Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/226



One wonders whether it is not of himself Mr. Padraic Colum is writing as "The dawn-man ... in the sunset." That phrase arrests one on the first page of his little book of verse "Wild Earth" (1909), in the first poem, "The Plougher." It refers, of course, to an elemental man of to-day, to the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of horses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against an April sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west that gold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen loved; by way of that Dumfries peasant whose


 * "conquering share

Upturned the fallow fields of truth anew";

by way of Wayland Smith, whose anvils dot the shores