'A Young Man's Ghost': Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge (Critical Essay‪)‬

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1923 Yeats remarked that by rights 'two forms should have stood, one at either side of me,' to join in receiving the honour: 'an old woman sinking into the infirmity of age and a young man's ghost'. (1) In 'The Municipal Gallery Re-visited' written five years after Lady Gregory's death in 1932, he would evoke his fellow-Abbey Theatre Directors again--'John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory' (2)--now flanking him syntactically rather than physically. Yeats's self-positioning in both texts subtly reflects his sense of centrality and primacy in the influential triad. In the Nobel speech he places himself suggestively in median space between a spectre and a woman in her last years, thereby hinting at his long-running aspiration to use his art and adeptship to negotiate the boundaries between the actual and the metaphysical, life and death. But the self-positionings also elliptically express his sense of having been in middle ground 'between' his Co-Directors in the more mundane realm of their personal transactions. Although his writings typically celebrate the Abbey triumvirate as heroic figures working together in common cause--'We three alone' (3)--he was uniquely aware of and party to the personal and creative strains, and occasional outright hostilities, which divided Synge and Gregory. This essay seeks to highlight those strains, and to consider one occasion in which Yeats belatedly served as intermediary between his fellow Directors. The ghosts in Yeats's poetry typically appear in response to invocation, when summoned rhetorically as a focus for poetic meditation and inspiration. Following his death in 1909, however, Synge made at least one unbidden, and consequently more troublesome, visit to Yeats's imagination.