After Maurya follows Bartley down to the sea in order to give him his bread and a blessing, she returns home and tells her daughters about a vision she had of Michael, using a hyperbole and allusion in the process:
I’ve seen the fearfulest thing any person has seen, since the day Bride Dara seen the dead man with the child in his arms […] I went down to the spring well, and I stood there saying a prayer to myself. Then Bartley came along, and he riding on the red mare with the gray pony behind him […] I seen Michael himself.
The hyperbole that Maurya uses here—“I’ve seen the fearfulest thing any person has seen”—is an intentional exaggeration. Whether she truly believes that seeing the ghost of her son on a horse is the most terrifying sight anyone has ever seen, she describes it as such for dramatic effect. She wants Cathleen and Nora—and Synge wants readers—to understand that Maurya’s vision is a pivotal moment in the story.
Maurya’s description of “Bride Dara [seeing] the dead man with the child in his arms” is an allusion to a story in Irish mythology about a Celtic goddess who sees a dead man holding a child and then loses her son in battle soon after. In having Maurya compare her fear to that of the goddess Bride Dara’s, Synge is hinting at how her son Bartley will soon die the way that Bride Dara’s son died.
