Poetry
James Joyce (1882–1941), 1907
The poems Joyce wrote before Ulysses: love lyrics built like songs, and later, darker pieces from Trieste and Paris, short enough to read standing up. These poems move like songs: tender, lyrical, sometimes longing, with a melancholy that settles in quietly and stays.
Feels like longing, tenderness and melancholy. About love, nature and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy songlike love lyrics, gentle rhyme, and poems that fit into a short pause. Some early pieces lean on old-fashioned lyric phrasing, so they can feel distant if you want plainly modern speech.
Why read it
A compact way to hear Joyce before the fiction: tender, songlike love poems and darker later pieces, short enough for a spare few minutes.
Pages from the book
The moment a parent's love turns into fear of the world.
Wind whines and whines the shingle,The crazy pierstakes groan;A senile sea numbers each singleSlimesilvered stone.From whining wind and colderGrey sea I wrap him warmAnd touch his trembling fineboned shoulderAnd boyish arm.Around us fear, descendingDarkness of fear aboveAnd in my heart how deep unendingAche of love! A cathedral made of darkness, with the stars serving as candles.
Gaunt in gloom,The pale stars their torches,Enshrouded, wave.Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume,Arches on soaring arches,Night’s sindark nave.Seraphim,The lost hosts awakenTo service tillIn moonless gloom each lapses muted, dim,Raised when she has and shakenHer thurible. The friend you lost without ever deciding to lose him.
Because your voice was at my sideI gave him pain,Because within my hand I heldYour hand again.There is no word nor any signCan make amend—He is a stranger to me nowWho was my friend. James Joyce.Joyce trained as a singer and won a bronze medal at Dublin's Feis Ceoil in 1904; before fiction took over, he half thought his voice might earn him a living.
Books that feel like this
Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems
Christina Rossetti, 1862
Also longing and love.
More by James Joyce
Ulysses
James Joyce, 1922
One Dublin day in 1904, followed through two men's minds — an ad-canvasser and a young writer — with every joke, smell and stray thought left in.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce, 1916
A boy in Dublin grows up inside a family, a religion and a language, and tries to invent a self that none of them wrote for him.
Dubliners
James Joyce, 1914
Fifteen short stories of ordinary Dubliners, from a boy's first crush to a party that ends in a quiet shock, written with a precision that makes small lives feel enormous.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Poetry for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy songlike love lyrics, gentle rhyme, and poems that fit into a short pause. Some early pieces lean on old-fashioned lyric phrasing, so they can feel distant if you want plainly modern speech.
- What is Poetry like?
- These poems move like songs: tender, lyrical, sometimes longing, with a melancholy that settles in quietly and stays. Feels like longing, tenderness and melancholy. About love, nature and memory.
- What should I read after Poetry?
- If you liked Poetry, try Sonnets from the Portuguese (Elizabeth Barrett Browning), The Lily of the Valley (Honoré de Balzac) and Gitanjali (Rabindranath Tagore).
A taste of the feed
What it costs to hand someone the ashes of your grief.
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up—those laurels on thine head, O my Beloved, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred The hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.
Sonnets from the Portuguese · Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A wish for a last song that holds every kind of joy.
Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.
Gitanjali · Rabindranath Tagore
The heaviest thing you will ever have to carry is yourself.
God strengthen me to bear myself; That heaviest weight of all to bear, Inalienable weight of care. All others are outside myself, I lock my door and bar them out The turmoil, tedium, gad-about. I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all? If I could once lay down myself, And start self-purged upon the race That all must run! Death runs apace.
Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems · Christina Rossetti
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