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They’re All Gone Now

A drama monologue from Riders to the Sea by J. M. Synge. About 1 min.

An island mother who has lost her husband and six sons to the sea kneels by the body of the last one.

Maurya
60s to 70s. An old woman of the Aran Islands

  1. Her son Bartley has been carried in drowned. The neighbours kneel around the body.

  2. They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me....

  3. I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south,

  4. and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west,

  5. making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other.

  6. I’ll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain,

  7. and I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.

  8. Give me the Holy Water, Nora, there’s a small sup still on the dresser.

  9. Nora gives it to her. Maurya drops Michael’s clothes across Bartley’s feet, and sprinkles the Holy Water over him.

  10. It isn’t that I haven’t prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God.

  11. It isn’t that I haven’t said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn’t know what I’ld be saying;

  12. but it’s a great rest I’ll have now, and it’s time surely.

  13. It’s a great rest I’ll have now, and great sleeping in the long nights after Samhain,

  14. if it’s only a bit of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking.

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Public domain, J. M. Synge, 1904. Text from Project Gutenberg #994.

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