It’s a hundred years this week — perhaps you’ve heard — since Ulysses was published. Joyce’s novel had an enormous influence on modern poetry via The Waste Land (1922). T.S. Eliot was reading episodes of Ulysses in proof as he began working on his poem, published later that year. He wrote: ‘It is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape’. But how many other poems owe Joyce money?
I began wondering about this after writing the final paragraph of a piece on Ulysses for this month’s Prospect magazine:
In “Ithaca,” the penultimate episode, Leopold Bloom, like Odysseus, comes home. But Joyce’s narration transfigures the heroic action of Homer into a modern intellectual epic by adopting the scientific precision of the home encyclopaedia. Odysseus returns to his native land stealthily, wary of the suitors around his wife, to whom he reveals himself by stringing and shooting his bow (and slaughtering them). The gentler Bloom, on returning to 7 Eccles Street, Dublin, finds that he has forgotten his front door key. Rather than wake his wife, he climbs over his own railings in order to drop down “two feet and ten inches” to the scullery entrance. (Joyce wrote to an aunt in Dublin to check the exact measurements.) Inside, he opens the door by “obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and turning its wards from right to left.” Here, the punning translation of Greek warrior into Dublin householder is the symbolic prelude to Bloom’s philosophical forgiveness of his wife’s affair. When Odysseus arrives home he kisses the earth; Bloom gets into bed and kisses Molly’s bottom. The house of keys that is Ulysses is full of such homely poetry.
The poetry of homeliness is one of the ways that poets have taken a pinch of Joyce — particularly from the ‘Calypso’, episode, which introduces us to Leopold Bloom with the information that he eats ‘with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls’.
‘The Butcher’, the first poem of Craig Raine’s first collection, The Onion, Memory (1978) — a book which features not one but two epigraphs from Joyce — evokes Bloom’s early morning trip to the local porkbutcher, with a queasy side-order of seaside postcard (‘He knows all about nudity — the slap / and trickle of blood’). And in the novelist Colm Tóibín’s first collection of verse, Vinegar Hill (Carcanet, 2022), there is a poem about undergoing chemotherapy in the Dublin hospital on Eccles Street, which fantasises about ‘an exemplary morning’ and ‘epic day’ in a post-cancer future that will begin, like the Blooms’, with grilled kidneys and tea in bed.
Both poems read like fan fiction to one of the most spectacular sequences of sentences in English (‘Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray.’) Joyce’s restless verbal inventiveness is channelled less genteelly by Tom Paulin’s ‘Door Poem’ (1999), which ends — like ‘Calypso’ — with Bloom emerging from his outdoor loo:
or the crazy door of the jakes
that Bloom kicks open
a jerky scraky shaky
door
that because we ken
a particular pong
– mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs
it’s like coming home
and knowing it is home
– and so Bloom came forth
from the gloom into the air
Irish poets in particular have summoned Joyce as a model for making poetry out of the materials to hand. The 1960 sonnet ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh — a poet who started the tradition of Bloomsday celebrations on 16th June in Dublin — ends with ‘Homer’s ghost’ muttering a Joycean moral: ‘I made the Iliad from such / A local row. Gods make their own importance’. And then there’s Paul Muldoon’s long poem ‘Immram’ (1980), which gives the Irish epic Immram Maele Dúin the Ulysses treatment by translating its seafaring voyage into a Chandleresque narrative that begins and ends in a ‘pool-room’.
The influence of Ulysses’ unique sentences, though, resonates more widely through the shadow canon of prose poetry. In his essay ‘Englands of the Mind’, Seamus Heaney shrewdly noted that Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) owes much to Joyce, including its ‘morose linguistic delectation, dwelling on the potential of each word with much the same slow relish as Leopold Bloom dwells on the thought of his kidney’ (Hill: ‘And the chef stood there, a king in his new-risen hat, sealing his brisk largesse with “any mustard?”’).
That’s one kind of style you get in Ulysses. But Joyce’s novel is not just ‘Calypso’ — it’s also ‘Penelope’, the miraculous unpunctuated monologue of Molly Bloom, which ends the book after her husband finally makes his way to bed (‘Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs’). Among the Uncollected Later Poems of Penelope are the moving conclusion of Sasha Dugdale’s sequence ‘Pitysad’, from Deformations (2020) (‘yes I’d brush away all the hero all the myth I’d chip and plane away at the lying outer form of him to expose the worthless soul inside […] and I would love it with all my own insignificance’); and the wonderful ‘Person’ monologue from Vahni Capildeo’s sequence, Person Animal Figure (2005), whose speaker shares the Gibraltar-born Molly’s experience of living in one place while remembering another, as well as her restless curiosity about the reason for things:
I am the person who buys stamps with the Queen’s head on them because this is England isn’t her profile fine was it really as fine as that yes people who remember the nineteen fifties say it was as fine as that or I wonder I suppose if people who rule have to have the right kinds of heads for stamps and coins why a letter because if your family lives far away they are in a different timezone
Finally, there’s Kate Bush’s ‘Flower of the Mountain’ (2011), the original version of ‘The Sensual World’ (1989), which reworked the final pages of Ulysses into lyrics that the Joyce estate would not allow to be recorded until 2011:
And Gibraltar as a girl where I was a flower of the mountain, yes
When I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used
Or shall I wear a red, yes
And how he kissed me under the moorish wall
And I thought well as well him as another
[Chorus]
Stepping out off the page into the sensual world
Stepping out off the page into the sensual world
Beautiful, and illuminating, about homely sensuality in poetry. I didn't know about that Kate Bush song, will seek it out.