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Library / Literature & Fiction

Deirdre of the Sorrows

by J. M. Synge

Pages
about 58
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
64 min at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 36 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Lavarcham’s house on Slieve Fuadh. There is a door to inner room on the left, and a door to open air on the right. Window at back and a frame with a half-finished piece of tapestry. There are also a large press and heavy oak chest near the back wall. The place is neat and clean but bare. Lavarcham, woman of fifty, is working at tapestry frame. Old Woman comes in from left.

OLD WOMAN. She hasn’t come yet, is it, and it falling to the night?

LAVARCHAM. She has not. . . (Concealing her anxiety.) It’s dark with the clouds are coming from the west and south, but it isn’t later than the common.

OLD WOMAN. It’s later, surely, and I hear tell the Sons of Usna, Naisi and his brothers, are above chasing hares for two days or three, and the same awhile since when the moon was full.

LAVARCHAM. — more anxiously. — The gods send they don’t set eyes on her — (with a sign of helplessness) yet if they do itself, it wasn’t my wish brought them or could send them away.

OLD WOMAN. — reprovingly. — If it wasn’t, you’d do well to keep a check on her, and she turning a woman that was meant to be a queen.

LAVARCHAM. Who’d check her like was meant to have her pleasure only, the way if there were no warnings told about her you’d see troubles coming when an old king is taking her, and she without a thought but for her beauty and to be straying the hills.

OLD WOMAN. The gods help the lot of us. . . . Shouldn’t she be well pleased getting the like of Conchubor, and he middling settled in his years itself? I don’t know what he wanted putting her this wild place to be breaking her in, or putting myself to be roasting her supper and she with no patience for her food at all.

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