'. . . he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
Towards nightfall upon a race
Passionate and simple like his heart.'

W. B. Yeats. (Lines on Synge in Major Robert Gregory.)

SYNGE IS THE only great poetic dramatist of the movement;
the only one, that is, for whom poetry and drama were in-
separable, in whose work dramatic intensity invariably finds
poetic expression and the poetic mood its only full expression
in dramatic form. All the other playwrights of the movement
seem, in the last analysis, to have been either dramatists in whom
the instinct for dramatic expression sometimes brought with it
the poetry of diction, imagery or cadence, or poets who turned
for a time to the dramatic form, returning, sooner or later, again
to other forms. But it is hard to imagine this separation in
Synge; poetic and dramatic expression in him are one and
simultaneous, as they appear to have been with Shakespeare
and with Webster, in whom the presence of a high degree
of one mood meant the presence of a high degree of the other,
whether the form were prose or verse, the matter comedy or
tragedy.

Yet there is a paradox in Synge's genius, a dualism of a
different and a rarer kind. For while he is essentially a dramatic
poet, one of the roots of his poetry is mysticism, such as he
recognized in the mountain and sea-faring Irish peasants living
far enough out of reach of civilization to respond to and reflect
the nature about them. And mystical experience, particularly
the extreme form of nature-mysticism that we find in Synge,
is in itself as nearly as possible incompatible with dramatic
expression. Yet the presence of nature is as strongly felt in the
plays as in The Aran Islands and In Wicklow and West Kerry

-163-