on.

In regard to poetry, as to all his art, Synge had, however, definite
views, though his verse is almost too little in bulk to exemplify them.
It was the poetry of exaltation, as it was the drama of exaltation, as
it was the exaltation in living, of change and speed and danger and
love, that meant most to him. He held further that "in these days poetry
is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that
wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots
among the clay and worms." The verse of Synge, as all his art, was so
rooted, surely. "Even if we grant," he continues, "that exalted poetry
can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed
in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by
feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again
it must learn to be brutal."

It is sayings of this sort that bring to mind his kinship with Whitman,
to whom he is also bound by the freemasonry of the roads. Both men felt
the call of the road; both loved the changing landscape and the little
adventures of the caravansaries; both loved most of all the men and
women they met. Once only Synge seems to have forgotten humanity when he
took to the road, that time which he has recorded in "Prelude":--

"Still south I went and west and south again,
Through Wicklow from the morning till the night,
And far from cities, and the sights of men,
Lived with the sunshine, and the moon's delight.

"I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,
The gray and wintry sides of many glens,
And did but half remember human words,
In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens."

It is to this, to the wandering wayside life of Synge that one's thought
of him always returns, and rightly, for it was the road that most
inspired him. It is the memory of the road that most kindles him; and so
it is always to the man of the road that he gives his most lyric
passages; or, perhaps, I should say it is the speech that the thought of
the man of the roads or of the woman of wild heart raises in his mind
that is his most beautiful speech, with the very wildness of the
wandering heart in it, and with the long swing that comes, with second
wind, when you have been a day abroad on the road.

What if the words have now the clauber of the roads upon them, and even
the muck, and now the reek of the shebeen or of the tinker's fire in a
roadside ditch