Picture of the Life
of the Islanders in ‘Riders to the Sea’
John
Millington Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’ is undoubtedly a regional play with a
local colouring. It gives a vivid account of the life and manners of the poor
islanders off the West-Coast of island. Synge’s deep and intimate acquaintance
with the life of the poor, innocent and simple hearted peasantry has enabled
him to re-capture the beauty and poetry of their life.
Born and
brought up as they are in the island, their life has been inextricably tied up
with moorlands, rugged chiffs, windy heaths, and howling seas. They cultivate
their small plots of land, but land, being rocky as it is alone can’t give them
the necessary subsistence. Hence, they take to fishing in the sea around. They
can’t do, they can’t subsist without venturing out on the sea. Maurya seeks to
prevent her only surviving son from crossing over the stormy sea saying: “He
wasn’t go this day with the wind rising the south and west.”
But Bartley
will have to go to the mainland for selling the horses. The dark landscape, the
monotony of the wave, the simple dignity of the Islanders and their customs,
dresses, festivals have in them, the elements of a fairy tale, yet the tragic
overtone is unmistakable even the most ordinary things of life are made to have
tragic implication life for them in a unending sorrow. They are in horrible
economic plight. The women folk work at the spinning wheels, mend tom pieces of
cloths and cook their simple food. The men folk rear sheep, pigs and horses and
make ashes out of the sea weeds for the manufacture of soda and potash. They
make fuel out of the decomposed vegetable matter because they can’t afford
earthy fuel.
Poverty and
sufferings are then the part and parcel of life of these people. Man jet
drowned and dies every now and then. The peculiarity of the circumstances of
their life is that whether they like or not they can’t but take risk in sailing
ever the perilous sea. If they do not take risk, they will have to starve at
home. There in lies the predicament of their life. The sea by delivering the
successive blows to them has made them fatalist. Maurya realises in the end
that which is totalled for them can’t be blotted. She has learnt from her own
experience that what cannot be cured must be endured.
Thus, Synge
in his play, ‘Riders to the Sea’, has faithfully reproduced the inner beauty
and harmony in the life of these primitive islanders who have not yet lost the
poetry of an imaginative life by sophistication.
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Written By
S. MALLICK
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BIBLIOGRAPHY – Text Book (FBC), A Study Guide
(FBC) & Handnote Series (Lecture)
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