POEM OF THE DAY

A PAEAN TO JAMES JOYCE WITH BLOOMSDAY IN MIND

All hail James Augustine Aloysius Joyce Ireland’s scribe of rich literary voice for whom all the muses seemed to meet with consciousness streams both bitter and sweet

you were Daedalus, Hibernia’s wordsmith sublime posing as an artist as a young man your pages aglow with verbal delight

no wonder in our wild Gaelic dreams the barnacle geese of Islay and the white swans of Yeats’s Sligo seem to dance to your prose

To populate that Thursday in June you plucked storm-tossed Odysseus languishing in the wine-dark Ionian Sea deserting Penelope and her suitors on that Ithacan shore for the city of the Liffey there to join Stephen, Leopold, Buck and the boys for a day on the spree no shortage of ploys wheeling a wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow crying cockles and mussels

‘slàinte mhath, slàinte mhòr’

Dublin’s Celtic and classical sights supreme

Homer’s heroes and gods at ease on St Stephen’s green

Aeolus, Hades and the great Book of Kells

Sandymount strand with Cyclops at hand

Calypso, Circe, Sirens and Scylla creatures and witches ceilidhing galore: what a maelstrom on Grafton Street as the quasi-hero quirkily quaffed Burgundy to wash down his Gorgonzola in Davy Byrne’s howff

So Bloomsday ended – a novelist’s mélange of fun and folly the final words of “Ulysses” you gave to Molly

The Scots have Burns Night; the Irish have Bloomsday, a celebration of their prized novelist (and poet), James Joyce. Here, from Scottish Gaeldom, Duncan Ferguson reflects on Joyce, and the events of his famed novel, Ulysses, all taking place on June,...