stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.
She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil?1 Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going
1. All words suggesting moving or dragging. ' i letter to the press and writes a poem, which is like that crescendo of verbs,' he [Joyce] said. 'The quoted later in the novel. irresistible tug of the tides' ' (Budgen). 8. He imagines himself as the constellation Cas2. Winedark sea (Homer). siopeia, supposed to represent the wife of Cepheus 3. He is thinking of his mother again. The follow-(an Ethiopian king) seated in a chair and holding ing Latin (from the burial service) means: All flesh up her arms. His ash walking stick he thinks of as will come to thee. an 'augur's [Roman soothsayer's] rod of ash.' 4. Death comes like the Flying Dutchman in a 9. George Berkeley (1685 -1753), bishop of phantom ship to give the fatal kiss. Cloyne (in Ireland), who argued that the external 5. Cf. Hamlet 1.5.107: 'My tables.' world has no objective reality but exists only in the 6. Cf. Blake's poem 'The Gates of Paradise,' esp. mind of the perceiver. Stephen (as at the opening the lines 'The door of death I open found / And of this episode) is experimenting again with ways the worm weaving in the ground: / Thou'rt my of sensing reality. mother from the womb, / Wife, sister, daughter, to 1. 'She' is Psyche, the soul, whom he is bringing the tomb.' Cf. also Romeo and Juliet 2.2.9?10: from 'beyond the veil.' But from metaphysical 'the earth, that's nature's mother, is her tomb. / speculations on reality and the soul Stephen is led What is her burving grave, that is her womb.' (by the Psyche association) to think of 'the virgin 7. Stephen tears off the blank end of Mr. Deasy's at Hodges Figgis' [a bookseller's] window.'
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22 12 / JAMES JOYCE
to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the braided jess of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park with a grief and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to some else, Stevie: a pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple dumplings, piuttosto.2 Where are your wits?
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.
He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket, his hat tilted down on his eyes. That is Kevin Egan's movement I made, nodding for his nap, sabbath sleep. Et vidit Dens. Et erant valde bona.3 Alo! Bonjour. Welcome as the flowers in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.
And no more turn aside and brood.4
His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck's castoffs, nebeneinander. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another's foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt's shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. Tiens, quel petit pied!5 Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde's love that dare not speak its name.6 He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all.
In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering green- goldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foam- pool, flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats,7 in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit.8 To no end gathered; vainly then released, forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.
Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies.9 At one he said.
2. Rather, sooner (Italian). 3. Connecting two phrases from the Vulgate (Latin Bible): 'And God saw' (Genesis 1.4) and 'And they were very good' (Genesis 1.31). 4. The first line of the second (and last) stanza of Yeats's poem 'Who Goes with Fergus?' which is often in Stephen's mind. The line expresses for him the mood, of noontide stillness and of lotos eating in a lush Asian scene, that overcomes him momentarily when he realizes that it is twelve o'clock, the hour of the Greek nature god Pan, 'faunal noon.' This Asian lotos-eating theme, which is associated also with Bloom, is important in the Odyssey.
5. Look, what a little foot! (French). 6. Asked at his 1895 trial for homosexuality what this line meant, Oscar Wilde defined it as the great spiritual affection of an elder man for a younger man. 7. A phrase from a vulgar song sung by Mulligan earlier that morning. 8. Night and day he patiently groaned forth his wrongs (St. Ambrose). 9. From Ariel's song (The Tempest 1.2.400).
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ULYSSES [LESTRYGONIANS] / 22 17
Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising salt-white from the undertow, bobbing landward a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.
Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwhale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.
A seachange1 this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix de Paris:2 beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum.3 No. My cockle hat and staff and hismy sandal shoon.4 W here? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.
He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year,
