"IT'S A BOY!"

Today James Joyce is 139 years old and by no means dead to me. Beyond his presence in his novels, short stories, and “Exiles,” his spirited play, he lives for me in the spare music of his poems—most particularly in “Ecce Puer,” which you can read below and which, amazingly, you can hear Joyce himself introduce and recite. (For another rendition, hear my dear friend and publisher, the poet Robert Murphy, sing the poem.

It‘s been one of my favorite poems since I first read it in my late teens. I return to it often. I love the simplicity of the first line, “Of the dark past,” which in a mere four monosyllablic words suggests “the dark backward and abysm of time” out of which we spring, in the phrase spoken by Prospero in The Tempest. The line sets up, and is balanced against, another four-syllable line, this time an exquisitely brief independent clause: “A child is born.” It is as if the title, which Joyce translates as “it’s a boy!,” beams down like a parent on the birth revealed in the second line.

If my metaphors gush, the reason may be that “Ecce Puer” largely replicates my personal experience as a new father experiencing the death of both my parents. Joyce’s poem “was dedicted on the passing of my father and the birth of my first grandson,” he explains. In March 1981, a bit more than two weeks before my first son Jacob was born, my father died suddenly in New York of what the doctor called a “big bleed in the brain.” As this was happening, my mother was in the final stages of a fast-moving cancer that would take her life in May. Before she died I was able to visit her in a hospital room in Hallandale, Fla.

Long divorced from my father and since remarried, my mother had shrunk to a shadow of herself. I silently gasped when I first saw her. I walked to the foot of the bed and turned my back to her so that she couldn’t see how horrified I was. I gathered myself, turned to her, and began to rub her back. We had been quite a voluble duo, we two, but now exchanged just a few quiet words. Soon the door opened, and my wife Linda brought Jake, who was just a little more than a month old, into the room and up beside the head of my mother’s bed.

With a scrawny finger, my mother drew away the blanket from the baby’s face, took his presence in, declared his beauty, and turned away to sleep. The birth of my child melded with my mother’s dying in my awareness. On reflection, I could see that Jake’s presence could serve as a compensation for the loss of my mother. And yet the two events also stand firm on their own and discrete in my memory, a presence and an absence. They are both together and apart, a sleeping child and a parent gone.

Ecce Puer

By James Joyce

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!

PHOTO CREDIT: "James Joyce Statue in Trieste" by diana_robinson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0