Bartley is the one of the two riders in John Millington Synge’s play, Riders to the Sea, the other being the ghost of Maurya’s fifth son, Michael. The rest of the menfolk have already died in the sea. Bartley, the youngest of six sons, is now the sole support of the household.Continue Reading
John Millington Synge’s one-act short play of a fishing family being struck by tragedy is set in Irishman, the middle island among the group of three Aran Islands, the most barren and forlorn part of an otherwise green Ireland. These islands are situated in Galway Bay, about thirty miles fromContinue Reading
The sea plays a vital role in the life of the Aran islanders in Synge’s one act play “Riders to the Sea” (1904). Their life and story are set up against the background of the sea. Its unseen presence fills the mind of both the characters and the audience. AsContinue Reading
The protagonist in J. M. Synge’s one-act tragic play Riders to the Sea, Maurya, is a peasant woman belonging to the Irish fishing community of the Aran Islands. Maurya appears to be a passive and helpless victim; yet the intensity of her suffering in the hands of the cruel and unpredictableContinue Reading
John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was a seminal Irish playwright, poet, and prose writer, best known for his role in the Irish Literary Revival and his association with the Abbey Theatre. Born in Dublin into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family, Synge was initially drawn to music but later turned to literature underContinue Reading
RIDERS TO THE SEAa play in one-actby John Millington Synge The following one-act play is reprinted from Riders to the Sea. John M. Synge. Boston: John W. Luce, 1911. It is now in the public domain and may therefore be performed without royalties.CHARACTERSMAURYA, an old womanBARTLEY, her sonCATHLEEN, her daughterNORA, a youngerContinue Reading
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, renowned for his lyrical beauty, radical political ideas, and imaginative power. Born into an aristocratic family in Sussex, England, Shelley was educated at Eton and Oxford, from which he was expelled for publishing a pamphlet titled The NecessityContinue Reading
A lyric poetry is a short poem, usually divided into stanzas and directly expressing in melodious language the thoughts, emotions and feelings of the poet himself. Originally, the Lyric meant a song which was to be sung in accompaniment with a Lyre or Harp. The original sense of the lyricContinue Reading
In the poem ‘To a Skylark’ Shelley addresses a skylark that soars up at a great height and sings so sweetly that the world is enchanted and bewitched by its sweetness. The skylark symbolizes many things. The skylark is Shelley’s greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the “harmonious madness”Continue Reading
The central thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley’s era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley’s treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship toContinue Reading
