Analysis
This little drama, while it has none of the uproarious "romping" of The Playboy of the Western World, is still an unmistakable indication of John Millington Synge's keen enthusiasm for all the concerns of human life. If he can take pleasure in the vitality and animal spirits of a Christy Mahon, he can likewise savor the dumb tragedy of a Maurya. The play is a picture, compressed and synthesized, of the helplessness of a mother in her hopeless struggle with the sea.
Synge's perfect mastery of words is one of his greatest assets. Like Shakespeare, he can at once supply environment, create atmosphere, paint word-pictures. That sharp contrast between the homely and everyday in life and the gruesomeness of death is clearly drawn in Riders to the Sea. Bartley says: "Where is the bit of new rope, Cathleen, was bought in Connemara?" and Cathleen replies: "Give it to him, Nora, it's on a nail by the white boards. I hung it up this morning, for the pig with the black feet was eating it." This is what Yeats means when he speaks of Synge's loving all that has edge. In Vale, the second volume of his Hail and Farewell, George Moore wrote of Riders to the Sea: "... when I heard this one-act play, it seemed very little more than the *******s of Synge's notebook, an experiment in language rather than a work of art, a preparatory essay; he seemed to me to have *******ed himself with relating a painful rather than a dramatic story, his preoccupation being to discover a style, a vehicle of expression...." And the incident is painful rather than dramatic, for the struggle must be felt in the background, it cannot be seen and participated in by the audience. Consequently, we might almost feel that the struggle here depicted was so hopeless as to leave no room for anything but dumb submission. A true tragedy ought to give the hero a chance to fight; here the dice are loaded. The play is, however, a powerful and beautiful picture.