Gradely (graithly) means willingly, meekly or decently; clem means starve; sithee is see you or look you; clogs are shoes with wooden soles and leather uppers, and dungarees, garments of coarse cotton cloth rather like overalls. A is used throughout for I.
As in many English stories, an extreme and painful dread of the workus, or poorhouse, provides a strong motive force.
John Millington Synge: RIDERS TO THE SEA
The work of the Irish Renaissance in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin reached its most powerful and tragic height in this tragedy, which Mr. Yeats compared to the Antigone and (Edipus of Sophocles). Synge at first wandered about Europe, poetizing; it was Yeats who brought him back to study and embody in genuine literature the poetry of life among his own people. On the bleak Arran Islands he lived in a fisherman's cottage, and through the floor of his room heard the dialect which he presents in simple and poignant beauty in this drama of hopeless struggle. The "second sight"—called "the gift" in Campbell of Kilmhor, and an incident also in The Riding to Lithend—was a sort of prophetic vision altogether credited among Celtic peoples, as among those of Scott's Lady of the Lake. When the mother sees the "riders to the sea,"—her drowned son and her living son riding together,—she feels convinced that he must soon die. The sharp cries of her grief and, above all, the peace of her resignation at the end, after all hope is gone, make this, as a writer in the Manchester Guardian is quoted as calling it, "the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has been in Europe, from Galway to Prague, it has made the word tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the spirit than it did."
The speech of the people is not difficult to understand when you master a few of its peculiarities. One is the omission of words we generally include, as in, "Isn't it a hard and cruel man (who) won't hear…." Another is the common form "It was crying I was." A few phrases, like what way for how, the way for so that, in it for here or near, and itself for even, or with no particular meaning, as "Where is he itself?" The meanings of other words will be easily untangled.
William Butler Yeats: THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
Mr. Yeats's best poetic dramas, and particularly this one, represent beyond question that "apex of beauty" to which Lady Gregory spoke of the Abbey Theatre dramatists as aspiring. This play is not founded on any particular Irish folk-tale. It is filled with the half-dread, half-envy with which the tellers of Irish legends seem to regard the fate of mortals bewitched by the Leprechaun or Good People. It is rich, too, with the music of beautiful words, without which, Mr. Yeats contends no play can be "of a great kind." He says too, "There is no poem so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater, or that a bad ear cannot make it nothing."
Mr. Yeats has written broad comedy like Synge's Shadow of the Glen and Lady Gregory's Irish Comedies; his Pot of Broth is a most clever retelling of an old, comical tale. But it is by his mystical and poetical plays that he would be judged as playwright and poet—particularly Deirdre, which should be compared with Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows; The Unicorn of the Stars, written in collaboration with Lady Gregory; Cathleen Ni Hoolihan, a dramatization of the spirit of Ireland; The King's Threshold, a high glorification of the poet's art, with a fable, based on an ancient Celtic rite, of the hunger strike; and The Land of Heart's Desire, most beautifully perfect of all.
Gordon Bottomley: THE RIDING TO LITHEND
"The Riding to Lithend is an Icelandic play taken out of the noblest of the Sagas," wrote Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his review of the published drama in 1909. "[It] is a fight, one of the greatest fights in legend…. The subject is stirring, and Mr. Bottomley takes it into a very high region of poetry, giving it a purport beyond that of the original teller of the tale…. [The play] is not a representation of life; it is a symbol of life. In it life is entirely fermented into rhythm, by which we mean not only rhythm of words, but rhythm of outline also; the beauty and impressiveness of the play do not depend only on the subject, the diction, and the metre, but on the fact that it has distinct and most evident form, in the musician's sense of the word. It is one of those plays that reach the artist's ideal condition of music, in fact."