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.
