Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Clouds About the Fallen Sun’)

“These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
    The majesty that shuts his burning eye;
    The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,
    Till that be tumbled that was lifted high
    And discord follow upon unison,
    And all things at one common level lie.” —Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “These Are The Clouds,” in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Richard Finneran, with revisions and additional poems by Anne Yeats (1989)

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on ‘Insult and Hatred’ Vs. Love)

“Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. What? says Alf. Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.” —Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

All hail James Joyce today, on “Bloomsday”—the worldwide celebration of the 24 hours (June 16, 1904) that constitute the “plot” of his novel Ulysses—and, not coincidentally, the same day that he began to see Nora Barnacle, his future muse and wife.

The above somehow feels an especially appropriate quote in an age in where “insult and hatred” reign supreme. And, as the novelist writes, “That’s not life for men and women.”

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Innocent and the Beautiful’)

“The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.”—Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” originally published in 1927, reprinted in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Richard Finneran (1989)

Quote of the Day (Edna O’Brien, on ‘Any Artist Who Bows to Pressure’)

“Doctrinaire opinions are anathema to art, and history has shown us that any artist who bows to pressure, political or otherwise, is a lost soul.”—Irish fiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, and memoirist Edna O’Brien (1930-2024), preface to An Edna O’Brien Reader (1993)

Quote of the Day (Donal Ryan, on How ‘We Never Stop Being Children’)

“We never stop being children. Or at least we never fully leave our childhood behind; we drag it with us and we stretch it out along our years and every now and then when we let our grip fail it snaps and reels us back.”—Irish novelist Donal Ryan, Heart, Be at Peace (2025)

Quote of the Day (Patrick Kavanagh, on an Irish Christmas Eve Long Ago)

“No snow, but in their minds
The fields and roads are white;
They may be talking of the turkey markets
Or foreign politics, but to-night
Their plain, hard country words
Are Christ’s singing birds.
 
“Bicycles scoot by. Old women
Cling to the grass margin:
Their thoughts are earthy, but their minds move
In dreams of the Blessed Virgin,
For One in Bethlehem
Has kept their dreams safe for them.”— Irish poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), “Christmas Eve Remembered,” from Collected Poems (2004)
 
The image accompanying this post, A Frost Piece, is by Irish painter James Arthur O’Connor (1792-1841), and is in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘Arrogance and Hatred’)

“Arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.” —Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “A Prayer for My Daughter,” originally published in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), republished in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
 
While “arrogance and hatred” might be sold in the streets, they are manufactured elsewhere—by heads of state, religious leaders, and media moguls who should know better.

Quote of the Day (Francis Ledwidge, on the ‘Fair Tanned Face of June’)

“Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
And plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
Floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair
Tanned face of June, the nomad gipsy, laughs
Above her widespread wares, the while she tells
The farmers' fortunes in the fields, and quaffs
The water from the spider-peopled wells.”— Irish poet Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917), “June,” in The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge (1919)
 
I took the image accompanying this post on June day 11 years ago at the Teaneck Creek Conservancy, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.
 
(Thanks to my friend Rob for bringing this poem to my attention.)

Quote of the Day (John Banville, on the Novel’s ‘Peculiar Contract’ With the Reader)

“One of the oddest aspects of the novel is the peculiar contract that it forges — how wonderfully ambiguous is the English language — between itself and the reader. Why are they believed, these cunningly fashioned lies? Sancho Panza, Emma Bovary, Leopold Bloom, these artefacts, conjured out of words, can seem more real to us than the person sitting opposite us at the breakfast table. What could be stranger? We are all children, longing for a story at bedtime, happy to suspend our disbelief for the sake of the fun.”— Irish novelist-memoirist John Banville, “Where Great Novels Come From,” The Financial Times, Sept. 2-3, 2023

Photo of John Banville taken May 10, 2019, by Jindrich Nosek (NoJin).

Quote of the Day (Sebastian Barry, on the Arc of an Irish Policeman’s Life)

“Tom would be thinking of the early rise in the morning to get out to the bus, and the long trek into town, nodding from the broken sleep, and the passing from his character as father and husband into his character as policeman and colleague, a curious transition that in the evening would be reversed, in the eternal see-saw of his life, of everyone's life. The only thing being missed by him in those moments being the absolute luck of his life, the unrepeatable nature of it, and the terminus to that happiness that was being hidden from him in the unconsidered future.” —Irish novelist Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time (2023)

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, With a Comic Take on a Most Serious Subject)

“-How’s Willy Murray those times, Alf?

-I don’t know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel street with Paddy Dignam.  Only I was running after…

-You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?

-With Dignam, says Alf.

-Is it Paddy? says Joe.

-Yes, says Alf. Why?

-Don’t you know he’s dead? says Joe.

-Paddy Dignam! says Alf.

-Ay, says Joe.

-Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff.

-Who’s dead? says Bob Doran.

-You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.

-What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five…What?….And Willy Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim’s…What? Dignam dead?

-What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who’s talking about…?

-Dead! says Alf. He’s no more dead than you are.

-Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.” —Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

Today is “Bloomsday,” named for Leopold Bloom, the everyman hero of Ulysses. All over the world, James Joyce aficionados are celebrating by reading, often in its entirety, this novel covering a single day in the life of this Dubliner and two people in his life: his wife Molly and the young man he’ll encounter in his contemporary Odyssey, Stephen Dedalus.

A college professor of mine once joked, “You wouldn’t believe how much it opens some people’s eyes once they realize that dashes in James Joyce represent quotation marks.” The author would definitely have chuckled—partly at the thought that he could flummox readers with the simplest of challenges to typographical conventions, and partly because, for all the deeply serious content of this novel, so much of it is the product of his wildly funny sensibility.

This dialogue sequence, from the “Cyclops” episode of the book, is a good example of Joyce’s antic muse. The arch highlight of this exchange in Barney Kiernan's pub —“They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow”—preserves in fiction a one-liner by the author’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, told at home.

The dialogue illustrates Joyce’s gift for capturing the rhythms of speech—his “ear,” if you will. Hearing it spoken—preferably, by someone Irish—helps you appreciate its laugh-out-loud moments. (I urge you to click on this YouTube audiobook link of the chapter, read by Dubliner Tadhg Hynes, so you can better understand what I’m talking about.)

How did Joyce develop his ear? I think some of it represented a heightened aural sense that functioned as compensation for his severe visual impairment. His gift for mimicry was paralleled by his talent for music. 

As Natalie Kopp observed in this 2015 post from the blog “Musical Geography,” Joyce was “himself was an amateur musician, playing piano and singing. His father had been a tenor, and for a short while Joyce, too, aspired to the same career.”

The exchange among Joe Hynes, Alf Bergan, and Bob Doran (awakening, in utter incomprehension, from having passed out at the bar) also highlights Joyce’s challenge to traditionally sacred subjects—not just to Mother Church, but here, to death itself.

It took a celebrated film funnyman to pay tribute to a writer whose comic gifts are often overshadowed by his reputation for obscurity. The Oscar-winning script for Mel Brooks’ The Producers borrows the name of Joyce’s Irish-Jewish protagonist Leopold Bloom for his own mild-mannered accountant. I think Joyce would have relished Brooks’ alteration of earthy, even raunchy, humor with sly literary allusions.

(Michael Sherman’s blog, “My Journey With James Joyce,” offers up his take on other Joyce gems, including this passage from Ulysses’ “Nestor” episode:

"—Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

—Iago, Stephen murmured.")

Quote of the Day (Flann O’Brien, As a Guardian Schools His Orphaned Nephew on Age and Culture)

“One evening Mr Collopy asked me where the morning paper was. I handed him the nearest I could find. He handed it back to me.

“  –This morning’s I told you.

“  –I think that’s this morning’s.

“  –You think? Can you not read, boy?

“  –Well… no.

“  –Well, may the sweet Almighty God look down on us with compassion! Do you realize that at your age Mose Art had written four symphonies and any God’s amount of lovely songs? Pagan Neeny had given a recital on the fiddle before the King of Prussia and John the Baptist was stranded in the desert with damn the thing to eat only locusts and wild honey. Have you no shame man?

“  –Well, I’m young yet.”—Irish novelist, newspaper columnist, and civil servant Brian O’Nolan, AKA Flann O’Brien (1911-1966), The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (1961)

Quote of the Day (Bernard MacLaverty, on Love)

“What was love but a lifetime of conversations. And silences. Knowing when to be silent. Above all, knowing when to laugh.”— Irish novelist and short-story writer Bernard MacLaverty, Midwinter Break: A Novel (2017)

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Worst Rogues and Rascals’)

“We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.”—Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” (1921), in The Tower (1928)

 In the U.S., the disillusionment expressed by Yeats had long since set in. Nevertheless, “the worst rogues and rascals” had never been more brazenly evident than during last week’s 15-vote count to elect Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House. 

It wasn't just serial liar George Santos was waiting to join a body he instantly dishonors by his presence. It was also that the last-ditch holdouts (notably including the mendacious Matt Gaetz, shown in the attached image in a tense moment with McCarthy) were merely fighting for their moment to shine on Fox News.

“Nihilists” might have been the most common word I kept hearing about the small group (less than 10%) of the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives who obstinately voted against McCarthy.

But the epithet could just as well have applied to many of his supporters. It was all too appropriate that the final ballots that moved McCarthy into his long-desired position took place on the second anniversary of the assault on the Capitol, for 118 members of the House who voted against Joe Biden’s certification as President have returned to their jobs.

In fact, it might be said that a straight line runs from January 6, 2021 to January 6, 2023. McCarthy not only joined those voting against certification, but went crawling down to Mar-a-Lago after coming under attack from MAGA forces for criticizing Donald Trump for inciting the insurrection.

To the longtime Republican leader’s horror, his consistent efforts since then to placate the Jacobin wing of his party may only have encouraged them. Policy differences between him and them are nonexistent, as he has continually yielded to their demands. But his attempts at appeasing them only confirmed their belief that he would do or say anything to become Speaker.

On January 6, 2023 as on January 6, 2021, a far-right coalition temporarily disrupted electoral processes long taken for granted. In their desire to sow division and disorder, they only managed to bring democracy into disrepute—and at a time when dictators were watching and gloating.

Quote of the Day (Poet Patrick Kavanagh, With a Memory of an Irish Christmas)

“My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
 
“Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
 
“Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.”—Irish poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), “A Christmas Childhood,” from Collected Poems (2004)

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on “Every Life’)

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”—Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

Quote of the Day (Colin Barrett, on a Would-Be Poet)

"Bobby Tallis possessed the drainpipe physique, knee-length mackintosh, and balefully frail demeanour of a poet, or so he believed...as he pursued a lavishly wayward course...One hand broodingly ensconced within a pocket, Bobby smoked as he walked."—Irish fiction writer Colin Barrett, “Anhedonia, Here I Come,” originally printed in The New Yorker, April 18, 2016, then reprinted in Homesickness (2022)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Teresa Brayton, on What Jesus May Have Seen and Heard in Bethlehem)

“Did You hear the cries of the groping blind,
   The woe of the leper’s prayer,
The surging sorrow of all mankind,
   As You lay by Your Mother there?
Beyond the shepherds, low bending down,
   The long, long road did You see
That led from peaceful Bethlehem town
   To the summit of Calvary?”— Irish nationalist, writer and poet Teresa Brayton (1868-1943), “A Christmas Song,” in Joyce Kilmer’s Anthology of Catholic Poets, edited by Shaemas O’Sheel (1939)

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Horses of Disaster’)

“I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,
Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;
The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,
The East her hidden joy before the morning break,
The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,
The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:
O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,
The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay.” —Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace,” in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Joseph Mary Plunkett, on Christ, the Reaper)

“The sun rose up at midnight,
The sun rose red as blood,
It showed the Reaper, the dead Christ,
Upon His cross of wood.
 
“For many live that one may die,
And one must die that many live—
The stars are silent in the sky
Lest my poor songs be fugitive.”—Irish poet, journalist, and patriotic martyr Joseph Mary Plunkett (1887-1916), “The Stars Sang in God’s Garden,” in Joyce Kilmer’s Anthology of Catholic Poets, with a supplement of more recent poems edited by Shaemas O’Sheel (1939)
 
(The image accompanying this post, a detail of the painting Christ Crucified, was part of the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, by the late Italian Renaissance master Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594).