President Michael D. Higgins has unveiled a plaque recognising the connection of Rahoon Cemetery and Michael ‘Sonny’ Bodkin with James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in what is the 110th Anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.
The event took place at 2pm on Saturday at the Bodkin Family Vault in Rahoon Cemetery.
Joyce’s connection with Galway can be traced back to 10 June 1904 when he first met Nora Barnacle from Galway.
While Joyce only visited Galway twice, briefly in 1909 and for a longer period in 1912, it remains a place that has had a deep impact on his work and on the world of Irish literature.
It was Nora who inspired so much of his work and several of his most memorable characters, including Gretta Conroy in The Dead and Molly Bloom in Ulysses.
It was Nora’s doomed earlier love affair in Galway with the young Michael ‘Sonny’ Bodkin that formed the basis of the masterpiece short story The Dead, which is considered to be among the greatest of the 20th century.
It is of course in Rahoon cemetery – the imagined ‘lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried’ – that Michael ‘Sonny’ Bodkin, on whom the fictional Michael Furey in The Dead is modelled, was laid to rest.
The poignant poem She Weeps Over Rahoon (from the Pomes Penyeach collection) was also inspired by Rahoon Cemetery, where Joyce imagined standing with Nora mourning at the grave of Sonny Bodkin ‘the dark rain falling – then as now’.
