Old, Old, Old, Old, Old

John Kerrigan

  • W.B. Yeats: A Life: Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915-39 by Roy Foster
    Oxford, 822 pp, £16.99, March 2005, ISBN 0 19 280609 2

The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1938. An old pedlar and his young son stand on a moonlit stage bare but for the ruins of a great house and a leafless tree. The Old Man declares that the house is still inhabited, by the ghost of his mother, heir to the estate, who brought destruction on it when she married his low-born, wastrel father. A light comes on in a shattered window. It is the spirit of the mother, condemned to relive in remorse, over and over again, her passionate wedding night. Ghostly hoofbeats announce her husband’s return from the pub. The Old Man becomes the witness of his own conception. In a wild attempt to stop the cycle of suffering, he stabs his son with the same jack-knife he had used to murder his father. As the tragedy ends, the drumming hoofbeats resume.

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