James Joyce's "Song"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2022

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Friday, March 18th. And yesterday was
0:08.6	St. Patrick's Day. And so I wanted to read a poem by an Irish poet to y'all, and I stumbled across
0:15.2	the poetry of James Joyce. And many of you might be surprised to hear that. I certainly was. James Joyce is known
0:23.2	as a novelist, a prose writer, a fiction writer. He was the author of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake,
0:30.8	the short story collection, the Dubliners, and other great fiction and prose. But he was also a poet. And his poetry is not as well known.
0:42.1	And so I thought I would share a poem with you today. This poem is called Song, and this is how it goes.
0:50.5	My love is in a light's attire among the apple trees, where the gay winds do most desire to run in
0:59.2	companies. There, where the gay winds stay to woo, the young leaves as they pass, my love goes slowly,
1:09.9	bending to her shadow on the grass and where the skies a pale blue cup over the laughing land
1:18.5	my love goes lightly holding up her dress with dainty hand i really liked this little poem.
1:29.4	It is in many ways a simple love poem.
1:33.1	I picture our narrator gazing at his beloved as she moves among apple trees.
1:39.7	In my imagination, he's lying on the ground, dressed in kind of mid-century attire, early 20th century attire, leaning on his hand and gazing at her as she picks apples.
1:55.2	And I don't know if you have a similar image in your mind.
1:58.9	But there is this quality of joy and peace. Certainly,
2:06.1	of course, since this is a love poem, there is a quality of this like effervescent delight in this
2:13.5	young woman in his beloved. And it's very much captured within the poetry, that sense
2:21.2	of utter absorption in the beloved. And you could just picture this young man gazing with delight
2:31.2	and love on his beloved. And I just really loved that picture. He captures that
2:38.7	so beautifully in the poem. And on the surface, it is just a simple love poem. And I actually just
2:46.0	think that's kind of what it is. But I was struck mostly by James Joyce as a poet because as a prose writer,
2:55.3	particularly in his novels, Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses, Joyce is known for bending form and style,
	...

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