[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Officially, the work week’s gonna be over in a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and then. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

John Millington Synge is gross. Not really. At least not as far as I know. I was reading The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and got caught without a bookmark. J.M. Synge starts on page 144, so that was my little mnemonic: “John Millington Synge is gross.”

Synge was a great Irish playwright who wrote poetry, but very little of it. At least, he published very little of it. As best I can tell his sole collection is Poems and Translations. It contains twenty-two original poems, all short and mostly light and amusing. In addition are translations of poems by Petrarch and Villon, but they’re prose translations of the original author’s verse. I don’t find those terribly interesting.

The twenty-two seem more from a man who wanted to play with an amusing thought that channel a muse. Yeats was fastidious after perfection. Heaney feared frogs. Gogarty swashbuckled. Irish poets have great origin stories. Synge was wickedly clever and insightful, but I don’t get the sense he envisioned himself as a poetic force. That’s not to say he didn’t think big thoughts on the subject. There was a conservator about him.