Throughout many lifetimes I have heard tell

Of stories too strange to believe,

But stranger still is this everyday tale,

This greyish yarn James Joyce did weave.

 

What moral conceived? What point to reach?

In the feverish mind of a man who devours

Naught but kidneys, livers, and fetid innards

And meanders with wand‘ring thoughts for hours?

 

The great name of ancient Ulysses invoked,

The bravest of mariners throughout all time.

But this tales shares no semblance at all

To the voyage of old, no part aligns.

 

His mind sails on continuous aberrations  

The story told only through many caprices.

First breakfast and cats and minute inquisitions,

Wardrobe and potato; confusion increases.

 

A traveler’s tale! I now see what it is.

He sets out for adventure into a brave new world!

The signs are all there, mine eye can discern it.

Under sun and moon his expedition unfurls.

 

Aye these lines are as sweet to my mind

As the scent of sea salt alighted on icy winds,

Strands and strange lands and the sun and the moon.

How the sky once shone bright and how it has dimmed.

 

Metempsychosis? Now to that I relate.

How life and death are both intertwined.

Out of nymphs and their magic good stories are made.

If the rest be like this it would please my mind.

 

Alas so soon returned to bland minutiae

Of shops and of breakfast and city streets.

Droll conversation and frivolous formalities

Without some profundity it seems incomplete.

 

Where is the controversy of fate and men’s deeds?

Where does damnation and salvation contest?

Is it that the albatross Leopold Bloom must bear?

A story about excrement is what he should profess?

 

If his entire journey be similar to this

I should like to keep his ship far in the offing

And both our rivers remain distant and parallel

Ne’er to pass, like two ships in the night.

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