The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly is a song in book one of James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake (pages 44.24 to 47.32), where the protagonist H.C.E.
has been brought low by a rumour which begins to spread across Dublin, apparently concerning a sexual trespass involving two girls in Phoenix Park; however details of HCE's transgression change with each retelling of events.
Most of chapters 1.2 through 1.4 follow the progress of this rumour, starting with HCE's encounter with "a cad with a pipe."
Child)[citation needed] – called "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly", described as a "scurrilous rann against H. C. Earwicker, which recounts the All-Father's fall from grace.
Joyce's blindness or near-blindness forced him away from the visual to the musical and emotional associations of words, and his linguistic erudition supplied another element for the construction of the language of Finnegans Wake.