Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

These lines appear at the close of James Joyce’s novel *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* (1916), presented as entries from Stephen Dedalus’s diary. Dated “April 27,” the passage comes as Stephen resolves to leave Ireland and pursue an artist’s vocation abroad, rejecting the claims of family, church, and nationalist expectation that have constrained him. The invocation “Old father, old artificer” alludes to Daedalus, the mythic craftsman and father of Icarus—Stephen’s symbolic namesake—casting artistic creation as a kind of forging or making. The moment crystallizes Joyce’s modernist theme of self-fashioning through art and exile.

Stephen’s “Welcome, O life!” is a declaration of readiness to embrace lived reality rather than inherited doctrine or secondhand ideals. “To forge in the smithy of my soul” imagines the self as a workshop where experience is hammered into art; “the uncreated conscience of my race” signals an ambition to give imaginative form to an Irish moral and cultural consciousness not yet fully articulated. The prayer to the “old artificer” blends myth and craft: Stephen seeks the steadiness of Daedalus-like skill as he undertakes the risky flight of artistic independence. The passage is both manifesto and benediction for Joyce’s artist-hero.

1) “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
2) “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”