Life of Aran Islanders as depicted in Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’
Ans. Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’ (1904) 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 nearted 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 cann’t give
them the necessary subsistence. Hence, they take to fishing in the sea around.
They cann’t do, they cann’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 fairly
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 torn 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 vegitable
matter because they cann’t affored carthy fuel.
Poverty
and sufferings are then the part and parcel of life of these people. Man jet
drowned and die every now and then. The pecularity of the circumstances of
their life is that whether they like or not they cann’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 realizes
in the end that which is totaled for them cann’t be blotted. She has learnt
from her own experience that what can not be cured must be endured.
Thus,
Synge in his ‘Riders to the Sea’
(1904) has faithfully reproduced the inner beauty and harmony in the life of
these primitive people who have not yet lost the poetry of an imaginative life
by sophistication.
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