And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, is no more basic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men, at war with joy and exaltation--irony and grotesquerie, keen insight into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick passing of all good things, _diablerie_ and mordancy. Strange, then, should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of Donne as one reads "In Kerry":--
"We heard the thrushes by the shore and sea, And saw the golden stars' nativity, Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn, Across the church where bones lie out and in; And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud, What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea, This new wild paradise to wake for me ... Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins."
One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty:--
_Christy_ (_indignantly_). Starting from you, is it? (_He follows her._) I will not, then, and when the airs is warming, in four months or five, it's then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and you'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.
_Pegeen_ (_looking at him playfully_). And it's that kind of a poacher's love you'd make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?
_Christy_. It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or an earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden chair.