The unicorn’s song

The publication of Gogarty's bawdy songs in the appendix of Jeffares' Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty provides a concrete source for this allusion. The third stanza of Gogarty's "Medical Students' Song" reads:

The Unicorn, it appears,

Can only get a horn in a thousand years;

But when he does, he makes up for arrears –

So here's to Copulation.¹

In Telemachus (U 1.706), Joyce also quotes from the fourth stanza of the poem:²

High Church parsons fuck like stoats;

Red-headed women buck like goats;

And all Creation simply gloats

Over Copulation.

It seems a pity we do not know the tune of the song.

Harald Beck

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