The Hidden World of Poetry - Unravelling Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry by Wyeth Adam

Author:Wyeth, Adam [Wyeth, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Published: 2013-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,

That dying chose the living world for text.

The ‘living world’ becomes the crux of the poem. Death becomes the stimulus for Synge. Life and death are one. The closer Synge came to death – the closer he was to life. During his sick periods, Synge was bed-ridden but he still managed to write lying down, literally ‘from the pillows’. While ‘pillows’ is a soft image, it also has the connotations of being stifled, indicative of Synge’s oppressive background. Again the description of the outside world is a window into Synge’s sentiments.

The final image of ‘the distant hills’ as a symbol of death and the otherworld, takes us back up to the title, ‘Synge Dying’. Here another pun is ghosting in the background. For ‘Synge’ also read ‘sing’, bringing to mind the musicality of the Irish language, which was dying out. Even during Synge’s last days he poured all his energy into writing a new play, Deirdre of The Sorrows, taken again from Celtic Mythology. Synge never completed it, dying just weeks short of his 38th birthday.

Synge’s imagination saw ‘past {the} smoking chimneys’ of the choking modern world and his detractors. But ‘the distant hills’ is also a reference to Synge’s most famous character, Christy Mahon, the anti-hero in The Playboy. In the play, Christy is described as coming from ‘a windy corner of high distant hills.’ Through the allusions, puns and symbols, this poem plays with hiddenness and visibility. These aspects are explored in The Playboy - which resonates again with both Synge and Derek Mahon (the two Mahon’s sharing more than just their surnames). Towards the end of the play Christy seeks to define himself out of his own construction. Both Synge and Derek Mahon, also sought to define themselves beyond their background and the narrow-mindedness of their critics.

Despite those early protestations against Synge’s work, he is now recognised as one of Ireland’s finest playwrights, whose plays shaped and created Irish theatre. Similarly, Mahon’s work has managed to shun any political provincialism, his original poetic voice winning him international acclaim.

Just as Synge finds through words ‘a living world’ so do we find ‘a living world’ in the poem’s words. One of the delights of a good poem is the more you delve the more you discover. W.H. Auden called great art ‘clear thinking about complex feelings.’ Like a ‘clock’, beneath the seamless surface of this poem, hides the intricate and complex mechanics that could only have been made by a technical virtuoso.

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