inning:

I met her in the leafy woods,
Early a summer's night;
I saw her white teeth in the dark,
There was no better light.

There is a remarkable confidence and elation in the little poem _The
Elements_, wherein he identifies himself with Nature--it could only be
quoted entire. And he records his impression of a tramcar which sweeps
along Westminster in the twilight carrying its load of sleeping men to
work. He can also write in a vein wholly unlike that of his simple and
more characteristic lyrical verses. Thus he describes his childish
impressions of a mariner "no good in port or out," as his granddad
said:

And all his flesh was pricked with Indian ink,
His body marked as rare and delicate
As dead men struck by lightning under trees,
And pictured with fine twigs and curled ferns;
Chains on his neck and anchors on his arms;
Rings on his fingers, bracelets on his wrist;
And on his breast the Jane of Appledore
Was schooner rigged, and in full sail at sea.
He could not whisper with his strong hoarse voice,
No more than could a horse creep quietly;
He laughed to scorn the men that muffled close
For fear of wind, till all their neck was hid,
Like Indian corn wrapped up in long green leaves;
He knew no flowers but seaweeds brown and green,
He knew no birds but those that followed ships,
Full well he knew the water-world; he heard
A grander music there than we on land.

All of it is the intensely personal and direct poetry of a man of many
moods, many sympathies, but happily removed from the cramping effects
of current fashions of thoughts, and talk about thought. He has lived
in the open air and among simple people, but always companioned by the
poets. And so we have in him a singer fresh and unspoilt, writing from
impulse, probably with little conscious technique, about things which
he knows and the immediate experiences of life.

VI

J.M. SYNGE

Four volumes, none too thick, contain the collected works of the man
who is coming to be regarded as the greatest of Irish dramatists. As
we turn over the pages, and observe that they contain no more than six
plays--three of them very short--a few Poems and Translations, the
volume on the Aran Islands, and a volume of miscellaneous studies of
his experiences among the folk of Wicklow, Kerry, and the Congested
Districts, it is to feel wonder that a man with so profound a