The Bloomiad: A Mock Heroic Epic in Eighteen Stanzas

TELEMACHUS

Two students standing on a tower (he, Mulligan: I, Dedalus) are echoing the ancient hour (Antinous: Telemachus).

My mother’s ghost haunts the environs, her silence singing with the sirens. Buck holds the mirror of my fear, pouring quicksilver in my ear.

Why must we live in silly Ireland? While he flees to his Omphalos and I embrace the art of gloss, the sea is narrowing our island

for him, his father’s burier, for me, my mother’s murderer.

NESTOR

The bells are striking ten in heaven: to master Deasy I must go to get my money at eleven. The sky is blue, the cock will crow.

The boys hate my lessons of history. How can they understand my mystery? Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro: my father gave me seeds to sow.

My work? A riddle in the making. Who am I? Nothing but a stream of consciousness. The past? A dream, a nightmare from which I’m awaking.

My future? Just a winding sheet. God? God is this shout in the street.

PROTEUS

On Sandymount strand I am strolling: a young man wearing borrowed shoes under the faunal noon unrolling a vista of reflecting views:

here goes my soul, the form of various forms, seeking in the multifarious metamorphoses of the sea (these patterns that Penelope

is weaving, weaving, and reweaving) the glimpse of an epiphany: pswepsupsebzibzepizzipee: I hear the speech of sea upheaving

while I stand pissing to the skies: full fathom five my father lies.

CALYPSO

She (Molly) makes the bed springs jingle while turning over lazily: he (Leopold) goes shopping, single. The kettle is put on for tea.

One card, two letters in the morning are waiting, as a silent warning to the canvasser, on the floor. He gathers them all at the door.

Milly announces her arrival (his only child since Rudy’s doom). The deceived husband, Mr Bloom, discerns the writing of his rival

on the odd letter’s envelope. This afternoon. No s… I hope.

LOTOPHAGI

Bloom, alias Henry Flower, shuffled into the post office. Slow, slack. There are the dreams of Martha Clifford: his secret pen-friend wrote him back.

Dear Henry. I got. Your last letter. Longing for him. For worst or better. What’s this? A pin. A flower. For whom? For him. Language of flowers. Bloom.

The race today. Who’ll be the winner? Sceptre or Throwaway? Who bets? The baths. The mosque. The minarets. Forgot. My key. I’m a foreigner.

O water warm as woman’s womb, welcome your Wandering Jew, old Bloom.

HADES

We are four Dubliners who hurry from Sandymount to Cemetery to pray for Paddy and to bury the drunk with the big family:

de mortuis nil nisi bene. Who will mourn us among so many? We kneel and listen to the knell, hoping he’s well and not in hell.

Why is Rudy no longer living? Eleven he would be, that elf. And Daddy? He poisoned himself, but understanding is forgiving.

Now we are thirteen wearing black. Who is that stranger in the mack?

AEOLUS

The Freeman’s Journal. – Dublin, high noon, 16th of June, 1904: B. has been swallowed by a typhoon of printing paper pulp. The poor

canvasser was drowned by the rising of articles and advertising together with an editor, a clerk, and a compositor.

S. D. escaped from the attraction exerted by the journalist, the jurist, and the jingoist, exhorting our young poet to action.

Out of the whirling street noise rose the Nelson pillar of his prose.

LESTRYGONIANS

The big fish eats the little fishes; swill, slurp and swallow what you want; clink, clatter with the dirty dishes in the smoke-ridden restaurant;

get out of here, you cannot luncheon with cannibals munchin’ and crunchin’; order a sandwich at the bar of Davie Byrne’s; look: there are

two flies glued on the glass in fever; two, buzzing, sticking, he and she; your belly’s full of burgundy; don’t let approach the young deceiver;

keep out of Blazes Boylan’s sight; flee from...