Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was
a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow
that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy
named baby tuckoo...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him
through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road
where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.
His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.
His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played
on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He
danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
*****
The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod
had written on the opposite page:
Dear Mother,
How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words
were where they said BURY ME IN THE OLD CHURCH-
YARD! A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how
Roderick Kickham
John Lawton
Anthony MacSwiney
Simon Moonan
Every word of it was for him. Against his sin, foul and
secret, the whole wrath of God was aimed. The preacher’s
—Brother Hickey.
Brother Quaid.
Brother MacArdle.
Brother Keogh.—
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And elliptical billiard balls.
The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmur-
ing them over, he felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle
pass through them. The rose-like glow sent forth its rays of
rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays burned up
the world, consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays
from the rose that was her wilful heart.
*****
What birds were they? He stood on the steps of the li-
brary to look at them, leaning wearily on his ashplant. They
flew round and round the jutting shoulder of a house in
Molesworth Street. The air of the late March evening made
clear their flight, their dark quivering bodies flying clearly
against the sky as against a limp-hung cloth of smoky tenu-
ous blue.
He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a
swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before
all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven:
and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve,
thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky.
They were flying high and low but ever round and round in
straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right,
circling about a temple of air.
He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind
the wainscot: a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long
and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling
a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the
air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like
threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.
The inhuman clamour soothed his ears in which his
mother’s sobs and reproaches murmured insistently and
the dark frail quivering bodies wheeling and fluttering and
swerving round an airy temple of the tenuous sky soothed