The Aran Islands by John M. Synge; Maunsel & Company,
LTD, Dublin, 1911
After Mass this morning an old woman was buried. She lived
in the cottage next mine, more than once before noon I heard a faint echo of
the keen. I did not go to the wake for fear my presence might jar upon the
mourners, but all last evening I could hear the strokes of a hammer in the
yard, where, in the middle of a little crowd of idlers, the next of kin
laboured slowly at the coffin. Today, before the hour for the funeral, poteen
was served to a number of men who stood about upon the road, and a portion was
brought to me in my room. Then the coffin was carried out, sewn loosely in sailcloth,
and held near the ground by three cross-poles lashed upon the top. As we moved
down to the low eastern portion of the island, nearly all then men, and all the
oldest women, wearing petticoats over their heads, came out and joined the
procession.
While the grave was being opened the women sat down among
the flat tombstones, bordered with a pale fringe of early bracken, and began a
wild keen, or crying for the dead. Each old woman, as she took her turn in
leading the recitative, seemed possessed for the moment with a profound ecstasy
of grief, swaying to and fro, and bending her forehead to the stone before her,
while she called out to the dead with a perpetually recurring chant of sobs.
All round the graveyard other wrinkled women, looking out
from under the deep red petticoats that cloaked them, rocked themselves with
the same rhythm, and intoned the inarticulate chant that is sustained by all as
an accompaniment.
The morning had been beautifully fine, but as they lowered
the coffin into the grave, thunder rumbled overhead and hailstones hissed among
the bracken.
In Inishmaan one is forced to believe in a sympathy between
man and nature, and at this moment, when the thunder sounded a death-peal of
extraordinary grandeur above the voices of the women, I could see the faces
near me stiff and drawn with emotion.
When the coffin was in the grave, and the thunder had rolled
away across the hills of Clare, the keen broke out again more passionately than
before.
This grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the
death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate
rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain
the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for instant, and
to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of the
universe that wars on them with wind and seas. They are usually silent, but in
the presence of death all outward show of indifference or patience is
forgotten, and they shriek with pitiable despair before the horror of the fate
to which they are all doomed.
Before they covered the coffin an old man kneeled down by
the grave and repeated a simple prayer for the dead.
There was an irony in these words of atonement and Catholic
belief spoken by voices that were still hoarse with cries of pagan desperation.
A little beyond the grave I saw a line of old women who had
recited in the keen sitting in the shadow of a wall beside the roofless shell
of the church. They were still sobbing and shaken with grief, yet they were
beginning to talk again of daily trifles that veil from them the terrors of the
world.
When we had all come out of the graveyard, and two men had
rebuilt the hole in the wall through which the coffin had been carried in, we
walked back to the village, talking of anything, and joking of anything, as if
merely coming from the boat-slip, or the pier.
One man told me of poteen-drinking that takes place at some
funerals.
‘A while since,’ he sais, ‘there were two men fell down in
the graveyard while the drink was upon them. The sea was rough that day, the
way no one could go to bring a doctor, and one of the men never woke again, and
found dead that night.’
No comments:
Post a Comment