Today’s Poem: A Flower Given to My Daughter

Rose-frail and fair

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, By the Stream, 1888 (Wikimedia Commons)

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A Flower Given to My Daughter

by James Joyce

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rose-frail and fair — yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blue-veined child.
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Among the notable artistic dates coming up, there’s the February 2 birthday of James Joyce (1882–1941) that might be mentioned. Literary commentators typically speak of the author on June 16, Bloomsday, the anniversary of the single day in which the entire action of Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses takes place. And fair enough. The book still occupies a towering place, and the combination of all the mentions of Bloomsday make it seem as though a lively appreciation of literature still animates English-language publications.

Still, apart from Bloomsday, Joyce is treated oddly. Some of the short stories in his 1914 collection Dubliners — notably “The Dead” — get referenced, but I don’t actually see much more than occasional gestures at the 1939 Finnegans Wake, as though it were a place-marker rather than a book someone might actually read.

And among several public intellectuals I read, those with an interest in literature, a curious anti-Joyce sentiment seems to have taken hold. From the 1950s into the 1990s, the standard thought, the received opinion, was that Joyce wrote works that were brilliant and problematic. The more recent dismissal, however, seems to come from simply emphasizing the problematic, and thereby freeing readers from figuring out the brilliance of the prose. It is as though, to borrow from Philip Rieff, we only have to know that Joyce wrote deathworks of culture, and so are relieved from having actually to read them.

Bah. James Joyce may be a craggy and difficult mountain, but he is a peak of literature nonetheless, and the literary sensibility that cannot bother reading him is neither literary nor sensible.

James Joyce in 1915 (Wikimedia Commons)

His poetry, admittedly, is not at the level of his prose. Nonetheless, among the poems in his collection Pomes Penyeach (1927) is the interesting 1913 poem “A Flower Given to My Daughter” — written when his (later psychologically troubled) daughter Lucia (1907–1982) was six years old. (Giorgio, his other child, was born in 1905.)

In two quatrains rhymed abab, the poem moves through a progression of increasing frailty: a rose, a child’s hands, the wonder in a daughter’s eyes. Alternating three- and two-foot lines, the brief verse moves through its adjectives to its ambiguous conclusion — but the thing to notice is how frail the poem itself is. The Victorianesque throwback to lost English conjugations in “veilest” is so fragile, the line itself threatens to collapse. And the blue veins? Glimpsed through pale insubstantiality.

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