Bloomsday Tour: The Language of Flowers

“He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it because no-one can hear.”

-James Joyce, Ulysses

Join us on an odyssey through the flowers, plants, and blooms which inspired James Joyce’s work ranging over the entirety of his oeuvre and illuminating a little-explored avenue of its verbal play and symbolic detail. From the ancient elms of Finnegans Wake to the floral dictionaries of Ulysses this tour will illuminate a fascination with plants that accompanied Joyce throughout his life and which has received little critical comment. This tour will also delve into how Joyce appropriates and interprets some of the literary history of Glasnevin, examining its associations with figures like Jonathan Swift and Thomas Tickell.