The Explicator
ISSN: 0014-4940 (Print) 1939-926X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20
49. Joyce’s ULYSSES, Calypso Episode
Douglas Schwegel
To cite this article: Douglas Schwegel (1969) 49. Joyce’s ULYSSES, Calypso Episode, The
Explicator, 27:7, 99-101, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.1969.11482825
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1969.11482825
Published online: 26 Oct 2015.
Submit your article to this journal
View related articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vexp20
Download by: [University of California, San Diego]
Date: 17 March 2016, At: 04:22
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 04:22 17 March 2016
to him. The reason lies in the contemporary significance "George
Eastman" would have for Mrs. Freeman, and in the symbolic value
this name would lend to the story.
At the time "The Revolt of 'Mother'" was being written a real
George Eastman was making social history in the United States. Rising
from a modest background, Eastman had his own substantial photography business by the time he was thirty years old in 1884. By 1888
the first low-priced Kodak camera was on the market, and by 1890
the Eastman Company was worth one million dollars. Obviously,
then, the "George Eastman" of Mrs. Freeman's story is meant to represent the urban, business, and materialistic society toward which America
was turning. For Mrs. Freeman, the marriage of the frail Nanny
Penn, unfit for the harshness of farm life, with George Eastman indicated the new trend in American social life. Sarah Penn was no longer
willing to endure in primitive simplicity, and the embarrassment envisioned in the forthcoming marriage of her daughter is a prime cause
of her "revolt."
The subtle submergence of art to action in "The Revolt of
'Mother,' " exemplified here in the choice of names, renders this story
a ·very effective member of the local-color genre. The reader does not
sense the mediation of the author; the objectivity necessary to "capture" a particular geographical region is preserved. In the simple,
and often overlooked, art of naming, however, one can detect the sure
and conscious hand of the author.
-EDWARD J. GALLAGHER, University of Notre Dame
49. JOYCE'S ULYSSES, CALYPSO EPISODE
As Leopold Bloom thinks about his wife on his way to the butcher
shop in the Calypso episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, his thoughts turn
to Gibraltar, Molly's birthplace, which he thinks of as an oriental city,
exotic and mysterious. This part of his interior monologue ends with
fragments in which Joyce couples allusions to "Kubla Khan" and
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." It reads: "Night sky moon,
violet, colour of Molly's new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing
one of those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass."
(Modern Library edition, p. 57.)
The playing of "a damsel with a dulcimer" at the end of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" stirs in the poet a desire to recreate "her
symphony and song." It is an impossible wish, the granting of which
would give him irresistible powers like those of Amphion, and set him
off as a marked man who "on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the
milk of Paradise." In context with the reference to a girl playing
a dulcimer, Bloom's "I pass" recalls a crucial stanza in another of
Coleridge's poems, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (lines
586-590) :
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange powers of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
&.t)
VERTUE
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 04:22 17 March 2016
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie:
The dew shall weep thy fall to night,
For thou must die.
Sweet rose whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
.My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Only a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season'd timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
-GEORGE HERBBRT.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 04:22 17 March 2016
Coming as part of Joyce's introduction of Bloom, this double
allusion supplies some hints about him and his relationship to his wife.
It gives a dimension of wonder to his habit of associating Molly with
the Orient. The fact that dulcimers are called up in his mind by the
thought of her new garters anticipates the Rabelaisian "music" of the
"sonnez la cloche" in the episode of the Sirens, but for the purpose of
this part of the novel it suggests the complexity of Bloom's feelings
about Molly, which range from prurience to idealism. As for Bloom
himself, the combination of allusions suggests that he resembles the
ancient mariner and the poet of "Kubla Khan" in being a haunted
man set apart from the rest of mankind. When he confronts Stephen
Dedalus he is instinctively drawn to him, as the mariner is to the
wedding guest. Finally, insofar as both passages alluded to are concerned with "strange powers of speech," there is an echo of one of
Joyce's favorite themes, his conception of the artist as a man with a
special mission, to whom the world must listen.
-DOUGLAS M. SCHWEGEL, University of Windsor, Ontario
50. HERBERT'S VERTUE
I wish to elaborate further the explication of stanza 4 of Herbert's
Vertue proposed by Roberts W. French. (Exp., Sept., 1967, XXVI, 4).
Professor French reasons that the comparison of the soul to seasoned
timber that will never yield (line 14) forbids us to gloss the word
"coal" in the following line as "ashes" or "a cinder" (Hutchinson's
long-established interpretation) because the soul thus becomes part of
the dead ashes or cinder into which the world is changed and would
not, as the final line maintains, "then chiefly live." In order to avoid
this contradiction Professor French suggests that we visualize Herbert's
image of the world as a glowing coal in the midst of which the soul
will chiefly live because its seasoned timber will shine brighter than
the glowing mass.
Having avoided the contradiction we must now observe the distinction between the live soul and the surrounding dead flesh implicit
in Herbert's terminology. Clearly the poet has in mind at this point
the term "live coal," which permits him to distinguish the dead cinder
into which the world of flesh turns at death from the live coal which
yet glows in the center ("chiefly") of the mass. Herbert provides the
best explication of the image in the second stanza of "Employment"
(II) :
Man is no starre, but a quick coal
Of mortall fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth cantrall
A faint desire,
Lets his own ashes choke his soul.
-DAN S. COLLINS, University of Massachusetts
Q 1. HOLMES' HERSELF
In How Does a Poem Mean John Ciardi prints the poem "Herself"
by John Holmes (p. 1012). "Herself" remains perfectly opaque, not
merely to me but also to everyone else I have consulted. Can anyone
throw light on this poem?
-R. L. A.