Robert Ryan’s Character, Larry, Crosses Himself at the End of Eugene O’Neill’s Great Play, “The Iceman Cometh”
Jack Foley
but it is not an affirmation of religion:
it is an affirmation
of the paucity of what we have
to replace religion:
still, it is the only gesture
solemn enough for the deep occasion
of the suicide of a young man
who could no longer find a way to live.
O’Neill
understood drunkenness and longing
and the fear and desire
of oblivion.
we discover
in this story of the interplay
of voices
that the iceman
is not only death
but a lover,
the dark father
who gathers us in
to the nothing
from which we arose—
the nothing for which we have no words
except for those
in which—weeping—
we no longer
believe...
this Irish play is not
an elegy
but a recognition
of the shattering
to which history
has brought
both belief
and
unbelief.
a review
Poet and scholar Jack Foley at ē· rā/ tiō.