On a recent trip to Austin, I tickled my soft spot for rare vintage literary treasures and indulged my guilty travel pleasure: A trip to the finest local rare-books seller, in this case the lovely South Congress Books, where I discovered a fortunate first edition of James Joyce’s Collected Poems (public library). It was originally published in 1937 by The Viking Press as a limited edition of 1,000 copies and features a signed portrait of Joyce by Welsh painter and etcher Augustus John.

Here are three sublime poems, one from each of the book’s three sections.

From the first section, titled “Chamber Music” and containing 36 untitled, numbered love poems:

XXV

Lightly come or lightly go:
Though thy heart presage thee woe,
Vales and many a wasted sun,
Oread let thy laughter run,
Till the irreverent mountain air
Ripple all thy flying hair.

Lightly, lightly — ever so:
Clouds that wrap the vales below
At the hour of evenstar
Lowliest attendants are;
Love and laughter song-confessed
When the heart is heaviest.

From the second section, titled “Pomes Penyeach” — a play on the French words for apples, offered at “a penny each” — and containing 13 short poems written over the course of 20 years between 1904 and 1924:

SIMPLES

O bella bionda,
Sei come l’onda!

Of cool sweet dew and radiance mild
The moon a web of silence weaves
In the still garden where a child
Gathers the simple salad leaves.

A moondew stars her hanging hair
And moonlight kisses her young brow
And, gathering, she sings an air:
Fair as the wave is, fair, art thou!

Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear
To shield me from her childish croon
And mine a shielded heart for her
Who gathers simples of the moon.

From the final section, containing a single poem written in 1936 and previously unpublished in America:

ECCE PUER

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

Collected Poems was eventually reissued as a much more affordable mass-market paperback. Complement it with Joyce’s little-known children’s book and this rare 1935 edition of Ulysses featuring exquisite etchings by Henri Matisse.