Joyce's 'Tilly'- which was deeply silly.

' Tilly' which means a bonus or something extra given gratuitiously, is the first poem in Joyce's Pomes Penyeach.

He travels after a winter sun,

Which for the Irish & Indian Aryans, meant something spiritually very positive.

 

Urging the cattle along a cold red road,

They are the cattle of Flidais- a symbol of Mother Ireland whose wealth had been stripped from her by Proddy bastids.

Calling to them, a voice they know,

Cows know the voice of Brigid who is also the patron saint of poets. Her Saint's day- the more ancient Imbolc- falls about halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox

He drives his beasts above Cabra.

The Dublin municipality acquired this land towards the end of the Twenties and built council houses on the land. 

The voice tells them home is warm.

It mayn't be, but Mum's voice makes it so- at least in Memory

They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.

Kids make a racket. This is Music- so long as Mum is around. Once she is dead, it is a Daedalean labyrinth or "grave morrice" of mathematical mummery by which Death smiles its subtle madness. 

He drives them with a flowering branch before him,

Which suggests Beltane- which falls between the Spring Equinox & the Summer Solstice. The cattle are driven out into the meadows and the poets are forced to quit their sties and have a fucking bath you stinking pile of shite. 

Smoke pluming their foreheads.

This is Liturgical censing or the swinging of the thurible during Mass. It symbolises offering oneself to the Father. 

Irish 'Fenians' comfortably settled in the US had gone to fight for the Boers in South Africa. The Pope had excommunicated them as early as 1870. Bishop Moriarty said 'Hell wasn't hot enough' for them. 

Boor, bond of the herd,

like the defeated Boer who was supposed to sleep quietly under Milner's kindergarten. 

Tonight stretch full by the fire!

viz. Brigid's eternal flame in Kildare. True, it was  put out circa 1540, but wherever Mum is, there is vatsalya- i.e  an un-smoking hearth, an  home & the milk of human kindness.  

I bleed by the black stream

Lethe

For my torn bough!

i.e this shite about a boor rather than a bore.