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!

Podcast Transcript

James Joyce is famous as one of the greatest novelists, if not the greatest, of the 20th century. He’s not nearly as well known as a poet, but he was a very fine poet. His first published book was a collection of poetry – Chamber Music – and he wrote poetry on and off, side by side with his novels. Some people, including me, would say that there is superb poetry on just about every page of his novel Ulysses. So, as far as I’m concerned, he absolutely takes his place and earns his spot among the ranks of poets that I’ve featured on A Mouthful of Air. I’m sure he’d be delighted to hear that!

And this is one of his best-known poems, written in 1932. It’s worth bearing in mind that at this point he had already written Ulysses, which was published in 1922, and he was deep into the writing of Finnegans Wake. If you’ve ever cracked the covers of either of those books, you’ll know that they are two of the most dense, ornate, and baroque works of literature ever written in English – if indeed you could say that Finnegans Wake was written in English at all. And yet, what’s remarkable is that in the midst of writing such extended and complex fiction, he took time out to write a very short, very simple, very direct, and very heartfelt lyric like this. It really is a testament to the extraordinary range he had as a writer.

So, let’s get started on the poem. The title is in Latin: ‘Ecce Puer’. It means ‘behold the boy’. Once we get into the poem, we see why he’s saying that, because clearly it’s about the birth of a child. We know from the biographical record that this was, in fact, Joyce’s grandchild, Stephen Joyce. As you might expect of a poem about a newborn child, it is suffused with joy, and the word ‘joy’ appears in the first stanza. But there are other presences standing by the cradle, and those are darkness and grief.

The poem begins:

Of the dark past
A child is born.

So ‘dark’ is the first thing that we hear about, and it’s out of that dark that the child is born. And then:

With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

So, it’s a bittersweet moment for some reason that we don’t yet know. But the first impression is of a tension between joy and grief, darkness and light, between birth and perhaps death. And this balance and tension is right there in the form from the beginning.

The poem is written in four-line stanzas with very short lines. They are rhymed, and the notation is x-a-x-a, which means the first and the third lines don’t rhyme, but the second and the fourth lines do. So we’ve got: ‘Of the dark past’ (which doesn’t rhyme), ‘a child is born’ (which rhymes with ‘my heart is torn’), and ‘With joy and grief’ (which doesn’t rhyme).

Of the dark past
A child is born.
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

It’s an echo of the traditional ballad stanza that, as we have seen in other episodes, has been used for centuries by singers and poets in a lyric and musical tradition that Joyce saw himself as very much a part of. He was a fine singer, he knew lots of traditional ballads, and snatches of them appear throughout his novels.

The rhythm is two beats per line, and it’s in stress metre, which, as you may recall from other episodes on the ballad, means you don’t have to count all the syllables. You don’t have to have a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables; you only count the stresses. So, for instance, in the first line, ‘Of the dark past’, ‘dark’ and ‘past’ carry the stresses, while ‘of’ and ‘the’ don’t. You wouldn’t do that if it were iambic, for instance. ‘A child is born’ – you could scan that as iambic, ‘a child is born’, ti TUM ti TUM – but he’s already signalled stress metre with ‘Of the dark past’, and with several other lines, that are too irregular for the poem to be iambic.

So right from the start, we feel a doubleness. There are two beats, there are lines linked by rhyme, and it’s very telling that the first rhyme of the poem is ‘born’ and ‘torn’, enacting the tension that we get between the joy and the grief.

In the next stanza, the grief recedes and the joy comes to the fore:

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes.

Joyce is treading a fine line here, he’s teetering on the brink of sentimentality, even. And ballads do this a lot – I mean, they are often sentimental – but lines like ‘Calm in his cradle / the living lies’ are not what you expect from an avant-garde modernist writer. It shows that there was a rich vein of tradition at the heart of Joyce’s project as a writer.

But the thing that, to me, saves this from being conventional and flat is that wonderful detail of the word ‘unclose’ in the last line of the stanza. It could easily have said ‘open’, and if you just listen to that, you can feel how much more flat, conventional, and sentimental it sounds:

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Open his eyes.

That’s awful, isn’t it? Really flat and conventional and sentimental. But just that one word, ‘unclose’ makes all the difference. And it’s such a precise word, you know, a little wrinkle in the line. Because babies do close their eyes a lot, don’t they? And ‘unclose’ is a double negative, which is not as straightforwardly positive as ‘open’. So I think it’s really beautifully judged, having that word there; it means Joyce can have his sentimental cake and eat it.

Then, the third stanza starts to take a turn for the biblical:

Young life is breathed
On the glass,
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

So, on the one hand, ‘Young life is breathed / on the glass’ – isn’t that beautifully realistic? It’s the breath misting the glass. I’m not sure if he’s actually holding a mirror or a glass up to the baby’s lips; I doubt it! So, therefore, it has to be an imagined glass. And given how steeped Joyce was in the Bible, having been raised as a good Irish Catholic, I think we can maybe detect a hint of Saint Paul: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly.’

And certainly, ‘The world that was not / Comes to pass’ puts me in mind of the magnificent opening of the Gospel of Saint John, where he describes the coming of Christ, with phrases such as: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God… and the light shineth in darkness… the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world’. And I think this starts to make sense of ‘the dark past’ from the first line of the poem – ‘the world that was not / Comes to pass’. It’s not too heavy-handed, but certainly, I think there is a hint of a Christian light shining in the darkness with the birth of a child.

Then the final stanza opens with a bald statement of the facts of the situation:

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.

So we already know that there’s a child sleeping with his eyes closed, and now the darkness and the grief are coming into focus. An old man is gone, and we learn in the next line that the old man is the poet’s father:

O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son.

This makes explicit sense of that feeling of being torn between joy and grief, darkness and light, earlier in the poem. Even the eyes being opened or closed. Because, of course, it’s not just babies whose eyes are closed; it’s traditional for a corpse to have its eyes closed when its waiting for burial, and we use phrases such as, ‘his eyes closed forever’. But it’s only right at the end of the poem that we learn that the speaker’s father has gone, and it has quite a dramatic impact, does it not? Particularly as he’s not just saying ‘my father has gone’, but ‘O, father forsaken, / Forgive your son!’.

So, the sense I get is of the speaker of the poem – whom I think we can identify pretty closely with James Joyce – sitting by the cradle of his grandson, meditating on the mystery of life and death. His own father has recently died, and it’s as though he’s been sitting there silently until his grief bursts out, or his guilt bursts out, because he’s asking for forgiveness: ‘O, father forsaken, / Forgive your son!’ And it’s wonderfully human, isn’t it? I mean, anyone who has become a parent, or who has welcomed a new child into the family, you know, you find yourself sitting there watching them and thinking about life and death, and your own parents and their experience, and all kinds of emotions come up. I think that’s beautifully evoked here.

So that is the progression – quite a dramatic progression, I think, the first time we read this short and apparently simple poem. But, of course, we don’t just read a poem once, do we? That’s one of the great things about poetry: we can read it or listen to it over and over, like a song, and get more out of it over time. And actually, with James Joyce, this is also true of his novels. I mean, they are so incredibly densely and poetically written that you can keep going back over and over a single page of his prose.

So, what do we see when we take another look at ‘Ecce Puer’? Well, first of all, I think we have to wonder what’s going on with that title. Why put it in Latin? Why make the reader enact the labour of figuring it out? Well, again, for Joyce, the answer would have been obvious, because it calls to mind the famous phrase in the Gospel of John, ‘ecce homo’, ‘behold the man’ – spoken by Pontius Pilate at the moment he presents Jesus, who had been whipped and scourged by the Roman soldiers, to the crowd in Jerusalem before condemning him to death and crucifixion. ‘Ecce homo’ is such a well-known phrase, and it’s such a well-known scene, depicted by many artists over the centuries, that to a reader alert to the connection, the title presents a kind of double image. We see that Joyce has taken the famous phrase and given a twist to it.

That’s not to say that ‘ecce puer’ originated with Joyce; the phrase appears elsewhere in the Bible, in Virgil and other places, but it’s not as well known as ‘ecce homo’. So I think we can be pretty confident he’s positioning the title as a twist on ‘ecce homo’. So, why would he do that? Well, I think it’s another aspect of the doubleness, the joy and the grief of the poem. As we know, the Christ child would grow up to be the man who was crucified, who died for the sins of humanity. And so you’ve got a juxtaposition in that title of the innocent child, the joy, the light of the world, and the adult, the suffering, the sin, the brutality, and the cruelty of the world – the sorrowful knowledge of what the world can do to human beings.

And it’s pretty evident that the speaker of the poem has a pretty complicated relationship with his father. You know, at one and the same time, he is beholding the child, but he’s also beholding the man, or contemplating the man, who was his father, and feeling very mixed feelings between the two. So this is an example of Joyce’s brilliant linguistic imagination. He would take a phrase that if you contemplate it and its connotations and connections to other texts, opens up another layer of meaning in the poem.

Another thing I can’t help thinking about when I read this poem – which is about a man caught between life and death, youth and age, being a son and becoming a grandfather – it puts me in mind of a conversation that James Joyce had with his friend Frank Budgen, when he was working on the novel that became Ulysses. He wanted a model for the hero, an ‘everyman’, a universal or complete man. When Budgen suggested Jesus, Joyce rejected the idea: ‘He was a bachelor, and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.’ Instead he chose Homer’s character Odysseus, using his Roman name Ulysses:

Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca.

So I think we’re entering the same territory here, where Joyce is considering himself in the network of family relationships – son to John Joyce, grandfather to Stephen and by implication father to Giorgio, so maybe we can pick up the ghost of Leopold Bloom, who was the Ulysses of Joyce’s novel – the main character, the ‘hero’ in inverted commas.

And I think this gets to the heart of the poem’s appeal. This is something where we have all found ourselves, caught between the generations and wondering about our own place in the world. Obviously, this is a very male-oriented poem – it’s about fathers and sons, and it explicitly talks about an everyman – but hopefully, it’s also relatable and accessible for everyone.

So to me, when I read this in the context of Joyce’s other works, we’ve got Joyce the man sitting by his grandson’s cradle, thinking about his own father; we’ve also got a superimposed image of the Christ child and the crucified Christ; and we also have, maybe, the more profane and pagan mythology of Ulysses. Of course, this was Joyce’s great method in Ulysses: that you could read it simultaneously as a realistic book about the ‘vulgarity of a single Dublin day’, as Yeats described it, but also mythically, with this structure taken from Homer’s Odyssey.

Okay, so at this point, you might be saying, ‘Really, Mark? You’re getting all of that from the two words of the title and the sixteen lines of this really short and simple poem? Did Joyce really mean us to pick up on all of that? Are you not over-egging it a bit?’

I think it’s a really good question. It’s a question that gets to the heart of our experience of reading poetry. Because one of the things that makes poetry different from prose isn’t the fact that it’s chopped up into lines (because it isn’t always), and it isn’t the fact that we associate it with intense, highfalutin, or beautiful imagery (because it doesn’t always give us those things). It isn’t necessarily any of the technical, formal properties of the writing itself; it’s the contract between the reader and the writer. In prose, we don’t typically go back over a page and scrutinise every word for meaning. Whereas in poetry, that’s exactly what we do: we read it, and then we read it again, and we think about it, and what it could possibly mean.

Of course, it’s an ongoing debate as to which poems are worth the effort. It has been argued that sometimes poets get away with undue mystification, that people give the poet more credit than they deserve, that we read stuff into it simply because it’s a big name and it’s supposed to be important, assuming they must know more than we do. I won’t say that’s never happened. In fact, you could say part of the art of poetry is positioning yourself in such a way that people are going to make the effort.

But in Joyce’s case, going back to your imaginary question – did Joyce really mean all of that? – I wouldn’t put it past him. He was the kind of writer who said part of his intention in writing Ulysses was to ‘keep the professors busy for centuries’ chasing up all his references. He deliberately put in lots of references to all kinds of texts, from advertising jingles, street ballads, classic literature and pornography, to the sacred texts of Christianity and several other religions. So, I would say, it is worth our effort with Joyce to scrutinise every word.

And I’m not saying he was doing this in an academic way, you know; it’s not like he wrote the story and then went back and thought, ‘Well, how can I pack in some kind of abstruse reference?’ He clearly had an extraordinarily fertile linguistic imagination. It must have been hard work being James Joyce! If you read some of the stream of consciousness in his novels, and you look of Stephen Dedalus – the character in his novels who was based on Joyce himself – the guy never stopped thinking, never stopped having interesting, complicated, and clever thoughts. So I would say that it’s completely natural for Joyce to write in this way. He was constantly reading, thinking about reading, words, and life, and how the two intersected. It was second nature to him that a word would be supercharged with meaning in a way that many readers, including me, find quite magical.

And look, if you think I’m giving Joyce too much credit and he couldn’t possibly have meant all of this, have a listen to what is probably my favourite podcast of all time: Re: Joyce by the late novelist Frank Delaney. He read through every single word in James Joyce’s Ulysses and explained and expounded all the references that he could, that he had time for. It took him years. He did the podcast for seven years before he died, and he only got about a third of the way through the novel. But his podcast is an absolute delight. He is so clever, such an enthusiast, and so patient with the way he winkles out the little meanings, double meanings, references, and allusions. If you listen to a few episodes of Frank talking about Ulysses, your mind will be blown. And it’s not just Frank; you can buy an Oxford book of annotations for Ulysses that is actually longer than Ulysses itself.

But look, the cleverness is a means and not the end. Coming back to what I said earlier on, I think it is really remarkable, and a testament to Joyce’s humanity, that he had this hundred-horsepower brain that was in the middle of writing something as extraordinarily baroque and clever as Finnegans Wake, and yet he was able to pause by the cradle of a newborn child, and write such a beautiful, heartfelt, and emotionally resonant poem as ‘Ecce Puer’.

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!

James Joyce

James Joyce was an Irish writer who was born in 1882 and died in 1941. Though he spent most of his life abroad – in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich – the city of his birth, Dublin, was the subject of most of his writing. He left Ireland in his early twenties, chafing against the provincialism and religious conservatism he felt were stifling his art. He began as a poet, publishing the lyrics of Chamber Music, before turning to the short stories of Dubliners and radically remaking the novel in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email.

The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.