On Bloomsday Remembering James Joyce, Nora Barnacle and Dublin

 

The banks of the River Liffey much as it would have looked on June 16, 1904.

Today is Bloomsday, a literary festival celebrated around the world in honor of Irish novelist James Joyce and his masterwork Ulysses.  It celebrates June 16, 1904, and the life and thoughts of Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew, his wife Molly and a host of other characters both fictional and real from 8 am that morning to the wee hours of the next day. 

He set his novel on that day because it was the occasion of the first date between Joyce and his future mistress and wife, Nora Barnacle. 

Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest of ten children.  He was educated at Jesuit schools before enrolling at University College on Stephen’s Green where he studied modern languages at a time when Irish nationalism was spurring a renaissance of national culture and literature. 

Upon graduation he went to Paris as a medical student but spent most of his time drinking in cafés and writing.  He was called home for the terminal illness of his mother in 1904 during which time he met Nora. 

                                    Young Jim Joyce and Nora Barnacle in 1904--the would-be writer and his red haired future mistress and wife.

That August the first of his short stories was published in the Irish Homestead magazine.  In October he left Ireland with Nora in tow for a job as an English teacher with a Berlitz school in Pola, Croatia.  He would only return to Ireland for four short visits after that, and the last of those was in 1912.  The couple lived as expatriates. 

For ten years they lived in the city of Trieste where they immersed themselves in the local culture, spoke the local Italian dialect at home, and added two children, Georgio and Lucia, to the family.  Joyce contributed articles in Italian to the local press and lectured on literature. 

Joyce’s separation from Ireland crystallized his memories of it and fixed them perfectly in a set time in a way that might not have been possible had he been living there amid the inevitable changes. 

In 1914 Joyce had a breakthrough year as a writer.  American poet Ezra Pound assisted getting his first novel, the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published as a serial in Harriet Weaver’s London magazine, Egoist and his collection of short stories, begun in 1904, was published as The Dubliners.  These two works, plus a short play, The Exiles, introduced him as an important writer. 

World War I erupted the same year and disrupted Joyce’s life. Italian speaking Trieste was a southern outpost of the Austo-Hungarian Empire.  Suddenly Joyce and his family were “enemy aliens” in hostile territory apt to be arrested.  They escaped to Zurich, Switzerland where they waited out the war and lived in squalor and poverty, supported by handouts from friends and literary admirers. 

Joyce was working on the manuscript for Ulysses in which tied the events of Homer’s Odysseus to Bloom’s story and he incorporated people he knew from Trieste and Zurich into characters in his story.  Nora, particularly her distinct speech pattern and red hair, was the model for Molly Bloom. 

                                        Joyce as an expatriate language teacher and writer.

After the war Pound induced the family to move to Paris, where they stayed for twenty years.  Joyce became part of the international community of expatriate writers and intellectuals that included his some-time drinking companion, Ernest Hemmingway. 

In 1921 the serial publication of Ulysses in the American magazine The Little Review was stopped when the government charged the publisher with circulating pornography through the mails.  An English edition was scuttled before it could be issued when Harriet Weaver could not even find a printer willing to typeset the now notorious book.  In 1922 the American expatriate owner of the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop in Paris, Sylvia Beach finally published the novel, which was hailed as a masterpiece and denounced as lewd, unintelligible trash.  In 1932 an edition of the book was published by Joyce’s friend and associate Paul Léon, a Russian Jewish émigré living in Paris, under the imprint of Odyssey Press. 

Joyce with the publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach the American owner of Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris.

Despite a pirated 1929 edition, Ulysses remained banned in America until Bennett Cerf of Random House, a friend from Paris, arranged to have a French edition of the book seized by Customs authorities so he could challenge the earlier obscenity ruling.  In 1934 U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the novel was not pornography and thus not obscene. The decision was upheld on appeal the next year.   Random House published an authorized American edition the same year.

The case was the death knell of using postal regulations to censor literary works in the U.S.  Two years later British censorship restrictions fell and the Bodley Head edition was published. 

Each of these and subsequent editions have major differences in texts resulting from the lack of a single, unified original manuscript by Joyce, various textual editorial theories of the publishers and editors, and attempts to correct perceived “mistakes” in earlier editions. 

While all this publication drama swirled around him, Joyce worked on the manuscript of his most complex work, the enigmatic Finnegan’s Wake published in 1939. 

War once again disrupted his life as the Nazis closed in on Paris in 1940.  Joyce and family fled to the South of France before being given refuge once again in Zurich.  The faithful Paul Léon dared to return to Paris to rescue Joyce’s personal effects and manuscripts, which he put in hiding. 

Joyce, always frail and half blind, died in Zurich on January 31, 1941 at the age of 59. 

John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Flann O’Brien aka Myles na Gopaleen, Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce, on Sandymount Strand on Bloomsday 1954.

The first observation of Bloomsday was organized by the Irish writers Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien in 1954 on the 50th anniversary of the original date.  A tour of the various sites in the book was never completed when the participants partook too deeply at pubs in route.  Joyce would have approved.  Since then, Bloomsday events, usually involving extended readings from the book, have been spread around the globe.  Want to participate?  You can start from the beginning:

 

 STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo  ad altare Dei

.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

            Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.   

Dublin celebrates her wayward son.  Joyce at city center.

Ireland's Formidable Eavan Boland—National Poetry Month 2026

 

Beloved Irish poet Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland, one of the greatest of Irish contemporary poets, died six years ago at the age of 75 at her Dublin home.  Her prolific body of work wrestled with often thorny issues of Irish identity and insisted on the recognition of the role of women including their domestic situations.  It became so central to the conversation about evolving modern Ireland that her poems are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate, the final exam of secondary students required for admission to a college or university.  Mary Robinson selected her to read a poem at her 1990 inauguration as the first woman President of Éire and Barack Obama quoted her at a White House St. Patrick’s Day reception. 

Eavan Frances Boland was born on September 24, 1944 in Dublin to career diplomat Frederick Boland and his wife, noted painter Frances Kelly.  When she was six in 1950 her father was appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom, the most important Irish diplomatic post at a time when relations between the country were tense over Ireland’s neutrality during World War II and continuing claims on Northern Ireland.  As a child in London she first experienced anti-Irish sentiment strengthening her identification with her Irish heritage which she later described in her poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951. 

Boland in academic robes with her friend and contemporary Mary Robinson, first woman president of Ireland and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

At 14, she returned to Dublin to attend Holy Child School in Killiney and them Trinity College where she was a classmate of Mary Robinson and where she published a first pamphlet 23 Poems in 1962.  She earned her BA with First Class Honors in English Literature and Language from Trinity in 1966.

She held numerous teaching positions and published poetry, prose criticism, and essays. Boland married the novelist Kevin Casey in 1969 and had two daughters. Her experiences as a wife and mother influenced her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes.

Boland on her wedding day with husband Kevin Casey and her father Fredrick Boland.

She taught at Trinity College, University College, Dublin, and Bowdoin College in Main, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was also writer in residence at Trinity and at the National Maternity Hospital.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland taught at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she was a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University and divided her time between Palo Alto, and her home in Dublin.

Boland’s first book of poetry was New Territory published in 1965 followed by The War Horse in 1975, In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), which established her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world.

 Boland reading in a pub.

She published dozens of collections most recently Eavan Boland: A Poet’s Dublin edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph and A Woman Without A Country both in 2014.

Boland’s many honors and awards on both sides of the Atlantic are too numerous to mention.  Her work best speaks for itself.

My friend and radical poet Jerry Pendergast selected this apt poem about the Irish famine and the typhoid epidemic that accompanied it to remember Boland.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season

of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman.

And in which darkness it can best be proved.

—Eavan Boland

This one cuts to the quick of shame and guilt.

Domestic Violence

1.

It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk

Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.

Pleased to meet you meat to please you

said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.

Everything changed the year that we got married.

And after that we moved out to the suburbs.

How young we were, how ignorant, how ready

to think the only history was our own.

And there was a couple who quarreled into the night,

Their voices high, sharp:

nothing is ever entirely

right in the lives of those who love each other.

               2.

In that season suddenly our island

Broke out its old sores for all to see.

We saw them too.

We stood there wondering how

the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,

the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes

we thought we knew

had been made to shiver

into our ancient twelve by fifteen television

which gave them back as gray and grayer tears

and killings, killings, killings,

then moonlight-colored funerals:

nothing we said

not then, not later,

fathomed what it is

is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.

             3.

And if the provenance of memory is

only that—remember, not atone—

and if I can be safe in

the weak spring light in that kitchen, then

why is there another kitchen, spring light

always darkening in it and

a woman whispering to a man

over and over what else could we have done?

               4.

We failed our moment or our moment failed us.

The times were grand in size and we were small.

Why do I write that

when I don't believe it?

We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one.

Children were born and raised here

and are gone,

including ours.

As for that couple did we ever

find out who they were

and did we want to?

I think we know. I think we always knew.

—Eavan Boland

How We Made New Art on Old Ground wan in Boland's collection Against Love Poems.

Finally, one on the complex interactions of history, the natural world, love, and art.

How We Made New Art on Old Ground

A famous battle happened in this valley.   

                     You never understood the nature poem.   

Till now. Till this moment—if these statements   

                     seem separate, unrelated, follow this   

silence to its edge and you will hear   

                     the history of air: the crispness of a fern   

or the upward cut and turn around of   

                     a fieldfare or thrush written on it.   

The other history is silent: The estuary   

                     is over there. The issue was decided here:   

Two kings prepared to give no quarter.   

                     Then one king and one dead tradition.   

Now the humid dusk, the old wounds   

                     wait for language, for a different truth:   

When you see the silk of the willow   

                     and the wider edge of the river turn   

and grow dark and then darker, then   

                     you will know that the nature poem   

is not the action nor its end: it is   

                     this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

the cattle grid underneath our feet,   

                     on the steering wheel shaft: it is   

an aftermath, an overlay and even in   

                     its own modest way, an art of peace:

I try the word distance and it fills with   

                     sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen   

And as I write valley straw, metal   

                     blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.   

Silence spreads slowly from these words   

                     to those ilex trees half in, half out   

of shadows falling on the shallow ford   

                     of the south bank beside Yellow Island   

as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion   

                     begins to be complete: what we see   

is what the poem says:   

                     evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and when bushes and a change of weather   

                     about to change them all: what we see is how

the place and the torment of the place are   

                     for this moment free of one another.

—Eavan Boland

Anglo-Irish John Millington Synge Channeled the Catholic Peasantry—National Poetry Month 2025

 

John Millington Synge.

John Millington Synge is best remembered as playwright,  chronicler of the peasantry of the Aran Islands and the untamed Gaeltacht of the West of Ireland, a founder of the Abbey Theater and its first important dramatist, and as a key figure in the flowering of the Irish Literary Renaissance around the turn of the 20th Century.  But as an Anglo-Irishman from a long line of dissenting Evangelical Protestants he was often at odds with his Irish Nationalist colleagues and viciously attacked by the most visible conservative Catholic leaders of the movement including Arthur Griffith and Padraic Pearse.

Synge was born the youngest of eight children to the family of a wealthy barrister and member of the landed gentry that had mostly oppressed Catholic peasants for generations on April 16, 1871 in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, a comfortable semi-rural suburb of Dublin.  His father died of small pox on his first birthday and he was raised by his mother in Rathgar, County Dublin.  Although often himself sickly, he had a happy, privileged childhood that included time spent at his family’s ancestral estate Glanmore Castle in County Wicklow.

The boy took an interest in both nature, especially bird watching, and music at which he excelled.  He was educated privately at schools in Dublin and Bray, and later studied piano, flute, violin, music theory, and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music before enrolling at Dublin’s elite Trinity College from which he graduated in 1892.  While there he studied Irish—Gaelic—introducing him to a youthful, idealistic Irish Nationalist circle.

Despite his promise as a musician and additional studies in Paris and Germany, Synge was painfully shy about public performance and doubted his ability.  He decided to abandon music and pursue literary interests. 

During this same period his exposure to Charles Darwin as a member of Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club led him first to doubt the stern religion of his family and then to cast it away entirely.  “…I had relinquished the kingdom of God…[and] began to take up a real interest in the kingdom of Ireland. My politics went round ... to a temperate Nationalism,” he later wrote.

Maude Gonne.

In 1896 he joined the Irish League when it was founded by Maude Gonne who was also Anglo-Irish, a fervent nationalist, and the object of William Butler Yeat’s unrequited love.  But a year later he resigned from the League writing Gonne, “my theory of regeneration for Ireland differs from yours ... I wish to work on my own for the cause of Ireland, and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement.”  That reluctance to take a revolutionary stance would later put him at odds with other Patriots.

Like Yeats, Synge had his own unrequited love, Cherrie Matheson.  She was a member of his family’s Plymouth Brethren faith and turned his proposals down twice because of his apostasy.  Heartbroken, he fled to Europe intent on spending as little time as possible in Ireland.  Although he spent much time abroad, he ended up returning to Dublin frequently.

William Butler Yeats, Synge's friend, mentor, defender, promoter.

In 1896 he first met Yeats in Paris.  Perhaps they bonded over their mutual rejections.  At any rate, Yeats took an interest in the younger man and when he learned of Synge’s interest in Irish folklore, encouraged him to spend time in the Aran Islands where it was supposed that the true Irish culture was preserved by their wild isolation.  Yeats was ever after a mentor and often a defender of Synge when he ran afoul of certain Nationalists and Catholics.

Back in Dublin later the same year he joined Yeats, Lady Gregory, and George William Russell to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which subsequently established the Abbey Theatre, the epicenter of the Irish cultural renaissance and the place where Synge would make his greatest mark.

But in 1897 Synge suffered the first symptoms of Hodgkin’s Disease, a lymph node cancer and had an enlarged node surgically removed from his neck.  From then on his health was in slow decline.  

Synge's rented cottage on Inis Meáin, now a litterary shrine.

Synge spent most of the year in Paris and later in London, but regularly visited Dublin and beginning in 1897 spent five summers at a rustic cottage on Inis Meáin in the Aran Islands where he researched folklore, absorbed the local culture, and most importantly sort of ease dropped on the lives and conversations of the local folk—stone field farmers and fishermen.

The Aran Islands, based on his journals, was completed in 1901 and published in 1907 with illustrations by Jack Butler Yeats, younger brother of William.  Although Synge had regularly published articles, including pieced based on his Island experience, his early attempts as a playwright were largely unsuccessful and his poetry mostly unpublished.  The book was his first major public success and he considered it his first important work.  But a theme that the islander’s Catholicism was a mask for underlying Gaelic paganism drew criticism.

In 1903 while living in London he completed two one-act plays based on his Aran Island stories.  Lady Gregory approved of the work, despite having rejected his first play.  The Shadow of the Glen was performed at the Molesworth Hall in Dublin October.  Riders to the Sea premiered on the same stage a few months later in 1904.  When the Abbey Theater opened in December, Riders was 1903 on the bill with Yeat’s poetic Kathleen Ni Hoolihan.

The Abbey Theater opening poster.

Despite the scathing attacks on his work by Arthur Griffin, Padraic Pearse, and others, Synge was appointed literary advisor to the Abbey and soon was on the Board of Directors with Yeats and Lady Gregory despite his differences with her over the direction of Irish theater.  He wrote:

I do not believe in the possibility of “a purely fantastic, unmodern, ideal, breezy, spring-dayish, Cuchulainoid National Theatre” ... no drama can grow out of anything other than the fundamental realities of life, which are never fantastic, are neither modern nor unmodern and, as I see them, rarely spring-dayish, or breezy or Cuchulanoid.

In the end Synge’s earthy peasants won out over Lady Gregory’s romanticism, and plays in that style became the backbone of the famous theater’s repertoire.

Synge’s first produced full length three act play, The Well of the Saints was staged at the Abbey in 1905.  This time he mined Irish folklore for a story of two blind siblings who have always been told they were beautiful who were cured of their affliction by a saint only to bitterly discover they are ugly and old.  Heartbreak and revenge ensued.  It again drew bitter criticism from Catholics. 

Synge did not even try to stage another play,  The Tinker’s Wedding  because of a scene in which a priest is tied up in a sack.  It would offend “a good many of our Dublin friends,” he told his London publisher.

The original Abbey Theater.

But if he thought he had a hostile reception before, nothing compared to the premier of the play now considered his great masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World on January 27, 1907.  The bawdy comedy about an apparent patricide was greeted with a riot in the theater—possibly organized in advance by Arthur Griffith’s nationalists.  Every subsequent performance in the run was met with similar disturbances.  The Freeman’s Journal denounced it as “an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood.”

With his work under attack in his homeland—only one provincial staging of Riders to the Sea was subsequently produced—Synge’s health went into decline.  He died at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin on March 24, 1909 at age 37, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross, Dublin.

Little of Synge’s poetry was published in his life time but Poems and Translations, with a preface by Yeats, was published by the Cuala Press just days after his death.  Yeats also helped Synge’s fiancée Molly Algood, the actress who appeared on stage as Mare O’Neil for whom he wrote The Playboy of the Western World, complete his final play, Deirdre of the Sorrows.  It was staged at the Abby in 1910 starring O’Neil.  

Synge's fiancee Mare O'Neil--Molly Allgood.

Synge may be most remembered for his plays but he was a fine poet.

Prelude

Still south I went and west and south again,
Through Wicklow from the morning till the night,
And far from cities, and the sights of men,
Lived with the sunshine, and the moon's delight.

I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,
The grey and wintry sides of many glens,
And did but half remember human words,
In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.

 

—John Millington Synge

On An Island

You’ve plucked a curlew, drawn a hen,

Washed the shirts of seven men,

You've stuffed my pillow, stretched my sheet,

And filled the pan to wash your feet,

You've cooped the pullets, wound the clock,

And rinsed the young men's drinking crock;

And now we’ll dance to jigs and reels,

Nailed boots chasing girl’s naked heels,

Until your father’ll start to snore,

And Jude, now you’re married, will stretch on the floor.

—John Millington Synge

In Kerry

We heard the thrushes by the shore and sea,

And saw the golden star's nativity,

Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn,

Across the church where bones lie out and in;

And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud

Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud,

What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea,

This new wild paradise to wake for me. . . .

Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins

Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins.

—John Millington Synge

To the Oak of Glencree

My arms are round you, and I lean

Against you, while the lark

Sings over us, and golden lights, and green

Shadows are on your bark.

There’ll come a season when you'll stretch

Black boards to cover me;

Then in Mount Jerome I will lie, poor wretch,

With worms eternally.

—John Millington Synge