1. A Northside suburb of Dublin.

1. ‘Tilly’ means the thirteenth in a baker’s dozen – Joyce’s original title was ‘Cabra’, the name of the district where his family lived. Writing to his brother Stanislaus on 18 October 1906, Joyce asks him if he thought ‘Cabra’ should be included in Chamber Music: ‘Can I use it here or must I publish it in a book by itself as, of course, my dancing days are over.’

1. A needleboat is a racing shell, and Joyce had seen his brother take part in a needleboat race at San Sabba, near Trieste. He recalls that, as the scullers approached the shore, they had begun to sing an aria from the last act of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West: ‘Aspetterà ch’io torni […]’ Joyce enclosed the poem in a letter to Stanislaus, dated 9 September 1913, writing: ‘I present the enclosed lines to your young friends of the Rowing Club if they want them for a dinner programme or some such thing – with the rheumatic chamber poet’s (or pot’s) compliments.’

1. The poem recalls an incident recorded in Giacomo Joyce: ‘A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue-veined child.’

1. The poem was written by Joyce in 1913 soon after he and his wife had visited the grave of her former lover Michael Bodkin at Rahoon in Galway City. In his notes to Exiles, Joyce writes: ‘Moon: Shelley’s grave in Rome. He is rising from it: blond. She weeps for him. He has fought in vain for an ideal and died killed by the world. Yet he rises. Graveyard at Rahoon by moonlight where Bodkin’s grave is. He lies in the grave. She sees his tomb (family vault) and weeps. The name is homely. Shelley’s is strange and wild. He is dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young. The earth holds him […] She weeps over Rahoon too, over him whom her love has killed, the dark boy whom, as the earth, she embraces in death and disintegration. He is her buried life, her past […] She is Magdalen who weeps remembering the loves she could not return.’ The poem recalls the final section of ‘The Dead’, from Dubliners, in which Michael Furey is the fictional counterpart of Michael Bodkin. Moeran’s setting – his final solo song – dates from about 1946 and was dedicated to Kathleen Ferrier, who first performed it in a BBC Third Programme broadcast on 3 November 1947.

1. The phrase ‘Tutto è sciolto’ (‘All is lost/undone!’) is sung in Bellini’s La Sonnambula (libretto by Felice Romani) by Elvino, who believes that his fiancée, Amina, has been unfaithful. The phrase also occurs several times in Ulysses, most memorably when Bloom says to himself: ‘Lovely air. In sleep she went to him […] Yes: all is lost.’

1. Joyce wrote about his son, George, in one of his Trieste notebooks: ‘I held him in the sea at the baths of Fontana and felt with humble love the trembling of his frail shoulder […]’

1. The refrain is from a popular Italian song (‘O beautiful blonde,/You are like the waves’), and the child mentioned in the poem is Lucia, Joyce’s daughter. Joyce wrote the following letter to Bliss, thanking him for ‘Simples’: ‘Dear Bliss, I like your song better than any other in the book. It’s rich and ample and melodious, delightfully balanced in its movements. You have done my little song great honour. Please accept my warm thanks.’

1. A possible reference to Amalia Popper or other schoolgirls taught by Joyce in Trieste.

1. The poem is based on a scene in Giacomo Joyce: ‘Tawny gloom in the vast gargoyled church. It is cold as on that morning: quia frigus erat [because it was cold]. Upon the steps of the far high altar, naked as the body of the Lord, the ministers lie prostrate in weak prayer. The voice of an unseen reader rises, intoning the lesson from Hosea. Haec dicit Dominus: in tribulatione sua mane consurgent ad me. Venite et revertamur ad Dominum [‘Thus saith the Lord: In their affliction they will rise early to Me: Come, and let us return to the Lord’] … She stands beside me, pale and chill, clothed with the shadows of the sindark nave, her thin elbow at my arm. Her flesh recalls the thrill of that raw mist-veiled morning, hurrying torches, cruel eyes. Her soul is sorrowful, trembles and would weep. Weep not for me, O daughter of Jerusalem!’

1. The poem was inspired by Joyce’s involvement with a group of amateur actors in Zurich, the English Players.

1. The poem, written in Zurich in 1918, refers to the attack of glaucoma that Joyce suffered in Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse in August 1917.

1. Written in Paris in 1924, the poem was the first that Joyce had written in six years. It was sent to Valery Larbaud on 22 May 1924.

1. Referring to this poem, Joyce wrote to the Irish composer G. Molyneux Palmer: ‘ “Sleep Now” is in its place at the end of the diminuendo movement and the two last songs are intended to represent the awakening of the mind.’

1. These reflections on death by the daughter, Nuvoletta-Isabel-Issy, teem with neologisms, double entendres and puns that are typical of Joyce’s multi-layered language. Barber, interviewed by Phillip Ramey, confessed that he did not entirely understand the text: ‘What can you do when you get lines like “Nuvoletta reflected for the last time on her little long life, and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy, cloudy cry”, except to set them instinctively, as abstract music, almost as a vocalise?’

1. The text of Barber’s ‘Solitary hotel’ occurs in Part III of Ulysses, towards the end of the work. The sobriety of Joyce’s prose (often erroneously printed as a poem) is mirrored by Barber’s declamatory music.