Language of Poetry and Language of Nature in Maurice Riordan and Seán Lysaght

Abstract

The prevalence of the pastoral tradition in modern Irish poetry may be among the most enduring influences of the Irish Revival. W. B. Yeats, a spectre of influence as polarizing as he is inescapable, continuously championed the peasant and peasant life over the budding early twentieth century Irish petit bourgeoisie, asserting in a valedictory poem “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” that “John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said and sang/Must come from the contact with the soil” (Yeats 321). Although revisionist in their approach to peasant life and culture, Lady Gregory and particularly J. M. Synge set their plays in the rural areas rather than the city. For Synge, “the natural world serves [...] as a site for reflection, a site of longing, and, in the case of his characters, of displacement” so that “nature and landscape [...] come to be much more complex in their signification, elements of an Irish past that contain both ideals and their opposites” (Frawley 103). On a general note, in her analysis of the use of the pastoral mode in Irish literature, Oona Frawley claims: