Page 199 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes 26.1.3 John Drinkwater (1882-1937)

John Drinkwater is best known for his prose historical drama Abraham Lincoln (1918) which
secured for him international fame. But here we are concerned with his poetic dramas which came
only before 1918 and which include The Storm (1915), The God of Quiet (1916), and X=O: A Night
of the Trojan War (1917). These plays were not as popular as Abraham Lincoln and even his other
historical dramas like Mary Stuart and Oliver Cromwell, but they helped to promote and preserve
the vogue of poetic play. The Storm is indeed very effective and puts one in mind of Synge’s Riders
to the Sea. A young woman is waiting fearfully for her husband who has been overtaken by a
furious storm. Her mind, torn between hope and fear, comes to a settlement with the bringing in
of the dead body of her husband. The play is meditative rather than expressive of action. The storm
in the soul of the young woman going to be bereaved is given more importance than the physical
storm raging outside her cottage. Her tragedy which she takes with an agonized silence is really
pathetic and heart-writing. X-O attempts a smart exposure of the evils of war. Even the most
expensive war yields no profit in the end: it comes to zero. Drinkwater has presented in the play
an imaginary episode during the course of the Trojan War. The chief characters of the play are
four—two Trojan friends and two Greek friends. At night one of the Trojans leaves his friend
behind to kill some Greek straggler, and, likewise one of the Greeks goes to ambush some unwary
Trojan. The Greek and the Trojan left behind happen to become the victims. It is discovered by the
Greek and the Trojan assasins when they come back from their respective errands. Drinkwater,
aware as he was of the tragedy of war, was not yet a pacifist-as his Abraham Lincoln shows.

Notes Lincoln turned to war when things went out of hand, though John Drinkwater did so
with a deep spiritual agony.

26.1.4 Yeats and the Irish Movement
The Irish Movement contributed a lot to English drama, both prose and verse. The leaders of the
Irish Movement were W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Synge. Their followers were many and included
some very talented writers. Synge wrote plays in a poetic language all his own. but it was prose
not verse. Hence he will not detain us here.
Yeats was a poet of considerable powers. His poetic plays posed a serious challenge to the products
of the realistic prose school. They were poetic not only in form but spirit also. They were full of
rich symbolism, mystic esotericism. and delicate refinements which characterise much of his
poetry. Yeats “deprecated the conversion of the theatre into the lecture-platform and the pulpit by
realistic playwrights.” His was, say Moody and Lovett, “the first dramatic verse since Jacobean
days that was really related to human impulse and expression and was not a mere decoration; he
took the new Anglo-Irish poetry, with its tendency towards rhetoric and its gleams of racial
imaginativeness, and he gave it an aesthetic form that was to be the greatest influence on the next
generation of Irish writers.” The Countess Cathleen (which came towards the end of the nineteenth
century), The Land of Heart’s Desire, The King’s Threshold, On Baile’s Strand, and Deirdre are his
chief plays. For sheer poetry and emotional effectiveness The Countess Cathleen occupies the
most prominent place. It is the story of a Christ-like countess who offers her own soul for hell in
return for the release of many others. She is a benevolent Faustus. On finding her dead even the
unsophisticated peasants express themselves poetically:
A Peasant. She was the great white lily of the world. A Peasant. She was more beautiful than pale
stars. An Old Peasant Woman. The little plant I love is broken in two.
The grief of Aleel, the Countess’s lover, finds a Shakesperean expression. He breaks the Countess’s
mirror and exclaims:
I shatter you in fragments, for the face
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more:
And die, dull heart, for she whose mournful words
Made you a living spirit has passed away
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