see
how deeply sympathetic Synge is with the Irish peasant, and in no
patronizing way. In "The Aran Islands" he takes the greatest care to
disguise the identity of those he knew intimately lest they be pained by
anything he wrote of them. No one could write with higher courtesy of
those whose guest he had been than Synge. You, reading, are made one of
their home circle, but no family secrets are betrayed. You are made
aware of their weaknesses, but there is never any disloyalty; and always
in his records of them their virtues of courage and endurance, of
adaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communal
helpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects from
the primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect and
liking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their rich
humanity.

It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and out
of his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems of
his that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it in
his younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphant
tone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, but
there could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instant
to be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or in
earlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens," "On an Anniversary,"
"To the Oaks of Glencree," "A Question," and "I've Thirty Months." There
is in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that is
very seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong in
attributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is a
more intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's
youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It
is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these
verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in
subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the
verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both.
The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison with
the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the
rest of his writing, for they are not needed to explain a philosophy of
life as are Mr. Hardy's verses. Fortunately, Synge attempted no
philosophy, had the rare wisdom to rest content with observati