Omeros by Derek Walcott

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Walcott’s most ambitious book-length poem, Omeros, was published in 1990. Shortly thereafter in 1992, he won the Nobel Prize. “Omeros” which is a corruption of “Homer” refers to a tradition of thinking of the West Indies as a potential site for a new civilization which would aspire to the heights of ancient Greece. The primary setting for Omeros is Walcott’s native St. Lucia, which had earned the epithet, “Helen of the West” in the midst of England and France’s colonial rivalry over the island.

SUMMARY/EXPLICATION:
Omeros is divided into seven books and sixty-two chapters, a kind of dual scheme. Each of the chapters are further divided into sub-sections. Formally, the poem is a hybrid form: it is in loose hexameter much like Homer’s, but with occasional pentameter and tetrameter lines which suggest a more folk-like character. The stanzas are mostly tercets reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy without, however, the strict rhyme of terza rima.

Book 1: This initial book focuses primarily on introducing the major characters on the island of St. Lucia. In the opening scene, Philoctete is hewing trees to make canoes and displaying his work for tourists. We are introduced to Seven Seas the blind man, who doubles as one of the “Omeros” figures throughout the work. Ma Kilman owns the oldest bar in town, and her belief systems are a mix of Obeah African origins and Catholic influences. Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, originally from Ireland, have committed themselves to living abroad, though Major Plunkett adamantly tries to super-impose a Westernized history of St. Lucia, meticulously and obsessively drawing correspondences between St. Lucia and Homeric myth. In particular, Plunkett is obsessed with the pretty native woman, Helen, who for a time was the Plunkett’s maid. Achille is Helen’s lover but he is involved in a rivalry with Hector for her love. Helen is fairly proud of her beauty, and Maud resents her presence and influence on her husband. A cyclone’s destruction is described in great detail in this book, and the difficulty of maintaining order over the landscape greatly bothers Plunkett, whose primary occupation is that of a pig farmer. Finally, the poetic “I” (who is Walcott) intrudes into the first book as a kind of character living alongside the rest of the characters. He is told in this first book by his father in a kind of dream-like vision (Warwick Walcott died when Derek was a one year old) to find a way to give voice to the people of the island.

Book 2: This second book breaks chronological time and space through a flashback to Plunkett’s ancestor, a midshipman during the battle between France and Britain in 1782 over St. Lucia. The French are defeated, though the young midshipman perishes. One of the slaves which the English take is Afalobe, whom they rename Achilles. Back in the present time, there is an election—Philoctete and Hector join Maljo’s “United Love Party,” but they are defeated. The election scene demonstrates a failure of self-government after the colonial encounter, and how elections don’t have much of an impact on the everyday lives of the citizens. Major Plunkett, meanwhile, struggles with his fascination for Helen in a vivid scene where he can’t bring himself to scold her when she takes one of Maud’s bracelets. Helen moves in with Hector, preferring him to Achille. In order to make more money, Hector gives up fishing for the more lucrative (but far more oppressive and constrained) work of driving a passenger van. Helen announces that she is pregnant, though she is unsure whos’ baby it is. She boldly asks Maud to borrow money. At the close of the book, Achille is out on his fishing boat, In God We Troust, and begins to fall into a sort of hallucinatory vision of the Middle Passage. He wonders, for the first time, about his own identity.

Book 3: This shorter book describes how Achille goes back in time to the slave trade and back to his ancestral African village during a kind of dream or hallucination. He meets his ancestor Afolabe and learns about his origins--the different rituals and customs which Achille then realizes to be in the shadows of St. Lucian rituals and customs in his present-day life. Achille also witnesses the brutal scene of his ancestor’s enslavement through a raid. Afolabe enslaved becomes renamed as Achilles, a name which he accepts because, beaten down, it is simply easier to do so. When Achille makes him temporal and spatial return, he evinces a new interest in dispossessed peoples, including the Native Americans. His perspective has become more global.

Book 4: As if matching Achille’s now expanded perspectives, Book 4 opens up new geographic and temporal spaces. The first part includes scenes of Walcott’s own divorce while in New England, the Wounded Knee massacre in December, 1890 and the perspective of Catherine Weldon, a white woman who sympathizes with the Native Americans. Like Achille during the slave raid in his ancestral village, Catherine cannot do anything but witness the massacre of over one-hundred Native Americans by the U.S. cavalry. Walcott links the breach of contract in his own marriage to the breach of contract in the treaties signed between the Native Americans and the United States government. Book four also contains an extended imagining of Walcott’s own father, Warwick (who died when he was one) telling him he needs to visit various capitals of the Old World before he will be able to understand the experience of his colonial native home. Warwick Walcott tells his son that journeys are circular.

Book 5: On is father’s advice, Walcott visits four destinations: Lisbon, London, Dublin, and the Aegean Islands. Each of these four places has unique significance for the poet: Lisbon was an important site for the African slave trade, London bears the weight of being the center of English imperialism, Dublin called up associations with literary forebears like Joyce since Walcott analogized between the colonial subjection of Ireland and of the West Indies, and finally the Aegean Islands represent the cradle of Western civilization. What the poet learns, finally, is not to imitate, or use the structures that belong to these centers of (literary) culture to write the literature of the Caribbean but to focus more on gathering material from the immediate world around him.

Book 6: Back in St. Lucia, Hector is in a fatal accident because of his reckless driving of his passenger van (called the Comet). Achille and Helen reconcile after Hector’s death, and Achille also honors his friends memory. Maud also dies in this section, succumbing to cancer. After his wife’s death, Plunkett realizes the great burden which he has placed on his Irish wife who has always wished to return to Dublin, though she had learned to live in St. Lucia. He realizes too that his obsessive project of trying to find Homeric parallels to “build a history” for St. Lucia was futile: “Why not see Helen as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow?” Walcott, of course, has the same realization and essentially repudiates the methods of his own poem. The other major event which happens in this book is Ma Kilman’s successful healing of Philoctete’s shin wound. She finds a cure by following a trail of ants into the mountains to a specific African herb. Thus, the book is largely about reconciliations, and these reconciliations mirror the poet’s own maturing process and reconciliation to the native colonial landscape.

Book 7: Omeros is a character in this final book that serves as a kind of guide to Walcott. He underscores the lesson which Walcott has already learned, that he should concentrate on what he sees in his surroundings rather than worry about framing his account with appropriately authoritative literary structures. Major characters like Major Plunkett and Achille have also learned to be more present and aware of their surroundings; Plunkett gives up the project of writing a history and bringing English “order” to the land, and Achille returns to his original work of fishing. The final lines suggest a sort of continuity between the lives that these characters now live and the natural landscape: “When he (referring to Achille) left the beach the sea was still going on.”

Translations by Brian Friel

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Irish playwright Brian Friel's Translations was first performed in September 1980 at the Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland. Its production was managed by a theater company founded by Friel and actor Stephen Rea.

SUMMARY:
Act I: The action is set in a small Irish town called Baile Beag in August 1833. At the "hedge-school" held in an old barn in general disarray and filth, Manus, the son of the old schoolmaster, Hugh, is managing things before his father arrives. Manus tries to get Sarah, a woman with a speech impediment, to correctly pronounce basic phrases of introduction. Meanwhile, another pupil, Jimmy (also known as the Infant Prodigy) spouts phrases of Greek and Latin. Otherwise, we are to assume they are all speaking in Irish. Soon Maire, a young, attractive woman appears. Manus tells Maire about how someone named Biddy Hanna asked him to write a letter to her sister in Nova Scotia, and how Biddy Hanna was so clueless as to have asked Manus to write, "Thank God one of them new national schools is being built" without realizing that he was the son of the schoolmaster. Maire brings news of English soldiers living in tents in the town. Soon Doalty and Bridget arrive; Doalty is drunk and boasts about his ruse, shifting the poles of a "machine" that the English soldiers were using to confuse them. Manus explains that his father is late because of a christening he was attending. Maire and Manus seem to have intimate relations, and she asks him if he's going to apply for a job at the new national school. Manus says no because his father is going to apply for it and he doesn't want to be in the way of his father. Maire hints that she wants to go to America to escape from her rather large family ("There's ten below me to be raised and no man in the house.") The group talks about the new school, which will be mandatory for children 6-12 and which will operate in English. Hugh arrives, and conducts his "lesson" by imparting them news and stopping at certain words to ask his pupils about their Latin origins. He tells of the christening, the arrival of Captain Lancey of the Royal Engineers and his partner Yolland--the Englishmen, who are conducting an ordnance survey of the area, and of how he will be running the new national school. Suddenly, Owen, Manus's brother who hasn't been back in six years comes in and receives a hearty welcome for all. He is a "city man," and announces that he has brought with him Lancey and Yolland. Owen brings them in and serves as a (mis)translator as Lancey and Yolland explain their project. Lancey says that they will be making a comprehensive map of the entire country, in order that they might better assess taxation policies. Owen's somewhat lazy translations help the Englishmen to convince the Irish that the project will be for their own good. The act ends with Manus expressing concern that Yolland can't even pronounce Owen's name, calling him "Roland," and Owen reassuring him that it is just a "name."

Act II, Scene 1: The act opens with Owen and Yolland working together to Anglicize the names of local Irish landmarks. Owen criticizes Yolland's "romantic" view of the Ireland; unlike Lancey, whom Yolland describes as "[t]he perfect colonial servant," Yolland's imagination is prone to wandering, idealizing Owen's family and friends and ascribing a kind of Edenic status to the Irish landscape. He still can't pronounce Owen and proves generally unaware of Owen correcting him because he's so caught up in his own speechifying. An encounter between Hugh and Yolland ensues in which Hugh reveals that he has never heard of Wordsworth. This becomes an opportunity for Yolland to idealize Irish literature and myth. Yolland tells Hugh that he's learning to speak Irish, though Hugh doesn't much care. After Hugh leaves on some errands, Yolland confesses to Owen that he fears that the colonial project is "an eviction of sorts" and is ethically uncomfortable with his own part in the project. Owen shrugs off Yolland's "romanticizing" and essentially says that the old Irish place names are part of myths that people who live there don't even remember anymore. Yolland finally listens to Owen when he says his name isn't Roland. He is ashamed and horrified but Owen puts him at ease. Manus arrives and announces he has gotten a job at a school on an island called Inis Meadhon fifty miles away. Manus is reluctant to speak English even though he knows it because he resents colonialists like Yolland. Maire also comes by, and Manus tells her the good news as well. They all congratulate Manus. Maire and Yolland communicate with some difficulty, through Owen--she says there will be a dance at Tobair Vree, a name which Yolland has just learned and he is clearly overjoyed that he knows it. Drunk by this time, Yolland shouts out a bunch of Irish names of places and humorously throws in Bombay and Eden into the mix.

Act II, Scene 2: Maire and Yolland hold hands after the dance, and though they don't understand each other, they both talk. Maire comically tells him her only phrase in English: "In Norfolk we besport ourselves around the maypoll." Yolland lists off Irish place names, Maire corrects him. Eventually they kiss, and Sarah sees them.

Act 3: In the schoolhouse, Owen continues to work on place names. Manus comes in with a travel bag, about to leave. Apparently something has happened to Yolland because Yolland is missing. Manus asks Owen to tell the people at Inis Meadhon that he might be a while before going to the school. Manus leaves, and Sarah stutters sympathetically, "I'm sorry...I'm sorry...I'm so sorry, Manus." Doalty and Bridget arrive on the scene, bringing news of more English soldiers arriving and how Hugh, drunk, had been yelling out names at them ("Visigoths! Huns! Vandals!"). Maire comes in, talking of Yolland. She also doesn't know where he is, but caught in her own romance, starts listing off place names in England associated with Yolland. Lancey comes in and asks Owen to translate to everyone that if Yolland is not found in a day, they will shoot all the livestock in the town. In forty-eight hours, they will evict people and level their lands. Bridget rushes off to hide livestock while Doalty thinks about fighting the English. Jimmy and Hugh arrive, with Jimmy talking about how he's going to marry Pallas Athena. Hugh remarks while looking at James, how "it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. James has ceased to make that discrimination." Hugh then concludes that they need to keep "renewing those images" to keep a culture alive. Hugh says he will teach Maire English because in his mind, he's made a kind of compromise wherein he wishes the Irish to claim English for themselves because it will be the only living language. James blathers on about endogamein and exogamein, marrying in and out of one's tribe (he's referring to himself in considering marriage with Athena, but also his comments clearly apply to Maire). The play ends with Hugh trying to quote ineffectually from the Aeneid, focusing on a passage telling of how Juno wanting to make her city the capital of all nations, but couldn't because of the destined rise of Troy.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Though Friel has been cited as saying that Translations is really just about language, it is clear that contained in the concern about language are very specific identity politics relating to Northern Ireland's encounter with England from colonial times into the times during which Friel was writing. Friel's own biography provides a useful context for the identity politics which Translations works through. Born in 1929 in Killyclogher (rural Northern Ireland), Brian Friel was actually registered as "Bernard Patrick," "Bernard" being a part of a trend to discourage Gaelic sounding names. "Bernard Patrick" might be a kind of symbol of a destabilized identity which mediates between his father's rural nationalism and his own move towards a more moderate "citified" position which critiqued, among other things, the backwards educational systems perpetuated by the Catholic Church which feared, above all, Anglicization. Translations certainly comments on the inadequacy of the kind of education which Hugh and Manus provide; the students learn in a filthy barn, the snippets of Latin and Greek which Hugh throws out at his pupils are meaningless and farcical. But at the same time Friel critiques a position which gives in entirely to the Anglicization processes promoted by the imperialists. Maire's budding Anglophilia is deeply satirized by her equally meaningless romance with Yolland, and Lancey's extreme measures deployed to find Yolland are absurdly punitive. Yolland's romanticization of Ireland and conflation of the poor, rural landscape with Eden is also satirized. It seems hat Hugh's idea at the end of the play that the English language must be accepted but re-colonized/re-appropriated by Irishmen is the moderate position towards which the play finally settles on. The image of Greece's destruction and the inevitable rise of Troy provides an allegory for Northern Ireland's destruction and inevitable Anglicization. Friel seems to advocate, finally, some kind of compromise position, but perhaps Hugh's forgetfulness as he recites the lines signals that this is in no way an easy compromise to hammer out.

Selections from William Butler Yeats

Edition: Selected Poems And Four Plays of William Butler Yeats


BACKGROUND/CONTEXTS:

Yeats is often described as one of the last Romantics whose poetic career signaled a transition into modernism. M. Rosenthal writes in his introduction to his selected poems: "He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Yeats's biography is helpful for contextualizing some of the elements in his poetry which Rosenthal mentions. John Butler Yeats, his father, was an intellectual cosmopolitan, and his mother came from the countryside. Rosenthal suggests that this mixture of backgrounds produced in Yeats highly intellectual commitments on the one hand and natively patriotic, and often spiritual commitments on the other hand (in his later life, Yeats became part of Mme. Blavatsky's circle, developing interests in the occult and philosophies on the supernatural). Politically, Yeats was committed to the Irish nation, but often the realities of politics seemed "by its very nature inimical to [his] uncompromised idealism." Maud Gonne, whom Yeats was in love with but whom he never ended up being with, becomes an antithetical figure for Yeats: she found passion in political action, and he in poetry. More often than not, Maud (though unnamed in the poems) rebuffs Yeats's world of words and ideas. Yet ideas are deeply important for Yeats--the oppositions that he sets up (action versus ideas included) show his mistrust of fixed, calcified orthodoxies; in setting up oppositions, he affirms a Blakean philosophy of necessary antagonisms and avoids falling into the trap of self-created orthodoxies. 

SUMMARY/THEMES by COLLECTION:
The Rose (1893)
The influence of Romantic poets is very strong in these early poems. In "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," the poet declares that he will go to Innisfree and build a cabin there among nature, and find peace. The final stanza particularly evokes the Romantic notion of memory and inner perception, particularly of nature, as a salutary reprieve amidst other settings: referring to Innisfree, the poet writes: "I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray / I hear it in the deep heart's core." "The Two Trees" also privileges an inner vision, contrasting "the holy tree" which is growing in his beloved's heart with the "broken boughs and blackened leaves" in the "bitter glass" which she looks at. In the ardent "To Ireland in the Coming Times," the poet philosophizes that poetry, beyond its measured structure, needs to reach an ancient, unmeasured nature, "the-red-rose-bordered hem / Of her, whose history began / Before God made the angelic clan, / Trails all about the written page." The poet importantly makes the following distinction: "My rhymes more than their rhyming tell," signaling the deeper importance of sound (elemental, natural) rather than structural function (systematic, rational) in a poem.


The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
The Romantic influence is clear in this collection as well -- in "Into the Twilight," nature serves as a reparative force for the "Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn." "Your mother Eire is always young, / Dew ever shining and twilight grey," the poet tells the heart. This distinction between modern times' weariness and the past's greater connection to nature (and also tradition) will remain important for Yeats throughout his career.


In the Seven Woods (1904)
"Adam's Curse" specifically imagines one symptom of modern weariness as losing "the old high way of love." To Maud (presumably), the poet writes: "I had a thought for no one's but your ears: / That you were beautiful, and that I strove / To love you in the old high way of love; / That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown / As weary-hearted as that hollow moon."


The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
This collection has a few striking poems about Maud, and the antithetical force with which Yeats set great value on. In "A Woman Homer Sung," the poet chronicles his own time wasted over writing words and thoughts on her, himself grown grey and "That coming time can say, / 'He shadowed in a glass / What thing her body was.'" The next stanza continues, "For she had fiery blood / When I was oung, / And trod so sweetly proud / As 'twere upon a cloud." The physical world of the body, of action (trodding) triumphs in this poem over the representational world of Yeats's words. "No Second Troy" reflects more negatively on Maud; the poem compliments her in calling her a "Helen," but the Helen in a modern world does harm rather than good: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery, or that she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways." Though the poet doesn't blame this fiery Helen, for her beauty was "not natural in an age like this," she nevertheless does harm.


Responsibilities (1914)
This collection marks a turning point in Yeats's career--the onset of World War I and the brewing of conflict which would result in episodes like the 1916 Easter Uprising necessitated a new poetics that would account for modern political violence. No longer could this be a world he could reject; of the year 1900, he famously said, "everybody got down off his stilts." "The Coat," explicitly refers to a new poetics: "I made my song a coat / covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies," he writes, but believes from then on that "there's more enterprise / In walking naked." An earlier poem in the collection,"September 1913," idealizes the past--the line, "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone / It's with O'Leary in his grave" ends every stanza--but this repetition also consolidates that this is an unrecoverable past. The final stanza suggests the possibility of bringing back these Romantic exiles, but ends pessimistically: "But let them be, they're dead and gone, / They're with O'Leary in the grave." "To a Shade" is similarly pessimistic, addressing Parnell's ghost and effectively telling him not to come back because the people have not appreciated his "passionate serving kind" and so as it were, he would be "safer in the tomb."


Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
Wild Swans continues to engage, as Responsibilities has, more poignantly and directly with the struggles of the modern world. Some poems, like "Wild Swans at Coole" maintains Yeats's faith in nature's goodness, but unlike in some of the earlier poems, there seems to be a greater gulf between himself and nature. Nature's reparative force doesn't reach him because nature's hearts, unlike man's, don't "grow old." In the past, the poet writes, "I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, / And now my heart is sore." Other poems in the collection reflect the turn towards direct engagement with modern times, often on a very personal level as with "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" and "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death," both poems about his friend Lady Gregory's son, killed in war. "In Memory" actually mostly discusses many disparate people who have been important to Yeats, all of whom he has brought together in his head, even though they are dead. He brings together Lionel Johnson, John Synge, George Pollexfen, all "my close companions many a year" who, in a way, find unity in Yeats's mind even if they may have fought if they were instead alive together. One person, however, fails to be so simply assimilated--Robert Gregory: "Soldier, scholar, horseman, he," "I had thought...to have brought to mind / All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved / Or boyish intellect approved, / With some appropriate commentary on each; /...but a thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech." On a broader level than a tribute to Robert Gregory, it seems that the poem also comments on the difficulty of unifying the Irish nation, even when so many individuals were so good, each in their own right. "An Irishman Foresees his Death" is in the voice of Robert Gregory, whom Yeats sees as oddly yoking together the world of words (art) and the physical world. Yeats has this Irish airman rejecting politics, law, and duty ("Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love...Nor law, nor duty bade me fight. / Nor public men, nor cheering crowds") and embracing an artistic impulse in the act of dying. He says: "A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds; / I balanced all, brought all to mind...In balance with this life, this death." Yeats's personal engagement with Maud in relation to working out his own place in the world continues in poems like "The People" which imagines the two of them in dialogue. Yeats says that he might have earned more renown and made a bigger impact as a poet in an age and place like Ferrara's Italy, to which Maud rebuffs him the statement that she has never "[c]omplained of the people." Yeats literally has the last word in this poem, saying that  he "can neither close / The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech" but he finds in the final lines to himself that he is "abashed" when thinking back on this dialogue nine years later. Continuing with the personal engagements of this collection, Mabel Beardsley (Aubrey Beardsley's sister) appears also in this collection in the heartbreaking poem, "Upon a Lady Dying" recording her resilient decorum and courage before her friends in her dying days (Mabel died of cancer)--the poem suggests Yeats's continuing admiration of traditional, old values that have gone from the modern age, and records Mabel as embodying these. Other poems in this collection are more abstract, though they still reflect struggles of the modern age, though perhaps less directly since less personally: "The Scholars" critique the "old, learned, respectable bald heads" who "edit and annotate the lines / That young men tossing in their beds / Rhymed out in love's despair / To flatter beauty's ignorant ear." "On Being Asked for a War Poem" envisions an unbridgeable gap between the poet and the statesman, the poet humbly admitting that he feels it "better that in times like these / A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right." "Ego Dominus Tuus" records a dialogue between "Hic" and "Ille" in which Ille critiques the modern age, wherein "[w]e are but critics, or but half create, / Timid, entangled, empty and abashed," leaving his books and manuscripts behind to seek an "image" (an "anti-self," he says, while before nature). The poem seems to criticize those who are entangled amongst books as highly selfish in their supposed individualism, hence the need for an "anti-self" that will be less timid, more engaged with the physical world. In "The Phases of the Moon"a fictional character named Michael Robartes charts Yeats's belief in more occult philosophy (elucidated in "The Vision") of the soul's progress through twenty-eight incarnations, the final incarnation being "The Fool," a nameless, mindless figure blown around by the wind.  



The Tower (1928)

In his 1925 essay, "A Vision," Yeats talks about a cyclic theory of civilization, and his sense that the current age was a declining age--that out of the ruins of this Christian age would be another pagan ascendancy. Unlike Eliot, Yeats's solution was not a return to Christian orthodoxy, but a turn to art as eternity. This is the usual interpretation of the inaugural poem in this collection, "Sailing to Byzantium," in which the aging poet leaves his declining, inhabitable modern world, where "whatever is begotten, born, and dies" to go to Byzantium, a place with "the artifice of eternity."

"The Tower" is a further reflection on old age and ruin, but also an imagination of potential continuity through bequeathing something to the next generation. The poet reminisces on the work which he has created in the past, thinking now that "[s]trange, but the man who made the song was blind," though upon consideration, realizes that Homer too was blind. Of his prior creations he singles out Hanrahan, a folksy character, until returning again to an idea which he began with, asking if "all old men and women, rich and poor, / Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door, /whether in public or in secret rage / As I do now against old age?" Accepting old age, in the third stanza the poet says that "It is time that I wrote my will," bequeathing his "faith and pride / To young upstanding men / Climbing the mountain side." "Meditations in Time of Civil War" is a collection of poems which reflect on the possibilities of continuity amidst difference, ending the penultimate section pessimistically with, "We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart's grown brutal from the fare; / More substance in our enmities / Than in our love; O honey-bees, / Come build in the empty house of the stare." In the very last section there seems to be a solution only via abstraction: "I turn away and shut the door.../ The abstract joy, / The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, / Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy." "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" also muses on civil war, the failed "fine thought" or "master-work of intellect or hand" deteriorating into days that "are dragon-ridden," in which violently, "a drunken soldiery / Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, / To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free." The fifth stanza is a kind of warped unity, in which a chorus is unified in its mockery of pretty much everything: it mocks those who have "toiled so hard and late / To leave some monument behind," the wise, and the good. The Tower also contains the two famous poems, "Leda and the Swan," which imagines the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of the swan (the encounter a symbol of the birth of a new historical period, as signaled by "the burning roof and tower" of Troy following out of the birth of Helen) and "Among Schoolchildren," inspired by a visit to St. Oteran's school in his later career as a senator of the Irish free state, chronicling how he imagined Maud amongst the children, launching him into a reverie on the pangs of creative work.  

The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge

Edition: The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays (The Complete Plays of J. M. Synge)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World premiered in 1907 at the Irish National Theater and has become famous largely because of the riots surrounding its performance. The play was nearly shut down by radical nationalists (Sinn Fein was founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith) who felt the play to be an offensive portrayal of Irish identity.

SUMMARY:
All three acts of Playboy take place at a public house owned by Michael James Flaherty.
Act I: As the play opens, Pegeen (Margaret Flaherty, Michael's daughter) is ordering supplies for the pub and for her wedding. Shawn, whom she is set to marry once a bishop's dispensation has been received, comes in and it is revealed that he is no match for her. He fears that the parish priest, Father Reilly, will disapprove of his visiting, and also fears a man that he has heard outside. Pegeen's father arrives, with his friends, Jimmy and Philly. They are off to Kate Cassidy's wake, where they plan on getting drunk; Shawn is afraid to go with them and the men make fun of him. Suddenly, Christy Mahon breaks in, a shy, timid and "slight young man" who asks for a glass of porter. Christy asks if the police come by there, and so they all begin to speculate about what he has done to be running from the police. Christy can barely get a word in but finally he admits he has killed his father. Amazed, more speculations follow as to what weapon he has used; it turns out to be a loy (a club). Christy immediately becomes of great interest to the party, and potentially even useful, as Jimmy notes, "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." They decide to let him stay with them as their pot-boy, and the men leave. Shawn tries to stick around, but Pegeen sends him away, clearly interested in Christy. Encouraged by Pegeen's imaginings that he has been on the road regaling many girls with his story, and that he is a fiery soul much like a poet, Christy begins to come out of his shell. He tells her that his father ill treated him. The Widow Quin now arrives, and is also interested in Christy; the two women argue over who should keep him, and timidly, Christy expresses a preference to stay with Pegeen.

Act II: In the morning, Christy is cheerfully cleaning a pair of boots, when a group of village girls come in, having heard from Shawn that a murderer was at the Flaherty's. They too are delighted with Christy, and bring him suggestive gifts--"I brought you a little laying pullett--Feel the fat of that breast, mister," one village girl says. The widow comes in again, and proclaims that she is going to engage him in the sports of the town. Christy, happy with the attention that he is getting, tells them that his father was going to wed him to an old, overweight widow who had suckled him, and that thus he had gotten up the courage to kill him. Pegeen returns, and is angry at the visitors, and with Christy for entertaining them. Christy talks to her about how he is lonely in the world, but she dismisses him as merely posturing. They come to an understanding of their mutual interest in each other and Pegeen says she is single, when Shawn comes running in to tell Pegeen that the sheep are eating cabbages in Jimmy's field. She goes out, and Christy "with a new arrogance" (as the stage directions indicate), resists Shawn who tells him that he will give him some of his nice clothes if he will quit the town. The widow, meanwhile, has re-entered and she suggests to Shawn that she marry Christy, and then in return, Shawn should give her some material rewards. Shawn leaves, and as the widow and Christy are talking, Old Mahon bursts in--he is not dead but merely injured. Christy hides and the widow gets from Mahon that his son is a poor, timid idiot. The widow sends him off of Christy's track. She then finds out that Christy is stuck on Pegeen, so makes a deal with him that she won't reveal his secret and aid him, if he will promise her "a right of way I want...a mountainy ram, and a load of dung at Michaelmas" after he becomes master.

Act III: Jimmy and Philly come into the pub later in the day, drunk, and encounter Mahon lurking around. Widow Quin allays their suspicions that this may be Christy's father by suggesting that Mahon is mad. Meanwhile, Christy has been engaged a race, which he triumphantly wins atop an old mule. Mahon discerns Christy and runs after him. The widow, thinking quickly, gets the men to restrain him and manages to convince Mahon that he is mad, because he had said his son was an idiot, and clearly, the man on the mule was "the wonder of the Western World." Mahon is sent on his way as Christy returns, victorious, with Pegeen, other girls, and men surrounding him. Pegeen sends them all away, and Pegeen and Christy exchange some loving words. Pegeen's father returns drunk from the wake (with Shawn in tow) and informs them that the bishop's dispensation has been gotten, so that she must then marry Shawn. Pegeen rejects him and informs her father that she will be marrying Christy instead. Michael and Shawn fight over who should attack Christy--Shawn, of course, is too cowardly to do so and flees. Michael, seeing how cowardly Shawn is, agrees to the marriage: "A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man did split his father's middle with a single clout, should have the bravery of ten." Just then, Mahon rushes in and all is revealed. A crowd, which has accompanied Mahon to the pub, eggs Chrsity and Mahon on in a fight. Outside, it seems that Christy has killed his dad this time for sure. Horrified, and fearing that they will be accomplices, Pegeen, Michael and the others decide to hang Christy with a rope. Christy by this time seems a changed character; fierce, and insolent. Mahon returns one more time, still not dead. He tells his father that they are taking him off to be hanged because he has killed his father. Mahon suggests that he and his son go away together, and so off they go, but in the words of Christy, "like a gallant captain with his heathen slave," himself ascendant over his father. Shawn expects to wed Pegeen after all, but the play ends with her lament that she has "lost the only Playboy of the Western World."

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century was politically wracked with competing sentiments as to how the Irish were to define themselves independently of British colonial subjugation. Fervent nationalists resented Synge's portrayal of Irish peasant life because they felt he was suggesting that they possessed such degraded and savage morals that they would deem a murderer of his own father a hero.

As George Cusack points out, however, the villagers make Christy in a hero largely because there is such a lack of bravery in the town--Pegeen makes fun of Shawn and upholds the likes of "Daneen Sullivan" and "Marcus Quinn," two figures who oppose British authority (Source: LitEncyc). The biggest surprise in Synge's drama is that this desire actually has a transformative effect: Christy begins a timid man but then actually becomes confident (in love and in fighting--he becomes both a poet and a warrior) because everyone has believed him to be so. Synge's play reveals the power of words in forming identities even when these words are not actively intended to form any sort of identity. Although the hero leaves town, Pegeen's lament that she has lost "the only Playboy of the Western World" suggests her awareness of Christy's transformation by their words--perhaps Synge suggests to his audiences a more conscious and careful use of language to forge a lasting Irish identity. As he indicates in his own preface to the work (January 1907), his own words are chosen carefully: "In every good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips to poetry." He is talking about the "joyless and pallid words" of modern drama such as that, specifically, of Ibsen and Zola--against this, Synge draws from the "fiery and magnificent" quality of the "popular imagination," locating in Irish peasant life the power necessary for forging together a Irish identity that they all might be proud of.