John Millington Synge

“ CATHLEEN
Michael is after being found in the far north, and when he is found there how could he be here in this place?
MAURYA
There does be a power of young men floating round in the sea, and what way would they know if it was Michael they had, or another man like him, for when a man is nine days in the sea, and the wind blowing, it’s hard set his own mother would be to say what man was it. ”

“ NORA
What stick?
CATHLEEN
The stick Michael brought from Connemara.
MAURYA.
Taking a stick Nora gives her.
In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old.
She goes out slowly.
Nora goes over to the ladder.
CATHLEEN
Wait, Nora, maybe she’d turn back quickly. She’s that sorry, God help her, you wouldn’t know the thing she’d do.
NORA
Is she gone round by the bush?
CATHLEEN
Looking out. ”

“ A writer in The Manchester Guardian shortly after Synge’s death phrased it rightly when he wrote that it is “the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has been played in Europe from Galway to Prague, it has made the word tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the spirit than it did.”
The secret of the play’s power is its capacity for standing afar off, and mingling, if we may say so, sympathy with relentlessness. There is a wonderful beauty of speech in the words of every character, wherein the latent power of suggestion is almost unlimited. ”

“ MAURYA
How would the like of her get a good price for a pig?
BARTLEY
To 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. It’s hard set we’ll be from this day with no one in it but one man to work.
MAURYA
It’s hard set we’ll be surely the day you’re drownd’d with the rest. What way will I live and the girls with me, and I an old woman looking for the grave?
Bartley lays down the halter, takes off his old coat, and puts on a newer one of the same flannel.
BARTLEY
To Nora. ”

“ I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. ”

“ The gray pony knocked him into the sea, and he was washed out where there is a great surf on the white rocks.
Maurya has gone over and knelt down at the head of the table. The women are keening softly and swaying themselves with a slow movement. Cathleen and Nora kneel at the other end of the table. The men kneel near the door.
MAURYA
Raising her head and speaking as if she did not see the people around her. ”

“ It is only in the far places, where solitary communion may be had with the elements, that this dynamic life is still to be found continuously, and it is accordingly thither that the dramatist, who would deal with spiritual life disengaged from the environment of an intellectual maze, must go for that experience which will beget in him inspiration for his art. ”

“ 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? ”