The Yeats exhibit at the National Library is a phenomenal window into Yeats’s life. The layout of the exhibit and the different sets around the periphery of the main room create a uniquely intimate atmosphere that I don’t usually associate with these types of exhibits. Yeats’s father’s self-portrait is stunning. I enjoyed reading about how the Yeats family entered into the arts. It’s easy to mythologize these families and people and forget the very real struggles associated with an artist’s life.

The rooms around the periphery of the exhibit are fun and informative. The séance room is quirky and provides interesting insight into Yeats’s preoccupation with the occult. The theatre room is enlightening with regard to Yeats’s contributions to theatre, especially in light of our visit to The Abbey to see No’s Knife. Robert Gregory’s miniature set designs are charming. The large picture of Maude Gonne made me pause and wonder what it was about her that so captivated Yeats. References to and pictures of Hugh Lane and Lady Gregory are spread throughout the exhibit, which was interesting given their established influence on the arts.

The letters from Joyce to Yeats are fascinating in their progression. In the first letter, Joyce bemoaned Dubliners’ publishing woes, in the second letter, Joyce thanked Yeats for the money he had given him and mentioned a book he was working on, Ulysses, that wouldn’t be finished for several years, and in the third letter, Joyce advised Yeats about how to unbind the first few pages of Ulysses so Joyce could sign it for him. It was surreal to read their correspondence.

I enjoyed the way in which this exhibit reinforced so much of what we’ve talked about on this trip and beautifully illustrated the intersection of people and place.

Last summer, I read Ulysses with a small group of graduate students from GSU. To put it simply, Ulysses is a difficult text. As the summer wore on, our mantra became “let’s just get through it.” We incorporated into our study of Ulysses Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Gilbert Schema and Linati Schema, and some other criticism, but we mostly soldiered through the text. I read Ulysses after my first visit to Ireland, so I had a limited frame of reference for many of the places and people Joyce included in his tome; however, on this trip, I have been able to relate much more to the text because I’m in Ireland and many of the tours and activities in which we’ve participated have revealed aspects of Joyce’s life, both personal and professional, that have helped me better understand the minutiae of Ulysses.

Randy Malamud and I have had several discussions about the importance of reading certain texts in place. To that end, I appreciated our read in place assignment because it made me connect differently with the material. Also, with regard to preparing for my comprehensive exams, I’ve read all Irish literature on this trip. Specific aspects of these texts are more meaningful to me because of what I’ve learned in the last week. Although I couldn’t read Ulysses in its entirety on this trip, it was exciting to read “Telemachus” and visit the Martello tower at Sandycove. The tower was exactly as I envisioned it, especially the round room.

In honor of Bloomsday, I want to post my favorite passage from Ulysses, which is in the episode “Ithaca.” Joyce’s prose in this passage is stunning:

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendor, when visible: her attraction, when visible.