Poem of the Week

Ulysses

I’ve been reading James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses for quite some time now, never having the time to finish it due to all the other books I’ve had to read for school. The magic of Joyce is that every line is a poem, every phrase a glittering little metaphor, every paragraph a view into the stream-of-consciousness mind of the current narrator. This short paragraph, as told by Leopold Bloom, takes place shortly after the “pornographic” section that had this book banned in the United States for years. This December 6th will be the 76th anniversary of the ban being repealed, so what better way to celebrate then with a glimpse of the poetry that drives the entire novel?

from James Joyce’s Ulysses
(page 377 in the Corrected Edition)

Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out of me, little wretch. She kissed me. My youth. Never again. Only once it comes. Or hers. Take the train there tomorrow. No. Returning not the same. Like kids your second visit to a house. The new I want. Nothing new under the sun. Care of P.O. Dolphin’s barn. Are you not happy in your? Naughty darling. At Dolphin’s barn charades in Luke Doyle’s house. Mat Dillon and his bevy daughters: Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy, Hetty. Molly too. Eightyseven that was. Year before we. And the old major partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only child, I an only child. So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse walking in a ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in Henny Doyle’s overcoat. Van: breadvan delivering. Winkle: cockles and periwinkles. Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She leaned on the sideboard watching. Moorish eyes. Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow. All changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew.

***
We’ve all felt that way. Drained. Maybe from finals, maybe from work or family or friends or oh god that paper is due friday and I’ve forgotten and perhaps even tired like Leo is tired, tired from love and unlove and the degrading and lonely self-love that Billy Joel sings about in Captain Jack. Leopold Bloom, older Irish gentleman, watches young girls and thinks of his own young love, of eighteen-eightyseven when he and wife Molly were not yet—what? Married? Dating? In love? Joyce gives us snapshots, Leo won’t think on it. “Year before we.” He remembers Molly’s father and how both he and she are only children and how “it returns” with his one living daughter, an only child next to his dead-at-11-days-old son. Leopold ran, free at last, and got nowhere—running into Molly, “yourself,” the very person you try to run from. They played a game and it was probably summer and he did love her then, and remembers her love and her large and sad and black “Moorish eyes” and how she watched him playing “Rip van Winkle coming back” in charades when no one can ever come back, when “Never again…returning not the same.” But still she watched him, and it was like he or she or the world was asleep because he can remember those eyes like it was yesterday, but it wasn’t, it was twenty years ago, twenty years he or she or the world was asleep and today he awoke and “all changed,” all “forgotten.” The young, be that he or Molly or Tiny and Floey and Maimy and Louy and Hetty or even his very own daughter are now “old.” Luke Doyle, or Matt Dillon, or Molly’s father, “the old major,” or maybe even Rip van Winkle himself who all may be dead or dying leave nothing behind but a gun, one that was perhaps used so often when you blink your eyes and see twenty years ago and realize how much has passed, how much you’ve left behind, how much you can never get anything back, nothing but that gun that isn’t even used anymore, but lies alone, “rusty from the dew.”

We just passed Thanksgiving. Be thankful for all you’ve left behind. Those we love will not be with us forever and going back is an impossibility even when we wake up one morning and feel like we’ve slept for hundreds of years, like we don’t know our own face in the mirror or the hands of someone we once could not let go of; parent, lover, friend. Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness passage of Leo’s suffering mind places that feeling on all of us, that life is complicated and difficult and exhausting but so impossibly beautiful, that language and memory are mystical in their imperfections and omissions and the puzzle-piece way we live surrounded by pointless details like Henny Doyle’s overcoat ripping that just makes living—and dying—even more ridiculously imperfect yet lovely, that we all have days when we feel the way the modernists felt, that nothing is new, what we remembered and love is gone, that Molly will no longer look at Leopold with those Moorish eyes and her head leaning on the sideboard and that all we’re left with is a gone rusty from what nature has done to it—a reminder of what it does and will do to us—but the language is poetry, and the memory is poetry—

And Joyce makes us see that even the very rusting is beautiful.

-Christina Squitieri
Picture courtesy of seikinsou (Flickr)