Small Things Like These

“In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.”

These first sentences of the novel establish a sense of time and place as the town of New Ross moves from a bright, yellow-leaved autumn to a bleak, rainy winter. The contrast of the crisp autumn leaves with the “dark as stout” river creates a pathetic fallacy, as the description moves from hope and abundance to depressing times that must be endured. The image of the winds stripping the trees bare is a metaphor for the stripping away of illusions and foreshadows the confrontation with the truth that takes place in the rest of the novel.

“Mothers, so used now to ducking their heads and running to the clothesline, or hardly daring to hang anything out at all, had little faith in getting so much as a shirt dry before evening. And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.”

This description of how New Ross’s residents manage the cold gives an impression of dwindling faith. The mothers, “so used to ducking their heads,” a gesture that can literally mean avoiding the rain, or more metaphorically, keeping a low profile so that they do not get into trouble, think that the odds of good weather—and, by extension, luck—are so little in their favor that they do not hang their clothes out to dry. Their “little faith” in a good outcome is mirrored in the fact that fewer people than before kneel to say the rosary.