Conclusion

Abstract

A single statement brings us close to the centre of Synge’s dramatic vision — ‘on the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy’. As always with Synge’s theorising he writes from the specific artistic position in which he finds himself, arguing here against both the joylessness of Scandinavia and the unreal poetic country of Maeterlinck and the early Yeats. But he speaks also for his deepest intuitions as a dramatist, and right through his plays the balance between reality and joy is essential. Reality began for him on Aran, and it began with the acute realisation of death. According to Padraic Colum, Synge once said that Riders was inspired by the recognition of his own mortality which came to him at the age of thirty. It seems almost absurdly banal as a motive fur writing that play, but this urgent sense of death stayed with him all through the rest of his career. It is one of the reasons why it is unnecessary to see in Deirdre a prefiguration of his own death. The tragic awareness which is there both in Deirdre and in Riders is not simply the feeling of a man who knew that his own life was to be short. It is the horrified realisation of loss which we find at its most naked in his poetry:

I read about the Blaskets and Dunquin, The Wicklow towns and fair days I’ve been in. I read of Galway, Mayo, Aranmore, And men with kelp along a wintry shore. Then I remember that that ‘I’ was I, And I’d a filthy job - to waste and die. (Poems P: 66)