told that it was “cancer” or “some form of cancer,” which caused him “not very great pain,” but which “would have been excessively painful had he lived a little longer.” Doctors may be able to conclude from these vague statements what it was. He was operated upon in May, 1908, but the growth could not be removed, and from that time on he was under sentence of death. He passed his last few months of life trying to finish his play of Deirdre and writing some of his few poems. He died in a private nursing home in Dublin on the 24th. March, 1909, and was buried two days later in a family vault in the Protestant graveyard of Mount Jerome, Harold’s Cross, Dublin. He had been betrothed, but not married.
One thing more needs to be said. People have stated that Synge’s masters in art were the writers of the French Decadent school of the eighteen nineties, Verlaine, Mallarmé, J. K. Huysmans, etc. Synge had read these writers (who has not?) I often talked of them with him. So far as I know, they were the only writers for
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