Re: Joyce, Episode 39. A Latin Quarter Hat

Mulligan is full of contradictions.

The Writer's Life: If, under threat of death, I had to choose only one poet of all time, who would it be?

Answer – The sublime and immortal Gerard Manley Hopkins. Born 1844 in England, died 1889 in Ireland, a Jesuit who despaired at what he saw as his own lack of excellence, he wrote some of the most profound poems of all time. His rooms in Dublin are preserved as he left them, and in them you feel the austerity that focused him and made him great. Here (in a timely way) is one of my favorite Hopkins pieces, the sonnet, “See How Spring Opens.”

See how Spring opens with disabling cold,
And hunting winds and the long-lying snow.
Is it a wonder if the buds are slow?
Or where is strength to make the leaf unfold?
Chilling remembrance of my days of old
Afflicts no less, what yet I hope may blow,
That seed which the good sower once did sow,
So loading with obstruction that threshold

Which should ere now have led my feet to the field.
It is the waste done in unreticent youth
Which makes so small the promise of that yield
That I may win with late-learnt skill uncouth
From furrows of the poor and stinting *weald.
Therefore how bitter, and learnt how late, the truth.*
“Weald” – open countryside, sometimes wooded.

 

The Matchmaker of Kenmare Book Trailer

Re: Joyce, Episode 38. Hammocks and Holdfasts

We have a bit of a breather while Stephen and Buck debate what, if anything, Stephen's aphorisms are worth.