SOURCE: "James Joyce's 'Ecce Puer': The Return of the Prodding Gaul," in University of Kansas City Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, June, 1959, pp. 265-71.

In the following essay, Fisher explores thematic links between Joyce's poem "Ecce Puer" and his works of fiction.

"Ecce Puer" is a slender poem, simply yet gracefully eloquent. To both critics and cultists it is recognizable as one of James Joyce's greatest single lyrical achievements, a poem that is worthy of praise without compensatory references to his more distinguished prose efforts. "Ecce Puer" need borrow none of the accumulated luster of the better known prose works beginning with Dubliners and culminating in Finnegans Wake, since the poem contains rather the most satisfying splendor that can be effected by an economy of means in the hands of the most methodical writer in modern literature. Here is the poem:

 Of the dark past
A child is born;
With...