Do not be cross with poetry

[Lizzie]

"Students of literature in particular, accustomed as they are to understanding most words in every sentence of every prose work they read, are apt to experience frustration in reading a text constructed along these lines, where it can sometimes seem that one is doing extremely well if one makes sense of only a sentence or two on a single page. If, however, one surrenders the need to be master of everything -- or even most things -- in this strange and magnificent book, it will pour forth lots of rewards. As it says in the Irish American ballad from which Joyce derived his title, after all, 'There's lots of fun at Finnegan's wake.'"

~John Bishop