Riders_to_the_Sea

RIDERS TO THE SEA • POETIC DRAMA The Irish Dramatic movement led by Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats in the 1890’s was dedicated to bring back to the English Theatre the quality of poetry missing for nearly two centuries. As opposed to prose drama which tends to deal with the particular, poetic drama is universal in nature. It is a drama of emotion which will transport us into an unfamiliar reality where the audience can sink to the very depths of emotional existence: the very essence of life. Riders to the Sea is grounded in the fundamental and timeless truth of existence that from the day one is born it is only a constant journey towards death. The play centres on the frightful vision of a red mare symbolising life followed by a grey mare symbolising death conveying with the greatest of simplicity that life is forever followed by death. His play concentrates on the biggest and undeniable fact of life that from the moment man comes into the world he is simply walking towards death. The basic tenets of poetic drama involve a poetic vision, poetic characters and poetic material. Synge couldn’t find it in Germany or Paris. He took the suggestion of Yeats and visited the Aran Islands and described Aran life as poetic. Their life was so essentially primitive that they retained their particular, different awareness of life and death. Their life was a constant interaction with nature as represented by the sea. Their response is dual- oscillating between good and evil. The whole of the play brings out a civilization so shockingly different in their values, ethics and beliefs that it is almost impossible to credit their existence in the modern world. As is logical, any drama that professes to be poetic must contain within itself several poetic characteristics. It is best then to begin with an identification and explanation of these features that in their totality makes this play poetic in nature. The most obvious poetic feature of the play is its language. It has been given a poetic flavour because of which the speech is rhythmical. Synge uses it to create an atmosphere in which the speech must be seen as emanating from deep feelings. It creates an absolutely terrifying miasma of death hanging over the action of the play making it impossible for us to forget the theme of the play for even a single moment. The language though poetic is completely devoid of every kind of ornamentation. It is strikingly realistic from a particular point of view. However, Synge could not afford to be completely authentic as he could not use the original Aran language for fear of obscurity. He very cleverly created an amalgamation of the unconventional diction of the Aran language and the sophisticated diction of the normal English language which had a curious poetic rhythm of its own. The stage directions in such a play take on a special significance because of their symbolic overtones. In the very beginning the basic necessities around which Aran life revolves is made clear through the ‘cake’ representing food,’fisihing nets’ representing the means of livelihood and the ‘spinning wheel’ representing clothes. The sea represents death which is always intruding as we see the door which Nora half closed is blown open by a gust of wind- an image of death intruding upon life, something that is routine for the Aran people.