TWO CELTIC ROMANCES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3542, 31 January 1922, Page 55

TWO CELTIC ROMANCES.

By

JESSIE MACKAY.

D EIE.DE E. (Continued.) ■Synge is himself in the scene where the young Deirdre calls upon Naisi to save himself and her from the tragedy of unfulfilment, and grey parting: You must not go, .Naisi. and leave me to the High King, a man is aging in his dun, with his crowds round him and his silver and gold. I will not live to he shut up in Emain, and wouldn’t we do well, paying, Naisi, with silence and a near death? I’m a long while in the woods with my own self, and I’m little in dread of death, and it earned with riches would make the sun red with envy, and lie going u« the heavens; and the moon pale and lonesome, and she wasting away. Isn’t it a small thing, is foretold about the ruin of ourselves, Naisi, when all men have age coming and great ruin in the end?” Thus it comes that Deirdre, standing on the hearth of her childhood's home puts her hand in her lover's and hears the brief, deathless bridal words: “By the sun and moon and the whole earth, I wed Deirdre to Naisi. May the air bless you, and water and the wind, the sea, and all the hours of the sun and moon. Beautiful, primitive, pagan, and tender, all this, again, we say, is Synge’s play, and his Deirdre is a flame of fate and delight. She works out at once to a higher and a prouder end than the softer, wilier Yet as fixed and faithful Deirdre. of Yeats. Nevertheless, it is she who sends Naisi open-eyed to his

death. For though the story is substantially the same, the treatment diverges utterly. Yeats is a romanticist; his “Deirdre” is pure poetry shot with moonlight and saddened with the roar of seas. Synge’s “Deirdre” is all poetry too, strange, wild, brusque, archaic, but it is the poetry of relentless realism, under all the sheen of love’s glamour. Synge is the very priest of the morning glory;. rejecting every hint of autumn yellowing. It is the crude yet pure realism of our race’s childhood that returns here so late m time. That remorseless realism drives the story to its tragic close. Deirdre’s clear eyes see the trap under Conochar's specious embassy, and does not need the wild, broken hints of Owen, the herdsman, to know that all is not well. Yet fate decrees that she shall overhear Fergus press Naisi to return to the men and affairs of his rank before he wearies of love in the woods. A moralist or a romanticist would make Deirdre follow this lure, and return beguiier to meet her doom. It is the petrifying compassion of Naisi that brings Deirdre to the last of her good days cm earth: “I'll not tell you a lie,” Naisi answers slowly. “There have been days awhile past when I’ve been throwing a line for salmon or watching for the run of hares, that I’ve a dread upon me a clay’d come I’d weary of her voice, and Deirdre’d seem'd wearied. In a flash her high and solemn resolve is taken, and she says to Naisi: ‘There are as many ways to wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain ; but there is no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only. It’s for that there’s nothing lovesomelike, a love is watching out the time most lovers do be sleeping. . . . It’s for that we’re setting out for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand. . . We’re seven years without roughness or growing wearv ; seven years so sweet and shining, the gods would he hard set to give us seven days the like of them. It's for that we’re going to Emain, where there’ll he a re-t for ever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they making a stir.” So on comes the night of doom, when Naisi and Deirdre returned from Scotland, reach the mean dwelling that C'onochar’s guile prepares for them, ringed with armed men among the trees. And then comes the sombre triumph of pessimism in the last hour of life when the trapped lovers stand by their open grave. Romance would have filled that last hour with tender pledges; realism renders instead a strange jealousy where each tortures the other. The loftier, more stable character of Deirdre shines out when the formless changes of Naisi’s mood strike home, and when in the scene with Conochar she parries his rage, and with her deep, true woman’s talk all but melts the old King to repentance and peace. But the cry of Naisi’s brothers, set upon in the woods, breaks the gleam; Conochar goes out to summon his men, Naisi strains out to the rescue. Then Deirdre of the Sorrows tastes more than the bitterness of death, when he all but spurns her from him to rush to his brothers: “Go to your brothers. For seven years you have been kindly, but the hardness of death has come between us.” Then Naisi cries, manlike: “And you’ll have me meet death with a hard word from your lips in my ear.” . I Deirdre replies : “We've had a dream, but this night has waked us surely. In a little while i we’ve lived too long. Naisi. Let you go where they are calling. Have you no shame loitering and talking, and a cruel death facing Ainnle and Ardan in the woods?” i Naisi in turn hurls the death-word at Deirdre : 3 “They’ll not get a death that’s cruel and they with men alone. It’s women that have loved that are cruel only, and \ if I went on living from this day I’d be putting a curse on the lot of them I’d meet walking in the east or west.”

Thus far these wild primitive lovers tear the conventions of romance. But surely Synge could have spared us the wild Sagawornan touch in Deirdre that gives us her last words to her lover in life. “I’m well pleased there’s no one in this place to make a story that Naisi was a laughing-stock the night he died. But swiftly in the cry and shout beyond comes her repentance, and a burst of vengefulness that vet dies away without deed in the vast inevitability : “I have pity surely. . . . It’s the way pity has me this night when 1 think of Naisi, that I could set my teeth into the heart, of a king. . . . But who’ll pity Deirdre has lost the twilight in the woods with Naisi, where beech trees were silver and copper and ash trees were fine gold?” Pure poetry, her high compelling resolve, flows out in prophecy : —- “I see the flames of Emain starting upward in the dark night; and because of me there will be weasels and wild cats crying on a lonely wall where there were queens and armies and red gold, the way there will be a story told of a ruined city and a raving King, and a woman will be sung for ever. 1 see the trees naked and bare, and the moon shining. Little moon, little moon of Alban, it’s lonesome you’ll be to-night and to-morrow night, long nights after looking every place for Deirdre and Naisi. It was not a low thing to be chosen by Conochar, who was Irish, and Naisi had no match for bravery. . . . Keep back, Conochar, for the High King, who is your master, has put his hands between us. It was sorrows were foretold, but great joys were my share always; yet it is a cold place I must go to be with you, Naisi. . . . It’s a pitiful tiling, Conochar, you have done this night in Emain, yet a thing will be a* joy and triumph to the end of life and time.

This is the high note of exultation on which the wild tale closes. Conochar could not part Deirdre from Naisi: he could but give Naisi back to her pure from every shadow of earthly change, strong against every illusion of Time, her lover to all eternity. Another day we shall glance at the softer Deirdre, the true Naisi, of Yeat’s poem, in contrast with this wild saga of the prime. (To be Concluded.)