h Renaissance in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin
reached its most powerful and tragic height in this tragedy,
which Mr. Yeats compared to the Antigone and (Edipus of
Sophocles). Synge at first wandered about Europe, poetizing; it
was Yeats who brought him back to study and embody in genuine
literature the poetry of life among his own people. On the bleak
Arran Islands he lived in a fisherman's cottage, and through the
floor of his room heard the dialect which he presents in simple
and poignant beauty in this drama of hopeless struggle. The
"second sight"--called "the gift" in _Campbell of Kilmhor_, and
an incident also in _The Riding to Lithend_--was a sort of
prophetic vision altogether credited among Celtic peoples, as
among those of Scott's _Lady of the Lake_. When the mother sees
the "riders to the sea,"--her drowned son and her living son
riding together,--she feels convinced that he must soon die. The
sharp cries of her grief and, above all, the peace of her
resignation at the end, after all hope is gone, make this, as a
writer in the _Manchester Guardian_ is quoted as calling it, "the
tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has
been in Europe, from Galway to Prague, it has made the word
tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to
the spirit than it did."

The speech of the people is not difficult to understand when you
master a few of its peculiarities. One is the omission of words
we generally include, as in, "Isn't it a hard and cruel man (who)
won't hear...." Another is the common form "It was crying I was."
A few phrases, like _what way_ for how, _the way_ for so that,
_in it_ for here or near, and _itself_ for even, or with no
particular meaning, as "Where is he itself?" The meanings of
other words will be easily untangled.

_William Butler Yeats_: THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE

Mr. Yeats's best poetic dramas, and particularly this one,
represent beyond question that "apex of beauty" to which Lady
Gregory spoke of the Abbey Theatre dramatists as aspiring. This
play is not founded on any particular Irish folk-tale. It is
filled with the half-dread, half-envy with which the tellers of
Irish legends seem to regard the fate of mortals bewitched by the
Leprechaun or Good People. It is rich, too, with the music of
beautiful words, without which, Mr. Yeats contends no play can be
"of a great kind." He says too, "There is no poem so great that a
fine speaker cannot make it g