-O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.
This capsule of utterance, which comes at the climax of the short first passage (or first independent "poem" of the book, as Fisher might assert) that Joyce presents to us, defines the heroic quest that "Stephen Hero" (and/or his latent identity as mythic Daedalus) must undertake. He is, in this instance, bound by a strict commandment from "above" (from the towering grown-ups above him, from the air-borne, attacking eagles), from the poets of the past , and - most superficially from his elders, to perform an act of "apology". Stephen seals this cosmic agreement with his little song: .
Pull out his eyes,.
Apologise,.
Apologise,.
Pull out his eyes.
.
Apologise,.
Pull out his eyes,.
Pull out his eyes,.
Apologise. .
Stephen internalizes his predicament or legacy - by chanting the words that descend to him from layers of higher authority. He shapes the received words with his own voice (whether it be "out loud" or only inside his head), compressesextractions phrases from the longer syntax, and utilizes rhyme in a patterned repetition. (In short, he has applied a "craft".) .
If his mother, a temporal and merely parental figure, initiates young Stephen's artistic covenant in a mundane way, "Dante" (whose "real" identity in Stephen's world is sparsely revealed in this passage) is the accidental and incidental avatar of an old poet, or the "poetic tradition", or the artist-creator that Stephen (or Joyce, if we treat this work as autobiographical) must become. The implied historic Dante serves as a representative, for Stephen and Joyce, of the poetic craft (Daedalus is a craftsman in myth), and a link across time with the Classical world; the latter being a world that the grown and almost fully adult Stephen in Ulysses and his compatriots would feign inhabit. ( His comrade, dissatisfied with Ireland, instructs to Stephen, "Hellenise it.
