Chapter II

My heart ran wild when it heard
The curlew cry before dawn
And the eddying cat-headed bird;
But now the night is gone.
I have heard from far below
The strong March birds a-crow,
Stretch neck and clap the wing,
Red cocks, and crow.

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CALVARY

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_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_

THREE MUSICIANS (_their faces made up to resemble masks_). CHRIST (_wearing a mask_). LAZARUS (_wearing a mask_). JUDAS (_wearing a mask_). THREE ROMAN SOLDIERS (_their faces masked or made up to resemble masks_).

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_At the beginning of the play the_ FIRST MUSICIAN _comes to the front
of the bare place, round three sides of which the audience are
seated, with a folded cloth hanging from his joined hands. Two other
musicians come, as in the preceding plays, one from either side, and
unfold the cloth so that it shuts out the stage, and then fold it
again, singing and moving rhythmically. They do the same at the end
of the play, which enables the players to leave the stage unseen._

[_Song for the folding and the unfolding of the cloth_]

FIRST MUSICIAN

Motionless under the moon-beam,
Up to his feathers in the stream;
Although fish leap, the white heron
Shivers in a dumbfounded dream.

SECOND MUSICIAN

God has not died for the white heron.

THIRD MUSICIAN

Although half famished he’ll not dare
Dip or do anything but stare
Upon the glittering image of a heron,
That now is lost and now is there.

SECOND MUSICIAN

God has not died for the white heron.

FIRST MUSICIAN

But that the full is shortly gone
And after that is crescent moon,
It’s certain that the moon-crazed heron
Would be but fishes’ diet soon.

SECOND MUSICIAN

God has not died for the white heron.

[_The three musicians are now seated by the drum, flute, and
zither at the back of stage._

FIRST MUSICIAN. The road to Calvary, and I beside it Upon an ancient stone. Good Friday’s come, The day whereon Christ dreams His passion through. He climbs up hither but as a dreamer climbs. The cross that but exists because He dreams it Shortens His breath and wears away His strength. And now He stands amid a mocking crowd, Heavily breathing.

[_A player with the mask of Christ and carrying a cross has
entered and now stands leaning upon the cross._

Those that are behind Climb on the shoulders of the men in front To shout their mockery: ‘Work a miracle,’ Cries one, and ‘Save yourself’; another cries, ‘Call on your father now before your bones Have been picked bare by the great desert birds’; Another cries, ‘Call out with a loud voice And tell him that his son is cast away Amid the mockery of his enemies.’

[_Singing_]

Oh, but the mockers’ cry
Makes my heart afraid,
As though a flute of bone
Taken from a heron’s thigh,
A heron crazed by the moon,
Were cleverly, softly played.

[_Speaking_]

Who is this from whom the crowd has shrunk, As though he had some look that terrified? He has a deathly face, and yet he moves Like a young foal that sees the hunt go by And races in the field.

[_A player with the mask of Lazarus has entered._

LAZARUS. He raised me up. I am the man that died and was raised up; I am called Lazarus.

CHRIST. Seeing that you died, Lay in the tomb four days and were raised up, You will not mock at me.

LAZARUS. For four whole days I had been dead and I was lying still In an old comfortable mountain cavern When you came climbing there with a great crowd And dragged me to the light.

CHRIST. I called your name. ‘Lazarus, come out,’ I said, and you came out Bound up in cloths, your face bound in a cloth.

LAZARUS. You took my death, give me your death instead.

CHRIST. I gave you life.

LAZARUS. But death is what I ask. Alive I never could escape your love, And when I sickened towards my death I thought I’ll to the desert, or chuckle in a corner Mere ghost, a solitary thing. I died And saw no more until I saw you stand In the opening of the tomb; ‘Come out!’ you called; You dragged me to the light as boys drag out A rabbit when they have dug its hole away; And now with all the shouting at your heels You travel towards the death I am denied. And that is why I have hurried to this road; And that is why I claim your death.

CHRIST. I have conquered death
And all the dead shall be raised up again.

LAZARUS. Then what I heard is true. I thought to die When my allotted years ran out again; And that, being gone, you could not hinder it; But now you will blind with light the solitude That death has made; you will disturb that corner Where I had thought I might lie safe for ever.

CHRIST. I do my Father’s will.

LAZARUS. And not your own; And I was free four days, four days being dead. Climb up to Calvary, but turn your eyes From Lazarus that cannot find a tomb Although he search all height and depth: make way, Make way for Lazarus that must go search Among the desert places where there is nothing But howling wind and solitary birds.

[_He goes out._

FIRST MUSICIAN. The crowd shrinks backward from the face that seems Death stricken and death hungry still; and now Martha, and those three Marys, and the rest That live but in His love are gathered round Him. He holds His right arm out, and on His arm Their lips are pressed and their tears fall; and now They cast them on the ground before His dirty Blood-dabbled feet and clean them with their hair.

[_Sings_]

Take but His love away
Their love becomes a feather
Of eagle, swan or gull,
Or a drowned heron’s feather
Tossed hither and thither
Upon the bitter spray
And the moon at the full.

CHRIST. I felt their hair upon my feet a moment And then they fled away--why have they fled? Why has the street grown empty of a sudden As though all fled from it in terror?

JUDAS [_who has just entered_]. I am Judas
That sold you for the thirty pieces of silver.

CHRIST. You were beside me every day, and saw The dead raised up and blind men given their sight, And all that I have said and taught you have known, Yet doubt that I am God.

JUDAS. I have not doubted; I knew it from the first moment that I saw you; I had no need of miracles to prove it.

CHRIST. And yet you have betrayed me.

JUDAS. I have betrayed you
Because you seemed all-powerful.

CHRIST. My Father Even now, if I were but to whisper it, Would break the world in His miraculous fury To set me free.

JUDAS. And is there not one man
In the wide world that is not in your power?

CHRIST. My Father put all men into my hands.

JUDAS. That was the very thought that drove me wild, I could not bear to think you had but to whistle And I must do; but after that I thought Whatever man betrays Him will be free; And life grew bearable again. And now Is there a secret left I do not know, Knowing that if a man betrays a God He is the stronger of the two.

CHRIST. But if ’Twere the commandment of that God Himself That God were still the stronger?

JUDAS. When I planned it There was no live thing near me but a heron So full of itself that it seemed terrified.

CHRIST. But my betrayal was decreed that hour
When the foundations of the world were laid.

JUDAS. It was decreed that somebody betray you-- I’d thought of that--but not that I should do it, I the man Judas, born on such a day, In such a village, such and such his parents; Nor that I’d go with my old coat upon me To the High Priest, and chuckle to myself As people chuckle when alone, and that I’d do it For thirty pieces and no more, no less, And neither with a nod, a look, nor a sent message, But with a kiss upon your cheek. I did it, I, Judas, and no other man, and now You cannot even save me.

CHRIST. Begone from me.

_Three Roman soldiers have entered._

FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. He has been chosen to hold up the cross.

[_During what follows_, JUDAS _holds up the cross while_ CHRIST
_stands with His arms stretched out upon it_.

SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. We’ll keep the rest away; they are too
persistent;
They are always wanting something.

THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. Die in peace.
There’s no one here but Judas and ourselves.

CHRIST. And who are you that ask your God for nothing?

THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. We are the gamblers, and when you are dead We’ll settle who is to have that cloak of yours By throwing dice.

SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Our dice were carved
Out of an old sheep’s thigh at Ephesus.

FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. Although but one of us can win the cloak That will not make us quarrel; what does it matter? One day one loses and the next day wins.

SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Whatever happens is the best we say
So that it’s unexpected.

THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. Had you sent A crier through the world you had not found More comfortable companions for a death-bed Than three old gamblers that have asked for nothing.

FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. They say you’re good and that you made the
world,
But it’s no matter.

SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Come; now let us dance The dance of the dice-throwers, for it may be He cannot live much longer and has not seen it.

THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. If he were but the God of dice he’d know it,
But he is not that God.

FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. One thing is plain, To know that he has nothing that we need Must be a comfort to him.

SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. In the dance We quarrel for a while, but settle it By throwing dice, and after that, being friends, Join hand to hand and wheel about the cross.

[_They dance._

CHRIST. My Father, why hast Thou forsaken Me.

[_Song of the folding and unfolding of the cloth_]

FIRST MUSICIAN

Lonely the sea-bird lies at her rest
Blown like a dawn-blenched parcel of spray
Upon the wind, or follows her prey
Under a great wave’s hollowing crest.

SECOND MUSICIAN

God has not appeared to the birds.

THIRD MUSICIAN

The geer-eagle has chosen his part
In blue deep of the upper air
Where one-eyed day can meet his stare;
He is content with his savage heart.

SECOND MUSICIAN

God has not appeared to the birds.

FIRST MUSICIAN

But where have last year’s cygnets gone?
The lake is empty; why do they fling
White wing out beside white wing?
What can a swan need but a swan?

SECOND MUSICIAN

God has not appeared to the birds.

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NOTES AND MUSIC

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NOTE ON THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’

A couple of years ago I was sitting in my stall at the Court Theatre in London watching one of my own plays, _The King’s Threshold_. In front of me were three people, seemingly a husband, a wife, and a woman friend. The husband was bored; he yawned and stretched himself and shifted in his seat, and I watched him with distress. I was inclined to be angry, but reminded myself that music, where there are no satisfying audible words, bores me as much, for I have no ear or only a primitive ear. Presently when the little princesses came upon the stage in their red clothes, the woman friend, who had seemed also a little bored, said: ‘They do things very well,’ and became attentive. The distinguished painter who had designed the clothes at any rate could interest her. The wife, who had sat motionless from the first, said when the curtain had fallen and the applause--was it politeness or enthusiasm?--had come to an end, ‘I would not have missed it for the world.’ She was perhaps a reader of my poetry who had persuaded the others to come, and she had found a pleasure, the book could not give her, in the combination of words and speech. Yet when I think of my play, I do not call her to the mind’s eye, or even her friend who found the long red gloves of the little princesses amusing, but always that bored man; the worst of it is that I could not pay my players, or the seamstress, or the owner of the stage, unless I could draw to my plays those who prefer light amusement or have no ear for verse, and fortunately they are all very polite.

Being sensitive, or not knowing how to escape the chance of sitting behind the wrong people, I have begun to shrink from sending my muses where they are but half-welcomed; and even in Dublin, where the pit has an ear for verse, I have no longer the appetite to carry me through the daily rehearsals. Yet I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a dramatist; I desire to show events and not merely tell of them: and two of my best friends were won for me by my plays, and I seem to myself most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the one lofty emotion. My blunder has been that I did not discover in my youth that my theatre must be the ancient theatre that can be made by unrolling a carpet or marking out a place with a stick, or setting a screen against the wall. Certainly those who care for my kind of poetry must be numerous enough, if I can bring them together, to pay half-a-dozen players who can bring all their properties in a cab and perform in their leisure moments.

I have found my first model--and in literature if we would not be parvenus we must have a model--in the ‘Noh’ stage of aristocratic Japan. I have described in _Certain Noble Plays of Japan_ what has seemed to me important on that most subtle stage. I do not think of my discovery as mere economy, for it has been a great gain to get rid of scenery, to substitute for a crude landscape painted upon canvas three performers who, sitting before the wall or a patterned screen, describe landscape or event, and accompany movement with drum and gong, or deepen the emotion of the words with zither or flute. Painted scenery after all is unnecessary to my friends and to myself, for our imagination kept living by the arts can imagine a mountain covered with thorn-trees in a drawing-room without any great trouble, and we have many quarrels with even good scene-painting.

Then too the masks forced upon us by the absence of any special lighting, or by the nearness of the audience, who surround the players upon three sides, do not seem to us eccentric. We are accustomed to faces of bronze and of marble, and what could be more suitable than that Cuchulain, let us say, a half-supernatural legendary person, should show to us a face, not made before the looking-glass by some leading player--there too we have many quarrels--but moulded by some distinguished artist? We are a learned people, and we remember how the Roman theatre, when it became more intellectual, abandoned ‘make-up’ and used the mask instead, and that the most famous artists of Japan modelled masks that are still in use after hundreds of years. It would be a stirring adventure for a poet and an artist, working together, to create once more heroic or grotesque types that, keeping always an appropriate distance from life, would seem images of those profound emotions that exist only in solitude and in silence. Nor has any one told me after a performance that he has missed a changing facial expression, for the mask seems to change with the light that falls upon it, and besides, in poetical and tragic art, as every ‘producer’ knows, expression is mainly in those movements that are of the entire body.

_At the Hawk’s Well_ was performed for the first time in April, 1916, in a friend’s drawing-room, and only those who cared for poetry were invited. It was played upon the floor, and the players came in by the same door as the audience, and the audience and the players and I myself were pleased. A few days later it was revived in Lady Islington’s big drawing-room at Chesterfield Gardens for the benefit of a war charity. And round the platform upon three sides were three hundred fashionable people, and once more my muses were but half welcome. I remember, however, with a little pleasure that we found a newspaper photographer planting his camera in a dressing-room, and explained to him that as fifty people could pay our expenses, we did not invite the press, and that flashlight photographs were not desirable for their own sake. He was incredulous and persistent--a whole page somewhere or other was at our disposal--and it was nearly ten minutes before we could persuade him to go away. What a relief after directing a theatre for so many years--for I am one of the two directors of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin--to think no more of pictures unless Mr. Dulac or some other distinguished man has made them, nor of all those paragraphs written by young men, perhaps themselves intelligent, who must applaud the common taste or starve!

Perhaps I shall turn to something else now that our Japanese dancer, Mr. Itow, whose minute intensity of movement in the dance of the hawk so well suited our small room and private art, has been hired by a New York theatre, or perhaps I shall find another dancer. I am certain, however, that whether I grow tired or not--and one does grow tired of always quarrying the stone for one’s statue--I have found out the only way the subtler forms of literature can find dramatic expression. Shakespeare’s art was public, now resounding and declamatory, now lyrical and subtle, but always public, because poetry was a part of the general life of a people who had been trained by the Church to listen to difficult words, and who sang, instead of the songs of the music-halls, many songs that are still beautiful. A man who had sung ‘Barbara Allan’ in his own house would not, as I have heard the gallery of the Lyceum Theatre, receive the love speeches of Juliet with an ironical chirruping. We must recognise the change as the painters did when, finding no longer palaces and churches to decorate, they made framed pictures to hang upon a wall. Whatever we lose in mass and in power we should recover in elegance and in subtlety. Our lyrical and our narrative poetry alike have used their freedom and have approached nearer, as Pater said all the arts would if they were able, to ‘the condition of music’; and if our modern poetical drama has failed, it is mainly because, always dominated by the example of Shakespeare, it would restore an irrevocable past.

W. B. Y., 1916.

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MUSIC FOR ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’[18]

BY EDMUND DULAC

A NOTE ON THE INSTRUMENTS

In order to apply to the music the idea of great simplicity of execution underlying the whole spirit of the performance, it was necessary to use instruments that any one with a fair idea of music could learn in a few days.

The following offer hardly any difficulty, while they provide a sufficient background of simple sounds which the performer can, after a very little amount of practice, elaborate at will.

A plain bamboo flute giving the appropriate scale.

A harp, a drum and a gong. For these last two, any instruments on oriental lines with a good shape and a deep mellow sound.

For the harp an ordinary zither, such as shown in the design of the musician, can be used. The strings, beginning by the lower ones, are grouped in nine or ten chords of four notes consisting of: the key-note, two strings in unison giving the fifth above, and the octave of the key-note.

Ex.:

[Musical example showing, in bass clef, the note D, G in two octaves,
and then D again.]

Beyond these chords there are seven double strings tuned to any pentatonic scale that suits the play.

The tuning of the chords and free strings would be altered according to the performance, and several flutes giving different scales would be required.

The same chords and scales should be used throughout any one play.

The instruments are distributed as follows: one musician plays the drum and gong, one the flute, the singer takes the harp.

The drum and the gong must be used at times during the performance to emphasise the spoken word; no definite notation of this can be given, and it is left to the imagination and taste of the musician.

SCALES FOR THE INSTRUMENTS

[Three musical examples. The first two are for the harp, showing,
first, the chords, and second, the free strings. The second is for the
flute.]

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MUSIC FOR “AT THE HAWK’S WELL”

_To be sung without accompaniment as they unfold the curtain._

I call to the eye of the mind
A well long choked up and dry
And boughs long stripped by the wind,
And I call to the mind’s eye
Pallor of an ivory face,
Its lofty dissolute air,
A man climbing up to a place
The salt sea wind has swept bare.

What were his life soon done!
Would he lose by that or win?
A mother that saw her son
Doubled over a speckled shin,
Cross-grained with ninety years,
Would cry, ‘How little worth
Were all my hopes and fears
And the hard pain of his birth!’

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_To be sung as they sit down_

The boughs of the hazel shake,
The sun goes down in the west.

The heart would be always awake,
The heart would turn to its rest.

‘Why should I sleep?’ the heart cries.
‘For the wind, the salt wind, the sea wind,
Is beating a cloud through the skies;
I would wander always like the wind.’

‘O wind, O salt wind, O sea wind!’
Cries the heart, ‘it is time to sleep;
Why wander and nothing to find?
Better grow old and sleep.’

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PRELUDE TO THE DANCE

_To begin when the Young Man says_:
“Ah, you have looked at her....”]

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THE DANCE

The Dance is played through to ⨁ A, begun again at ⨁ going to B, begun
again at ⨁ and played to the end, omitting the passage from A to B.
Thus it ought to last about 3½ minutes.

_This Dance is joined on to the Prelude by a soft roll on the gong
while the girl begins to move._

He has lost what may not be found
Till men heap his burial mound
And all the history ends.
He might have lived at his ease,
An old dog’s head on his knees,
Among his children and friends.

_To be sung before they rise to unfold the curtain._

Come to me, human faces,
Familiar memories;
I have found hateful eyes
Among the desolate places,
Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes.

Folly alone I cherish,
I choose it for my share;
Being but a mouthful of air,
I am content to perish;
I am but a mouthful of sweet air.

O lamentable shadows,
Obscurity of strife,
I choose a pleasant life,
Among indolent meadows;
Wisdom must live a bitter life.

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_To be sung while they unfold and fold up the curtain._

‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the empty well,
‘Lives all his days
Where a hand on the bell
Can call the milch cows
To the comfortable door of his house.
Who but an idiot would praise
Dry stones in a well?

‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the leafless tree,
‘Has married and stays
By an old hearth, and he
On naught has set store
But children and dogs on the floor.
Who but an idiot would praise
A withered tree?’

-----

Footnote 18:

All rights of performance reserved by Edmund Dulac.

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NOTE ON ‘THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER’

While writing these plays, intended for some fifty people in a drawing-room or a studio, I have so rejoiced in my freedom from the stupidity of an ordinary audience that I have filled _The Only Jealousy of Emer_ with convictions about the nature and history of a woman’s beauty, which Robartes found in the _Speculum_ of Gyraldus and in Arabia Deserta among the Judwalis. The soul through each cycle of its development is held to incarnate through twenty-eight typical incarnations, corresponding to the phases of the moon, the light part of the moon’s disc symbolising the subjective and the dark part the objective nature, the wholly dark moon (called Phase 1) and the wholly light (called Phase 15) symbolising complete objectivity and complete subjectivity respectively. In a poem called ‘The Phases of the Moon’ in _The Wild Swans at Coole_ I have described certain aspects of this symbolism, which needs, however, 100 pages or more for its exposition, for it purports to be a complete classification and analysis of every possible type of human intellect, Phase 1 and Phase 15 symbolising, however, two incarnations not visible to human eyes nor having human characteristics. The invisible fifteenth incarnation is that of the greatest possible bodily beauty, and the fourteenth and sixteenth those of the greatest beauty visible to human eyes. Much that Robartes has found might be a commentary on Castiglione’s saying that the physical beauty of woman is the spoil or monument of the victory of the soul, for physical beauty, only possible to subjective natures, is described as the result of emotional toil in past lives. Objective natures are declared to be always ugly, hence the disagreeable appearance of politicians, reformers, philanthropists, and men of science. A saint or sage before his final deliverance has one incarnation as a woman of supreme beauty.

In writing these little plays I knew that I was creating something which could only fully succeed in a civilisation very unlike ours. I think they should be written for some country where all classes share in a half-mythological, half-philosophical folk-belief which the writer and his small audience lift into a new subtlety. All my life I have longed for such a country, and always found it quite impossible to write without having as much belief in its real existence as a child has in that of the wooden birds, beasts, and persons of his toy Noah’s ark. I have now found all the mythology and philosophy I need.

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MUSIC FOR ‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’[19]

By WALTER MORSE RUMMEL
(1917)

_Music of tone and music of speech are distinct from each other._

_Here my sole object has been to find some tone formula which will enhance and bring out a music underlying the words. The process is therefore directly opposed to that of tone-music creation, which from the formless directly creates its tone form, whereas I seek to derive a formless overflow from the already formed._

FIRST MUSICIAN: _A medium voice_, more chanting than singing, not
letting the musical value of the sound predominate too greatly the
spoken value.

The First Musician uses a _Plucked Instrument_ (harp or zither) to
reinforce the notes of his song in unison or in the octave. (It is
advisable not to reinforce _each_ note sung, but only each _beat_,
unless certain difficulties of pitch would necessitate the reinforcing
of such note.)

During the symphonic moments of the play the Plucked Instrument assumes
a more individual part.

SECOND MUSICIAN: Using a _Flute_, of a soft and discreet quality.

THIRD MUSICIAN: Using a _Bowed Instrument_, one-stringed, more like a
Hindu Sarinda, perhaps with a sympathetic vibrating string, giving a
nasal sound. This part furnishes a bass, a sort of horizon to the
song, and becomes more individual in the symphonic parts of the play.

FOURTH MUSICIAN: Using a _Drum_, preferably also an oriental model,
played with the palm and the fingers of the hand. The drum part is
indicated by ¯ (long) and ˘ (short). The numbers below these
indications signify the fingers employed. The using of the palm of the
hand is indicated by P.

In case there are only _Three Musicians_, the Second and Third Musicians can alternatively take the Drum part in places where they are unoccupied.

_All instrumental music, especially during the speaking parts, must always leave the voice in the foreground._

W. M. R.

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THE DREAMING OF THE BONES

_The stage is any bare place in a room with a wall beyond it. A screen
or curtain hung with a pattern of mountain and sky can stand against
it, but the pattern must only symbolize or suggest._

THREE (FOUR) MUSICIANS _enter. One stands singing while the others sit
down against the wall by their instruments which are already there: a
plucked instrument, a bowed instrument, and flute and drum._

FIRST MUSICIAN (_singing_).

Why does my heart beat so?
Did not a shadow pass?
It passed by a moment ago.
Who can have trod in the grass?
What rogue is night-wandering?
Have not old writers said
That dizzy dreams can spring
From the dry bones of the dead?
And many a night it seems
That all the valley fills
With those fantastic dreams.
They overflow the hills,
So passionate is a shade,
Like wine that fills to the top
A grey-green cup of jade,
Or maybe an agate cup.

The hour before dawn and the moon covered up;
The little village of Abbey is covered up;
The little narrow trodden way that runs
From the white road to the Abbey of Corcomroe
Is covered up; and all about the hills
Are like a circle of Agate or of Jade.
Somewhere among great rocks on the scarce grass
Birds cry, they cry their loneliness.
Even the sunlight can be lonely here,
Even hot noon is lonely. I hear a footfall--
A young man with a lantern comes this way.
He seems an Aran fisher, for he wears
The flannel bawneen and the cow-hide shoe.
He stumbles wearily, and stumbling prays.

[_A young man enters, praying in Irish._

Once more the birds cry in their loneliness,
But now they wheel about our heads; and now
They have dropped on the grey stone to the northeast.

[_A Young Man and Young Girl come in._

For fear their owners might find shelter there.
What is that sound?

An old horse....

Or grey Aughtmana shake their wings and....

THE WALK AROUND THE STAGE

Two steps may be taken to each musical measure, making it a very slow figurative step. This will mean about 24 steps to one walk around the stage (Round). The last two steps may be twice as long (_in time_), accompanied by certain movements of expectancy. In calculating that each step amounts to half a metre, the length of the stage would have to be five metres.

[A diagram of a stage, with a walk of five metres across and five
metres back shown in the centre and one metre on either side, making 12
metres in all.]

If necessary the two opening measures may be repeated at will, the same at beginning of each round.

As to the spoken part preceding the song in each round, this must be arranged for by the singer. The singing voice must be able to easily enter in time at its proper place. The spoken part, however, can be begun before the time indicated for it in the music, or after, according to the speed of speech. The rhythm of the music should be _slow_.

STRANGER:--cry

1ST ROUND. _In a slow mysterious rhythm_

FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. They’ve passed the shallow well and the flat stone Fouled by the drinking cattle, the narrow lane Where mourners for five centuries have carried Noble or peasant to his burial; An owl is crying out above their heads.

[_Singing._]

Why should the heart take fright?
What sets it beating so?
The bitter sweetness of the night
Has made it but a lonely thing.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.

[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.

And now they have climbed through the long grassy field And passed the ragged thorn trees and the gap In the ancient hedge; and the tomb-nested owl At the foot’s level beats with a vague wing.

[_Singing._]

My head is in a cloud;
I’d let the whole world go;
My rascal heart is proud
Remembering and remembering.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.

[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.

They are among the stones above the ash Above the briar and thorn and the scarce grass; Hidden amid the shadow far below them The cat-headed bird is crying out.

[_Singing._]

The dreaming bones cry out
Because the night winds blow
And heaven’s a cloudy blot.
Calamity can have its fling.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.

_Speaking_:--THE STRANGER: We’re almost, etc. _No music_

CLOSING SONG
THE MUSICIAN _singing_

At the grey round of the hill
Music of a lost kingdom
Runs, runs and is suddenly still.
The winds out of Clare-Galway
Carry it: suddenly it is still.

I have heard in the night air
A wandering airy music;
And moidered in that snare
A man is lost of a sudden,
In that sweet wandering snare.

What finger first began
Music of a lost kingdom?
They dream that laughed in the sun.
Dry bones that dream are bitter,
They dream and darken our sun.

Those crazy fingers play
A wandering airy music;
Our luck is withered away,
And wheat in the wheat-ear withered,
And the wind blows it away.

My heart ran wild when it heard
The curlew cry before dawn
And the eddying cat-headed bird;
But now the night is gone.
I have heard from far below
The strong March birds a-crow,
Stretch neck and clap the wing,
Red cocks, and crow.

PARIS, _September 1917_.

-----

Footnote 19:

All rights of performance reserved by W. M. Rummel.

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NOTE ON
‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’

Dervorgilla’s few lines can be given, if need be, to Dermot, and Dervorgilla’s part taken by a dancer who has the training of a dancer alone; nor need that masked dancer be a woman.

The conception of the play is derived from the world-wide belief that the dead dream back, for a certain time, through the more personal thoughts and deeds of life. The wicked, according to Cornelius Agrippa, dream themselves to be consumed by flames and persecuted by demons; and there is precisely the same thought in a Japanese ‘Noh’ play, where a spirit, advised by a Buddhist priest she has met upon the road, seeks to escape from the flames by ceasing to believe in the dream. The lovers in my play have lost themselves in a different but still self-created winding of the labyrinth of conscience. The Judwalis distinguish between the Shade which dreams back through events in the order of their intensity, becoming happier as the more painful and, therefore, more intense wear themselves away, and the Spiritual Being, which lives back through events in the order of their occurrence, this living back being an exploration of their moral and intellectual origin.

All solar natures, to use the Arabian terms, during life move towards a more objective form of experience, the lunar towards a more subjective. After death a lunar man, reversing the intellectual order, grows always closer to objective experience, which in the spiritual world is wisdom, while a solar man mounts gradually to the most extreme subjective experience possible to him. In the spiritual world subjectivity is innocence, and innocence, in life an accident of nature, is now the highest achievement of the intellect. I have already put the thought in verse.

He grows younger every second
That were all his birthdays reckoned
Much too solemn seemed;
Because of what he had dreamed,
Or the ambitions that he served,
Much too solemn and reserved.
Jaunting, journeying
To his own dayspring,
He unpacks the loaded pern
Of all ’twas pain or joy to learn,
Of all that he had made.
The outrageous war shall fade;
At some old winding whitethorn root
He’ll practise on the shepherd’s flute,
Or on the close-cropped grass
Court his shepherd lass,
Or run where lads reform our daytime
Till that is their long shouting playtime;
Knowledge he shall unwind
Through victories of the mind,
Till, clambering at the cradle side,
He dreams himself his mother’s pride,
All knowledge lost in trance
Of sweeter ignorance.

The Shade is said to fade out at last, but the Spiritual Being does not fade, passing on to other states of existence after it has attained a spiritual state, of which the surroundings and aptitudes of early life are a correspondence. When, as in my poem, I speak of events while describing the ascent of the Spiritual Being, I but use them as correspondence or symbol. Michael Robartes writes to Aherne, under the date of May 1917, a curious letter on this subject: ‘There is an analogy between the dreaming back of the Body of Passion’ (I have used instead of this term the more usual term Shade), ‘and our ordinary dreams--and between the life of Spirit and Celestial Body taken together’ (I have substituted for both terms the less technical, though, I fear, vague term Spiritual Being), ‘and those coherent thoughts of dreamless sleep, which, as I know on my personal knowledge, coincide with dreams. These dreams are at one time their symbols, and at another live with an independent life. I have several times been present while my friend, an Arab doctor in Bagdad, carried on long conversations with a sleeping man, and I have myself joined in those conversations. I do not say a hypnotised man, or even a somnambulist, for the sleep seemed natural sleep produced by fatigue, though sometimes with a curious suddenness. The sleeper would discuss the most profound truths and yet while doing so make, now and again, some movement that suggested dreaming, although the part that spoke remained entirely unconscious of the dream. On waking he would often describe a long dream, sometimes a symbolic reflection of the conversation, but more often produced by some external stimulus--a fall in temperature in the rooms, or some condition of body perhaps. Now and again these dreams would interrupt the conversation, as when he dreamed he had feathers in his mouth and began to blow. Seeing, therefore, that I have observed a separation between two parts of the nature during life, I find no difficulty in believing in a more complete separation, affirmed by my teachers, and supported by so much tradition, when the body is no longer there to hold the two parts together.’

I wrote my play before the Robartes papers came into my hands, even before I myself had received much of their thought from a different source, and in making the penance of Dermot and Dervorgilla last so many centuries I have done something for which I had no warrant in these papers or from that source, but warrant there certainly is in the folklore of all countries. At certain moments the Spiritual Being, or rather that part of it which Robartes calls ‘the Spirit,’ is said to enter into the Shade, and during those moments it can converse with living men, though but within the narrow limits of its dream.

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NOTE ON ‘CALVARY’

I have written the little songs of the chorus to please myself, confident that singer and composer, when the time came for performance, would certainly make it impossible for the audience to know what the words were. I used to think that singers should sing a recipe for a good dish, or a list of local trains, or something else they want to get by heart, but I have changed my mind and now I prefer to give him some mystery or secret. A reader can always solve the mystery and learn the secret by turning to a note, which need not be as long as those Dante put to several of the odes in the _Convito_. I use birds as symbols of subjective life, and my reason for this, and for certain other things, cannot be explained fully till I have published some part at any rate of those papers of Michael Robartes, over which I have now spent several years. The following passage in a letter written by Robartes to Aherne in the spring of 1917 must suffice. ‘At present I rather pride myself on believing all the superstitions of the Judwalis, or rather in believing that there is not one amongst them that may not be true, but at first my West European mind rebelled. Once in the early morning, when I was living in a horse-hair tent among other similar tents, a young Arab woke me and told me to come with him if I would see a great wonder. He brought me to a level place in the sand, just outside the tent of a certain Arab, who had arrived the night before and had, as I knew, a reputation as a wonder-worker, and showed me certain marks on the sand. I said they were the marks of a jackal, but he would not have this. When he had passed by a little after sunrise there was not a mark, and a few minutes later the marks were there. No beast could have come and gone unseen. When I asked his explanation he said they were made by the wonder-worker’s “Daimon” or “Angel.” “What,” I said, “has it a beast’s form?” “He goes much about the world,” he said; “he has been in Persia and in Afghanistan, and as far west as Tripoli. He is interested in things, in places, he likes to be with many people, and that is why his Daimon has the form of a beast, but your Daimon would have a bird’s shape because you are a solitary man.” Later on, when I mastered their philosophy, I came to learn that the boy had but classified the wonder-worker and myself according to their division of all mankind into those who are dominated by objects and those who are dominated by the self or _Zat_, or, as we would say, into objective and subjective natures. Certain birds, especially as I see things, such lonely birds as the heron, hawk, eagle, and swan, are the natural symbols of subjectivity, especially when floating upon the wind alone or alighting upon some pool or river, while the beasts that run upon the ground, especially those that run in packs, are the natural symbols of objective man. Objective men, however personally alone, are never alone in their thought, which is always developed in agreement or in conflict with the thought of others and always seeks the welfare of some cause or institution, while subjective men are the more lonely the more they are true to type, seeking always that which is unique or personal.’

I have used my bird-symbolism in these songs to increase the objective loneliness of Christ by contrasting it with a loneliness, opposite in kind, that unlike His can be, whether joyous or sorrowful, sufficient to itself. I have surrounded Him with the images of those He cannot save, not only with the birds, who have served neither God nor Cæsar, and await for none or for a different saviour, but with Lazarus and Judas and the Roman soldiers for whom He has died in vain. ‘Christ,’ writes Robartes, ‘only pitied those whose suffering is rooted in death, in poverty, or in sickness, or in sin, in some shape of the common lot, and He came especially to the poor who are most subject to exterior vicissitude.’ I have therefore represented in Lazarus and Judas types of that intellectual despair that lay beyond His sympathy, while in the Roman soldiers I suggest a form of objectivity that lay beyond His help. Robartes said in one of the conversations recorded by Aherne: ‘I heard much of _Three Songs of Joy_, written by a certain old Arab, which owing to the circumstances of their origin were considered as proofs of great sanctity. He held the faith of Kusta ben Luki, but did not live with any of the two or three wandering companies of Judwalis. We lived in the town of Hâyel as servant to a rich Arab merchant. He himself had been a rich merchant of Aneyza and had been several times to India. On his return from one of these journeys he had found his house in possession of an enemy and was himself driven from Aneyza by the Wahâbies on some charge, I think of impiety, and it was then he made his first song of joy. A few years later his wife and child were murdered by robbers in the desert, and after certain weeks, during which it was thought that he must die of grief, his face cleared and his step grew firm and he made his second song. He gave away all his goods and became a servant in Hâyel, and a year or two later, believing that his death was near, he made his third song of joy. He lived, however, for several months, and when I met him had the use of all his faculties. I asked him about the “Three Songs,” for I knew that even on his deathbed, as became the votary of a small, contentious sect, he would delight in exposition. I said (though I knew from his songs themselves, that this was not his thought, but I wanted his explanation in his own words): “You have rejoiced that the Will of God should be done even though you and yours must suffer.” He answered with some emotion: “Oh, no, Kusta ben Luki has taught us to divide all things into Chance and Choice; one can think about the world and about man, or anything else until all has vanished but these two things, for they are indeed the first cause of the animate and inanimate world. They exist in God, for if they did not He would not have freedom, He would be bound by His own Choice. In God alone, indeed, can they be united, yet each be perfect and without limit or hindrance. If I should throw from the dice-box there would be but six possible sides on each of the dice, but when God throws He uses dice that have all numbers and sides. Some worship His Choice; that is easy; to know that He has willed for some unknown purpose all that happens is pleasant; but I have spent my life in worshipping His Chance, and that moment when I understand the immensity of His Chance is the moment when I am nearest Him. Because it is very difficult and because I have put my understanding into three songs I am famous among my people.”’

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Transcriber’s Notes

This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. New original cover art included with this ebook is granted to the public domain.

The following changes and corrections have been made:

• p. 44: Replaced “year” with “year’s” in phrase “The two plays in this
year’s _Samhain_.”
• p. 154: Added closing single quotation mark after phrase “what I have
made of her is very living.”
• p. 194: Replaced “is” with “it” in phrase “even if hundreds desired
that it should not be silenced.”
• p. 229: Replaced period with comma after phrase “So you are starving
even in this wood.”
• p. 229: Replaced period with comma after phrase “being weak with
hunger and thirst.”
• p. 286: Replaced “éte” with “été” in phrase “car le soleil avait été
rare.”
• p. 353: Removed extra quotation mark after first “Eofe!” in phrase
“The Musicians cry ‘Eofe! Eofe!’ and strike gong.”
• p. 360: Replaced “Archimedes” with “Archimedes’” in phrase “Beyond
hearing or seeing, / Or Archimedes’ guess.”
• p. 368: Moved period outside of closing bracket after direction “_to_
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN.”
• p. 378: Added period after phrase “Knows that his own harsh sea made
my heart cold.”
• p. 398: Added period after phrase “Songs for the unfolding and
folding of the cloth.”
• p. 443: Added closing single quotation mark after phrase “They do
things very well.”
• p. 450: Replaced “neccessary” with “necessary” in phrase “If
necessary the two opening measures may be repeated at will.”