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PURGATORY

William Butler Yeats

<<<The place to which Roman Catholics believe that the spirits of dead people go and suffer for the evil acts that they did while they were alive, before they are able to go to heaven>>> (यातना/कष्टशुद्धि का स्थान)

In the short poetic drama Purgatory, the writer W.B. Yeats expresses the following things:

  1. The crime of the father will be repeated by his son to an endless cycle of violence.
  2. Living beings can render help to the departed soul which suffers in purgatory.
  3. The living beings have to suffer the consequences of the sin committed by the dead while alive.


Ruined House: Burnt and derelict (ruined/neglected) building before which the play’s only two characters, an Old Man and a Boy (his son), stand throughout the play. The Old Man explains to his disinterested son that he was born in the house and that it was occupied for generations before him by magistrates, colonels, and members of Parliament, captains, and governors—great people who loved the house and its intricate (complex) passages (ways) and magnificent library. However, the house is now a ruin, burned nearly to the ground by the drunken groomsman (attendant) who inherited it from his wife, the Old Man’s mother. All that now remains is a ghostly façade (front), a ruin without floors, windows, or a roof. For Yeats, the ruined house represents the disordered, democratic present, which he measures unfavourably against the ordered, aristocratic past, symbolized by the house in its original, bygone splendour (brightness).

Bare Tree: The tree standing behind the house provides the second key element of the play’s setting, while further symbolizing the loss of familial (ancestral) and social order that resulted from the marriage of the Old Man’s mother and her groomsman. The Old Man recalls that in his boyhood, the tree had had ripe leaves as thick as butter. Once a sign of life, it is now bare, a symbol of sterility (barrenness) and death. The Old Man also remembers other trees that once surrounded the great house, but these were cut down by the groomsman, leaving the estate the barren, lifeless place that it now is.


Purgatory: Place imagined and described by the Old Man. The souls in Purgatory, he says, return to habitations (dwellings/homes) and familiar spots. Thus, his mother is forced, again and again, to relive her “transgression (wrongdoing)”—the sexual act that mixed her blood with that of the inferior groomsman. The Old Man witnesses this act in the lit window of the ruined house. His mother’s soul must live through everything in exact detail, driven by remorse, just as the Old Man himself must live with the consequences of his mother’s and his own actions.


W.B. Yeats’s poetic play Purgatory depicts the restlessness of spirit after the death and bothers the living beings. Purgatory refers the place or state into which the soul passes after death to become purified of pardonable sins before going to heaven. In the play, there are two characters: an old man and his son. Besides that there is dead spirit who hovers (move to and fro) here and there. The play basically concerns with the sorrow of the dead and the consequences of the crimes of the dead upon the living ones. The father of the old man committed a great crime by wasting the property by drinking and destroying the honourable house and deprived his son (the old man) from education and inheritance of the property. As a result, the old man, when he was sixteen, murdered his own father. In the play the ruined house is often visited by the remorseful (regretful/पिडित) spirit of old man’s father and mother. The suffering spirit is not purified to enter the heaven because of its crimes and sins during alive.

An Old Man and his adolescent (teenage) son stand before a ruined old house, behind which stands only one bare tree. The boy complains of long wandering (turning irregularly, not going directly to the destination) carrying a heavy pack while having to listen to his father’s talk. Ignoring the complaints, the Old Man instructs the boy to study the house, which once was the scene of amity (harmony), storytelling, and jokes. He is now the only living person with such memories. Although the boy mocks at these memories as pointless, the Old Man continues with his fantasy (dream) about the cloud-shadowed house. He had visited the site one year earlier when the tree was as bare as it is now. Fifty years earlier, before lightning had struck it, he had seen the tree at the height of its beauty, dignified with luxuriantly green leaves just as the house had been luxurious with intellectual life.

The old man was born in the same ruined house. His mother was an aristocratic woman who fell in love with a groomsman (male attendant of the bridegroom at a wedding) and married him despite the opposition from her family. She owned more than the house; her property extended as far as one could see. His mother died while giving birth to him. She didn't know that her husband wasted all her money on alcohol, women and playing cards. The old man’s father destroyed the spirit of the house by doing wrong things. The old man wasn't sent to school but was taught by a priest and by the wife of a servant. On being complained by his son that he had not sent him to school, the Old Man’s father told him that he didn't deserve to go to school because he was the son of an unmarried, low class woman. When the old man was sixteen years old, his father burnt down the house when he was drunk. Therefore, he stabbed his father to death with a knife that he kept using for cutting food. He was not arrested for the crime because it was impossible to prove that his father’s body had been stabbed to death as it was burnt very badly. After the murder, he ran away from the house and became a peddler.


During the anniversary of the old man’s mother’s wedding night, the old man finds that the suffering spirit visits the house again and again in the ruined house. The old man sees the ghost of his mother and hears the hoof-beats (sound from animal foots) of his father’s horse. The boy sees nothing and calls his father mad. As the old man was disclosing the history of the destroyed house to his son, the boy steals the bag of money from the old man and tries to run away. They fight for the money that is scattered (spread) on the ground. The boy threatens to kill the old man. Now the old man is afraid of his own son who is now 16 years old. The old man thinks that his son may repeat the disgraceful tradition of his father. So, he decides to stop the polluted tradition that may last for generations. In the meantime, the boy also sees the spirit of his grandparents and he becomes shocked. The old man suddenly stabs (kills by knife) his son to death to finish all the consequences. The stage is darkened and the bare tree appears “like a purified soul’ in the white light. The old man at the tree and explains why he has killed the boy. He wants to put an end to the chain of consequences, the polluted blood and its consequence. When he bends to pick up the scattered money, he again hears the hoof-beats of the dead spirit and sadly thinks that the consequence has not come to an end. He laments that he has killed his own father and son without any obvious purpose. Finally, the old man prays to God to free the tormented soul and calm there.

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