At the very end he drafted his own epitaph. In the poem “Under Ben Bulben” he describes the place where he shall be buried, and the words that shall be read over his grave:
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by.
So it was, and so it is. You may go and see for yourself if you wish. It is one of the few literary pilgrimages worth the bother.
W.B. Yeats was a voluminous poet and the Collected Poems is a big, heavy book. Buy it nevertheless and treasure it, for it is one of the foundations of any good personal library. Only practiced and sophisticated readers of poetry should sit down with such a book and read it from beginning to end. A book of poems is not a novel. Start with these twenty poems, more or less: “The Ballad of Father Gilligan,” “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” “The Cat and the Moon,” “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “For Anne Gregory,” “The Cold Heaven,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Among School Children,” “The Tower,” “Down by the Salley Gardens,” “When You Are Old,” “September 1913,” “Easter 1916,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “Words for Music Perhaps” (the Crazy Jane Poems), and “Under Ben Bulben.”
Then put down the book and think about it. Come back to Yeats again and again, as you grow older. And wiser.
J.M. SYNGE
1871–1909
The Playboy of the Western World
John Millington Synge was born near Dublin in 1871, attended Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied languages, and decided after graduating to be a musician. His life remained confused and his career uncertain until he was twenty-eight, in 1899, when he met William Butler Yeats in Paris. Yeats was interested in his young countryman, but not in a plan Synge proposed to write literary criticism. Something much more important than mere literature was happening in Ireland, Yeats said. We now call it the Irish Renaissance. Synge, inspired by Yeats’s words, returned to Ireland, to the western country and the Aran Islands, where he found his métier.
In his preface to The Playboy of the Western World, his masterpiece, Synge explained both his method and his source of literary inspiration. “Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry,” he wrote, “will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a collaboration,” he went on; “and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the storyteller’s or the playwright’s hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work, he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege.”
Synge told of how, some years before, when he had been writing “The Shadow of the Glen,” he had crouched over a chink in the floor of his room in the inn at Wicklow and listened to the servant girls talking to one another in the kitchen. “This matter, I think, is of importance,” he wrote, “for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.”
On the stage, Synge insisted, one must have both reality and joy. The intellectual modern drama, he said, has failed; Ibsen and Zola were dealing “with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words; people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality. In a good play,” Synge went on, “every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry.” Such was not the case in Ireland, Synge felt; at least for a time, until the modern world should descend upon it and shut up its springs of fancy. “In Ireland,” he concluded, “for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender.”
It is indeed that fiery and tender imagination that infuses Playboy. The play tells the story of a country lad who appears out of the night with a confession that he has murdered his father. He is welcomed as a hero and then, strangely, he becomes one in fact. But his father turns up, unmurdered, and Christy Mahon loses all his reputation, although not his new, more successful self. As such, the story was scandalous to Irish eyes and ears, and the audience rioted at its opening at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907. The first American production, in New York in 1911, was met with equal distaste.
Later audiences have come to understand that the story is a great metaphor, and not just an attack—which was certainly far from Synge’s intention—on the Irishman’s love of boasting and his tendency to glamorize ruffians. Joyce’s Ulysses is also an account of a young man’s quest for an accommodation with his father, and The Playboy of the Western World is now read as comparable to such major work.
Metaphor or not, the most wonderful thing about Playboy is its language. Synge’s time spent on the floor listening to the kitchen girls in the inn at Wicklow was not wasted. The words of the text dance and sing as you read them out loud, as you should do. Brush up your Irish accent and go to it. Many lines will bring the tears to your eyes, and others will make your heart leap.
Best of all are the words with which young Christy woos Pegeen Mike, the “wild-looking but fine girl,” as Synge describes her, who is the daughter of the keeper of a country public house where the action takes place. Pegeen is smitten by Christy from the moment she sets eyes on him, and he soon falls madly in love with her. He begins to pour out his soul to her in a kind of poetry he has never spoken before and that she has never before heard. He tells her that they will walk the mountains together “in the dews of night, the times sweet smells be rising, and you’d see a little shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills”:
PEGEEN—looking at him playfully.—And it’s that kind of a poacher’s love you’d make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?
CHRISTY. It’s little you’ll think if my love’s a poacher, 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.
PEGEEN. That’ll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or talk, at all.