SOURCE: "The Romanticism of Brian Friel," in Contemporary Irish Writing, edited by James D. Brophy and Raymond J. Porter, Iona College Press, 1983, pp. 127-40.

In the following essay, Leary examines the themes of "life and death, exile and home, being and loss, " which recur throughout Friel's work.

Some day when I'm awf'ly low,
 When the world is cold,
 I will feel a glow just thinking of you
 And the way you look tonight.

The Kern-Fields song runs throughout Brian Friel's Faith Healer (1979) and resonates in all his earlier stories and plays. Friel is part of the romantic tradition, a sour variety that foresees little for man, but one that treasures early memories as visions to be drawn upon in later, bleaker years and views authority in its various forms-—familial, religious, civil—as the destroyer of that vision.

Citing that Fields verse may be misleading. The vision in...