J.M. Synge

“ Yet the earth itself is a silly place, maybe, when a man’s a fool and talker.
OWEN.
— sharply. — Well, go, take your choice. Stay here and rot with Naisi or go to Conchubor in Emain. Conchubor’s a wrinkled fool with a swelling belly on him, and eyes falling downward from his shining crown; Naisi should be stale and weary. Yet there are many roads, Deirdre, and I tell you I’d liefer be bleaching in a bog-hole than living on without a touch of kindness from your eyes and voice. It’s a poor thing to be so lonesome you’d squeeze kisses on a cur dog’s nose. ”

“ Disordered people look disordered, unusual people look unusual. A youth with long hair, a velvet coat, extravagant manners, and the other effeminacies of emptiness looks the charlatan he is. Synge gave one from the first the impression of a strange personality. He was of a dark type of Irishman, though not black-haired. Something in his air gave one the fancy that his face was dark from gravity. Gravity filled the face and haunted it, as though the man behind were forever listening to life’s case before passing judgment. ”

“ PEGEEN.
It’s queer joys they have, and who knows the thing they’d do, if it’d make the green stones cry itself to think of you swaying and swiggling at the butt of a rope, and you with a fine, stout neck, God bless you! the way you’d be a half an hour, in great anguish, getting your death.
CHRISTY.
getting his boots and putting them on.—If there’s that terror of them, it’d be best, maybe, I went on wandering like Esau or Cain and Abel on the sides of Neifin or the Erris plain. ”

“ LAVARCHAM.
— to Old Woman. — She doesn’t heed us at all. We’ll be hard set to rouse her.
OLD WOMAN.
If we don’t the High King will rouse her, coming down beside her with the rage of battle in his blood, for how could Fergus stand against him?
LAVARCHAM.
— touching Deirdre with her hand. — There’s a score of woman’s years in store for you, and you’d best choose will you start living them beside the man you hate, or being your own mistress in the west or south?
DEIRDRE.
It is not I will go on living after Ainnle and after Ardan. After Naisi I will not have a lifetime in the world. ”

“ He said that he had just come to London from Paris, and that he found Bloomsbury strange after the Quartier Latin. He was puzzled by the talk of the clever young men from Oxford. “That’s a queer way to talk. They all talk like that. I wonder what makes them talk like that? I suppose they’re always stewing over dead things.”
Synge lodged in a front room on the second floor of No. 4, Handel Street, Bloomsbury. It was a quiet house in a quiet, out-of-the-way street. His room there was always very clean and tidy. The people made him very comfortable. ”

“ I was beginning to think that they would have to give up and row round to the lee side of the island, when the curagh seemed suddenly to turn into a living thing. The prow was again towards the slip, leaping and hurling itself through the spray. Before it touched, the man in the bow wheeled round, two white legs came out over the prow like the flash of a sword, and before the next wave arrived he had dragged the curagh out of danger.
This sudden and united action in men without discipline shows well the education that the waves have given them. ”

“ DEIRDRE.
— in a high and quiet tone. — 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. It is not a small thing to be rid of grey hairs, and the loosening of the teeth. (With a sort of triumph.) It was the choice of lives we had in the clear woods, and in the grave, we’re safe, surely. ”

“ DEIRDRE.
— with a more tender intensity. — We’re seven years without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and shining, the gods would be hard set to give us seven days the like of them. It’s for that we’re going to Emain, where there’ll be a rest for ever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they making a stir.
NAISI.
— very softly. — We’ll go, surely, in place of keeping a watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (They cling to each other for a moment, then Naisi looks up.) There are Fergus and Lavarcham and my two brothers. ”

“ On some days I feel this island as a perfect home and resting place; on other days I feel that I am a waif among the people. I can feel more with them than they can feel with me, and while I wander among them, they like me sometimes, and laugh at me sometimes, yet never know what I am doing.
In the evenings I sometimes meet with a girl who is not yet half through her teens, yet seems in some ways more consciously developed than any one else that I have met here. She has passed part of her life on the mainland, and the disillusion she found in Galway has coloured her imagination. ”

“ 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.
CATHLEEN.
It’s Michael, God spare him, for they’re after sending us a bit of his clothes from the far north.
[She reaches out and hands Maurya the clothes that belonged to Michael. Maurya stands up slowly, and takes them into her hands. Nora looks out.] ”

“ NAISI.
Then we’ll go away. It isn’t I will give your like to Conchubor, not if the grave was dug to be my lodging when a week was by. (He looks out.) The stars are out, Deirdre, and let you come with me quickly, for it is the stars will be our lamps many nights and we abroad in Alban, and taking our journeys among the little islands in the sea. There has never been the like of the joy we’ll have, Deirdre, you and I, having our fill of love at the evening and the morning till the sun is high. ”

“ NAISI.
I will not. . . . I’ve had dread, I tell you, dread winter and summer, and the autumn and the springtime, even when there’s a bird in every bush making his own stir till the fall of night; but this talk’s brought me ease, and I see we’re as happy as the leaves on the young trees, and we’ll be so ever and always, though we’d live the age of the eagle and the salmon and the crow of Britain.
FERGUS.
— with anger. — Where are your brothers? My message is for them also.
NAISI.
You’ll see them above chasing otters by the stream. ”

“ PEGEEN.
That’d be a lad with the sense of Solomon to have for a pot-boy, Michael James, if it’s the truth you’re seeking one at all.
PHILLY.
The peelers is fearing him, and if you’d that lad in the house there isn’t one of them would come smelling around if the dogs itself were lapping poteen from the dungpit of the yard.
JIMMY.
Bravery’s a treasure in a lonesome place, and a lad would kill his father, I’m thinking, would face a foxy divil with a pitchpike on the flags of hell. ”

“ It’s easy being fearful and you alone in the woods, yet it would be a poor thing if a timid woman (taunting her a little) could turn away the Sons of Usna from the life of kings. Let you be thinking on the years to come, Deirdre, and the way you’d have a right to see Naisi a high and white-haired justice beside some king of Emain. 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? ”

“ She belonged to one of the most primitive families on the island, and she shook with uncontrollable fury as she saw the strange armed men who spoke a language she could not understand driving her from the hearth she had brooded on for thirty years. For these people the outrage to the hearth is the supreme catastrophe. They live here in a world of grey, where there are wild rains and mists every week in the year, and their warm chimney corners, filled with children and young girls, grow into the consciousness of each family in a way it is not easy to understand in more civilised places. ”

“ This grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas. ”

“ However, the very asceticism of the play has begotten a corresponding power which lifts Synge’s work far out of the current of the Irish literary revival, and sets it high in a timeless atmosphere of universal action.
Its characters live and die. It is their virtue in life to be lonely, and none but the lonely man in tragedy may be great. He dies, and then it is the virtue in life of the women mothers and wives and sisters to be great in their loneliness, great as Maurya, the stricken mother, is great in her final word. ”

“ Well, I'm on three legs this minute, but the old man beyond is back on four; I don't know if I'm better than the way he is; he's got his sight and I'm only an old dark man.'
I am settled at last on Inishmaan in a small cottage with a continual drone of Gaelic coming from the kitchen that opens into my room.
Early this morning the man of the house came over for me with a four-oared curagh—that is, a curagh with four rowers and four oars on either side, as each man uses two—and we set off a little before noon. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Take him on from this, for I think bad the world should see me raging for a Munster liar, and the fool of men.
MAHON.
Rise up now to retribution, and come on with me.
CROWD.
jeeringly.—There’s the playboy! There’s the lad thought he’d rule the roost in Mayo. Slate him now, mister.
CHRISTY.
getting up in shy terror.—What is it drives you to torment me here, when I’d asked the thunders of the might of God to blast me if I ever did hurt to any saving only that one single blow. ”

“ A lady read the plays very beautifully. Afterwards we all applauded. Synge learned his métier that night. Until then, all his work had been tentative and in the air. After that, he went forward, knowing what he could do.
For two or three months I met Synge almost daily. Presently he went back to Ireland (I believe to Aran) and I to “loathed Devonshire.” I met him again, later in the year. During the next few years, though he was not often in town, I met him fairly often whenever the Irish players came to London. Once I met him for a few days together in Dublin. ”

“ She came first to my bedside and gave me a dram, then she did the same for her father and brother, handed us our pipes and tobacco, and went back to the kitchen.
There were to be sports at noon in Ballyferriter, and when we had talked for a while I asked the host if he would think well of my going over to see them. 'I would not,' he said 'you'd do better to stay quiet in this place where you are; the men will be all drunk coming back, fighting and kicking in the canoes, and a man the like of you, who aren't used to us, would be frightened. ”

“ Will the High King get the better of her, Lavarcham? If I was Conchubor, I wouldn’t marry with her like at all.
LAVARCHAM.
Hang that by the window. That should please her, surely. When all’s said, it’s her like will be the master till the end of time.
OLD WOMAN.
— at the window. — There’s a mountain of blackness in the sky, and the greatest rain falling has been these long years on the earth. The gods help Conchubor. He’ll be a sorry man this night, reaching his dun, and he with all his spirits, thinking to himself he’ll be putting his arms around her in two days or three. ”

“ Where is it you have her hidden away? Isn’t it a black shame for a drove of pitiful beasts the like of you to be making game of me, and putting a fool’s head on me the grand day of my life? Ah, you’re thinking you’re a fine lot, with your giggling, weeping eyes, a fine lot to be making game of myself and the woman I’ve heard called the great wonder of the west.
[During this speech, which he gives with his back towards the church, Mary Doul has come out with her sight cured, and come down towards the right with a silly simpering smile, till she is a little behind Martin Doul.] ”

“ PEGEEN.
breaking out into wild rage.—And you’ll say that, Widow Quin, and you gasping with the rage you had racing the hill beyond to look on his face.
WIDOW QUIN.
laughing derisively.—Me, is it? Well, Father Reilly has cuteness to divide you now. (She pulls Christy up.) There’s great temptation in a man did slay his da, and we’d best be going, young fellow; so rise up and come with me.
PEGEEN.
seizing his arm.—He’ll not stir. He’s pot-boy in this place, and I’ll not have him stolen off and kidnapped while himself’s abroad. ”

“ If you’d a quiet place settled up to be playing yourself, maybe, with a gentle queen, what’d you think of young men prying around and carrying tales? When I was a bit of a girl the big men of Ulster had better manners, and they the like of your three selves, in the top folly of youth. That’ll be a story to tell out in Tara that Naisi is a tippler and stealer, and Ainnle the drawer of a stranger’s cork. ”