James Joyce
Let us recall that bitter, dogged Dubliner, Jamese Joyce,
Whose yeasty chaos travelled Europe in his aching brain.
Trieste, Zurich, Paris, Rome and other cities
Knew the young exile buoyed on anger and contempt
For all that was provincial, meanly self-sufficing.
A furnace blazed in his mind’s core perpetually
And would not give him rest from constant labour
Until the multi—imaged soul cascaded many thousand words
Barbed and pristine with a febrile, love-hate energy.
Silence, exile,cunning - those sharp keys he cut
To unlock the obdurate gates to Europe,
These keys made in his Dublin prison in friend-wasted days,
When Ibsen, Jonson, Hauptmann floodlit each chamber of his mind
And he determined not to honour those fierce claims
Of country, family and church: I will not serve.
Then think of him, half-blind and penniless in European towns
Rocked by the restive daemon of creativeness,
Showing a will inflexible against the little streets
With hatred in their piping, rabble voices,
He ceaselessly dredging an oceanic mind for images
To haunt our splintered century and show us to ourselves,
Crying aloud with all the anguish of our time.
