Gerty MacDowell remembers a moving poem she read in a newspaper: "Art thou real, my ideal?" The title suits her fantasy of finding Mister Right, but anyone in a sensible frame of mind might reply to the question, Of course not, you idiot! It is the nature of ideals to exceed reality, and the nature of reality to fall short of ideals. One might imagine Joyce cooking up this title in one of his more savagely playful moments, but in fact it was a line in a real poem he encountered at University College. The portion of it preserved in Stephen Hero seems well suited to Gerty's way of thinking.

In chapter 19 Madden tells Stephen about a poem written by Hughes, the Irish language teacher modeled on Patrick Pearse. He hands Stephen a sheet of paper containing a poem "consisting of four stanzas of eight lines each, entitled 'My Ideal'."

Each stanza began with the words "Art thou real?" The poem told of the poet's troubles in a "vale of woe" and of the "heart-throbs" which these troubles caused him. It told of "weary nights" and "anxious days" and of an "unquenchable desire" for an excellence beyond that "which earth can give." After this mournful idealism the final stanza offered a certain consolatory, hypothetical alternative to the poet in his woes: it began somewhat hopefully:

Art thou real, my Ideal?
Wilt thou ever come to me
In the soft and gentle twilight
With your baby on your knee?

The [combined] effect of this apparition on Stephen was a long staining blush of anger. The tawdry lines, the futile change of number, the ludicrous waddling approach of Hughes's "Ideal" weighed down by an inexplicable infant combined to cause him a sharp agony in the sensitive region. (82-83)

Ulysses changes the author from Hughes to Louis Walsh, who was studying law at UC Dublin when Joyce was an undergraduate there. Gerty feels "that she too could write poetry if she could only express herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that she had copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the potherbs. Art thou real, my ideal? it was called by Louis J. Walsh, Magherafelt, and after there was something about twilight, wilt thou ever? and ofttimes the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears that the years were slipping by for her, one by one."

Like Pearse, Walsh was an ardent nationalist active in the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin. He was born in Maghera, a town in the civil parish of Magherafelt in County Londonderry. After studying law at UCD he practiced law as a solicitor in Maghera, and after independence he was made a district judge in County Donegal. He found time to publish a number of books and plays, including some well-received comedies, so it seems conceivable that he could have written the poem. But Pearse too was a writer. He composed poems, stories, and plays in both Irish and English, and was much more well known for poetry than was Walsh. One other interesting detail unites the two men: Walsh learned Irish from Pearse.

As far as I know, no one has yet discovered a copy of the complete poem or demonstrated who wrote it, but Joyce had bones to pick with both men. In Stephen Hero Stephen decides on the basis of the poem that "attendance in Mr Hughes's class was no longer possible for him"—a fictional variation on Joyce's decision to leave Pearse's class because he had offered the word "thunder" as an example of the inferiority of the English language. As for Walsh, Vivien Igoe notes that "Joyce was involved with the Literary and Historical Society and was nominated to be treasurer of its executive on 21 March 1899, but was defeated by Louis J. Walsh, known as 'the boy orator'. On 15 February 1902 Joyce read a paper on James Clarence Mangan to the society. Walsh took exception to Joyce's omission of the fact that Mangan was one of the men of '48."

Beyond settling an old score, there seems to be no reason for identifying the author of "My Ideal" in Nausicaa. But that was always sufficient reason for Joyce.

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