud or a fire, And I know nothing but the body, nothing. But that old vehement, bewildering kiss. 2

The chess game, in fact, becomes the concrete symbolic repre- sentation of the higher game they are playing, as Naisi associates himself and Deidre with all those who have met death with careful ceremony and aloofness. Yeats responds to the artistic formality which the consciousness of destiny gives to human passion, and his characters seem to move to the rituals of a dance of death, a movement which is broken only by Deidre's momentary clinging to life. Yet his concern -

with formality necessitates the use of a rather artificia contrivance to allow Deidre a dignified suicide behind the curtain which hides ~aisi'sdead body. It seems impossible that Conchubor could be deceived by the feeble ruse she employs to attain this private confrontation with death.

Yeats' concern with dramatic stagecraft occasionally over- whelms his sense of dramatic credibility. The belief which he expressed in a letter to Synge, that "One must have a complete aestheticism when dealing with a synthetic art such as the stage," appears to be the guiding force behind his interpretation of the legend.

The legend of Deidre and the beauty which caused sorrows and brought ruin to those who loved her, must have possessed a particular fascination for the Irish temperament for there are at least twenty versions of the play in existence. This fascination may possibly be connected, how- ever, with a tendency which is not particularly Irish; for it is related to a tradition which stretches back to Helen of Troy and Dido, and is manifested amongst Synge's contem- poraries in the work of Oscar Wilde in SaZome, and in Yeatsv poetic celebration of the correlation between beauty and violence, personified in the figure of Maud Gonne. In his article on Synge and Tragedy, Hugh I'A Fausset makes a connec- tion between beauty and the tragic sense; Beauty, in itself, the finest realization of strength, physical, spiritual or intellectual, can to many modern minds seem, at least for moments, intensely tragic, simply for the conflict it suggests between the ideal and the real by its mere existence. 5

Although Synge's focus is on Deidre's extraordinary beauty, it never exists as a static image of the ideal. He concen- trates instead on her passionate expression of this unique beauty, in a world which is governed by the peasant realities of loneliness and the slow movement towards old age. Deidre's beauty does not suggest a conflict between those indefinable entities "the ideal and the real" but rather, a merging of both into one imaginative dimension.

Synge first translated a version of the story of

Deidre from the modern Irish in 1901. Althouqh it is possibl-e, as D.H. Greene suggests, that Lady Gregory's prose version in CuchuZain and Murthemne showed him the possibility of "making the personages of the past speak like peasants while still remaining heroesIu6 it seems to me that this was not the particular quality with which Synge was concerned. He does not merely transform the heroes and heroines of the legend into speakers of the peasant dialect, but alters the impetus behind their action^.^ It is their ability to respond with imaginative intensity to the forces of inevitability that he explores; and the world of the imagination surely produces not heroes, but poets who are ever-conscious of their own story and draw their strength from their power to tell it in 107 many different forms. Deidre draws the energy for each action from her consciousness of the wonder of the tale which has been foretold about her, but her final awareness of the necessity which the legend embodies comes from her poetic capacity to respond to the rhythms of the natural world, which can provide her with the imaginative terms for its fulfillment. It is through this alignment with the natural world that she is able to make articulate her consciousness of the value of their ultimate losing:

The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and summer pass quickly and what way would you and I Naisi have joy forever. 8

This "natural understanding" of life has run through all Synge's plays; the legend itself becomes the means of defining these rhythms with the intensity which stems from Deidre's determin- ation to remain always in the spring time. From his own translation of the legend together with Lady Gregory's version, Synge drew the focussing images around which the action of the play revolves. He selects the "ridge of the world" as one of the dominating images of the story for it provides the sources of imaginative living. In Lady Gregory's Deidre, Conchubor uses the phrase to express his sense of the limitlessness of Deidre's beauty, as he commands Fergus to escort her on her journey back to Emain. Go over and bring me word if Deidre has the same shape and the same appearance she used to have, for if she has, there is not on the ridge of the world or on the waves of the earth, a woman more beautiful than herself. 9

Synge was also sensitive to the poetic possibilities the rhythms of the dialect provided for emphasizing the uniqueness of the beauty or the joy which is worth every risk. The inversion of syntactical order in speeches such as Conchubor's allows the movement of the negative comparison to come to rest in the super- lative measure of Deidre's beauty. The same pattern may be seen in a speech of Naisi's when he expresses his belief in the incomparableness of their joy:

There has never been the like of the joy we'll have ~eidre,you and I having our fill of love at the evening and the morning till the sun is high. [I. p. 1831

Imagery and rhythm work together here as Synge organizes the peasant dialect into a rich dramatic medium. The emphasis in the speech falls on the last over-hanging phrase, leaving us with the sense that the end of their joy will come when it has reached its fullest expression. Synge's elimination of the super-human element of the original story does not reduce the significance of the characters, but it shifts the emphasis from the event to the responses to the event; there are no mystical or magical powers to propel the central figures from action to action. He does not portray Naisi as the great warrior, but dramatizes Deidre's capacity to make of him a worthy mate for the ful- filling of their destiny. In the original saga the description of the magnificence of Naisi and his brothers is given by a hunter :

. . . the colour of the raven is on their hair, their skin is like the swan of the wave,their swiftness and their leap are like the salmon of the stream, and like the deer of the grey mountains; and the head and shoulders of Naoise are above all the other men of ' Ireland. 10

Significant changes are made in the description when Synge gives it to Deidre to speak as she describes the lover who will be her "likeness":

. . . a man with his hair like the raven maybe and his skin like the snow and his lips like blood spilt on it. [I. p. 1731

The images of the raven and the snow and the blood are retained but the description is not extended into an inflation of Naisi's stature. In Deidre of the Sorrows, Synge's characters are always human, both in their beauty and their passions, so

that the superhuman and the magical must be the creation of each individual caught within the common processes of mutability.

Loneliness and a concern with the coming of old age,

as in the preceding plays, are the motifs which link place

to place and precipitate the action. In the clarity of vision which comes from her direct physical confrontation with the 110 grave. Deidre describes herself, Naisi and Conchubor as merely "three lonesome figures before the grave." It is Conchubor's desperate refusal to admit his own age which hardens his determination to possess Deidre so that he may gain a second youth through her gaiety and beauty. In the context of Synge's dramatization of the saga he is guilty only of a blasphemy against the natural world, for he has made a false response to the spring time and "the daws sitting two by two on the ash trees by the duns of Emain." The conflict in the play is caused by Deidre's insistence on the rites of her own spring time, adher awareness of a destiny which has already been defined by the prophecy and is reinforced by her consciousness of the patterns of the natural world.

Her first entry in the play is made after she has been out on the hills, gathering nuts and "twigs for our fires at the dawn of day." The nature of her concern con- trasts vividly with Conchubor's anxiety over the "mats and hangings and the silver skillets." Synge's fine control of the imagistic structure of the play makes of the images that each character selects, a significant reflection of their ability to respond to their own human state. Conchubor is forever conscious of the time when: " . . . dry leaves are blowing back and forward at the gate of Emain. [I. p. 1741 These images are constant reminders of his own old age and lone'liness, and the presents he tells Deidre he will give her when she is his queen further reflect the sterility and oppressiveness of life at Emain:

It's soon you'll have dogs with siver chains to be chasing in the woods of Emain, for I have white hounds rearing for you, and grey horses, that I've chosen from the finest in Ulster and Britain and Gaul. [I. p. 1731

He can choose only spectral colours, white and silver and

grey, to attract her from the vivid world she inhabits, while

Deidre herself chooses the more vibrant colours of the natural world and is also associated with them in the speeches of the

other characters. Lavarcham describes her beauty in a clumsy

effort to point out the incongruity of a match between them:

I'll tell you if you seen her that time, with her white skin, and her red lips, and the blue water and the ferns about her, you'd know maybe and you greedy itself, it wasn't for your like she was burn at ail. [I. p. 17ij

Lavarcham sets Deidre in the context where her beauty finds

its most natural expression and 2s most perfectly defined by

the "blue water and the ferns about her." But the presentation

of this static picture of Deidre's beauty in an effort to

persuade Conchubor that the girl is not a suitable wife for

him, is also an indication of the blundering attempts Lavarcham makes throughout the play to alter the course of events, succeeding only in hastening their arrival.

Ironically Conchubor flatters that talent in Deidre

which is to negate all his attempts to change her will. He

praises her "skill at choosing colours and making pictures 112 on the cloth," and Lavarcham also testifies to this talent:

All say there isn't her match at fancying figures and throwing purple upon crimson, and she edging them all times with her greens and gold. [I. p. 1711

In her tapestry she has depicted Naisi and his brothers "chasing

in the green gap of a wood," for it is in this context that their love is endowed with its quality of uniqueness and

intensity. Her colourful weaving of the scene is to be indic-

ative of her capacity for "making pictures" in the natural world in her sure progress from the hut surrounded by apple

trees on Slieve Fuadh, to the green woods of Alban, to the

deep grave at Emain. It is through her linguistic creativity

that she endows her destiny with a present significance, for

it is impossible that Synge's very human heroine could exist

purely in terms of the high abstractions of the legend.

Synge merges the natural and the human cycle so closely in this play that they become almost indistinguishable,

as images from the natural world become the medium through which each character articulates his joy or fear or jealousy.

In her study of Deidre of the Sorrows, Una Ellis Fermor

comments :

. . . in this last play the nature experience of his life-time seems to meet and join hands with the undying tradition of Irish thought and poetry. It is no ornament. It is woven deep. And in the moments of intensest passion it seems more essential than the passion itself. 11 113 Nature is never a background against which the characters move, but is itself one of the dynamic agents of the play's progression. The "mountain of blackness in the sky," and "the greatest rain falling has been these long years on the earth," endows the particular night on which the play opens with an ominous significance, but the rain and darkness are also the vital agents which move Conchubor and Naisi towards the glowing windows of the hut. Deidre's delight in wander- ing the hills, and the full moon which tempts Naisi out to hunt the hares are the forces which precipitate the action, since it is their joy in the natural world which first causes their coming together. Nature provides the causative as well as the imaginative terms through which the legend is made potent. The natural forces which are to direct the course of the play are first expressed in Conchubor's dangerous response to the spring time. The "daws trooping two by two" on the ash trees at Emain inspire in him thoughts of recaptur- ing a second youth through his possession of Deidre. In Synge's dramatization of the legend, Conchubor's failure to recognize his own position in the natural cycle is his greatest "villainy." Naisi too, in his moments of weakness, fails to respond to the necessary ending of spring time. When their happiness is at its fullest in Emain he claims that they are "as happy as the leaves on the young trees and we'll be so ever and always though we'd live the age of - --

114

the eagle and the salmon and the crow of Britain." [II. p.

1921 Here he denies the autumn image of "the leaves on the

young trees," in his efforts to preserve their present joy

with the "ever and always" which denies its dependence on the vigour and intensity of youth. Naisi's weakness at such points, are a significant indication of his final bitterness

at the edge of the grave when he multiplies the sorrows which Conchubor's desire has brought to Deidre.

From her position at the edge of the action, Lavarcham

recognizes the seasonal truths more strongly than either

Naisi or Conchubor. She knows that they govern the course of events more surely than any prophecy:

Who'd check her like was made to have her pleasure only, the way if there were no warnings told ahnut her yccf2. see troubles coming when an old king is taking her, and she without a thought but for her beauty and to be straying the hills. [I. p. 1691

She is conscious, like all Synge's clear-sighted characters,

of the inevitability which is expressed in "but who can help it?" for:

Birds go mating in the spring of the year, and ewes at the leaves falling, but a young girl must have her lover in all the courses of the sun and moon. [I. p. 1851

Despite this recognition, her love for Deidre causes her to make blundering attempts to alter the course of events. She d herself can remain only the passive witness at the ceremony for she has already made her choice of a retreat into a secure old age. Deidre along recognizes that "There's a reason all times for an end that's come," and that the in- tensity and uniqueness of her love depends upon its termin- ation. Although they cannot escape the falling cycle of the seasons, they can make the cycle turn quickly by "following on to a near death." The imaginative clarity of Deidre's evocation of the alternatives which are offered in her "choice of lives" provides her with much of the strength to know that there can be only one qualitative choice. She easily,rejects the trappings of royalty which Conchubor offers her, for she is already conscious of a regality which is independent of

Conchubor, and demands instead the "right of a qnPen tha.+ is a master, taking her choice and making a stir to the edges of the sea." She associates the journey to Emain with the way ". . . Cuchulain brings his horse to the yoke, or Conall Cearnach puts his shield upon his arm." [I. p. 1771 The "big empty halls" of Emain and its "red gold walls" possess no attractions for Deidre, but she lingers for a moment over the safety of the hut on Slieve Fuadh even as she commits herself to the wider horizons of Alban:

And yet I'm in dread leaving this place where I have lived always. Won't I be lonesome and I think- ing on the little hills beyond and the apple trees do be budding in the springtime by the post of the door? . . . [I. p. 1831 116 The apparent security of this picture, however, is immediately shattered by her recollections that "I'm in dread from this out of the footsteps of a hare passing." In these very con- crete images, Deidre balances limitation against freedom, a fearful security against a risk-filled happiness. Deidre's dignity stems from her consciousness of the "wonder" of her story, but her strength to act it out in the present stems from her correlation of its course with the rhythms of the natural world. In this last exploration of a human coming to terms with a double inevitability, Synge eliminates the dividing line between the world of the imagin- ation and the world of experience. The story of Deidre and Naisi and the jealous king has already been foretold, so Deidre is already conscious of the wonder of her destiny before she makes her commitment to it in action. In The PZay- boy of the Western World, Christy Mahon must create his own tale of glory through an imaginative re-construction of deeds that have never taken place, before he finally identifies himself with the image he has evolved for himself and discards the necessity that the deed support it. Deidre's exaltation, however, stems from her poetic ability to transform the world of the imagination into a dynamic force which can create passion and encompass grief, and balance one against the other. She is indeed, Synge's most powerful artist of the imagina- tion, for she loves Naisi before he comes to her, puts an end to their love when it seems strong enough to last forever, and finally conducts the rites for her own suicide. The richness and intensity of the imaginative life must provide all the justification for Deidre's essentially hedonistic passion. She knows before she leaves Ireland that she will bring destruction to Naisi, but even her vision of eventual ruin suggests the grace of the dance, rather than the chaotic forces of struggle. Associating herself with the legendary beauties of the past--Emer in Dundealgan, or Maeve in her house in Connaught--she envisages the consequences of her own beauty:

And maybe from this day I will turn the men of Ireland like a wind blowing on the heath. [I. p. 1771 Since destruction is inevitable, she wills that it shall be graceful and magnificent. In her thesis on Synge's tragedies, Judith Hillery passes a very moral judgement on Deidre when she defines her choice as being "an escape from maturity with its problems and more complex happiness," reinforcing her argument by references to Riders to the Sea:

The identification she (Deidre) reaches with nature, too, is a more superficial, more easily won kinship than that which Maurya attains at the end of Riders to the Sea. Deidre's appreciation is for the brighter more joyous aspects of nature, while Maurya's is a hard-won recognition, "costing not less than every- thing . . . ." 12 118 This judgement does not take into account Deidre's constant introspection, for she is conscious throughout the play of all she risks and of the question as to "whether it's a game worth playing." It is this constant questioning, and the moments of indecision when she longs to prolong a happiness which is more human than legendary, which makes her appreciation of the necessities of the natural world as hard won as Maurya's and surely more active. Synge does not dramatize the time of Deidre's happin- ess in Alban, but focusses instead on the moment when it is time to test the validity of that experience by making the decision to face the troubles which await them in Alban. Their knowledge that the time has come to leave makes more vivid their evocation of the seven years of happiness. The exper- ience has already become a memory as Deidre formalizes it in her speeches, and defines it against the alternatives which Lavarcham and Fergus offer her. Lavarcham talks of the comforts of old age which she could still enjoy:

. . . the day'll come you'll have more joy having the senses of an old woman and you with your little grandsons shrieking round you, than I'd have this night putting on the red mouth, and the white arms you have, to go walking lonesome byways with a gamey king. [II. p. 1881

At this point, however, Deidre is only conscious that the future doom has now become the present: It's little joy of a young woman or an old woman I'll have from this day surely. But what use is our talking when there's Naisi on the foreshore, and Fergus with him. [II. p. 1881

Her imaginative powers are now to be tested to their fullest since she must find a justification for her passion.

The jealousy of Owen, which is itself a peasant echo of Conchubor's, strengthens her confidence in a joy which is already past. Owen asks if she is "well pleased" to have the same man beside her every day, and Deidre is able to define the quality of the "sameness."

Am I well pleased seven years seeing the same sun throwing light across the branches at the dawn of day? It's a heart-break to the wise that it's for a short space we have the same khings only. [TT, p2 1891

Here the nature images become the perfect articulate medium for the emotion, as Synge fuses the natural and the human world into one dimension. The melancholy that is expressed in her speeches in this scene makes Deidre's final assertion of the necessity to enact her destiny a more triumphant act of faith. Owen's reminders of a past in which Naisi had killed his father, and of a future, expressed in the image of "a queen's nose reaching down to scrape her chin," makes her surer that she will end the present while it is sufficiently brilliant to negate both. Fergus offers them the images of Ireland "where the Gaul can have peace always," and " a homely Dun beside the sea of Ireland," and taunts them with their inaction:

Wouldn't it be a poor story if a queen the like of you should have no thought but to be scraping up her hours dallying in the sunshine with the sons of kings? [II. p. 1911

The kind of life which Deidre and Naisi have lived in the woods of Alban is perhaps Synge's final comment on action.

Naisi is no warrior, and hunts only the hare and the salmon.

Deidre describes the quality of their dallying:

. . . . It's a long time we've had, pressing the lips together, going up and down, resting in our arms, Naisi, waking with the smell of June in the tops of the grasses, and listening to the birds in the branches that are nighest . . . . 111. p. 1931

And Ainnle and Ardan say of Deidre that there is none her like "for a happy and a sleepy queen." Beneath the happiness and the sleepiness, however, is the dread which Deidre has felt all the seven years for the moment which has now come: ~t'slonesome this place having happiness like ours till I'm asking each day, will this day match yester- day, and will tomorrow take a good place beside the same day in the year that's gone, and wondering all times is it a game worth playing . . . . [II. p. 1871

Synge is portraying Deidre's "choice of lives" as no easy commitment to a foreordained course of events, but as a hart decision, full of all the hesitancy which accompanies a very human coming to terms with loss. The roles which Deidre and Naisi are to play on their return to Emain are to demand passivity rather than action:

It isn't to great deeds you're going but to near troubles, and the shortening of your days the time that they are bright and sunny and isn't it a poor thing that I, Deidre, could not hold you away? [II. p. 1931

The completion of the cycle of destiny demands that Deidre and Naisi abandon themselves to the wills of those who seek to win through violent action, and only lose more completely. Conchubor's murder of Naisi and his brothers only renders him more impotent in the face of Deidre's "ravings", while Fergus, the warrior and unintentional traitor, can only throw his sword into the newly made grave as he finally admits its effectiveness, "There is my sword that could not shield you, my four friends that were the dearest always." [III. p. 2121 It is never through action that Synge's character's gain their final triumph, but through the transformation of the 121 irresistible forces of the natural world, and the savage re- action of humankind into a significant pattern of events, brought into vital relationship with themselves. Through

4t k: Deidre's imaginative vision of the meaningfulness of her own a 2 #5 destiny, even the foolishness of Conchubor's desire, Naisi's PC > 7. desertion of her and the ignominious suicide of Owen acquire I a measure of exaltation.

The language of the characters always keeps the - rhythms of exaltation in close contact with the possibility I that death can hold the threat of indignity as well as I h triumph. This awareness finds it clearest focus in the turb- ulent speeches o•’Owen, whose claim to immortality is to rest in the fact that he will be the first to die for Deidre's beauty. In his preface to the play, Yeats mentions that Synge had intended to make Owen a more important figure in the action:

He felt that the story, as he had told it, required a grotesque element mixed into its lyrical melancholy to give contrast and create an impression of solidity, and had begun that mixing with the character of Owen, who would have had some part in the first act also, where he was to have entered Lavarcham's cottage with Conchubor. 13

The portrayal of Owen accentuates the "earthiness" which is part of the play's vision, for he belongs to a world of un- balanced passions to which he has been driven by a loneliness -I so desperate "you'd squeeze kisses on a cur dog's nose." 122

Loneliness is in fact the motif which runs through the play, ,and eliminates our sense that there are any villains in the

;story. Each place has its degree of loneliness; it exists behind the red-gold walls of Conchubor's palace, in the hut

on Slieve Fuadh, and "on the ridge of the world," where the lovers must be watching for the fading of their happiness.

Conchubor's sense of loneliness drives him to jealousy and

violence, while Owen's "ravings" hasten him to a suicide which is the earthy antithesis of Deidre's. Lavarcham robs it of

all but an animal significance when she describes it to

Conchubor, "He went spying on Naisi, and now the worms is spy-

ing on his own inside." [III. p. 1991 Only his part in the

pattern of the legend can endow his death with a measure of

fi~ti~reglory. Throu~hthe emphasis Synge places on the animal --- ignominy which is connected with mortality, and is the other - - side to the dignity that Deidre achieves in death, he gives to

the legend its most human interpretation.

Since Deidre must come to terms with death without the aid of any divine power, her progress towards it must

take account of this kind of "messiness." The gods, in fact, 7 - are called on very perfunctorily in the play; their blessing

is invoked as a formal greeting for both the welcome and the unwelcome, but they have no part in the wedding of Deidre

and Naisi which is sanctified by very pagan rites, blessed

by the air "and water and the wind, the sea, and all the hours

of the sun and moon." This alignment with all the elements prepares us for the inclusion of the darkness and clay of Emain in the play's vision. The imagery of Deidre's speeches is already orientated t~wardsthese blacker elements when she tells Naisi of her vivid picture of what is to come:

. . . . And it's in the quiet woods I've seen them digging our grave, throwing out the clay on leaves are bright and withered. [II. p. 1931

The image sharply indicates the obliteration of the green leaves through which the sunshine pours in Alban, by the clay of Emain.

Despite this image, Deidre's hope rests in the fact that "bright" and "withered" are not directly paradoxical, but may be reconciled by a swift turning of the natural cycle.

Naisi is not yet strong enough to encompass the future in his language and can only think of all he will lose:

If a near death is coming what will be my touble losing the earth and the stars over it, and you Deidre are their flame and bright crown? Come away into the safety of the woods. [II. p. 1941

He can see no sense in the journey to Emain:

Would you have us go to Emain, though if any ask the reason we do not know it, and we journeying as the thrushes come from the north, or young birds fly out on a dark sea? [II. p. 1931

Deidre is able to explain the necessity for their return in terms of the changing seasons: . . .And I'm well pleased,Naisi,we're going forward ward in the winter the time the sun has a low place, and the moon has her mastery in the sky, for it's you and I are well lodged our last day, where there is a light behind the clear trees, and the berries on the thorns are a red wall. [II. p. 1931

Her speeches already hold in tension the images of Alban and the grave at Emain, whereas Naisi's language reflects his inability to prepare himself for the darker image. It is the image of the moon which now dominates Deidre's speeches. In the context of the "running" light imagery in the play, the moon becomes associated with the

4, memory of the passion, whereas the fullness of the sun is equated with the experience when it is at its most intense. 14 In the last act Deidre makes grief articulate through imagin- the absence of the lovers over whom it had watched. However, although these images are already used as a means of exalt- ing both grief and passion at the end of the second act, Deidre's final soliloquy focusses on the possible ignominy of death:

Woods of Cuan, woods of Cuan . . . . It's seven years we've had a life was joy only and this day we're going west, this day we're facing death maybe, and death should be a poor untidy thing, though it's a queen that dies. 111. p. 1971

Owen's death has provided a sharp reminder of this threat. ~eidre'srecognition of the darkness of the grave, in fact, 125 is as bleak as Maurya's, but unlike Maurya she has the energy of her own commitment to the significance of her passion to make the final sacrifice an infinitely more life-giving experience.

In the last act of Deidre of the Sorrows, Synge makes his most important alteration to the original story in plac- , ing the emphasis of the speeches, and the movement of the action, on Deidre's re-creation of the original legend in .- - terms of her own natural understanding of inevitability. In

Samuel Ferguson's Lays of the Red Branch, and in A.E.'s version of the tale, there is no final bitterness between

Deidre and Naisi, and Naisi and his brothers suffer death by one clean sweep of the magic sword which can behead three men at once. In Synge's play, Naisi dies in struggle and confusion, torn between his loyalty for his brothers and his love for Deidre, while Ainnle and Ardan are ambushed and slaughtered. It is in this time "between the daytime and the night," that Deidre suffers most intensely the conse- quences of making her decision, as her words prove ineffec- tive in holding Naisi at her side. Her dramatic assertion of herself in the first scene, "Naisi, do not leave me

Naisi, I am Deidre of the Sorrows," disintegrates in the last scene to "Do not leave me, Naisi . Do not leave me broken and alone." Ironically they are furthest apart at the moment when it would seem that only the closeness of their relationship could overcome the blackness of the grave. Deidre's last speeches of celebration must rely completely on her imaginative evocat'ion of their passion.

Naisi initiates the more turbulent rhythms of the final scene, and his expression of jealousy and dread echoes

Owen's rage as he reverts to the more colourful words of peasant dialect. The images of the sun and the moon with which he had associated his happiness with Deidre are now abandoned as he makes more articulate his sense that a blight has come upon their love. There is now an unhealthiness in the colour of the imagery he selects as he turns on Conchubor:

Look on her. You're a knacky fancier and it's well you chose the one you'd lure- from Alban. Look on her, I'm telling you, and when you've looked I've got ten fingers will squeeze your mottled goose neck thougn you're king itself. [III. p. 2041

Through the very earthy vitality of such language Naisi and

Conchubor are reduced to two jealous men squabbling over a woman. Naisi has found only mud and chaos at the edge of the grave as he fails to find any sense in their sacrifice. 15

Losing his awareness of the significance of the legend, and faced with a necessity which involves the murder of his brothers and the loss of Deidre, he turns against his lover as the worst betrayer of all:

It's women that have loved are cruel only, and if I went on living from this day I'd be putting a curse on the lot of them I'd meet walking in the east or west, putting a curse on the sun gave them beauty, and on the madder and the stone-crop put red upon their cloaks. [III. p. 2061 127 The quality of "mottling" which was present in his expres- sion of rage against Conchubor, now characterizes his accusations against Deidre, ". . . that mockery is in your eyes this night will spot the face of Emain with a plague of pitted graves." [III. p. 1061 The imagery, as in all great poetic drama, enacts the conflicts and choices within the play, and in this case, reflects the measure of Naisils disillusionment.

After Naisils death Deidre's language is also infused with a violent energy as she rages against all those who have precipitated the destruction:

It's the way pity has me this night, when I think of Naisi, that I could set my teeth into the heart of a king. [III. p. 2061

The insistence of Lavarcham, however, that she should retreat to a shelter, moves her towards defining the only alternative which is now open to her for, without Naisi, there is already no life left in "in the woods or the sea-shore." She is already discarding the images of clay and blood before

Conchubor comes with his marriage torches:

Let us throw down clay on my three comrades. Let us cover up Naisi along with Ainnle and Ardan, they that were the pride of Emain . . . . 1111. p. 2091

The speech moves towards a celebration of "the stars among the clear trees of Glen Ruadh," and "the moon pausing on the edges of the hills." All the bustling action that Conchubor's arrival introduces into the scene becomes irrelevant as Deidre vividly evokes the past, and finds in it the promise of her future :

Draw a little back with the sqabbling of fools when I am broken up with misery . . . . I see the flames of Emain starting upward in the dark night, and because of me there will be weasels and wild cats crying on a lonely wall where there were queens and armies, and red gold, the way there will be a story told of a ruined city and a raving king and a woman will be young forever . . . . I see the trees naked and bare, and the moon shining. Little moon of Alban, it's lonesome you'll be this night, and tomorrow night, and long nights after, and you pacing the woods beyond Glen Laio, look- ing every place for Deidre and Naisi who slept so sweetly with each other. [III. p. 2111

Her consciousness of the terrifying beauty of the destruction she has brought about, and of the immortality that is assured her in legend, demands that she also exalt the "fools" who have played their part in her story. In her next speech she reaches a stage where she is already invulnerable to events, and discards the mud and chaos and unbalanced passions which have characterized Emain:

I have put away sorrow like a shoe that is worn out and muddy, for it is I have had a life that will be envied by great companies. It was not by a low birth I made kings uneasy, and they sitting in the halls of Emain. It was not a low thing to be chosen by Conchubor, who was wise, and Naisi had no match for bravery . . . . [III. p. 2111 129 Like Maurya in Riders to the Sea, and christy in The pZay- boy of the Western world, she has reached a stage where she can bless all those who have brought her to the edge of destruction, but who have also contributed to her under- standing of the significance of her destiny. Ann Saddlemyer clearly defines the nature of the immortality she has won:

Deidre and Naisi are constantly aware of their place in the saga. They must put a "sharp end." In the work of the imagination the soul is not only regener- ated but perpetuated. As early as 1903, Synge had commented on Loti's terrified search for the persis- tence of the person." In the power of the imagination, especially in the mature and permanent form of the myth, Synge had discovered the artist's assurance of that persistence. 16

In this last play, Synge endows his heroine with his own artistic instincts.

Synge brings the action to rest in the same kind of static focussing images out of which it began. Out of the static cameo pictures of the beauty of Deidre and Naisi in the first scene have come the animated images through which they create each other, not in terms of the legend, but in terms of the natural and the peasant world. In Fergus' final speeches this animation is now channelled into the formality of the legend:

Four white bodies are laid down together, four clear lights are quenched in Ireland . . . . The flames of Emain have gone out: Deidre is dead and there is none to keen her. That is the fate of Deidre and Naisi next the children of Usna and for this night Conchubor, our war is ended. [III. p. 2123 130 Fergus expresses a dignified and almost passionless weighing of events, for the story has already become an image of the destruction and sorrows which are caused by great beauty through the imaginative rites which Deidre has herself conducted.

In Deidre of the Sorrows, Synge has explored a more human truth than that which can be explained by references to a destiny foretold in legend. He has celebrated the powers of the imagination to transform the rhythms of mutability, and the basic truths that "all places are lone- some," old age most of all, and "there is no place to keep youth and love a short time only," into the sources of immor- tality. In the closing speeches of the play the emphasis is once more on the very human concerns of those characters who have played their parts in this exaltation of inevit- ability. After the death of Deidre, Fergus is left with no cause of war with Conchubor, and Conchubor himself is now

"hard set to see the way before (me)." Our last picture is of Lavarcham guiding him out of the heavy dews towards the shelter of the hut. The image of the hut on which these last speeches of Lavarcham focus, is in fact the direct antithesis of the safe, splendid place which Deidre has chosen to make of the grave. Synge died before he could complete his revisions of the play, but Yeats indicates that it seems clear that he would have weighted it even more strongly towards the peas- 131 ant reality of the legend. Even as it stands, however, it surely represents Synge's most vital exploration of the power of the imagination to evolve rites which can make inevitability a significant process. Whereas his preceding plays leave us in irresolution as the central characters abandon the security of the shebeen or hut or church to test their own poetic power, this last tragedy asserts the validity of the imagination within the course of the action.

Like Riders to the Sea, its movement is always towards the

"deep grave," but the final passionless recognition of destiny comes after the intenser rites of spring, rather than after the bleakness of an everpresent winter. It is important too to recognize the position of Synge in relation to the play,

for he himself was engaged in the process of coming to terms with the grave: just as her own imaginative creation of the legend ensured his heroine of her immortality, so too

the play offered its creator the same promise of "the per- sistence of the personality." FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER V

l~eor~eRussell (A.E. ) , Deidre, (~ublin,Maunsel, 1907) p*78-

2~.~.Yeats, Collected Plays, (New York, Macmillan, 1953) , p. 126.

3~etterfrom W.B. Yeats to Synge, dated Nov. 15th, 1904, (L.M. Wilson Collection, ~rinitycollege, Dublin, presented 1958).

'~eference Judith Hillery, 'A Study of the Dramatic Structure of the Tragedies of J.M. Synge", unpublished M.A. thesis, (Trinity College, Dublin, 1959). The earliest extant version of the play was in the twelfth century collection of legends entitled "The Book of Leinster." Synge's translation, which he began on Aran in 1901, was based on the modern Irish version, "Fate of the Children of Usneach," published for the society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, Dublin, 1898, from a manuscript written by Andrea MacCurtin of Corcom- roe, Co. Clare, in 1740.

6~avidH. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge, 1871- 1909, (New York, Collier, 1961) , p. 222.

7~na review of Lady Gregory Is "Cuchulain of Muirthemne, " published in an edition of The Speaker dated 7th, 1902 Synge comments on the qualities which he' found particularly admir- able in her translation: "The Elizabethan vocabulary has a force and colour that make it the only form of ~n~lishthat is quite suitable for incidents of the epic kind, and in her intercourse with the peasants of the west Lady Gregory has learned to use this vocabulary in a new way, while she carries with her the plaintive Gaelic constructions that make her language, in a true sense, a language of Ireland. When we turn to the subject matter of these stories we find a new world of romance. Everywhere wildness and vigour are blended in a strange way with impetuous tenderness, and with the vague misgivings that are peculiar to primitive men. Most of the moods and actions that are met with are more archaic than anything in the Homeric poems, yet a few features such as the imperiousness and freedom of the women, seem to Footnotes (continued) imply an intellectual advance, beyond the period of Ulysses." His praise is only qualified by a comment on Lady Gregory's omission of "certain barbarous features" of the original saga. In his own version of Deidre, the strain of barbarity in the legend finds its expression in the character and actions of Owen.

'J.M. Synge, "Deidre of the Sorrows", Pay, ed. Anne Saddlemyer, (London, Oxford University Press, 1969), Act 11, p. 193. All subsequent references to this edition will be included in the text.

ad^ Augusta Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, (London, John Murray, 1902), p. 127.

10~regory,OJ. -cit . , p. 109.

lluna ~llis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement, (1939; rept. London, Methuen, 1964), p. 171.

l2 Judith Hillery, op. cit., pp. 63-64.

"w.B. Yeats, preface to "Deidre of the Sorrows ,I1 in Plays, ed. Anne Saddlemyer.

14yeats, in an essay entitled "The Emotion of Multitude," ("~ssaysand Introductions," London, Oxford University Press, 1924), defines the rich suggestiveness which great art distils from the limitations of the fable: "Indeed all the great Masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering many- imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it. There are some who understand that the simple unmysterious things living as in a clear moonlight are of the nature of the sun, and the vague many-imaged things have in them the strength of the moon." [p. 2161 It is this kind of evocativeness which characterizes Deidre's 'natural' expression of her story, and informs her creator's dramatization of the legend.

151t is easy to understand Synge's insistence to Willie Fay, who was to produce the play, that the open grave should actually be seen on the stage and should be the focus of the Footnotes (continued) last act, for by this time it has become one of the active protagonists, possessing the power to challenge and to ridicule man, but also holding the promise that he shall be young forever.

16~nneSaddlemyer, J.M. Synge and Modern Comedy, op. cit. (Dublin, Dolman Press, 1968), p. 27. CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

I have called the process by which Synge's peasant- poets come to terms with the oppressiveness of their environ-

ment and the inevitability of their own mortality the rites

of the imagination. Although it is possible to formulate the progress of these characters towards a vital acceptance of

limitation and loss in terms of the stages of a mythic journey

involving choice and trial, despair and redemption, such critical definition does not take into account the nature of

the rites or explain the ecstasy which is their offspring.

The rites themselves, because they are the fullest expression

of the nature of the individual, change and expand from moment to moment and draw their energy, not from a structured re-

sponse to the external world, but from the shifting patterns of image and cadence through which the character discovers

'his own relationship with all elements of this external world. When Synge talks of the qualities which should be sought in

a work of art he is surely describing too the life style of

the artists of the imagination in his own plays: a work of art "must have been possible to only one man at one period

and in one place. ,I 1 This quality of uniqueness chacterizes

the imaginative response of his characters to the universal i.! 136 I l concerns of loneliness and love and fear at the coming of old age. It provides them too with the energy to delight in

the image which they themselves create and to animate the

melancholy abstractions which underlie their assertions.

In Synge's first, and till recently unpublished play,

When the Moon has Set, the hero states those universal truths

which never need to be made explicit in the plays that follow,

where the playwright had found a dramatic medium which could project them in terms of "the accompanying emotional or imaginative life in which they naturally arise. "* 1n one version of the play Colm attempts to persuade Eileen, the nun who has nursed his dying uncle and with whom he has fallen in

love, to reject her Christian beliefs and follow the impulses- of her own passion:

No one pretends to ignore the bitterness of disease and death. It is an immense infinite horror, and the more we learn to set the real value on the vital- ity of life the more we will dread death. Yet any horror is better than the stagnation of belief . . . . There is stagnation in everything that has been once mature. . . . The world orchestra has been play- ing its oratorio for two thousand years and the thing has become effete. Now the players have gone out to gain new powers in lonely exaltation. The people who rebel from the law of God are not those who are essay- ing strange notes in the dark alleys of the world but the fools who linger in the aisles droning their withered chants with senile intonation . . . . I mean that in the Christian synthesis each separate faculty has been dying of atrophy. The synthesis has fallen. The imagination has wandered away to grow puissant and terrible again, in lonely vigils where she sits and broods among things that have been touched by madmen and things that have the smell of death on them and books written with the blood of horrible crimes. The intellect has peered down into the tumult of atoms and up into the stars till she has forgotten her complements in the personality and the instinct for practical joy has taught anarchists to hate in the passion of their yearning for love . . . . In the end men will grow human again with a more wonderful manhood. Every pattern will unite in new discords resolving in what are to us incon- ceivable harmonies. 3

Such language has none of the vitality which it praises, but remains a sterile statement of the conflict between orthodox religion and the need for the imaginative expression of the personality. In this first play Synge is statingrin universal terms of reference, the themes which were later to be enacted in the rhythms of the peasant dialect, and draw their unique- ness from the images of a particular landscape. Yet Colm is expressing with very clear definition the concern with

-ILLVLLL~~~IL~ - .- which informs the mature plays, and his preference for the horror of death, a horror magnified by placing "the real value on the vitality of life," rather than "the stag- I nation of belief" is also the choice made by the heroes and I heroines of the later dramas .* In these, however, the rich- I ness of the imaginative participation in the processes of the I natural world, the wild extravagance of the language, the I savagery of the cursing, are the regenerative forces which grow out of the recognition of mutability, and transform its necessity into a vital life style. I The bleakness and the melancholy which are part of the vision of the plays serve to define more vividly the the creativity of characters such as Deidre and Christy and Mary Byrne, who are able to find their own brand of revelry in the face of a meaninglessly destructive universe. The revelry involves a hedonistic delight in the impulses and passions of the individual and a delight in all that lives, whether human, animal or vegetable. In a brief sketch for a scenario, entitled A RabeZaisian Rhapsody, Synge attributes to Rabelais a speech which equates the all-inclusiveness of such revelry with the sources of ecstasy:

At a fair also with ale and the sound of fiddles and dancers and the laughter of fat women the soul is moved to an ecstasy which is perfection and not partial. 5

To be glad and careless, to deride the fall of the cycle even as they recognize it, constitutes the triumph of those characters who create their own festivities in life. Each phrase and cadence of the plays is organized to translate the abstractions of fear and love and jealousy into the vividness of the present moment. When Deidre claims that "There's a reason all times for an end that's come,lt6 as she recognizes that it is time to put a "sharp end" to her happiness, she comes nearest to stating the universal truth which inspires the celebration of life in both the comedies and the tragedies. To make a wonder of the "reason," after the animal rage which is involved in its questioning, is to choose the imaginative alternative and make it valid in reality. 139

FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER VI

l~romthe notebooks of J.M. Synge, cited by Anne Saddlemyer in "A Share in the Dignity of the World," in The World of W.B. Yeats, (1965; rev. ed. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1967), p. 214.

'~nne Saddlemyer, 2.- cit., p. 213.

3~.~.Synge, "Collected Works 111: Plays I ,I1 ed. Anne Saddlemyer, gen. ed. Robin Skelton, (London, Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 176. Typescript of Act I1 of play in Item 51.

4~.B. Yeats , in a Memorandum to Synge Is executors, 1909, makes this judgement on the play: "The only thing interesting about it is that it shows his preoccupation with the thought of death. He knew my opinion about it at the time. It was after its rejection by us he took to peasant work." (Plays, ed. Anne Saddlemyer, p. 155).

C; -J.M. Synge, Plays, ed. Anne Saddlemyer, o on don, Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 193. LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED

I. Primary Sources

Synge, J.M. Plays. ed. Anne Saddlemyer, London, 1969. . Collected Works I: Poems. ed. Robin Skelton, London, 1962. . Collected Works 11: Prose. ed. Alan Price, London, 1962. . Collected Works 111: Plays. ed. Anne Saddlemyer, (gen. ed., Robin Skelton), London, 1968.

11. Secondary Sources

Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction. London: 1928.

Bourgeois, Maurice. John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre. London, 1913. Boyd, E.A. Ireland's Literary Renaissance. Dublin, 1916. Brylowski, Walter. Faulkner's Olympian Laughter: Myth in the Novels. Colum, Padraic. The Road Round Ireland. New York, 1926. Corkery, Daniel. Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature. London, 1931. Eliot, T.S. Poetry and Drama. Massachusetts, 1961. Ellis-Fermor, Una. The Irish Dramatic Movement. London, 1931. . The Frontiers of the Drama. London, 1945. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London, 1947. Ferguson, Samuel. Lays of the Red Branch. London, 1912.

Figgis, Darrel. Studies and Appreciations. London, 1912.

Gascoigne, Bamber. Twentieth Century Drama. New York, 1962.

Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama. New York, 1940.

Gerstenberger, Donna. John Millington Synge. New York, 1964.

Greene, David H., and Edward M. Stephens. J.M. Synge, 1871- 1909. New York, 1959.

Gregory, Augusta. Our Irish Theatre. London, 1913. . Cuchulain of Muirthemne. London, 1902. Henn, T.R. The Harvest of Tragedy. London, 1955.

Hoare, Dorothy. The Works of Morris and Yeats in elation to Early Saga Literature. Cambridge, 1937.

Howarth, Herbert. The Irish Writers 1880-1940. London, 1958.

Howe, P.O. J.M. Synge. London, 1912.

Hyde, Douglas. Three Sorrows of Storytelling. London, 1895.

MacLiammoir, M. Theatre in Ireland. Dublin, 1950.

Malone, A.E. The Irish Drama. London, 1929.

MacKenna, Stephen. Journal and Letters. London, 1936.

Masefield, John. John M. Synge. Dundrum, 1915.

Peacock, R. The Poet in the Theatre. London, 1946.

Price, Alan. Synqe and Anglo-Irish Drama. London, 1961.

Russell, George (A.E.). Deidre. Dublin, 1907.

Saddlemyer, Anne, and Robin Skelton. The World of W.B. Yeats. Seattle, 1965.

. J.M. Synqe and Modern Comedy. Dublin, 1968. J Setterquist, Jan. Ibsen and the Beginnings of Anglo-Irish Drama: J.M. Synqe. Dublin, 1951. Skelton, Robin. Introduction to Riders to the Sea. Dublin, 1968. Stewart, J.A. The Myths of Plato. London, 1960.

Suilleabhain, Sean 0'. Irish Folk Custom and Belief. Dublin, 1967. Taylor, E.R. The Modern Irish Writers. Lawrence, 1954. Weygandt, C. Irish Plays and Playwrights. London, 1913. Williams, Raymond. Drama from Ibsen to Eliot. London, 1952. Yeats, W.B. Autobiographies. London, 1952. - . Essays and Introductions. London, 1924. . The Cutting ~f an Agate. London, 1919. . Collected Plays. New York, 1953.

111. Articles

Davie, Donald. "The Poetic Diction of Synge," Dublin i/ Magazine. XXVII, (1952). Donoghue, Denis. "Synge: Riders to the Sea: A Study," University Review. 1, No. 5 (Summer, 1955) . . "Too Immoral for Dublin: Synge's 'The Tinker's wedding' " , Irish Writing. 30, (1955).

Fausset, Hugh I'A. "Synge and Tragedy," The Fortnightly .A Review, V, (Jan. - July, l924), 258-273. Figgis, Darrel. "The Art of J.M. Synge," The Fortnightly ,, Review, V, (1911), 1056-1068. Freyer, Grattan. "The World of J.M. Synge," Politics and Letters, IV, (1948). Greene, D. H. " 'The Tinker ' s wedding A Revaluation' 1-PMLA. LXII, (1947). Hamel, A.G. van. "On Angle-Irish Syntax," Enqlische Studien. XLV, (1912). Pearce, Howard D. "Synge's Playboy as Mock-Christ," Modern Drama, VIII, (December, 1965) , 303-310. dl Podhoretz, Norman. "Synge's 'Playboy': Morality and the Hero," Essays in Criticism. 111, (July, 1953), 337-44. Quinn, Owen. "No Garland for John Synge," Envoy, 111, ii, (1950). Skelton, Robin. "The Poetry of J.M. Synge," Poetry Ireland. (Autumn, 1962).

Spacks, P.M. "The Making of the Playboy," Modern Drama. J IV, (December, 1961) , 314-23. Strong, L.A.G. "J.M. Synge," Bookman. LXX, iii, (1931), 125-36.

White, H.O. "John Millington Synge," Irish Writing.--- IX, ij.34~j .

IV. Theses

Carmody, Terence F. John Millington Synge: A Study of the Intruder in His Wicklow Plays. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Dublin, 1962. Frese, Jerome J. The Coalescence of Theme and Languaqe in the Comedies of J.M. Synqe. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Dublin, 1961. Hillery, Judith. A Study of the Dramatic Structure of the Tragedies of J.M. Synge. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Dublin, 1959.

V. Letters

L.M. Wilson Collection, presented to Trinity College, Dublin, 1958. (unpublished).