“Such boon we accord in due measure.
Life’s
term
“How my body stands in the world
We lengthen should any be moved for
love’s
sake
I do not know. So privileged is this rim
To forego life’s fulfilment, renounce
in the germ
of Ptolomea, that often souls fall to it
Fruit mature – bliss or woe – either
infinite.”
before dark Atropos has cut their thread.”
-- Apollo and
the Fates, Robert
Browning
-- The
Inferno: Canto XXXIII, Dante Alighieri
In James Joyce’s
short story “The Dead”, the main character Gabriel digresses for a brief moment
to contemplate his decision to include a quote from a poem by Robert Browning,
fearing its lines would “be above the heads of his hearers” (Joyce, 24). Eventually
choosing not to include the quote, the reader is left challenged by Joyce to
fill in the holes. In his New Historicist essay “Consuming High Culture:
Allusion and Structure in ‘The Dead’”, Thomas Jackson Rice attempts to fill the
absence Joyce has intentionally left by using textual evidence from “The Dead”
itself, while considering Joyce’s other work Ulysses, Robert
Browning’s poetry, and another important text, Dante’s Inferno,
that may have influenced the thematic choices made by both Browning and Joyce.
