Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/82

 62 suggests silence and loneliness. There is a door to right and left, and through the side windows one can see anybody who approaches either door, a moment before he enters. In the centre, a part of the house is curtained off; the curtains are drawn. There are unlighted torches in brackets on the walls There is, at one side, a small table with a chessboard and chessmen upon it, and a wine flagon and loaf of bread. At the other side of the room there is a brazier with a fire; two women, with musical instruments beside them, crouch about the brazier: they are comely women of about forty. Another woman, who carries a stringed instrument, enters hurriedly; she speaks, at first standing in the doorway.

But if one does not carry in memory so many lines of "Deirdre" as one does of the earlier less dramatic plays, there are passages in plenty that arrest and exalt. One such is those lines of Fergus that so well describe one phase of the imagination of Mr. Yeats—


 * "wild thought

Fed on extravagant poetry, and lit By such a dazzle of old fabulous tales That common things are lost, and all that's strange Is true because 't were pity if it were not."

Another such is the song of the musicians, of Queen Edain's tower, "When the Winds are Calling There"; and another such, the crying of a woman's heart in Deirdre's offer to go with Conchubar that Naisi may be saved:—


 * "It's better to go with him.

Why should you die when one can bear it all? My life is over; it's better to obey. Why should you die? I will not live long, Naisi. I'd not have you believe I'd long stay living; Oh, no, no, no! You will go far away.