When Joyce was publishing his strange novel “Finnegans Wake” in instalments, he wrote this skit on “Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross” to publicise one which personified Dublin’s river, the Liffey. It illustrates an important point about him, and about poetry in general: one moment, you are sitting on the bank: the next, you have fallen in and the stream is taking you away.
Anna Livia Plurabelle
by James Joyce
Buy a book in brown paper
From Faber and Faber
To see Annie Liffet trip, tumble and caper:
Sevensinns in her singthings,
Plurabelle on her prose,
Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows