Luke Tarpey

Luke Tarpey appears as one of the four old listeners who overhear Tristan and Isolde. A member of the “four maaster waves of Erin” and later named among the “old connubial men of the sea,” he shares in a chorus that observes the lovers, remembers its own past, and repeatedly gathers around the idea of four.

Identity and the Four Old Men

Luke is named alongside Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, and Johnny MacDougall as one of a group whose identity is inseparable from its number. The four call themselves the only four, correcting the count whenever one of them risks being left out. They are described as the great waves of Erin and, in another image, as old men of the sea: human listeners folded into the maritime language surrounding Tristan and Isolde.

Their togetherness has the settled familiarity of ritual. At Miracle Squeer they used to say grace before fish, naming one another and passing the food; the passage remembers this repeated practice as a refrain from earlier days. Luke is thus both an individual member of the group and one voice in its self-renewing collective identity.

Listening to Tristan and Isolde

The four listen as Tristan cuddles and kisses Isolde aboard ship, in a scene rendered as intimate, scandalous, and improper. They strain their ears and watch with glistening eyes; Luke is explicitly included among those listening, rather than placed among the lovers. The scene’s erotic closeness is set against the old men’s distance and age, while the ship and seabirds enlarge their act of overhearing into a maritime spectacle.

The narration connects this present listening with earlier occasions when the four remembered Tristan and Isolde’s story and their own youth. It recalls a bygone world of college days, youthful mischief, and shared memories, then returns to the old men listening before the lovers. The movement does not establish a straightforward personal history for Luke; instead, it makes the group’s act of recollection itself part of the episode’s structure.

Memory, Age, and Recurrence

Luke and Johnny MacDougall are singled out among the old men as they long for bygone times: “the wald times and the fald times and the hempty times and the dempty times.” Their wish for “a cup of kindness yet” and for four old tumblerfuls of “woman squash” mixes nostalgia with the group’s continuing appetite for company and pleasure. Their mouths water as they listen, joining desire for the past to the present spectacle of the lovers.

The passage repeatedly returns to four: four listeners, four remembered companions, and the old men assembled again around a scene of love. In a later recurrence Luke is named with Johnny MacDougall among those whose old experiences remain vivid, while the text invokes “auld acquaintance” and “auld luke syne.” His narrative function is therefore less that of a protagonist with an individual arc than of a witness whose presence helps bind erotic encounter, communal memory, and recurrence together.