Music in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce uses the incorporation of songs and musical allusions to his novels for combining two of his loves: music and literature.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce uses music as an emotional trigger which helps shifting to different moods, to conjuring up past memories and even to reveal something that otherwise could be inaccessible.

Some examples of this incorporations are when a young Stephen recalls “Brigid’s Song” while he is ill and bed-ridden thinking in his own funeral, when Stephen’s mom sings a musical rendition of Thomas Moore’s poem “Oft in the Stilly Night” before dinner when they become a poor family; when Cranly uses the music “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” to challenge Stephen’s opinions; the presence of “The Groves of Blarney” and “O Twine Me a Bower” on the repertoire of Uncle Charles or the association of “Killarney” to the degraded image of E.C.

Here there is list of spotify incorporating some of these themes.

You can complete this post reading “Music in the Works of James Joyce”, an interesting blog is this field.