[Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n Roll] starts in a Cambridge garden in 1968 with a piper playing the Syd Barrett song, Golden Hair.

Barrett, the Pink Floyd writer and singer, appears now and then in the play, a figure for the seductive, subversive glory of art…

Golden Hair. It’s Barrett’s song, but it’s James Joyce’s poem.

The charismatic rock star undone by drugs (In Stoppard’s play, we see him in his mother’s Cambridge garden. Barrett retreated there, mentally broken, in the mid-seventies, and stayed until his death not long ago, at the age of sixty.) took the James Joyce poem, Golden Hair, from Joyce’s 1904 collection Chamber Music, and in 1969 set it to stark guitar, stark voice, cymbals, and a low drone.

Here are Joyce’s words.

Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair.

Barrett changes the words in the first stanza a little:

Lean out your window
Golden-hair
I heard you singing
In the midnight air.

Barrett makes of this poem (which, in its pull toward the passion of art and away from the chill anxiety of intellect, has much in common with the Yeats poem about Fergus that echoes through Ulysses) a very private chant. His notes go nowhere; he ventures only one or two changes. His song is musing, minimalist, hesitant, circular, self-absorbed, even though the poem’s content is clearly celebratory, the speaker energized by the fire of the woman’s singing to throw away his book, leave his room, and beg her to lean from her window, so he can see her.

Barrett isn’t going to the woman. He isn’t going anywhere. He even brings his voice down, decisively, in the last line, as if to close out any possibility of release from his trance.

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With Bloomsday coming up, UD ponders not only the generativity of art, the way Joyce’s work sings through the work of Syd Barrett, Samuel Barber, Kate Bush, John Cage, Jefferson Airplane, and many others (to note only his musical influence), but also the suffering of the artist, the suffering out of which art emerges. Stephen Dedalus, on June 16, 1904, is going the way of Barrett, after all, drinking himself to an early grave if he doesn’t watch out… Like Barrett, he’s acting outrageously, self-destructively, getting into fights…

And certainly part of what our hero Bloom attempts to convey to Stephen is how deadly intellect, understood as a kind of arrogant self-absorption, can be to the creation of art. Art’s passion is a human passion, and Dedalus isn’t human enough yet. Hasn’t loved. Holds himself aloof from humanity. Bloom humanizes Stephen by embodying for him the capacity for selfless love. Bloom barely knows Stephen, but intuits, as a compassionate and perceptive human being, the depth of his suffering. He follows him around late at night in Dublin, worried that Stephen will get into trouble.

Stephen duly gets into trouble, and Bloom gets him out of it, takes him to his home, gives him hot chocolate, talks to him late into the night, escorts him out of the house (Stephen politely declines Bloom’s invitation to stay the night), and watches with him, from the yard, the quiet spectacular starry sky. This night sky watching produces one of the most famous lines from Ulysses:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

The line incorporates much of what one loves in Joyce’s prose: Neologisms (Nightblue is a kind of partner to skyblue; and, no, night isn’t black, or it’s not always black. Night and day aren’t always all that different; in Key West, I was amazed at how white clouds appeared in the sky late into the evening…Heaventree is heavenly. We might also hear lemontree. ). Assonance (humid nightblue fruit). Metaphor (The constellations make trees; each star is a fruit on the tree). Alliteration (heaventree, hung, humid.)

More deeply, there’s something exhilarating about the implicit humanizing, naturalizing, worlding, call it what you will, of the entire universe in this sentence. The distant, enigmatic, intimidating stars which make us feel small and transient are in this sentence gathered into our earth, made an extension of our trees and forest, our earthly garden. There’s a sort of heady insolence about this Romantic gesture, this pulling of the heavens down to earth, this re-sizing of the cosmos to fit us. This is Walt Whitman, claiming the universe, embracing all in his human arms.

More than anything, perhaps, we love the way this famous line seems ineffably balanced, as the stars seem balanced on the heaventree; somehow in the very composition of the sentence, in its smooth stately self-control, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

But of course this is the power of the artist, the power of art, that we’re registering. To be lifted up by a perfect phrase or sentence is to hear the piper in the Cambridge garden and follow him. It is to hear the woman singing through the gloom and follow her.

Barrett and Dedalus — and Bucky Wunderlick, the rock star in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street (a character in part inspired by Barrett) — these people, these fictions, draw our attention not so much to our own experience of aesthetic rapture, as to the cost to the artist of aesthetic creation.