My darling,

I ought to begin by begging your pardon, perhaps,
for the extraordinary letter I wrote you last night. While
I was writing it your letter was lying in front of me and
my eyes were fixed, as they are even now, on a certain word
of it. There is something obscene and lecherous in the very look
of the letters. The sound of it too is like the act itself, brief,
brutal, irresistible and devilish.
Darling, do not be offended at what I wrote. You thank me
for the beautiful name I gave you. Yes, dear, it is a nice name
‘My beautiful wild flower of the hedges! My dark-blue,
rain-drenched flower!’. You see I am a little of the poet still.
I am giving you a lovely book for a present too: and it is
a poet’s present for the woman he loves. But, side by side
and inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also
a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for
every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act
of it. My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal
beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you
down under me on that soft belly of yours and fuck you up
behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the open shame
of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in
the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It
allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight
word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some
chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you
feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or
stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock
while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands
clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue
licking ravenously up your rank red cunt. I have taught you
almost to swoon at the hearing of my voice singing or murmuring
to your soul the passion and sorrow and mystery of life and
at the same time have taught you to make filthy signs to me
with your lips and tongue, to provoke me by obscene touches
and noises, and even to do in my presence the most shameful
and filthy act of the body. You remember the day you pulled
up your clothes and let me lie under you looking up at you
as you did it? Then you were ashamed even to meet my eyes.
You are mine, darling, mine! I love you. All I have written above
is only a moment or two of brutal madness. The last drop
of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over
and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of
my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul
like a wind of spices. My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering
from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn
is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters
of my heart.
Nora, my faithful darling, my sweet-eyed blackguard schoolgirl,
be my whore, my mistress, as much as you like (my little frigging
mistress! my little fucking whore!) you are always my beautiful
wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower.

JIM

James Joyce, letter to Nora Barnacle, 2 December 1909