The Annotated "Ulysses"/Page 044
canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young
thing’s. Spurned and undespairing. Tell Pat you saw me, won’t you? I wanted
to get poor Pat a job one time. Mon fils, soldier of France. I taught him to
sing. The boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades. Know that old lay? I taught
Patrice that. Old Kilkenny : saint Canice, Strongbow’s castle on the Nore.
Goes like this. O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.
- O, O the boys of
- Kilkenny...
Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he
them. Remembering thee, O Sion.
He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots.
The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds of
brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship, am I? He stood
suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil. Turn back.
Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in new
sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbacans the
shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping
duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the dark-
ness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around
a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep
there when this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower entombing their
blind bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call : no answer. He lifted his
feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep
all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon’s midwatches I
pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore’s tempting
flood.
The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back
then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge and
eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a grike.
A bloated carcase of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the gun-
wale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensablé, Louis Veuillot called Gautier’s
prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. And
there, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Hide gold there.
Try it. You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout’s toys.
Mind you don’t get one bang on the ear. I’m the bloody well gigant rolls all