"What is the moon?"

It's possible that O'Casey was parodying Walt Whitman when he reaches the hilarious moment of Platonic incomprehension in relation to the sky obove his troubled little head.

"A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he."

Aristotelians (and gardeners) do not have such bother. Grass just "is" and has to be dealt with. Eavan Boland has an equally sticky moment with a tinker's horse who eats a hole in her hedge. "I could fix that" was my lacklustre response to the metaphor. ... and there's also the problem such poetry invokes like a miasma of incomprehension. Should "tinker" not read "member of the travelling community", even though it does not scan?

But anybody who does not know "The War Horse" or "Juno and the Paycock" will possibly be shocked by the emotional impact these works of literature achieve. Both are tragic in their effect and even though pure tragedy is a literary conceit, it has its function in giving words to what would be inexpressibly sad in life.

O'Casey, to give him his due, balances the sadness with a joy in living that would be hard to beat. Why do the women in his world put up with the men?

Because they're loveable, that's why...

"BOYLE: An' as it blowed an' blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question - what is the stars, what is the stars?
JOXER: Ah, that's the question, that's the question - what is the stars?
BOYLE: An' then, I'd have another look, an' I'd ass meself - what is the moon?
JOXER: Ah, that's the question - what is the moon, what is the moon?

And the play ends with Boyle too drunk to realise that his son has been shot speaking the famous line...

...the whole world's in a terrible state of chassis......"

The women in O'Casey finally had to throw in the towel.

In real life, one does not have that option...