Obscurity of strife,
I choose a pleasant life,
Among indolent meadows;
Wisdom must live a bitter life.
[_They then fold up the cloth, singing._
‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the empty well,
‘Lives all his days
Where a hand on the bell
Can call the milch cows
To the comfortable door of his house.
Who but an idiot would praise
Dry stones in a well?
‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the leafless tree,
‘Has married and stays
By an old hearth, and he
On naught has set store
But children and dogs on the floor.
Who but an idiot would praise
A withered tree?’
[_They go out._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_
THREE MUSICIANS (_their faces made up to resemble masks_).
THE GHOST OF CUCHULAIN (_wearing a mask_).
THE FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN (_wearing a mask_).
EMER } (_masked, or their faces made up
EITHNE INGUBA } to resemble masks_).
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE (_wearing a mask_).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Enter Musicians, who are dressed and made up as in ‘At the Hawk’s
Well.’ They have the same musical instruments, which can either be
already upon the stage or be brought in by the_ FIRST MUSICIAN
_before he stands in the centre with the cloth between his hands, or
by a player when the cloth has been unfolded. The stage as before can
be against the wall of any room, and the same black cloth can be used
as in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’_
[_Song for the folding and unfolding of the cloth._]
FIRST MUSICIAN. A woman’s beauty is like a white
Frail bird, like a white sea-bird alone
At daybreak after stormy night
Between two furrows upon the ploughed land:
A sudden storm and it was thrown
Between dark furrows upon the ploughed land.
How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes’ guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?
A strange unserviceable thing,
A fragile, exquisite, pale shell,
That the vast troubled waters bring
To the loud sands before day has broken.
The storm arose and suddenly fell
Amid the dark before day had broken.
What death? what discipline?
What bonds no man could unbind
Being imagined within
The labyrinth of the mind,
What pursuing or fleeing,
What wounds, what bloody press
Dragged into being
This loveliness?
[_When the cloth is folded again the Musicians take their place
against the wall. The folding of the cloth shows on one side of
the stage the curtained bed or litter on which lies a man in
his grave-clothes. He wears an heroic mask. Another man with
exactly similar clothes and mask crouches near the front._ EMER
_is sitting beside the bed_.
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. I call before the eyes a roof
With cross-beams darkened by smoke;
A fisher’s net hangs from a beam,
A long oar lies against the wall.
I call up a poor fisher’s house;
A man lies dead or swooning,
That amorous man,
That amorous, violent man, renowned Cuchulain,
Queen Emer at his side.
At her own bidding all the rest have gone;
But now one comes on hesitating feet,
Young Eithne Inguba, Cuchulain’s mistress.
She stands a moment in the open door,
Beyond the open door the bitter sea,
The shining, bitter sea, is crying out,
[_singing_] White shell, white wing!
I will not choose for my friend
A frail unserviceable thing
That drifts and dreams, and but knows
That waters are without end
And that wind blows.
EMER [_speaking_]. Come hither, come sit down beside the bed;
You need not be afraid, for I myself
Sent for you, Eithne Inguba.
EITHNE INGUBA. No, Madam,
I have too deeply wronged you to sit there.
EMER. Of all the people in the world we two,
And we alone, may watch together here,
Because we have loved him best.
EITHNE INGUBA. And is he dead?
EMER. Although they have dressed him out in his grave-clothes
And stretched his limbs, Cuchulain is not dead;
The very heavens when that day’s at hand,
So that his death may not lack ceremony,
Will throw out fires, and the earth grow red with blood.
There shall not be a scullion but foreknows it
Like the world’s end.
EITHNE INGUBA. How did he come to this?
EMER. Towards noon in the assembly of the kings
He met with one who seemed a while most dear.
The kings stood around; some quarrel was blown up;
He drove him out and killed him on the shore
At Baile’s tree, and he who was so killed
Was his own son begot of some wild woman
When he was young, or so I have heard it said;
And thereupon, knowing what man he had killed,
And being mad with sorrow, he ran out;
And after, to his middle in the foam
With shield before him and with sword in hand,
He fought the deathless sea. The kings looked on
And not a king dared stretch an arm, or even
Dared call his name, but all stood wondering
In that dumb stupor like cattle in a gale,
Until at last, as though he had fixed his eyes
On a new enemy, he waded out
Until the water had swept over him;
But the waves washed his senseless image up
And laid it at this door.
EITHNE INGUBA. How pale he looks!
EMER. He is not dead.
EITHNE INGUBA. You have not kissed his lips
Nor laid his head upon your breast.
EMER. It may be
An image has been put into his place,
A sea-borne log bewitched into his likeness,
Or some stark horseman grown too old to ride
Among the troops of Mananan, Son of the Sea,
Now that his joints are stiff.
EITHNE INGUBA. Cry out his name.
All that are taken from our sight, they say,
Loiter amid the scenery of their lives
For certain hours or days, and should he hear
He might, being angry, drive the changeling out.
EMER. It is hard to make them hear amid their darkness,
And it is long since I could call him home;
I am but his wife, but if you cry aloud
With that sweet voice that is so dear to him
He cannot help but listen.
EITHNE INGUBA. He loves me best,
Being his newest love, but in the end
Will love the woman best who loved him first
And loved him through the years when love seemed lost.
EMER. I have that hope, the hope that some day somewhere
We’ll sit together at the hearth again.
EITHNE INGUBA. Women like me, the violent hour passed over,
Are flung into some corner like old nutshells.
Cuchulain, listen.
EMER. No, not yet, for first
I’ll cover up his face to hide the sea;
And throw new logs upon the hearth and stir
The half-burnt logs until they break in flame.
Old Mananan’s unbridled horses come
Out of the sea, and on their backs his horsemen;
But all the enchantments of the dreaming foam
Dread the hearth-fire.
[_She pulls the curtains of the bed so as to hide the sick man’s
face, that the actor may change his mask unseen. She goes to
one side of platform and moves her hand as though putting logs
on a fire and stirring it into a blaze. While she makes these
movements the Musicians play, marking the movements with drum
and flute perhaps._
_Having finished she stands beside the imaginary fire at a
distance from_ CUCHULAIN _and_ EITHNE INGUBA.
Call on Cuchulain now.
EITHNE INGUBA. Can you not hear my voice?
EMER. Bend over him;
Call out dear secrets till you have touched his heart
If he lies there; and if he is not there
Till you have made him jealous.
EITHNE INGUBA. Cuchulain, listen.
EMER. Those words sound timidly; to be afraid
Because his wife is but three paces off,
When there is so great a need, were but to prove
The man that chose you made but a poor choice:
We’re but two women struggling with the sea.
EITHNE INGUBA. O my beloved, pardon me, that I
Have been ashamed and you in so great need.
I have never sent a message or called out,
Scarce had a longing for your company
But you have known and come; and if indeed
You are lying there, stretch out your arms and speak;
Open your mouth and speak, for to this hour
My company has made you talkative.
What ails your tongue, or what has closed your ears?
Our passion had not chilled when we were parted
On the pale shore under the breaking dawn.
He cannot speak: or else his ears are closed
And no sound reaches him.
EMER. Then kiss that image;
The pressure of your mouth upon his mouth
May reach him where he is.
EITHNE INGUBA [_starting back_]. It is no man.
I felt some evil thing that dried my heart
When my lips touched it.
EMER. No, his body stirs;
The pressure of your mouth has called him home;
He has thrown the changeling out.
EITHNE INGUBA [_going further off_]. Look at that arm;
That arm is withered to the very socket.
EMER [_going up to the bed_]. What do you come for; and from where?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. I have come
From Mananan’s court upon a bridleless horse.
EMER. What one among the Sidhe has dared to lie
Upon Cuchulain’s bed and take his image?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. I am named Bricriu--not the man--that Bricriu,
Maker of discord among gods and men,
Called Bricriu of the Sidhe.
EMER. Come for what purpose?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN [_sitting up parting curtain and showing its
distorted face, as_ EITHNE INGUBA _goes out_]. I show my face and
everything he loves
Must fly away.
EMER. You people of the wind
Are full of lying speech and mockery:
I have not fled your face.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You are not loved.
EMER. And therefore have no dread to meet your eyes
And to demand him of you.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. For that I have come.
You have but to pay the price and he is free.
EMER. Do the Sidhe bargain?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. When they would free a captive
They take in ransom a less valued thing.
The fisher when some knowledgeable man
Restores to him his wife, or son, or daughter,
Knows he must lose a boat or net, or it may be
The cow that gives his children milk; and some
Have offered their own lives. I do not ask
Your life, or any valuable thing;
You spoke but now of the mere chance that some day
You’d be the apple of his eye again
When old and ailing, but renounce that chance
And he shall live again.
EMER. I do not question
But you have brought ill luck on all he loves;
And now, because I am thrown beyond your power
Unless your words are lies, you come to bargain.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You loved your mastery, when but newly married,
And I love mine for all my withered arm;
You have but to put yourself into that power
And he shall live again.
EMER. No, never, never.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You dare not be accursed, yet he has dared.
EMER. I have but two joyous thoughts, two things I prize,
A hope, a memory, and now you claim that hope.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. He’ll never sit beside you at the hearth
Or make old bones, but die of wounds and toil
On some far shore or mountain, a strange woman
Beside his mattress.
EMER. You ask for my one hope
That you may bring your curse on all about him.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You’ve watched his loves and you have not been
jealous
Knowing that he would tire, but do those tire
That love the Sidhe?
EMER. What dancer of the Sidhe,
What creature of the reeling moon has pursued him?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. I have but to touch your eyes and give them
sight;
But stand at my left side.
[_He touches her eyes with his left hand, the right being
withered._
EMER. My husband there.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. But out of reach--I have dissolved the dark
That hid him from your eyes, but not that other
That’s hidden you from his.
EMER. Husband, husband!
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. Be silent, he is but a phantom now
And he can neither touch, nor hear, nor see;
The longing and the cries have drawn him hither.
He heard no sound, heard no articulate sound;
They could but banish rest, and make him dream,
And in that dream, as do all dreaming shades
Before they are accustomed to their freedom,
He has taken his familiar form; and yet
He crouches there not knowing where he is
Or at whose side he is crouched.
[_A_ WOMAN OF THE SIDHE _has entered and stands a little inside
the door_.
EMER. Who is this woman?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. She has hurried from the Country-Under-Wave
And dreamed herself into that shape that he
May glitter in her basket; for the Sidhe
Are dextrous fishers and they fish for men
With dreams upon the hook.
EMER. And so that woman
Has hid herself in this disguise and made
Herself into a lie.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. A dream is body;
The dead move ever towards a dreamless youth
And when they dream no more return no more;
And those more holy shades that never lived
But visit you in dreams.
EMER. I know her sort.
They find our men asleep, weary with war,
Or weary with the chase, and kiss their lips
And drop their hair upon them; from that hour
Our men, who yet knew nothing of it all,
Are lonely, and when at fall of night we press
Their hearts upon our hearts their hearts are cold.
[_She draws a knife from her girdle._
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. And so you think to wound her with a knife.
She has an airy body. Look and listen;
I have not given you eyes and ears for nothing.
[_The_ WOMAN OF THE SIDHE _moves round the crouching_ GHOST OF
CUCHULAIN _at front of stage in a dance that grows gradually
quicker, as he slowly awakes. At moments she may drop her hair
upon his head but she does not kiss him. She is accompanied by
string and flute and drum. Her mask and clothes must suggest
gold or bronze or brass or silver, so that she seems more an
idol than a human being. This suggestion may be repeated in her
movements. Her hair, too, must keep the metallic suggestion._
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Who is it stands before me there
Shedding such light from limb and hair
As when the moon, complete at last
With every labouring crescent past,
And lonely with extreme delight,
Flings out upon the fifteenth night?
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Because I long I am not complete.
What pulled your hands about your feet
And your head down upon your knees,
And hid your face?
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Old memories:
A dying boy, with handsome face
Upturned upon a beaten place;
A sacred yew-tree on a strand;
A woman that held in steady hand,
In all the happiness of her youth
Before her man had broken troth,
A burning wisp to light the door;
And many a round or crescent more;
Dead men and women. Memories
Have pulled my head upon my knees.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Could you that have loved many a woman
That did not reach beyond the human,
Lacking a day to be complete,
Love one that though her heart can beat,
Lacks it but by an hour or so?
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. I know you now, for long ago
I met you on the mountain-side,
Beside a well that seemed long dry,
Beside old thorns where the hawk flew.
I held out arms and hands; but you,
That now seem friendly, fled away
Half woman and half bird of prey.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Hold out your arms and hands again;
You were not so dumbfounded when
I was that bird of prey, and yet
I am all woman now.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. I am not
The young and passionate man I was
And though that brilliant light surpass
All crescent forms, my memories
Weigh down my hands, abash my eyes.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Then kiss my mouth. Though memory
Be beauty’s bitterest enemy
I have no dread, for at my kiss
Memory on the moment vanishes:
Nothing but beauty can remain.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. And shall I never know again
Intricacies of blind remorse?
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Time shall seem to stay his course;
When your mouth and my mouth meet
All my round shall be complete
Imagining all its circles run;
And there shall be oblivion
Even to quench Cuchulain’s drouth,
Even to still that heart.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Your mouth.
[_They are about to kiss, he turns away._
O Emer, Emer.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. So then it is she
Made you impure with memory.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Still in that dream I see you stand,
A burning wisp in your right hand,
To wait my coming to the house,
As when our parents married us.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Being among the dead you love her
That valued every slut above her
While you still lived.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. O my lost Emer.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. And there is not a loose-tongued schemer
But could draw you, if not dead,
From her table and her bed.
But what could make you fit to wive
With flesh and blood, being born to live
Where no one speaks of broken troth,
For all have washed out of their eyes
Wind-blown dirt of their memories
To improve their sight?
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Your mouth, your mouth.
[_Their lips approach, but_ CUCHULAIN _turns away as_ EMER
_speaks_.
EMER. If but the dead will set him free
That I may speak with him at whiles
By the hearth-stone, I am content--
Content that he shall turn on me
Eyes that the cold moon, or the vague sea,
Or what I know not’s made indifferent.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. What a wise silence has fallen in this dark!
I know you now in all your ignorance
Of all whereby a lover’s quiet is rent.
What dread so great as that he should forget
The least chance sight or sound, or scratch or mark
On an old door, or frail bird heard and seen
In the incredible clear light love cast
All round about her some forlorn lost day?
That face, though fine enough, is a fool’s face
And there’s a folly in the deathless Sidhe
Beyond man’s reach.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. I told you to forget
After my fashion; you would have none of it;
So now you may forget in a man’s fashion.
There’s an unbridled horse at the sea’s edge;
Mount; it will carry you in an eye’s wink
To where the King of Country-Under-Wave,
Old Mananan, nods above the board and moves
His chessmen in a dream. Demand your life
And come again on the unbridled horse.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Forgive me those rough words. How could you know
That man is held to those whom he has loved
By pain they gave, or pain that he has given,
Intricacies of pain.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. I am ashamed
That being of the deathless shades I chose
A man so knotted to impurity.
[_The_ GHOST OF CUCHULAIN _goes out_.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE [_to_ FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN]. To you that have no
living light, being dropped
From a last leprous crescent of the moon,
I owe it all.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. Because you have failed
I must forego your thanks, I that took pity
Upon your love and carried out your plan
To tangle all his life and make it nothing
That he might turn to you.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Was it from pity
You taught the woman to prevail against me?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You know my nature--by what name I am called.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Was it from pity that you hid the truth
That men are bound to women by the wrongs
They do or suffer?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You know what being I am.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. I have been mocked and disobeyed--your power
Was more to you than my good-will, and now
I’ll have you learn what my ill-will can do;
I lay you under bonds upon the instant
To stand before your King and face the charge
And take the punishment.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. I’ll stand there first,
And tell my story first, and Mananan
Knows that his own harsh sea made my heart cold.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. My horse is there and shall outrun your horse.
[_The_ FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN _falls back, the_ WOMAN OF THE SIDHE
_goes out. Drum taps, music resembling horse hoofs._
EITHNE INGUBA [_entering quickly_]. I heard the beat of hoofs, but
saw no horse,
And then came other hoofs, and after that
I heard low angry cries and thereupon
I ceased to be afraid.
EMER. Cuchulain wakes.
[_The figure turns round. It once more wears the heroic mask._
CUCHULAIN. Your arms, your arms. O Eithne Inguba,
I have been in some strange place and am afraid.
[_The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _comes to the front of stage, the others
from each side and unfold the cloth singing_.
[_Song for the unfolding and folding of the cloth._]
THE MUSICIANS
Why does your heart beat thus?
Plain to be understood
I have met in a man’s house
A statue of solitude,
Moving there and walking;
Its strange heart beating fast
For all our talking.
O still that heart at last.
O bitter reward
Of many a tragic tomb!
And we though astonished are dumb
And give but a sigh and a word,
A passing word.
Although the door be shut
And all seem well enough,
Although wide world hold not
A man but will give you his love
The moment he has looked at you,
He that has loved the best
May turn from a statue
His too human breast.
O bitter reward
Of many a tragic tomb!
And we though astonished are dumb
Or give but a sigh and a word,
A passing word.
What makes your heart so beat?
Is there no man at your side?
When beauty is complete
Your own thought will have died
And danger not be diminished;
Dimmed at three-quarter light
When moon’s round is finished
The stars are out of sight.
O bitter reward
Of many a tragic tomb!
And we though astonished are dumb
Or give but a sigh and a word,
A passing word.
[_When the cloth is folded again the stage is bare._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DREAMING OF THE BONES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_
THREE MUSICIANS (_their faces made up to resemble masks_).
A YOUNG MAN.
A STRANGER (_wearing a mask_).
A YOUNG GIRL (_wearing a mask_).
_Time_--1916.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The stage is any bare place in a room close to the wall. A screen, with
a pattern of mountain and sky, can stand against the wall, or a
curtain with a like pattern hang upon it, but the pattern must only
symbolise or suggest. One musician enters and then two others; the
first stands singing, as in preceding plays, while the others take
their places. Then all three sit down against the wall by their
instruments, which are already there--a drum, a zither, and a flute.
Or they unfold a cloth as in ‘At the Hawk’s Well,’ while the
instruments are carried in.
[_Song for the folding and unfolding of the cloth._]
FIRST MUSICIAN
[_or all three musicians, singing_]
Why does my heart beat so?
Did not a shadow pass?
It passed by a moment ago.
Who can have trod in the grass?
What rogue is night-wandering?
Have not old writers said
That dizzy dreams can spring
From the dry bones of the dead?
And many a night it seems
That all the valley fills
With those fantastic dreams.
They overflow the hills,
So passionate is a shade,
Like wine that fills to the top
A grey-green cup of jade,
Or maybe an agate cup.
[_The three Musicians are now seated by the drum, flute, and
zither at the back of the stage. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
The hour before dawn and the moon covered up;
The little village of Abbey is covered up;
The little narrow trodden way that runs
From the white road to the Abbey of Corcomroe
Is covered up; and all about the hills
Are like a circle of Agate or of Jade.
Somewhere among great rocks on the scarce grass
Birds cry, they cry their loneliness.
Even the sunlight can be lonely here,
Even hot noon is lonely. I hear a footfall--
A young man with a lantern comes this way.
He seems an Aran fisher, for he wears
The flannel bawneen and the cow-hide shoe.
He stumbles wearily, and stumbling prays.
[_A young man enters, praying in Irish._
Once more the birds cry in their loneliness,
But now they wheel about our heads; and now
They have dropped on the grey stone to the northeast.
[_A man and a girl, in the costume of a past time, come in. They
wear heroic masks._
YOUNG MAN [_raising his lantern_]. Who is there? I cannot see what
you are like.
Come to the light.
STRANGER. But what have you to fear?
YOUNG MAN. And why have you come creeping through the dark?
[_The girl blows out lantern._
The wind has blown my lantern out. Where are you?
I saw a pair of heads against the sky
And lost them after; but you are in the right,
I should not be afraid in County Clare;
And should be, or should not be have no choice,
I have to put myself into your hands,
Now that my candle’s out.
STRANGER. You have fought in Dublin?
YOUNG MAN. I was in the Post Office, and if taken
I shall be put against a wall and shot.
STRANGER. You know some place of refuge, have some plan
Or friend who will come to meet you?
YOUNG MAN. I am to lie
At daybreak on the mountain and keep watch
Until an Aran coracle puts in
At Muckanish or at the rocky shore
Under Finvarra, but would break my neck
If I went stumbling there alone in the dark.
STRANGER. We know the pathways that the sheep tread out,
And all the hiding-places of the hills,
And that they had better hiding-places once.
YOUNG MAN. You’d say they had better before English robbers
Cut down the trees or set them upon fire
For fear their owners might find shelter there.
What is that sound?
STRANGER. An old horse gone astray.
He has been wandering on the road all night.
YOUNG MAN. I took him for a man and horse. Police
Are out upon the roads. In the late Rising
I think there was no man of us but hated
To fire at soldiers who but did their duty
And were not of our race, but when a man
Is born in Ireland and of Irish stock,
When he takes part against us--
STRANGER. I will put you safe,
No living man shall set his eyes upon you;
I will not answer for the dead.
YOUNG MAN. The dead?
STRANGER. For certain days the stones where you must lie
Have in the hour before the break of day Been haunted.
YOUNG MAN. But I was not born at midnight.
STRANGER. Many a man that was born in the full daylight
Can see them plain, will pass them on the high-road
Or in the crowded market-place of the town,
And never know that they have passed.
YOUNG MAN. My Grandam
Would have it they did penance everywhere;
Some lived through their old lives again.
STRANGER. In a dream;
And some for an old scruple must hang spitted
Upon the swaying tops of lofty trees;
Some are consumed in fire, some withered up
By hail and sleet out of the wintry North,
And some but live through their old lives again.
YOUNG MAN. Well, let them dream into what shape they please
And fill waste mountains with the invisible tumult
Of the fantastic conscience. I have no dread;
They cannot put me into jail or shoot me,
And seeing that their blood has returned to fields,
That have grown red from drinking blood like mine,
They would not if they could betray.
STRANGER. This pathway
Runs to the ruined Abbey of Corcomroe;
The Abbey passed, we are soon among the stone
And shall be at the ridge before the cocks
Of Aughanish or Bailevelehan
Or grey Aughtmana shake their wings and cry.
[_They go round the stage once._
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. They’ve passed the shallow well and the
flat stone
Fouled by the drinking cattle, the narrow lane
Where mourners for five centuries have carried
Noble or peasant to his burial;
An owl is crying out above their heads.
[_Singing._]
Why should the heart take fright?
What sets it beating so?
The bitter sweetness of the night
Has made it but a lonely thing.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
And now they have climbed through the long grassy field
And passed the ragged thorn trees and the gap
In the ancient hedge; and the tomb-nested owl
At the foot’s level beats with a vague wing.
[_Singing._]
My head is in a cloud;
I’d let the whole world go;
My rascal heart is proud
Remembering and remembering.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
They are among the stones above the ash
Above the briar and thorn and the scarce grass;
Hidden amid the shadow far below them
The cat-headed bird is crying out.
[_Singing._]
The dreaming bones cry out
Because the night winds blow
And heaven’s a cloudy blot.
Calamity can have its fling.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
STRANGER. We’re almost at the summit and can rest.
The road is a faint shadow there; and there
The Abbey lies amid its broken tombs.
In the old days we should have heard a bell
Calling the monks before day broke to pray;
And when the day has broken on the ridge,
The crowing of its cocks.
YOUNG MAN. Is there no house
Famous for sanctity or architectural beauty
In Clare or Kerry, or in all wide Connacht,
The enemy has not unroofed?
STRANGER. Close to the altar
Broken by wind and frost and worn by time
Donogh O’Brien has a tomb, a name in Latin.
He wore fine clothes and knew the secrets of women,
But he rebelled against the King of Thomond
And died in his youth.
YOUNG MAN. And why should he rebel?
The King of Thomond was his rightful master.
It was men like Donogh who made Ireland weak--
My curse on all that troop, and when I die
I’ll leave my body, if I have any choice,
Far from his ivy tod and his owl; have those
Who, if your tale is true, work out a penance
Upon the mountain-top where I am to hide,
Come from the Abbey graveyard?
YOUNG GIRL. They have not that luck,
But are more lonely; those that are buried there,
Warred in the heat of the blood; if they were rebels
Some momentary impulse made them rebels,
Or the commandment of some petty king
Who hated Thomond. Being but common sinners,
No callers in of the alien from oversea,
They and their enemies of Thomond’s party
Mix in a brief dream battle above their bones;
Or make one drove; or drift in amity;
Or in the hurry of the heavenly round
Forget their earthly names. These are alone
Being accursed.
YOUNG MAN. But if what seems is true
And there are more upon the other side
Than on this side of death, many a ghost
Must meet them face to face and pass the word
Even upon this grey and desolate hill.
YOUNG GIRL. Until this hour no ghost or living man
Has spoken though seven centuries have run
Since they, weary of life and of men’s eyes,
Flung down their bones in some forgotten place
Being accursed.
YOUNG MAN. I have heard that there are souls
Who, having sinned after a monstrous fashion,
Take on them, being dead, a monstrous image
To drive the living, should they meet its face,
Crazy, and be a terror to the dead.
YOUNG GIRL. But these
Were comely even in their middle life
And carry, now that they are dead, the image
Of their first youth, for it was in that youth
Their sin began.
YOUNG MAN. I have heard of angry ghosts
Who wander in a wilful solitude.
YOUNG GIRL. These have no thought but love; nor joy
But that upon the instant when their penance
Draws to its height and when two hearts are wrung
Nearest to breaking, if hearts of shadows break,
His eyes can mix with hers; nor any pang
That is so bitter as that double glance,
Being accursed.
YOUNG MAN. But what is this strange penance--
That when their eyes have met can wring them most?
YOUNG GIRL. Though eyes can meet, their lips can never meet.
YOUNG MAN. And yet it seems they wander side by side.
But doubtless you would say that when lips meet
And have not living nerves, it is no meeting.
YOUNG GIRL. Although they have no blood, or living nerves,
Who once lay warm and live the live-long night
In one another’s arms, and knew their part
In life, being now but of the people of dreams,
Is a dream’s part; although they are but shadows,
Hovering between a thorn tree and a stone,
Who have heaped up night on winged night; although
No shade however harried and consumed
Would change his own calamity for theirs,
Their manner of life were blessed could their lips
A moment meet; but when he has bent his head
Close to her head, or hand would slip in hand,
The memory of their crime flows up between
And drives them apart.
YOUNG MAN. The memory of a crime--
He took her from a husband’s house it may be,
But does the penance for a passionate sin
Last for so many centuries?
YOUNG GIRL. No, no;
The man she chose, the man she was chosen by
Cared little and cares little from whose house
They fled towards dawn amid the flights of arrows,
Or that it was a husband’s and a king’s;
And how, if that were all, could she lack friends,
On crowded roads or on the unpeopled hill?
Helen herself had opened wide the door
Where night by night she dreams herself awake
And gathers to her breast a dreaming man.
YOUNG MAN. What crime can stay so in the memory?
What crime can keep apart the lips of lovers
Wandering and alone?
YOUNG GIRL. Her king and lover
Was overthrown in battle by her husband,
And for her sake and for his own, being blind
And bitter and bitterly in love, he brought
A foreign army from across the sea.
YOUNG MAN. You speak of Dermot and of Dervorgilla
Who brought the Norman in?
YOUNG GIRL. Yes, yes, I spoke
Of that most miserable, most accursed pair
Who sold their country into slavery, and yet
They were not wholly miserable and accursed
If somebody of their race at last would say:
‘I have forgiven them.’
YOUNG MAN. Oh, never, never
Shall Dermot and Dervorgilla be forgiven.
YOUNG GIRL. If some one of their race forgave at last
Lip would be pressed on lip.
YOUNG MAN. Oh, never, never
Shall Dermot and Dervorgilla be forgiven.
You have told your story well, so well indeed
I could not help but fall into the mood
And for a while believe that it was true
Or half believe; but better push on now.
The horizon to the East is growing bright.
[_They go round stage once. The musicians play._
So here we’re on the summit. I can see
The Aran Islands, Connemara Hills,
And Galway in the breaking light; there too
The enemy has toppled roof and gable;
And torn the panelling from ancient rooms;
What generations of old men had known
Like their own hands, and children wondered at,
Has boiled a trooper’s porridge. That town had lain,
But for the pair that you would have me pardon,
Amid its gables and its battlements
Like any old admired Italian town;
For though we have neither coal, nor iron ore,
To make us wealthy and corrupt the air,
Our country, if that crime were uncommitted,
Had been most beautiful. Why do you dance?
Why do you gaze, and with so passionate eyes,
One on the other; and then turn away,
Covering your eyes, and weave it in a dance?
Who are you? what are you? you are not natural.
YOUNG GIRL. Seven hundred years our lips have never met.
YOUNG MAN. Why do you look so strangely at one another,
So strangely and so sweetly?
YOUNG GIRL. Seven hundred years.
YOUNG MAN. So strangely and so sweetly. All the ruin,
All, all their handiwork is blown away
As though the mountain air had blown it away
Because their eyes have met. They cannot hear,
Being folded up and hidden in their dance.
The dance is changing now. They have dropped their eyes,
They have covered up their eyes as though their hearts
Had suddenly been broken--never, never
Shall Dermot and Dervorgilla be forgiven.
They have drifted in the dance from rock to rock.
They have raised their hands as though to snatch the sleep
That lingers always in the abyss of the sky
Though they can never reach it. A cloud floats up
And covers all the mountain head in a moment;
And now it lifts and they are swept away.
[_The_ STRANGER _and the_ YOUNG GIRL _go out_.
I had almost yielded and forgiven it all--
This is indeed a place of terrible temptation.
[_The Musicians begin unfolding and folding a black cloth. The_
FIRST MUSICIAN _comes forward to the front of the stage, at the
centre. He holds the cloth before him. The other two come one
on either side and unfold it. They afterwards fold it up in the
same way. While it is unfolded, the_ YOUNG MAN _leaves the
stage_.
[_Songs for the unfolding and folding of the cloth._]
THE MUSICIANS [_singing_]
I
At the grey round of the hill
Music of a lost kingdom
Runs, runs and is suddenly still.
The winds out of Clare-Galway
Carry it: suddenly it is still.
I have heard in the night air
A wandering airy music;
And moidered in that snare
A man is lost of a sudden,
In that sweet wandering snare.
What finger first began
Music of a lost kingdom?
They dream that laughed in the sun.
Dry bones that dream are bitter,
They dream and darken our sun.
Those crazy fingers play
A wandering airy music;
Our luck is withered away,
And wheat in the wheat-ear withered,
And the wind blows it away.
II
My heart ran wild when it heard
The curlew cry before dawn
And the eddying cat-headed bird;
But now the night is gone.
I have heard from far below
The strong March birds a-crow,
Stretch neck and clap the wing,
Red cocks, and crow.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CALVARY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_
THREE MUSICIANS (_their faces made up to resemble masks_).
CHRIST (_wearing a mask_).
LAZARUS (_wearing a mask_).
JUDAS (_wearing a mask_).
THREE ROMAN SOLDIERS (_their faces masked or made up to resemble
masks_).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_At the beginning of the play the_ FIRST MUSICIAN _comes to the front
of the bare place, round three sides of which the audience are
seated, with a folded cloth hanging from his joined hands. Two other
musicians come, as in the preceding plays, one from either side, and
unfold the cloth so that it shuts out the stage, and then fold it
again, singing and moving rhythmically. They do the same at the end
of the play, which enables the players to leave the stage unseen._
[_Song for the folding and the unfolding of the cloth_]
FIRST MUSICIAN
Motionless under the moon-beam,
Up to his feathers in the stream;
Although fish leap, the white heron
Shivers in a dumbfounded dream.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not died for the white heron.
THIRD MUSICIAN
Although half famished he’ll not dare
Dip or do anything but stare
Upon the glittering image of a heron,
That now is lost and now is there.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not died for the white heron.
FIRST MUSICIAN
But that the full is shortly gone
And after that is crescent moon,
It’s certain that the moon-crazed heron
Would be but fishes’ diet soon.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not died for the white heron.
[_The three musicians are now seated by the drum, flute, and
zither at the back of stage._
FIRST MUSICIAN. The road to Calvary, and I beside it
Upon an ancient stone. Good Friday’s come,
The day whereon Christ dreams His passion through.
He climbs up hither but as a dreamer climbs.
The cross that but exists because He dreams it
Shortens His breath and wears away His strength.
And now He stands amid a mocking crowd,
Heavily breathing.
[_A player with the mask of Christ and carrying a cross has
entered and now stands leaning upon the cross._
Those that are behind
Climb on the shoulders of the men in front
To shout their mockery: ‘Work a miracle,’
Cries one, and ‘Save yourself’; another cries,
‘Call on your father now before your bones
Have been picked bare by the great desert birds’;
Another cries, ‘Call out with a loud voice
And tell him that his son is cast away
Amid the mockery of his enemies.’
[_Singing_]
Oh, but the mockers’ cry
Makes my heart afraid,
As though a flute of bone
Taken from a heron’s thigh,
A heron crazed by the moon,
Were cleverly, softly played.
[_Speaking_]
Who is this from whom the crowd has shrunk,
As though he had some look that terrified?
He has a deathly face, and yet he moves
Like a young foal that sees the hunt go by
And races in the field.
[_A player with the mask of Lazarus has entered._
LAZARUS. He raised me up.
I am the man that died and was raised up;
I am called Lazarus.
CHRIST. Seeing that you died,
Lay in the tomb four days and were raised up,
You will not mock at me.
LAZARUS. For four whole days
I had been dead and I was lying still
In an old comfortable mountain cavern
When you came climbing there with a great crowd
And dragged me to the light.
CHRIST. I called your name.
‘Lazarus, come out,’ I said, and you came out
Bound up in cloths, your face bound in a cloth.
LAZARUS. You took my death, give me your death instead.
CHRIST. I gave you life.
LAZARUS. But death is what I ask.
Alive I never could escape your love,
And when I sickened towards my death I thought
I’ll to the desert, or chuckle in a corner
Mere ghost, a solitary thing. I died
And saw no more until I saw you stand
In the opening of the tomb; ‘Come out!’ you called;
You dragged me to the light as boys drag out
A rabbit when they have dug its hole away;
And now with all the shouting at your heels
You travel towards the death I am denied.
And that is why I have hurried to this road;
And that is why I claim your death.
CHRIST. I have conquered death
And all the dead shall be raised up again.
LAZARUS. Then what I heard is true. I thought to die
When my allotted years ran out again;
And that, being gone, you could not hinder it;
But now you will blind with light the solitude
That death has made; you will disturb that corner
Where I had thought I might lie safe for ever.
CHRIST. I do my Father’s will.
LAZARUS. And not your own;
And I was free four days, four days being dead.
Climb up to Calvary, but turn your eyes
From Lazarus that cannot find a tomb
Although he search all height and depth: make way,
Make way for Lazarus that must go search
Among the desert places where there is nothing
But howling wind and solitary birds.
[_He goes out._
FIRST MUSICIAN. The crowd shrinks backward from the face that seems
Death stricken and death hungry still; and now
Martha, and those three Marys, and the rest
That live but in His love are gathered round Him.
He holds His right arm out, and on His arm
Their lips are pressed and their tears fall; and now
They cast them on the ground before His dirty
Blood-dabbled feet and clean them with their hair.
[_Sings_]
Take but His love away
Their love becomes a feather
Of eagle, swan or gull,
Or a drowned heron’s feather
Tossed hither and thither
Upon the bitter spray
And the moon at the full.
CHRIST. I felt their hair upon my feet a moment
And then they fled away--why have they fled?
Why has the street grown empty of a sudden
As though all fled from it in terror?
JUDAS [_who has just entered_]. I am Judas
That sold you for the thirty pieces of silver.
CHRIST. You were beside me every day, and saw
The dead raised up and blind men given their sight,
And all that I have said and taught you have known,
Yet doubt that I am God.
JUDAS. I have not doubted;
I knew it from the first moment that I saw you;
I had no need of miracles to prove it.
CHRIST. And yet you have betrayed me.
JUDAS. I have betrayed you
Because you seemed all-powerful.
CHRIST. My Father
Even now, if I were but to whisper it,
Would break the world in His miraculous fury
To set me free.
JUDAS. And is there not one man
In the wide world that is not in your power?
CHRIST. My Father put all men into my hands.
JUDAS. That was the very thought that drove me wild,
I could not bear to think you had but to whistle
And I must do; but after that I thought
Whatever man betrays Him will be free;
And life grew bearable again. And now
Is there a secret left I do not know,
Knowing that if a man betrays a God
He is the stronger of the two.
CHRIST. But if
’Twere the commandment of that God Himself
That God were still the stronger?
JUDAS. When I planned it
There was no live thing near me but a heron
So full of itself that it seemed terrified.
CHRIST. But my betrayal was decreed that hour
When the foundations of the world were laid.
JUDAS. It was decreed that somebody betray you--
I’d thought of that--but not that I should do it,
I the man Judas, born on such a day,
In such a village, such and such his parents;
Nor that I’d go with my old coat upon me
To the High Priest, and chuckle to myself
As people chuckle when alone, and that I’d do it
For thirty pieces and no more, no less,
And neither with a nod, a look, nor a sent message,
But with a kiss upon your cheek. I did it,
I, Judas, and no other man, and now
You cannot even save me.
CHRIST. Begone from me.
_Three Roman soldiers have entered._
FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. He has been chosen to hold up the cross.
[_During what follows_, JUDAS _holds up the cross while_ CHRIST
_stands with His arms stretched out upon it_.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. We’ll keep the rest away; they are too
persistent;
They are always wanting something.
THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. Die in peace.
There’s no one here but Judas and ourselves.
CHRIST. And who are you that ask your God for nothing?
THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. We are the gamblers, and when you are dead
We’ll settle who is to have that cloak of yours
By throwing dice.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Our dice were carved
Out of an old sheep’s thigh at Ephesus.
FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. Although but one of us can win the cloak
That will not make us quarrel; what does it matter?
One day one loses and the next day wins.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Whatever happens is the best we say
So that it’s unexpected.
THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. Had you sent
A crier through the world you had not found
More comfortable companions for a death-bed
Than three old gamblers that have asked for nothing.
FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. They say you’re good and that you made the
world,
But it’s no matter.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Come; now let us dance
The dance of the dice-throwers, for it may be
He cannot live much longer and has not seen it.
THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. If he were but the God of dice he’d know it,
But he is not that God.
FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. One thing is plain,
To know that he has nothing that we need
Must be a comfort to him.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. In the dance
We quarrel for a while, but settle it
By throwing dice, and after that, being friends,
Join hand to hand and wheel about the cross.
[_They dance._
CHRIST. My Father, why hast Thou forsaken Me.
[_Song of the folding and unfolding of the cloth_]
FIRST MUSICIAN
Lonely the sea-bird lies at her rest
Blown like a dawn-blenched parcel of spray
Upon the wind, or follows her prey
Under a great wave’s hollowing crest.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not appeared to the birds.
THIRD MUSICIAN
The geer-eagle has chosen his part
In blue deep of the upper air
Where one-eyed day can meet his stare;
He is content with his savage heart.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not appeared to the birds.
FIRST MUSICIAN
But where have last year’s cygnets gone?
The lake is empty; why do they fling
White wing out beside white wing?
What can a swan need but a swan?
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not appeared to the birds.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES AND MUSIC
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE ON THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’
A couple of years ago I was sitting in my stall at the Court Theatre in
London watching one of my own plays, _The King’s Threshold_. In front of
me were three people, seemingly a husband, a wife, and a woman friend.
The husband was bored; he yawned and stretched himself and shifted in
his seat, and I watched him with distress. I was inclined to be angry,
but reminded myself that music, where there are no satisfying audible
words, bores me as much, for I have no ear or only a primitive ear.
Presently when the little princesses came upon the stage in their red
clothes, the woman friend, who had seemed also a little bored, said:
‘They do things very well,’ and became attentive. The distinguished
painter who had designed the clothes at any rate could interest her. The
wife, who had sat motionless from the first, said when the curtain had
fallen and the applause--was it politeness or enthusiasm?--had come to
an end, ‘I would not have missed it for the world.’ She was perhaps a
reader of my poetry who had persuaded the others to come, and she had
found a pleasure, the book could not give her, in the combination of
words and speech. Yet when I think of my play, I do not call her to the
mind’s eye, or even her friend who found the long red gloves of the
little princesses amusing, but always that bored man; the worst of it is
that I could not pay my players, or the seamstress, or the owner of the
stage, unless I could draw to my plays those who prefer light amusement
or have no ear for verse, and fortunately they are all very polite.
Being sensitive, or not knowing how to escape the chance of sitting
behind the wrong people, I have begun to shrink from sending my muses
where they are but half-welcomed; and even in Dublin, where the pit has
an ear for verse, I have no longer the appetite to carry me through the
daily rehearsals. Yet I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a
dramatist; I desire to show events and not merely tell of them: and two
of my best friends were won for me by my plays, and I seem to myself
most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the one lofty
emotion. My blunder has been that I did not discover in my youth that my
theatre must be the ancient theatre that can be made by unrolling a
carpet or marking out a place with a stick, or setting a screen against
the wall. Certainly those who care for my kind of poetry must be
numerous enough, if I can bring them together, to pay half-a-dozen
players who can bring all their properties in a cab and perform in their
leisure moments.
I have found my first model--and in literature if we would not be
parvenus we must have a model--in the ‘Noh’ stage of aristocratic Japan.
I have described in _Certain Noble Plays of Japan_ what has seemed to me
important on that most subtle stage. I do not think of my discovery as
mere economy, for it has been a great gain to get rid of scenery, to
substitute for a crude landscape painted upon canvas three performers
who, sitting before the wall or a patterned screen, describe landscape
or event, and accompany movement with drum and gong, or deepen the
emotion of the words with zither or flute. Painted scenery after all is
unnecessary to my friends and to myself, for our imagination kept living
by the arts can imagine a mountain covered with thorn-trees in a
drawing-room without any great trouble, and we have many quarrels with
even good scene-painting.
Then too the masks forced upon us by the absence of any special
lighting, or by the nearness of the audience, who surround the players
upon three sides, do not seem to us eccentric. We are accustomed to
faces of bronze and of marble, and what could be more suitable than that
Cuchulain, let us say, a half-supernatural legendary person, should show
to us a face, not made before the looking-glass by some leading
player--there too we have many quarrels--but moulded by some
distinguished artist? We are a learned people, and we remember how the
Roman theatre, when it became more intellectual, abandoned ‘make-up’ and
used the mask instead, and that the most famous artists of Japan
modelled masks that are still in use after hundreds of years. It would
be a stirring adventure for a poet and an artist, working together, to
create once more heroic or grotesque types that, keeping always an
appropriate distance from life, would seem images of those profound
emotions that exist only in solitude and in silence. Nor has any one
told me after a performance that he has missed a changing facial
expression, for the mask seems to change with the light that falls upon
it, and besides, in poetical and tragic art, as every ‘producer’ knows,
expression is mainly in those movements that are of the entire body.
_At the Hawk’s Well_ was performed for the first time in April, 1916, in
a friend’s drawing-room, and only those who cared for poetry were
invited. It was played upon the floor, and the players came in by the
same door as the audience, and the audience and the players and I myself
were pleased. A few days later it was revived in Lady Islington’s big
drawing-room at Chesterfield Gardens for the benefit of a war charity.
And round the platform upon three sides were three hundred fashionable
people, and once more my muses were but half welcome. I remember,
however, with a little pleasure that we found a newspaper photographer
planting his camera in a dressing-room, and explained to him that as
fifty people could pay our expenses, we did not invite the press, and
that flashlight photographs were not desirable for their own sake. He
was incredulous and persistent--a whole page somewhere or other was at
our disposal--and it was nearly ten minutes before we could persuade him
to go away. What a relief after directing a theatre for so many
years--for I am one of the two directors of the Abbey Theatre in
Dublin--to think no more of pictures unless Mr. Dulac or some other
distinguished man has made them, nor of all those paragraphs written by
young men, perhaps themselves intelligent, who must applaud the common
taste or starve!
Perhaps I shall turn to something else now that our Japanese dancer, Mr.
Itow, whose minute intensity of movement in the dance of the hawk so
well suited our small room and private art, has been hired by a New York
theatre, or perhaps I shall find another dancer. I am certain, however,
that whether I grow tired or not--and one does grow tired of always
quarrying the stone for one’s statue--I have found out the only way the
subtler forms of literature can find dramatic expression. Shakespeare’s
art was public, now resounding and declamatory, now lyrical and subtle,
but always public, because poetry was a part of the general life of a
people who had been trained by the Church to listen to difficult words,
and who sang, instead of the songs of the music-halls, many songs that
are still beautiful. A man who had sung ‘Barbara Allan’ in his own house
would not, as I have heard the gallery of the Lyceum Theatre, receive
the love speeches of Juliet with an ironical chirruping. We must
recognise the change as the painters did when, finding no longer palaces
and churches to decorate, they made framed pictures to hang upon a wall.
Whatever we lose in mass and in power we should recover in elegance and
in subtlety. Our lyrical and our narrative poetry alike have used their
freedom and have approached nearer, as Pater said all the arts would if
they were able, to ‘the condition of music’; and if our modern poetical
drama has failed, it is mainly because, always dominated by the example
of Shakespeare, it would restore an irrevocable past.
W. B. Y., 1916.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUSIC FOR ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’[18]
BY EDMUND DULAC
A NOTE ON THE INSTRUMENTS
In order to apply to the music the idea of great simplicity of execution
underlying the whole spirit of the performance, it was necessary to use
instruments that any one with a fair idea of music could learn in a few
days.
The following offer hardly any difficulty, while they provide a
sufficient background of simple sounds which the performer can, after a
very little amount of practice, elaborate at will.
A plain bamboo flute giving the appropriate scale.
A harp, a drum and a gong. For these last two, any instruments on
oriental lines with a good shape and a deep mellow sound.
For the harp an ordinary zither, such as shown in the design of the
musician, can be used. The strings, beginning by the lower ones, are
grouped in nine or ten chords of four notes consisting of: the key-note,
two strings in unison giving the fifth above, and the octave of the
key-note.
Ex.:
[Musical example showing, in bass clef, the note D, G in two octaves,
and then D again.]
Beyond these chords there are seven double strings tuned to any
pentatonic scale that suits the play.
The tuning of the chords and free strings would be altered according to
the performance, and several flutes giving different scales would be
required.
The same chords and scales should be used throughout any one play.
The instruments are distributed as follows: one musician plays the drum
and gong, one the flute, the singer takes the harp.
The drum and the gong must be used at times during the performance to
emphasise the spoken word; no definite notation of this can be given,
and it is left to the imagination and taste of the musician.
SCALES FOR THE INSTRUMENTS
[Three musical examples. The first two are for the harp, showing,
first, the chords, and second, the free strings. The second is for the
flute.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUSIC FOR “AT THE HAWK’S WELL”
_To be sung without accompaniment as they unfold the curtain._
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
I call to the eye of the mind
A well long choked up and dry
And boughs long stripped by the wind,
And I call to the mind’s eye
Pallor of an ivory face,
Its lofty dissolute air,
A man climbing up to a place
The salt sea wind has swept bare.
What were his life soon done!
Would he lose by that or win?
A mother that saw her son
Doubled over a speckled shin,
Cross-grained with ninety years,
Would cry, ‘How little worth
Were all my hopes and fears
And the hard pain of his birth!’
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_To be sung as they sit down_
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
The boughs of the hazel shake,
The sun goes down in the west.
The heart would be always awake,
The heart would turn to its rest.
‘Why should I sleep?’ the heart cries.
‘For the wind, the salt wind, the sea wind,
Is beating a cloud through the skies;
I would wander always like the wind.’
‘O wind, O salt wind, O sea wind!’
Cries the heart, ‘it is time to sleep;
Why wander and nothing to find?
Better grow old and sleep.’
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRELUDE TO THE DANCE
_To begin when the Young Man says_:
“Ah, you have looked at her....”]
[Illustration: A musical score for an instrumental passage.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DANCE
The Dance is played through to ⨁ A, begun again at ⨁ going to B, begun
again at ⨁ and played to the end, omitting the passage from A to B.
Thus it ought to last about 3½ minutes.
_This Dance is joined on to the Prelude by a soft roll on the gong
while the girl begins to move._
[Illustration: A musical score for an instrumental passage.]
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
He has lost what may not be found
Till men heap his burial mound
And all the history ends.
He might have lived at his ease,
An old dog’s head on his knees,
Among his children and friends.
_To be sung before they rise to unfold the curtain._
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
Come to me, human faces,
Familiar memories;
I have found hateful eyes
Among the desolate places,
Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes.
Folly alone I cherish,
I choose it for my share;
Being but a mouthful of air,
I am content to perish;
I am but a mouthful of sweet air.
O lamentable shadows,
Obscurity of strife,
I choose a pleasant life,
Among indolent meadows;
Wisdom must live a bitter life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_To be sung while they unfold and fold up the curtain._
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the empty well,
‘Lives all his days
Where a hand on the bell
Can call the milch cows
To the comfortable door of his house.
Who but an idiot would praise
Dry stones in a well?
‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the leafless tree,
‘Has married and stays
By an old hearth, and he
On naught has set store
But children and dogs on the floor.
Who but an idiot would praise
A withered tree?’
-----
Footnote 18:
All rights of performance reserved by Edmund Dulac.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE ON ‘THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER’
While writing these plays, intended for some fifty people in a
drawing-room or a studio, I have so rejoiced in my freedom from the
stupidity of an ordinary audience that I have filled _The Only Jealousy
of Emer_ with convictions about the nature and history of a woman’s
beauty, which Robartes found in the _Speculum_ of Gyraldus and in Arabia
Deserta among the Judwalis. The soul through each cycle of its
development is held to incarnate through twenty-eight typical
incarnations, corresponding to the phases of the moon, the light part of
the moon’s disc symbolising the subjective and the dark part the
objective nature, the wholly dark moon (called Phase 1) and the wholly
light (called Phase 15) symbolising complete objectivity and complete
subjectivity respectively. In a poem called ‘The Phases of the Moon’ in
_The Wild Swans at Coole_ I have described certain aspects of this
symbolism, which needs, however, 100 pages or more for its exposition,
for it purports to be a complete classification and analysis of every
possible type of human intellect, Phase 1 and Phase 15 symbolising,
however, two incarnations not visible to human eyes nor having human
characteristics. The invisible fifteenth incarnation is that of the
greatest possible bodily beauty, and the fourteenth and sixteenth those
of the greatest beauty visible to human eyes. Much that Robartes has
found might be a commentary on Castiglione’s saying that the physical
beauty of woman is the spoil or monument of the victory of the soul, for
physical beauty, only possible to subjective natures, is described as
the result of emotional toil in past lives. Objective natures are
declared to be always ugly, hence the disagreeable appearance of
politicians, reformers, philanthropists, and men of science. A saint or
sage before his final deliverance has one incarnation as a woman of
supreme beauty.
In writing these little plays I knew that I was creating something which
could only fully succeed in a civilisation very unlike ours. I think
they should be written for some country where all classes share in a
half-mythological, half-philosophical folk-belief which the writer and
his small audience lift into a new subtlety. All my life I have longed
for such a country, and always found it quite impossible to write
without having as much belief in its real existence as a child has in
that of the wooden birds, beasts, and persons of his toy Noah’s ark. I
have now found all the mythology and philosophy I need.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUSIC FOR ‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’[19]
By WALTER MORSE RUMMEL
(1917)
_Music of tone and music of speech are distinct from each other._
_Here my sole object has been to find some tone formula which will
enhance and bring out a music underlying the words. The process is
therefore directly opposed to that of tone-music creation, which from
the formless directly creates its tone form, whereas I seek to derive a
formless overflow from the already formed._
FIRST MUSICIAN: _A medium voice_, more chanting than singing, not
letting the musical value of the sound predominate too greatly the
spoken value.
The First Musician uses a _Plucked Instrument_ (harp or zither) to
reinforce the notes of his song in unison or in the octave. (It is
advisable not to reinforce _each_ note sung, but only each _beat_,
unless certain difficulties of pitch would necessitate the reinforcing
of such note.)
During the symphonic moments of the play the Plucked Instrument assumes
a more individual part.
SECOND MUSICIAN: Using a _Flute_, of a soft and discreet quality.
THIRD MUSICIAN: Using a _Bowed Instrument_, one-stringed, more like a
Hindu Sarinda, perhaps with a sympathetic vibrating string, giving a
nasal sound. This part furnishes a bass, a sort of horizon to the
song, and becomes more individual in the symphonic parts of the play.
FOURTH MUSICIAN: Using a _Drum_, preferably also an oriental model,
played with the palm and the fingers of the hand. The drum part is
indicated by ¯ (long) and ˘ (short). The numbers below these
indications signify the fingers employed. The using of the palm of the
hand is indicated by P.
In case there are only _Three Musicians_, the Second and Third Musicians
can alternatively take the Drum part in places where they are
unoccupied.
_All instrumental music, especially during the speaking parts, must
always leave the voice in the foreground._
W. M. R.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DREAMING OF THE BONES
_The stage is any bare place in a room with a wall beyond it. A screen
or curtain hung with a pattern of mountain and sky can stand against
it, but the pattern must only symbolize or suggest._
THREE (FOUR) MUSICIANS _enter. One stands singing while the others sit
down against the wall by their instruments which are already there: a
plucked instrument, a bowed instrument, and flute and drum._
FIRST MUSICIAN (_singing_).
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
Why does my heart beat so?
Did not a shadow pass?
It passed by a moment ago.
Who can have trod in the grass?
What rogue is night-wandering?
Have not old writers said
That dizzy dreams can spring
From the dry bones of the dead?
And many a night it seems
That all the valley fills
With those fantastic dreams.
They overflow the hills,
So passionate is a shade,
Like wine that fills to the top
A grey-green cup of jade,
Or maybe an agate cup.
[Illustration: Short musical scores providing background music for the
following passages:]
The hour before dawn and the moon covered up;
The little village of Abbey is covered up;
The little narrow trodden way that runs
From the white road to the Abbey of Corcomroe
Is covered up; and all about the hills
Are like a circle of Agate or of Jade.
Somewhere among great rocks on the scarce grass
Birds cry, they cry their loneliness.
Even the sunlight can be lonely here,
Even hot noon is lonely. I hear a footfall--
A young man with a lantern comes this way.
He seems an Aran fisher, for he wears
The flannel bawneen and the cow-hide shoe.
He stumbles wearily, and stumbling prays.
[_A young man enters, praying in Irish._
Once more the birds cry in their loneliness,
But now they wheel about our heads; and now
They have dropped on the grey stone to the northeast.
[_A Young Man and Young Girl come in._
For fear their owners might find shelter there.
What is that sound?
An old horse....
Or grey Aughtmana shake their wings and....
THE WALK AROUND THE STAGE
Two steps may be taken to each musical measure, making it a very slow
figurative step. This will mean about 24 steps to one walk around the
stage (Round). The last two steps may be twice as long (_in time_),
accompanied by certain movements of expectancy. In calculating that each
step amounts to half a metre, the length of the stage would have to be
five metres.
[A diagram of a stage, with a walk of five metres across and five
metres back shown in the centre and one metre on either side, making 12
metres in all.]
If necessary the two opening measures may be repeated at will, the same
at beginning of each round.
As to the spoken part preceding the song in each round, this must be
arranged for by the singer. The singing voice must be able to easily
enter in time at its proper place. The spoken part, however, can be
begun before the time indicated for it in the music, or after, according
to the speed of speech. The rhythm of the music should be _slow_.
STRANGER:--cry
1ST ROUND. _In a slow mysterious rhythm_
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. They’ve passed the shallow well and the
flat stone
Fouled by the drinking cattle, the narrow lane
Where mourners for five centuries have carried
Noble or peasant to his burial;
An owl is crying out above their heads.
[_Singing._]
Why should the heart take fright?
What sets it beating so?
The bitter sweetness of the night
Has made it but a lonely thing.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
And now they have climbed through the long grassy field
And passed the ragged thorn trees and the gap
In the ancient hedge; and the tomb-nested owl
At the foot’s level beats with a vague wing.
[_Singing._]
My head is in a cloud;
I’d let the whole world go;
My rascal heart is proud
Remembering and remembering.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
They are among the stones above the ash
Above the briar and thorn and the scarce grass;
Hidden amid the shadow far below them
The cat-headed bird is crying out.
[_Singing._]
The dreaming bones cry out
Because the night winds blow
And heaven’s a cloudy blot.
Calamity can have its fling.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
_Speaking_:--THE STRANGER: We’re almost, etc. _No music_
CLOSING SONG
THE MUSICIAN _singing_
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
At the grey round of the hill
Music of a lost kingdom
Runs, runs and is suddenly still.
The winds out of Clare-Galway
Carry it: suddenly it is still.
I have heard in the night air
A wandering airy music;
And moidered in that snare
A man is lost of a sudden,
In that sweet wandering snare.
What finger first began
Music of a lost kingdom?
They dream that laughed in the sun.
Dry bones that dream are bitter,
They dream and darken our sun.
Those crazy fingers play
A wandering airy music;
Our luck is withered away,
And wheat in the wheat-ear withered,
And the wind blows it away.
My heart ran wild when it heard
The curlew cry before dawn
And the eddying cat-headed bird;
But now the night is gone.
I have heard from far below
The strong March birds a-crow,
Stretch neck and clap the wing,
Red cocks, and crow.
PARIS, _September 1917_.
-----
Footnote 19:
All rights of performance reserved by W. M. Rummel.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE ON
‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’
Dervorgilla’s few lines can be given, if need be, to Dermot, and
Dervorgilla’s part taken by a dancer who has the training of a dancer
alone; nor need that masked dancer be a woman.
The conception of the play is derived from the world-wide belief that
the dead dream back, for a certain time, through the more personal
thoughts and deeds of life. The wicked, according to Cornelius Agrippa,
dream themselves to be consumed by flames and persecuted by demons; and
there is precisely the same thought in a Japanese ‘Noh’ play, where a
spirit, advised by a Buddhist priest she has met upon the road, seeks to
escape from the flames by ceasing to believe in the dream. The lovers in
my play have lost themselves in a different but still self-created
winding of the labyrinth of conscience. The Judwalis distinguish between
the Shade which dreams back through events in the order of their
intensity, becoming happier as the more painful and, therefore, more
intense wear themselves away, and the Spiritual Being, which lives back
through events in the order of their occurrence, this living back being
an exploration of their moral and intellectual origin.
All solar natures, to use the Arabian terms, during life move towards a
more objective form of experience, the lunar towards a more subjective.
After death a lunar man, reversing the intellectual order, grows always
closer to objective experience, which in the spiritual world is wisdom,
while a solar man mounts gradually to the most extreme subjective
experience possible to him. In the spiritual world subjectivity is
innocence, and innocence, in life an accident of nature, is now the
highest achievement of the intellect. I have already put the thought in
verse.
He grows younger every second
That were all his birthdays reckoned
Much too solemn seemed;
Because of what he had dreamed,
Or the ambitions that he served,
Much too solemn and reserved.
Jaunting, journeying
To his own dayspring,
He unpacks the loaded pern
Of all ’twas pain or joy to learn,
Of all that he had made.
The outrageous war shall fade;
At some old winding whitethorn root
He’ll practise on the shepherd’s flute,
Or on the close-cropped grass
Court his shepherd lass,
Or run where lads reform our daytime
Till that is their long shouting playtime;
Knowledge he shall unwind
Through victories of the mind,
Till, clambering at the cradle side,
He dreams himself his mother’s pride,
All knowledge lost in trance
Of sweeter ignorance.
The Shade is said to fade out at last, but the Spiritual Being does not
fade, passing on to other states of existence after it has attained a
spiritual state, of which the surroundings and aptitudes of early life
are a correspondence. When, as in my poem, I speak of events while
describing the ascent of the Spiritual Being, I but use them as
correspondence or symbol. Michael Robartes writes to Aherne, under the
date of May 1917, a curious letter on this subject: ‘There is an analogy
between the dreaming back of the Body of Passion’ (I have used instead
of this term the more usual term Shade), ‘and our ordinary dreams--and
between the life of Spirit and Celestial Body taken together’ (I have
substituted for both terms the less technical, though, I fear, vague
term Spiritual Being), ‘and those coherent thoughts of dreamless sleep,
which, as I know on my personal knowledge, coincide with dreams. These
dreams are at one time their symbols, and at another live with an
independent life. I have several times been present while my friend, an
Arab doctor in Bagdad, carried on long conversations with a sleeping
man, and I have myself joined in those conversations. I do not say a
hypnotised man, or even a somnambulist, for the sleep seemed natural
sleep produced by fatigue, though sometimes with a curious suddenness.
The sleeper would discuss the most profound truths and yet while doing
so make, now and again, some movement that suggested dreaming, although
the part that spoke remained entirely unconscious of the dream. On
waking he would often describe a long dream, sometimes a symbolic
reflection of the conversation, but more often produced by some external
stimulus--a fall in temperature in the rooms, or some condition of body
perhaps. Now and again these dreams would interrupt the conversation, as
when he dreamed he had feathers in his mouth and began to blow. Seeing,
therefore, that I have observed a separation between two parts of the
nature during life, I find no difficulty in believing in a more complete
separation, affirmed by my teachers, and supported by so much tradition,
when the body is no longer there to hold the two parts together.’
I wrote my play before the Robartes papers came into my hands, even
before I myself had received much of their thought from a different
source, and in making the penance of Dermot and Dervorgilla last so many
centuries I have done something for which I had no warrant in these
papers or from that source, but warrant there certainly is in the
folklore of all countries. At certain moments the Spiritual Being, or
rather that part of it which Robartes calls ‘the Spirit,’ is said to
enter into the Shade, and during those moments it can converse with
living men, though but within the narrow limits of its dream.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE ON ‘CALVARY’
I have written the little songs of the chorus to please myself,
confident that singer and composer, when the time came for performance,
would certainly make it impossible for the audience to know what the
words were. I used to think that singers should sing a recipe for a good
dish, or a list of local trains, or something else they want to get by
heart, but I have changed my mind and now I prefer to give him some
mystery or secret. A reader can always solve the mystery and learn the
secret by turning to a note, which need not be as long as those Dante
put to several of the odes in the _Convito_. I use birds as symbols of
subjective life, and my reason for this, and for certain other things,
cannot be explained fully till I have published some part at any rate of
those papers of Michael Robartes, over which I have now spent several
years. The following passage in a letter written by Robartes to Aherne
in the spring of 1917 must suffice. ‘At present I rather pride myself on
believing all the superstitions of the Judwalis, or rather in believing
that there is not one amongst them that may not be true, but at first my
West European mind rebelled. Once in the early morning, when I was
living in a horse-hair tent among other similar tents, a young Arab woke
me and told me to come with him if I would see a great wonder. He
brought me to a level place in the sand, just outside the tent of a
certain Arab, who had arrived the night before and had, as I knew, a
reputation as a wonder-worker, and showed me certain marks on the sand.
I said they were the marks of a jackal, but he would not have this. When
he had passed by a little after sunrise there was not a mark, and a few
minutes later the marks were there. No beast could have come and gone
unseen. When I asked his explanation he said they were made by the
wonder-worker’s “Daimon” or “Angel.” “What,” I said, “has it a beast’s
form?” “He goes much about the world,” he said; “he has been in Persia
and in Afghanistan, and as far west as Tripoli. He is interested in
things, in places, he likes to be with many people, and that is why his
Daimon has the form of a beast, but your Daimon would have a bird’s
shape because you are a solitary man.” Later on, when I mastered their
philosophy, I came to learn that the boy had but classified the
wonder-worker and myself according to their division of all mankind into
those who are dominated by objects and those who are dominated by the
self or _Zat_, or, as we would say, into objective and subjective
natures. Certain birds, especially as I see things, such lonely birds as
the heron, hawk, eagle, and swan, are the natural symbols of
subjectivity, especially when floating upon the wind alone or alighting
upon some pool or river, while the beasts that run upon the ground,
especially those that run in packs, are the natural symbols of objective
man. Objective men, however personally alone, are never alone in their
thought, which is always developed in agreement or in conflict with the
thought of others and always seeks the welfare of some cause or
institution, while subjective men are the more lonely the more they are
true to type, seeking always that which is unique or personal.’
I have used my bird-symbolism in these songs to increase the objective
loneliness of Christ by contrasting it with a loneliness, opposite in
kind, that unlike His can be, whether joyous or sorrowful, sufficient to
itself. I have surrounded Him with the images of those He cannot save,
not only with the birds, who have served neither God nor Cæsar, and
await for none or for a different saviour, but with Lazarus and Judas
and the Roman soldiers for whom He has died in vain. ‘Christ,’ writes
Robartes, ‘only pitied those whose suffering is rooted in death, in
poverty, or in sickness, or in sin, in some shape of the common lot, and
He came especially to the poor who are most subject to exterior
vicissitude.’ I have therefore represented in Lazarus and Judas types of
that intellectual despair that lay beyond His sympathy, while in the
Roman soldiers I suggest a form of objectivity that lay beyond His help.
Robartes said in one of the conversations recorded by Aherne: ‘I heard
much of _Three Songs of Joy_, written by a certain old Arab, which owing
to the circumstances of their origin were considered as proofs of great
sanctity. He held the faith of Kusta ben Luki, but did not live with any
of the two or three wandering companies of Judwalis. We lived in the
town of Hâyel as servant to a rich Arab merchant. He himself had been a
rich merchant of Aneyza and had been several times to India. On his
return from one of these journeys he had found his house in possession
of an enemy and was himself driven from Aneyza by the Wahâbies on some
charge, I think of impiety, and it was then he made his first song of
joy. A few years later his wife and child were murdered by robbers in
the desert, and after certain weeks, during which it was thought that he
must die of grief, his face cleared and his step grew firm and he made
his second song. He gave away all his goods and became a servant in
Hâyel, and a year or two later, believing that his death was near, he
made his third song of joy. He lived, however, for several months, and
when I met him had the use of all his faculties. I asked him about the
“Three Songs,” for I knew that even on his deathbed, as became the
votary of a small, contentious sect, he would delight in exposition. I
said (though I knew from his songs themselves, that this was not his
thought, but I wanted his explanation in his own words): “You have
rejoiced that the Will of God should be done even though you and yours
must suffer.” He answered with some emotion: “Oh, no, Kusta ben Luki has
taught us to divide all things into Chance and Choice; one can think
about the world and about man, or anything else until all has vanished
but these two things, for they are indeed the first cause of the animate
and inanimate world. They exist in God, for if they did not He would not
have freedom, He would be bound by His own Choice. In God alone, indeed,
can they be united, yet each be perfect and without limit or hindrance.
If I should throw from the dice-box there would be but six possible
sides on each of the dice, but when God throws He uses dice that have
all numbers and sides. Some worship His Choice; that is easy; to know
that He has willed for some unknown purpose all that happens is
pleasant; but I have spent my life in worshipping His Chance, and that
moment when I understand the immensity of His Chance is the moment when
I am nearest Him. Because it is very difficult and because I have put my
understanding into three songs I am famous among my people.”’
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Notes
This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. New original cover
art included with this ebook is granted to the public domain.
The following changes and corrections have been made:
• p. 44: Replaced “year” with “year’s” in phrase “The two plays in this
year’s _Samhain_.”
• p. 154: Added closing single quotation mark after phrase “what I have
made of her is very living.”
• p. 194: Replaced “is” with “it” in phrase “even if hundreds desired
that it should not be silenced.”
• p. 229: Replaced period with comma after phrase “So you are starving
even in this wood.”
• p. 229: Replaced period with comma after phrase “being weak with
hunger and thirst.”
• p. 286: Replaced “éte” with “été” in phrase “car le soleil avait été
rare.”
• p. 353: Removed extra quotation mark after first “Eofe!” in phrase
“The Musicians cry ‘Eofe! Eofe!’ and strike gong.”
• p. 360: Replaced “Archimedes” with “Archimedes’” in phrase “Beyond
hearing or seeing, / Or Archimedes’ guess.”
• p. 368: Moved period outside of closing bracket after direction “_to_
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN.”
• p. 378: Added period after phrase “Knows that his own harsh sea made
my heart cold.”
• p. 398: Added period after phrase “Songs for the unfolding and
folding of the cloth.”
• p. 443: Added closing single quotation mark after phrase “They do
things very well.”
• p. 450: Replaced “neccessary” with “necessary” in phrase “If
necessary the two opening measures may be repeated at will.”