Synge and the Ireland of his Time by W.B. Yeats

He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild / islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay / hidden in himself. There is passage after passage in which he dwells / upon some moment of excitement. He describes the shipping of pigs at / Kilronan on the North Island for the English market: 'when the steamer / was getting near, the whole drove was moved down upon the slip and the / curraghs were carried out close to the sea. Then each beast was caught / in its turn and thrown on its side, while its legs were hitched / together in a single knot, with a tag of rope remaining, by which it / could be carried.

Probably the pain inflicted was not great, yet the animals shut their / eyes and shrieked with almost human intonations, till the suggestion of / the noise became so intense that the men and women who were merely / looking on grew wild with excitement, and the pigs waiting their turn / foamed at the mouth and tore each other with their teeth.

After a while there was a pause. The whole slip was covered with amass / of sobbing animals, with here and there a terrified woman crouching / among the bodies and patting some special favourite, to keep it quiet / while the curraghs were being launched. Then the screaming began again / while the pigs were carried out and laid in their places, with a / waistcoat tied round their feet to keep them from damaging the canvas. / They seemed to know where they were going, and looked up at me over the / gunnel with an ignoble desperation that made me shudder to think that I / had eaten this whimpering flesh. When the last curragh went out, I was / left on the slip with a band of women and children, and one old boar / who sat looking out over the sea.

The women were over-excited, and when I tried to talk to them they / crowded round me and began jeering and shrieking at me because I am not / married. A dozen screamed at a time, and so rapidly that I could not / understand all they were saying, yet I was able to make out that they / were taking advantage of the absence of their husbands to give me the / full volume of their contempt. Some little boys who were listening / threw themselves down, writhing with laughter among the sea-weed, and / the young girls grew red and embarrassed and stared down in the surf. ' / The book is full of such scenes. Now it is a crowd going by train to / the Parnell celebration, now it is a woman cursing her son who made / himself a spy for the police, now it is an old woman keening at a / funeral. Kindred to his delight in the harsh grey stones, in the / hardship of the life there, in the wind and in the mist, there is / always delight in every moment of excitement, whether it is but the / hysterical excitement of the women over the pigs, or some primary / passion. Once indeed, the hidden passion instead of finding expression / by its choice among the passions of others, shows itself in the most / direct way of all, that of dream. 'Last night,' he writes, at / Innismaan, 'after walking in a dream among buildings with strangely / intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of music beginning far / away on some stringed instrument.

It came closer to me, gradually increasing in quickness and volume with / an irresistibly definite progression. When it was quite near the sound / began to move in my nerves and blood, to urge me to dance with them.

I knew that if I yielded I would be carried away into some moment of / terrible agony, so I struggled to remain quiet, holding my knees / together with my hands.

The music increased continually, sounding like the strings of harps / tuned to a forgotten scale, and having a resonance as searching as the / strings of the 'cello.

Then the luring excitement became more powerful than my will, and my / limbs moved in spite of me.

In a moment I was swept away in a whirlwind of notes. My breath and my / thoughts and every impulse of my body became a form of the dance, till / I could not distinguish between the instrument or the rhythm and my own / person or consciousness. For a while it seemed an excitement that was / filled with joy; then it grew into an ecstasy where all existence was / lost in the vortex of movement. I could not think that there had been a / life beyond the whirling of the dance.

Then with a shock, the ecstasy turned to agony and rage. I struggled to / free myself but seemed only to increase the passion of the steps I / moved to. When I shrieked I could only echo the notes of the rhythm. At / last, with a movement of uncontrollable frenzy I broke back to / consciousness and awoke.

I dragged myself trembling to the window of the cottage and looked out. / The moon was glittering across the bay and there was no sound anywhere / on the island.'