100 Words: “The Dead” (1907-1914), by James Joyce

Is our journey westward back or forth? Swoon, Gabriel, swoon in tragic misapprehension of your wife’s nether regions, planting a pliant face there, while her heart and eyes fill with sentiment for the young man that’s dead. Screwed together upon the scaffold erected for us by the Misses Morkan whose name means in Danish darkness and in Welsh the sea. Chastened foolish Gabriel Conroy dreams his way to dissolution like us all—be it death or regeneration or a bit may be of both. “The Lass of Aughrim” grims its way through Gretta’s dreaming mind, tenor-born. That man could sing.