Today is Bloomsday, so-called because the action of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, whose unassuming nonhero of a main character is the Jewish ad canvasser Leopold Bloom, takes place on the 16th of June, 1904, in Dublin. The date was significant to the author because on that day he went out for the first time with Nora Barnacle, who would become his wife.
Since I like to mark Bloomsday, which this year falls on Father's Day weekend, let us remember that Joyce's father shared many traits with the endearing Mr Bloom, and that Joyce was himself, as Harry Levin notes in his Introduction to The Portable James Joyce, somewhat more filial than Stephen Dedalus, the artist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It happens that the death of Joyce's father coincided roughly with the birth of his grandson, the events that stand behind one of his best poems:
Ecce Puer
Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!
Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
