Love's bitter mystery

After Mulligan tells Stephen to "Give up the moody brooding" about his mother's death, he quotes some apposite lines from a song in W. B. Yeats' play The Countess Kathleen: "And no more turn aside and brood / Upon love’s bitter mystery." The song’s soothing images of shore and sea underline the gesture that Mulligan has just made toward the surrounding water: “Look at the sea. What does it care about offences?" Within a few lines it becomes clear that Stephen too knows the song well, but for him it carries more troubling meanings in relation to his mother.

John Hunt 2011


William Butler Yeats ca. 1906. Source: www.lib.unc.edu.


1908 pencil drawing of Yeats by John Singer Sargent. Source: jssgallery.org.