‘Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.’

This is one of quite a few yeses in the last paragraphs of ‘The Dead’, the final short story in Dubliners by James Joyce. In Ulysses, which was written after, the last word of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy faintly echoes this, ‘Yes’.

Here it is Gabriel Conroy’s voice that affirms. One of the story’s main characters, his voice begins this piece but as we will see the narration switches to something more spiritual. He sounds positive and assertive. With a noble confidence he is quoting the newspapers, in one of which, The Daily Express, he writes a literary column every Wednesday. His statement is a bold headline that bolsters him well-equipped for his journey westward. Yet no sooner than the next line does his upright tone falter as it shifts to a more poetic rhythm.

‘It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills …’

‘On every part’ adds affirmation to what our newspaper man has said. A colloquial embellishment, ‘the dark central plain’ is a deliberate and geographical obscurity. Yes, the centre of Ireland is largely flat but should we be confused by a plain having hills, treeless or otherwise, or are we being gently drawn into an illusive setting of scene?

The plain encompasses the Bog of Allen, which comes next on our journey westward:

‘… falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and …’

In ‘falling softly’ the snow appears to act as Gabriel falls away from the strong central character he has been, and into a dreaming. The snow becomes the shape shifter, from object to subject.

The Bog of Allen is positioned as a milestone, halfway through our journey as Joyce leads us on with a greater degree of distance – farther is further than further.

‘… farther westward, softly falling …’

We get the sense of having an aerial view, perhaps that which snow could experience. This scene had started with snow on a windowpane at the hotel that brought Gabriel to think of a journey westward. It is the snow that takes us there; from flakes on a window, up into the winter’s sky across the country to land again in drifts.

The snow becomes ‘softly falling’. It was ‘falling softly’. Is there a difference? To me this subtly belongs to poetry. It is Joyce playing with ways to structure language with nuance. ‘Falling softly’ is descriptive realism, ‘softly falling’ is dreamy. The snow is transforming in this linguistic juxtaposition from falling to being soft, from action to being, firming up its role as character, even a narrator.

In this transformation the journey is slowing, changing pace, mood and tempo. The soft round vowel sounds are like a lullaby; their poetic rhythm is dreamlike.

‘… into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.’

Splash! Just in case we were lulled into a sleepy sense of a soft journey, Joyce wakes our attention with an ice-chilled dip into chopped consonants. The darkness returns with menace and there is a tinderbox threat of insurrection in ‘mutinous’. Is it that the dark waves refuse to go as softly as we journeyed, that their peaky energy swallows the snowflakes, stopping their march towards what the snow has in store for us all?

‘It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.’

Countless snowflakes are undisturbed by the loss of members to mutiny, and make their presence felt again so that we are left in no doubt as to who is in charge, where the power lies.

Joyce positions the two commas in this piece beautifully. The first serves to space a breath around our subject, letting the snow establish its ubiquity once more. With their polite introductions, the commas pass to each other with a fluidity known only to Champagne rugby. Comma number one passes to ‘too’, then to comma number two – from too to two. The game hots up as we begin to see purpose at play.

The quaint ‘upon’ appears again, having done some falling softly upon the Bog of Allen. It’s not ‘on’, it’s ‘upon’. It is a less used preposition in modern writing, but here it is eloquent as it emphasises our subject. Soft snow, after all, does build up on things, not just on things. In this piece of prose it suggests a blanketing of our consciousness; the snow damping us down. We are succumbing to its silence, its stillness, its soporific hypnosis.

And following ‘upon’ we have a second appearance of ‘every part of’. More blanketing, more laying claim to all of our attention. A string of tightly written clauses follows to paint a picture of where the aerial view is coming into land. Of course, in this darkness the churchyard is lonely. And being on a hill makes its loneliness stand out all the more.

‘It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.’

Joyce’s word picture is cinematic. With an establishing shot, we are introduced to a scene that needs little imagination. In 21 words snow is character again, introduced only as ‘it’, moderating all before it, taking us from the spacious to the specific – location, effects, props. There are mouthfuls of consonants in ‘thickly drifted’, alliteration stretching into ‘crooked crosses’. That so many letters are in a common order in ‘crooked crosses’ suggests Joyce favoured words over form. Crosses are sacred, rarely crooked, unless abandoned and in that we have a mood setting. With crooked crosses perhaps also the headstones. The thorns are barren. This scene is not idyllic, it’s a depiction of misery. The barren thorns emphasising the lack of life in the lonely churchyard. Yet Joyce clings to a little decency in ‘churchyard’ rather than graveyard. This helps permit the snow to cover it all, to hush the horror of death.

We’re not going to land on this scene of sharp spears, thorns, headstones and metal gates because the snow has cushioned it.

The second part of the sentence has an observer’s detail. Joyce was jealous of Nora Barnacle’s first love, Michael Furey, as is Gabriel Conroy jealous of hearing for the first time of his wife Gretta’s, the same Michael Furey. This is semi-autobiographical writing. Joyce, on a rare trip to Ireland from Trieste without Nora, visited her people in Galway in 1912. He rode a bicycle from Galway to Oughterard, some 27 kilometres. While there he discovered the gravestone of a J Joyce, which is perhaps why, being superstitious, he set Michael Furey’s grave there. Furey furtively declared his affection for Nora from the back garden of her grandmother’s house in Nun’s Island, where she was staying before she left for a convent in Dublin the next day, and succumbed shortly afterwards to a fever and was buried in Galway city.

‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling …’

Gabriel returns as character only to disappear ghost-like with his soul, wracking his emotions, rocking him to sleep. As in the end of Ulysses, we also hear the thoughts of the penultimate character Bloom drift from upright consciousness to recumbent sleep.

The silence that allows Gabriel to hear snow falling is palpable. What must it take to hear snow falling? Darkness, night, calm; a listening that can only come when the mind’s chattering thoughts are silenced by fatigue and consciousness broadens to embrace a universality.

The snow is taking Gabriel’s soul to a place outside the duality of sleep and wakefulness, of life and death, of night and day, of east and west. The universe has no duality. Gabriel is between living and dead.

The snow is faint, yet possesses power enough to be a universal object; to suggest intangibility.

‘… falling faintly … and faintly falling …’

These words are even more impermanent than the ‘falling softly’ and ‘softly falling’ earlier in the passage. Both are so close together as to lure us into a rhythmic lullaby. The sounds are soft and faint themselves, as though spoken by someone in a leave taking. The second ‘faintly’ takes up the action in a way that tells us something is ending:

‘… like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead.’

How can a snowflake take us to death? Is it that every snowflake, ‘silver and dark’ as Joyce earlier intriguingly describes them, is a soul itself – brief, vulnerable, complex, unique? Do these snowflakes represent the billions of humans who have passed? Souls, fragile, passing faintly, drifting thickly in their multitudes.

In this last line I sense Joyce is redefining eternity. He had the confidence as a writer to take that on. As most established religions would have it, souls should last forever. Yet he suggests that something as simple as snow can take us all out, living or dead. It envelopes all of us in its descent through the universe on to our last resting place in a graveyard. That the snow is soft and faint somehow makes it a gentle and welcome prospect, one we accept as inevitable.

The snow is falling on all souls, living, dead, those remembered faintly or sharply. There is movement in this last line in the juxtaposition of subject and object, the sauntering pace, the evocation of life and death, the continuous ‘living’, the halting ‘dead’.

In this sentence Joyce gathers all of us, fragile as snow – as fleeting, as individual and just as faint. He delivers us to the inevitability of our fate, to our end, with his final full stop.