Looking along Dollymount Strand to the southwest toward Dublin. The chimneys of the Poolbeg Generating Station are visible in the distance. PHOTO CREDIT: Rorser. This photo is licensed under the the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

“There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in his veins.”1

In James Joyce’s most accessible novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus grows from a sensitive and introverted child into a young man ready “to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscious of [his] race.” In the fourth section, after he has rejected life as priest and while he is waiting for news about his acceptance to the university, he heads to the Bull, where he is overwhelmed by an encounter with a girl standing in the water and recognizes his path as an artist.

The Bull is an artificial island in Dublin Bay, which is accessible by the wooden bridge connecting it with the mainland at the southern edge of the island. The island came into existence as the result of an engineering project to remove silt from the entrance to the River Liffey. In 1825 a wall was completed, behind which silt removed from the mouth of the river was deposited. Over time the silt created an island that Dubliners began to visit in order to enjoy views of Dublin Bay and to swim, as Stephen’s classmates do in the book. In the mid-twentieth century the island was used for military practice by the British Army, but now it is home to two golf courses and a nature preserve. The Dollymount Strand remains a popular beach for Dubliners to visit.

Read more about Bull Island on Wikipedia. Find A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at a local library, an independent bookstore, or on Amazon.





1Joyce, James. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin, 1993. 185. Print.

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