Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/129

Masefield on Synge ticipant or a talker. Is it not curious that the favorite author of such a man should have been Racine?

By far the greater part of Synge's work is in the form of plays. But what these could possibly owe to Racine is a mystery. They are the work of a man with a deep vein of irony, a malicious insight into life; but above everything else they are the work of a poet. Riders to the Sea is a poem; and, for the matter of that, so is The Playboy of the Western World.

But Mr. Masefield remarks that the few short poems reveal the Synge he knew more directly than the plays. By this I think he means that the poems are the most intimate, personal confession that this singularly quiet man ever made. They are, indeed, personal. They give us little touches of his life as he lived it in Paris, hoarding his sack of coals; or in Wicklow, walking the roads; or in the Arran Islands fiddling for a dance. And they give, too, that most poignant epitaph prepared for a day that Synge knew to be not far distant:

The poems have, too, that love of the flavor of all that is "wild," the austere phrasing, and the restraint, characteristic of the man and of the plays.