On the low sheets of rock to the east I can see a number of red and
grey figures hurrying about their work. The continual passing in
this island between the misery of last night and the splendor of
to-day, seems to create an affinity between the moods of these
people and the moods of varying rapture and dismay that are frequent
in artists, and in certain forms of alienation. Yet it is only in
the intonation of a few sentences or some old fragment of melody
that I catch the real spirit of the island, for in general the men
sit together and talk with endless iteration of the tides and fish,
and of the price of kelp in Connemara.
After Mass this morning an old woman was buried. She lived in the
cottage next mine, and 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.
To-day, 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 the men, and all the oldest women, wearing
petticoats over their heads, came out and joined in 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
the wild keen, or crying for the dead. Each old woman, as she took
her turn in the leading 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 an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their
isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds 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 the 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 the daily trifles that veil
from them the terror 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 the poteen drinking that takes place at some
funerals.
'A while since,' he said, 'there were two men fell down in the
graveyard while the drink was on them. The sea was rough that day,
the way no one could go to bring the doctor, and one of the men
never woke again, and found death that night.'
The other day the men of this house made a new field. There was a
slight bank of earth under the wall of the yard, and another in the
corner of the cabbage garden. The old man and his eldest son dug out
the clay, with the care of men working in a gold-mine, and Michael
packed it in panniers - there are no wheeled vehicles on this
island - for transport to a flat rock in a sheltered corner of their
holding, where it was mixed with sand and seaweed and spread out in
a layer upon the stone.
