The far distant shore 3

From Opel: Immersion Set for Distant Shores
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The verse "On a far distant shore" may have been taken from the Homer's Odyssey, although just one among dozens of versions is translated in that way. From the close-in-time but more popular "King James" version, Joyce's source for The Odyssey, it's similar: "from afar, from a distant land". About the other versions, compare the differences with a translation which became the "standard" in 1961:

For I a stranger, and in wretchedness.
Have hither come from a far distant shore;

— Translation by G.A. Schomberg, 1879

You see, I am a poor old stranger here;
my home is far away; here there is no …

— Translation by Robert Fitzgerald, 1961
The phrase "from a far distant shore" has been used at least four other times: in the song "The Wild Rover" popular since the early 19th century, in an 1855 translation of Schubert's The Wanderer, in an 1865 poem named "Spring", and, curiously enough,Immersion into.jpg in the same 1869 book of poems where Bigney wrote "Judah's land" and "opal's glow". All these "uses" are anyway second to the ancient Odyssey.
Immersion in an Homeric verse





The Odyssey was set in Greece. Rick Wright was in Greece in the summer of 1964, before knowing Syd in September, and in December Syd wrote to his girlfriend Jenny Spires that he wanted to be in Greece. Eventually Rick went in Greece in 1966, but Syd never went there. Islands miles distant from Spain like Ibiza and neighbouring Formentera have shores Homerically suggestive as well, and Syd spent his holidays two times there, in 1967 and in 1969.

sources →
Schomberg, George Augustus. The Odyssey of Homer: Rendered Into English Verse: Volume I: Books I. to XII. London: John Murray, 1879. 176. Print. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/BAB8345.0001.001/184
Homer. "Book Seven: Gardens and Firelight." The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Doubleday, 1961. 124. Print. http://www.bookrags.com/notes/od/PART7.html