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Updated: July 1, 2025
We feel Synge must have followed those people carrying the dead body, and touched to the quick by the caoine, passed the touch on to us, for in the lyric swell of the close we get the true emotion. Here alone is he in the line of greatness. This gripped his heart and he wrote out of himself. But in the other work of his it was otherwise.
I think it rained every day of the days I remained at Cong except the blink of sunshine that shone on the castle and grounds the day that I went over part of the Ashford demesne. At Cong, for the first time in my life, I heard the Irish lament or caoine for the dead. Some one was brought in from the country to be buried in the Abbey of Cong. It was a simple country funeral.
The dead was borne on one of the carts of the country, followed by the neighbors, and accompanied by the parish priest of Cong. The day was very wet even for Ireland. After the burial service was over the women, kneeling by the new made grave, among the rank wet grass, and the dripping ivy, raised the caoine.
He heard a faint, sobbing cry come from ahead, and so mournful was it, so charged with wild grief, that for an instant his heart stood still, and the color fled from his face. "It is some woman wailing her dead, Turlough," he said at length, although doubtfully. "Yet I have never heard a caoine like it; but onward, and let us see." "Wait, master!" implored the old man.
It was a most unearthly sound, sweet like singing, sad like crying, rising up among the ruined towers, and clinging ivy and floating up heavenwards. I believe the stories of banshees must have arisen from the sound of the caoine.
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