Farewell, yesterday! Welcome, tomorrow! A new day begins to dawn. The lotus blossom unfolds, scattering a light spray of dew. So, until next time:

— Adieu! Thanks, Thomas.

It is the hour of prayer. Humphrey ponders the mystery of transubstantiation. Bread and wine, when mixed together in a broth, are transformed. Yet the bread remains bread and the wine is still wine. Time does not so much alter as rearrange. He thinks of other examples: stale bread, the stub of a cigarette, a picture on the wall that might at any moment disintegrate into atoms. Of darkness too, the darkness that obscures. Of decay. Of falsehood that transforms the past. Humphrey struggles to rise. He thirsts.

— Tim! Time signal!

The past's present is the present's past as the present is the future's past. Upon the third stroke of the chime it will be exactly so fewer hours by so many minutes of the dawn of the day of the week of the month of the year of the age of the aeon^[385] of the great man and his little lady, husband and wife with their children, chattels, servants, friends, relations, leftovers, and with all their belongings, past, present and to come.

— Much obliged, Timothy! But what o'clock is it?

Struggling into consciousness, Humphrey seeks to locate himself with more definition in time and space. In a retrospective arrangement, retracing the steps taken by early nomadic man since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, he hears in the mind's ear the hoofthuds and footfalls of cycles upon cycles of generations of beasts and men that have lived, a multitude tramping, trooping, and pounding a path to the present.^[386] Yet the boundaries of land and sea have to a great extent persisted unchanged through successions of Viconian cycles, each of which, brought into being to the loud black crack of thunder, began with an age of gods (characterised by the institution of birth and baptism), continued with an age of heroes (characterised by the institution of marriage), culminated in an age of men (with its characteristic institution of burial), and finally fell into the oblivion of a ricorso or anarchic age presided over by divine providence.

What all this leads up to, at the place and period under scrutiny, is the existence of a city, Dublin, a socially organic entity whose citizens after a millennium of making war, making love, and making money have now settled down to a state of more or less equable economic equilibrium.

Humphrey suffers a recurrence of his stomach trouble and is reminded yet again of his perilous situation. Out at sea, the pilot gives the go-ahead to a steamer at anchor: seaworthy! The channel is clear, the route to Dublin is traversable and HCE's pub is open.

But where is he? Humphrey begs to be told. The scene shifts scale to encompass the mountains of Dublin and Wicklow where a programme of reforestation is underway and where, through a clearing in the enveloping clouds, a ray of sunshine pierces through to a hidden pool, the source of the Liffey and the locus of his present anxieties. He is urged to be reconciled to the truth. The natural cycle of water is explained to him. Moisture rises skyward from sea like steam from the kettle; a cloud or a fog (a cloud in which we are) is formed; then it falls as rain to return by stream and river to the sea whence it sprang. So who is to say where it begins and where it ends? Certainly not the sea, nor the sky: they keep silent and carry on as they have always done, unchanged and unchanging, while on the land the phantom pantomime of history keeps on repeating itself from cannibal king to property mogul. They have this much in common: the sexual cycle, like the cycle of water, remains unchanged and unchangeable, and man and woman, their hearts transfixed by the darts of desire, Cupid's arrow, couple, uncouple, and recouple again like sky and seascape, simply to keep the comedy of the river of lives going.

In a complex mixture of dream and (narrative) reality HCE is presented with a more particularized account of the environs of the pool of Anna Livia and of the ever-flowing fishing-brook meandering through hill and dale between braes of bog and meadow from higher waters down to the city whose very names, Dubh linn (dark pool) and Baile atha cliath (town of the ford of the hurdles), remind us of the symbiosis between town and river, of the stream of generations that have washed in its waters, fished from its banks, bridged over it, channelled it, and sluiced it, since the far-off days when the Vikings first founded the city and on down through all the time that it served as centre for the dominion of Ireland by the Saxon foreigners, an accursed race of aliens who crossed the Irish Sea (Moyleamore) and infested Dublin Ocean.

In the greening of an elm, its shade screening a love-seat, he sees a symbol of the rise of Irish nationalism and he thinks of the Wicklow rebel, Michael Dwyer, and of Father Michael, Anna Livia's past and future lover. Little white flowers, looking as if trimmed and cut with scissors — hobgoblins' handkerchiefs — represent her and his poor children, now leaving on the Holyhead boat to Anglesey, poor Irish emigrants accompanying evicted British troops. A stone slab, a boulder, squatting alone in the centre of the swamp like some dumb perpetual memorial, reminds him of Lambay Island, stepping-off point for the Scandinavian incursions. How naked a slab it is, he thinks, it ought at least to have a bishop's apron on it! He shivers as a breeze tickles his big bare bum, which offers to us its bold face, protruding cheekily from beneath the bed-clothes. The breeze rustles too the plants and reeds about the pool, now transformed into a lake as the morning unfolds and shafts of light begin to disperse the gloom. The reeds whisper each to each in good shrub-Irish that this place is proper and this time is right, so who is it to be who will celebrate the holy mystery?

As if in answer the dawn light discloses the white boulder to be none other than Shaun, now a naked yogi, a pilgrim priest, performing his morning ablutions and making to the river an offering of water.

Like a great drowned city becoming visible as the waters hiding it seep away, like Ys, Atlantis or the city under Lough Neagh conjured up by Isis, goddess of dawn, like these cities Humphrey strives to emerge from underneath the shadows of his long slumber. He hears the voice of his daughter Issy.

Her voice is magnified and multiplied. It becomes the chorus of the leap-year girls. Humphrey, turning his attention from one to the other, tries to tell them apart, but he sees his darling daughter equally in each one of them. He then counts them, counting them four times in four different ways: fifteen and fourteen, nine and twenty, eight and twenty one, twenty eight and one. Each time he arrives at the same sum. Each sister is slightly different from those at her side. They resemble a garland of small flower-bells as they circle around Shaun and in singsong voices call to him, and only to him, by the name he was known when he was a boy: Kevin.

The song of the flower-girls dissolves into the pealing of bells as the chimes of twenty-nine churches ring out in unison. Their ting-a-ling calls on Shaun to rise up and take his place at the head of New Ireland. The Roman virtues of virility and fecundity are extolled. Kevin is likened to a water-laden raincloud that will burst and irrigate an archipelago of girls. In a tableau reminiscent of the feast of Tara at which Grainne picked out from among the knights of the Fianna as the man of her choice curly-haired, freckled, red-cheeked Diarmuid, Issy points to Kevin.

Humphrey is sorely perturbed. Like the aged Fionn, he seethes with jealousy. Those virtues now so much acclaimed by the young girls were in past times his own attributes. At an earlier period in his life he also had taken the role of Diarmuid. He becomes suspicious, and well he might; for as we approach the conclusion to this section identities merge and tales telescope with even more than usual Wakean rapidity. Old Hump imagines Kevin coming at him from every direction in various historical poses. He speaks and is spoken of in idioms as diverse as Ossianic poetics, journalese, and American college slang. Kevin for his part has managed somehow to duplicate himself. He simultaneously approaches the bedroom door and the tavern entrance. In the first instance he is disguised as Jerry (Shem), the elder son bringing up HCE's breakfast, possibly with Jerry's connivance; in the second, in his more usual role he is Shaun the postman, letter-carrier.

So what is Kevin doing? What is he hiding? Is the Moraltack, Diarmuid's sword, still his best of weapons? These questions, laced with sarcasm, are ostensibly voiced by Shem. Humphrey warns him (as Shem) in sombre tones of the upcoming battle and urges him to silence and preparation. The river flows quietly now but soon it will merge with the sea in noise and confusion. The ass is about to bray in its terror as the four old men, coroners now, prepare to abandon Humphrey as surely and finally as smoke departs from an extinguished fire.

These considerations are rudely interrupted by a news bulletin on the wireless, a flash which develops into a series of newspaper headlines (470.21ff; 602.21ff) referring in an oblique way to the imminent decline and fall of HCE (here called ‘Ciwareke’). The burrowing investigative reporter “Mike” Portlund (Sigurdsson) who unearthed these stories did so by spying on the old codger in his pub, employing a camera obscura to record an image of his bare arse.

Shaun makes an appearance, emerging out of the mist like some young god from a Celtic Valhalla. He travels along winding river-routes, crosses sea-lanes, follows the star that guided many an invader to Irish shores and comes ambling up the road as Mr. Hurr Hansen, aspirant for the post of Mr. Porter and presently postal sorter extraordinaire working for the General Post Office. He thinks of all the fun he is going to have with the girls and his face is wreathed in smiles. He carries the letter to the tavern. In another space, at the same time, within the house, he approaches Humphrey bearing a tray of breakfast: bacon and eggs, bread and butter with tea.^[387] A cheer goes up: Shaun! Shaun! Shaun the Post! He looks so well, so handsome, such an improvement on the aged HCE! The old man, meanwhile, smells the morning offering of food and hears the knocking at the door. Knock, knock! Pub door, post. Bedroom door, breakfast. Reluctant to budge, he retreats under the bedclothes. He fears today is his Ides of March, his Waterloo.

The scene which follows is reminiscent of the encounter in the park with the cad. But the roles are reversed. Humphrey asks the question, Havd you the time, Hans ahike? Heard you the crime, senny boy?, and continues with a long rambling account replete with sexual innuendo and references to young persons in yet another cock-eyed attempt at exculpation.

Shaun replies that he does not have an idea what the correct time is but it might be anything after dark.

Humphrey is again threatened and protests that he has been libelled and someone must atone for it. On this occasion, however, he is not to be saved by the ten-ton bell as he was when asked the time by the cad. Fox Goodman, the sexton, does not ring out the hour. The bells have already been chimed, for Shaun.

‘But what does Kevin?’ The morning sunshine begins to illuminate the first of the triptych of stained-glass windows in the nearby Chapelizod Church. It depicts the legend of Saint Kevin. Thus the light will mediate an answer. Tired out, HCE bids him (as Shem, but with Shaun's voice) to ask no more. Nature is oblivious to his all-too-human concerns. The plains of Bregia and Teffia to the east and north of Dublin are deeply green. The boughs of the trees are heavy with fruit and leaves. All around the morning trills to the chorus of birds.^[388]

It is still early so the stars have not yet all faded from sight. The view from his bedroom window of the Milky Way and innumerable galaxies reminds the waking HCE that the milk-train with its endless rattling wagons full of gallons of milk has yet to arrive. He calls to the sham Shem to bid him be silent. As hymns begin to be intoned in the church, he falls back into sleep and his dreams. Before nodding off, offhandedly he gives Shem his blessing.

The radio crackles into life again. Shaun, newly notorious, first among the foreigners, exults in his elevation to the apostolic succession. He has the power to lay hands upon and bestow bishops in Ireland. But before teking office, as it were, he must cleanse himself through immersion in the ritual and wisdom of holy religion.

The radio announces a gale-warning for the Irish and all inhabitants of the islands.

Kevin (Shaun), having received his father's blessing and not being one to remain for long in the same place, hastens off across the Park through the trees to a rocky pool to wash himself and celebrate at once morning, springtime, the majesty of the continuity of life, the cleansing of his past sins, and his rebirth as the new HCE. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, tavernmaster, meanwhile dreams his penultimate dream. In this, Shaun's action is transmuted into an allegory of Saint Kevin at Glendalough. Though Joyce has overlaid onto this short narrative a string of series encapsulating in medieval terms Christian doctrine, the basic tale is simple and can be expressed briefly.^[389]

Saint Kevin, living on the island of Ireland in the Irish ocean, goes to Lough Glendalough to live on an island in the lake; and as there is a pond on the island and a little island in the pond he builds a hut on the little island and then scoops out the floor to a depth of one foot, after which he goes to the bank of the pond and fills his barrel-tub^[390] with water which he empties time after time into the cavity in his hut, thereby forming a pool. Having done that, he half-fills the tub with water, sets it in the middle of the pool, pulls up his frock, seats himself in the tub, and meditates with burning zeal upon the sacrament of baptism or the regeneration of man by water.^[391]

The dream of Kevin wrapt in tranquil meditation contracts and slows to become a still image, a picture painted on a window now darkening as the light passes from it.

The remainder of the section, like the Saint Kevin piece, is strongly positional in nature and comprises a gradual focussing of attention from sea and mountain to Dublin, the Park, Chapelizod, the Earwicker household, and HCE and ALP in bed. But there the similarity ends. In place of Christian harmony and the unperturbed meditation of one whose mind is at peace (Kevin) there is the anxious cogitation of a guilty conscience skipping from image to image in nervous disjunction. Echoes recur of motifs from elsewhere in the Wake. The phantom city is peopled with monsters: trolls, elves, goblins and fairies. Even the weather is unsettled, mixing thunder, lightning, fog and wind. Kevin's pool expands to become the Irish Sea. His tub is now a ship of the British and Irish Steam Packet Company making a right turn as it enters the bay of Dublin on its regular morning run from Liverpool. The lights in the buoys are extinguished as the shoreline of the city becomes visible. The vista — encompassing parks, tram-ways, cobbled streets and the pub itself (here called the Bristol) — is described as if it also is a painting. Certain charming details of light and dark are attributed to a female influence.

We next read an account of the reflections of the hero (and perhaps the author) on his life (and book). Like written-on inked pieces of paper, his stained bedsheets will soon be returned (galley and page proofs), carefully folded and enveloped. A seed planted long ago has developed to now supplant the sower. An old man boasts as he reminisces. He tries to retell old tales and claims that they will be told again. It's in the family. Images of Jacob and Esau — Shaun smoking a pipe on top of the hill of Slane and Shem eating lentils out of a borrowed warming-pan — pass through his mind as four clocks gong. It is the hour of changeover. Each change is a new death, bringing us ever closer to the last great change when flesh and blood must leave the bone.

Humphrey accepts his lot. It is high time. He stirs, disengaging himself from Anna, to sip his Tetley's tea. Awkward, they bump, bang, and rub each other, apologising profusely, politely and even endearingly, but still sleepily.

IV§3 A New Dispensation: Patrick, 2010 FW 475–480; 1939 FW 607.23–614.18

We experience a moment of stillness in which the suppression of darkness and sleep and the succession of light and wakefulness are intimated. The sun (and the ship) will soon show up above Dublin Bay as in the bedroom Humphrey's red hair rises above his reclined torso.

These images are inlaid in a reference to the imminent re-arrival of the ‘sailor king’ of I.2, accompanied once again by ‘two of his retinue of gallowglasses’ (mercenaries), now named as Captain Bunting and Lieutenant-Colonel Blaire. He is coming to confer a new name, “Dyk” ffogg, on the new HCE. Like his counterpart of the Marine Hotel, HCE is holding something aloft: ‘a clout capped sunbubble anaccanponied from his bequined torse.’

But are these facts correct? Humphrey is reminded that in the morning twilight or in fog or in half-sleep appearances can be deceptive. What he seems to see before him is just another image of the incident in the Park: the draper (H), two draper's assistants (J K), and the three soldiers (C, D, and G). There follows yet another theory as to the true identity of the protagonists.

The cry of Shaun (Stena, the Stone) chills him into wakefulness, but the voice of Shem (Alma, the Elm) reassures him in his dreaming. He hears the clattering of his breakfast things being brought up to him. The memory of his long dream begins to fade. Yet in somnolence he seems to remember some such things, the figure of II.2 distorted to exhibit the symbols of his family world. These signs/sigla are merely tokens (representing an archetypal family grouping) of the will to come into being that, as Schopenhauer avers, pervades the world. As the leaves begin to open to the morning sunshine, so their day-lives shall unfold. From the ashes of its own funeral pyre the Phoenix will arise.

All is passing out of the dream-world of sleep into the wide-awake world of reality. The book is inexorably drawing to an end. The dawn is daying. Yet it was all so agreeable back there among the illusions, unconfined by time and space, mixing up the high and the low, plebs and patricians, black and yellow and white. The dreamer is understandably reluctant to stir into everyday consciousness.

He half-remembers the four old men and their ass and the young girls. His gaze traverses the room to where light and shadow flicker across the window, which becomes many windows, exhibiting in multitudinous exemplars the human drama. The twelve appear as twelve locations where (in present memory) there are branches of Humphrey's tavern. But the images finally coalesce to represent, illuminated by the rising sun, another panel in the triptych of stained-glass windows in the village church. This transformation or movement begins the transition to the complex but pivotal tale (which will begin shortly) of the saint and the seer.^[392]

A new stage set is erected before us. It is now Ireland at the dawn of history and the ascending sun of dawn is transposed into a fire on top of the hill of Slane, lit at dusk on Holy Saturday by Saint Patrick to celebrate the advent of Easter. The lighting of the fire is in direct defiance of a pagan proscription that forbade the kindling of any light in the land of Ireland before the lamps had first been lit in the royal house at Tara. A sentry sees the flames ascend and immediately reports the violation to the king.

The episode proper begins with the last of the Wake's three plebeian dialogues. Muta and Juva (change and youth), watching the scene from afar, converse. After a short, partly Latin discussion as to the origin of the smoke pluming above the hill, smoke that may simply be steam issuing musically from a kettle being boiled to make tea, Muta sees a procession of monks that his companion identifies as the strange Christian, Patrick, with his Irish/Japanese bonzos or fellow priests.^[393] Speaking in a variety of Pidgin, Muta points out a tall lone chap, the Irish/Chinese arch-druid who, Juva says, is Berkeley the great philosopher (or perhaps it is Buckley, the sapper who shot the Russian General). Whoever it is, he is disgusted over the whole proceedings. He sees someone rise up:

— Who his dickhuns now rearrexes from undernearth the memorialorum?

Juva declares it is none other than High King Leary himself. To Muta's question, why is the king smiling, he answers that he is smiling that way because he has wagered a half-crown on Berkeley and two-and-six on Patrick (their coming clash is compared to a horse-race) and therefore he cannot lose no matter what the outcome. Muta notes that the king is drinking (like his counterpart in I.2). Juva says he is drinking water, a symbol of change. More precisely, a blend of tar water and baptismal water.^[394] Muta now states that it is clear to him that the acquisition of unification is followed by diversity that is inseparable from the combative instinct that results in a spirit of appeasement. Muta now borrows from Juva a hot-water bottle or warming-pan, though this may well be a fountain pen. Their discussion closes.

The piece that follows mixes the traditional form of a Chinese story with a newscast describing the events of a race-meeting in the Phoenix Park.^[395] It is first given in summation (headlined) out of politeness. The details follow. In the first part a brief image of the participants implicated in the Park incident is conjured up: two pairs of drawers (girls) and three ties (boys); but it is quickly suppressed. Patrick and Berkeley chat.

The arch-druid, wearing a seven-hued mantle emblematic of his high station (a status equal to the ri or king), opens the debate and explains his theory of colour to Patrick, who sits silent and is clothed in a plain white alb.^[396] No man, the pagan instructs him, is free in that all are subject to the multifarious illusions of the phenomenal world. All things, all the furniture of the world, animal, vegetal and mineral, appears to fallen man under but one reflection of the seven spectral gradations of solar light; namely, that one which the object is unable to absorb, and hence reflects. But, he adds, to a seer, to one who has attained the seventh degree of wisdom in druidic knowledge, all objects reveal themselves as they actually are, resplendent in the glory of the six colours retained inside them.^[397]

As Patrick cannot grasp the drift of the druid's argument, the druid re-expresses it with an example (though in so doing he reverses his own thesis), his voice increasing in loudness from a murmur to a shout as Patrick, for his part, grows hotter and hotter under his collar in diminishing apprehension.

To eyes so unsealed, the druid claims, the king's red hair appears the colour of sorrel green, whereas his orange kilt seems to be that of spinach, his breast-torc of gold that of cabbage, his green cloak that of laurel, his blue eyes that of parsley, the indigo gem in his ring that of lentils, and the very violet bruises and contusions of his features that of senna-cassia: in short, all appear green.

Patrick responds by accusing the druid of colour-blindness and false logic. He wipes his nose with a green handkerchief (a synthetic shamrock)^[398] and he thrice genuflects before the rainbow (Italian arcobaleno), the visible symbol of the invisible mystery (the spectrum) in white sunlight.^[399]

The insult to snot-green Ireland and the sight (during the genuflections) of Patrick's proffered derriere are the last straw, the very thing that up-ends the arch-druid. He raises five fingers in the air and, like Buckley, resorts to violence by throwing a blow at Patrick.^[400] Thud! The crowd raise a cheer: God save Ireland! They gaze in awe at the risen sun (Patrick having caused the sun to rise though it was sinking) before beginning to pray in Christian fashion: Per eumdem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum Filium Tuum. Tara has been converted.

Yet there has been no real change; only the order has been altered. As it was, so shall it be.^[401]

The chanting fades. The invader is welcomed, blessed, and absorbed as the third, final, and central panel of the triptych is briefly illuminated. This depicts Saint Laurence O'Toole, sometime Abbot of Glendalough, bishop and patron of Dublin, who welcomed Henry II on his arrival to secure the city for England in 1171.^[402]

Outside, daylight is growing. Wild flowers and plants of every description are unfolding in the warm sunshine. Light penetrates to their innermost parts, parts that are revealed and named as if by a second Adam.^[403] Meanwhile Humphrey's innards are at issue as he is urged to eat his breakfast, to wash himself thoroughly, and move his bowels. The night, the dream, and the book are ending out of necessity. The future, ominously announced by the thunder, has arrived and will be accepted, like the proverbial pig in a poke, by his ever-foolish, optimistic successor. It is bound to be a lovely day for marriages in the open. Shaun and Shem have agreed to bury the hatchet. The tailor shall make good the Captain's suit and trousers. All will be perfect. The ship shall steer into port. As for Issy and her lookalikes, she shall make her choice within the family and elect to marry them both, be they rich or poor, be they noble or bondsman. The Mookse and the Gripes, whom we last saw being gathered up by the washerwomen, will be coming back incessantly with all their stories, like the tales told in the Wake, from the Manor Mill Steam Laundry, Elm-Stone Lodge, Dundrum, beautifully bleached and made up, only later, like the words in the book, to be cleaned up again by some future Shem and Shaun pair, ‘every article entrusted to care going through several latherings and every lathering leaving several rinsings so as each rinse results with a dapperent rolle, cuffs for meek and chokers for sheek and a kink in the pacts for namby.’

Thus we come to the end. The reader's forbearance is sought. Themes have their times. History repeats itself. Old fires burst again into flames. Ardour and vigour father order. HCE is called on to put on his fresh new clothes and ‘step into style.’

IV§4 Witness for the Defence: The Letter, 2010 FW 481–485; 1939 FW 614.19–619.19

The bulk of this section is taken up with the text of the most complete version of the ‘Revered Letter’ about which we have read so much in preceding chapters (especially in I.5). Before discussing the section proper, it is not amiss to say a few words concerning the history of the letter's composition both in real and in fictional time-space.

It was in December 1923 (merely a matter of months since he began work on the Wake) that Joyce inscribed the first draft of the letter that was at the time intended to appear in I.5 (logically enough, I.5 being the letter chapter). Joyce, however, changed his mind. In January 1924, after developing the piece through three fair copies and a typescript, he extracted it from I.5 and laid it aside.^[404]

It was to remain out of hand but not actually out of mind — the whole text of Finnegans Wake is saturated with references to it — for the next fourteen years. In 1938, several months only before his work came to an end, Joyce retrieved it, re-arranged it and relocated it in its present position immediately preceding ALP's final monologue. He added a brief preamble to smooth over the transition from the Patrick piece and of course subjected it to augmentation. Yet it is still the same basic letter, a gossipy epistle defending HCE dictated by ALP (she is illiterate) and written by Shem to the King.

A good question is whether or not this letter is the same (in whole or in part) as the letter ostensibly originating in Boston (Mass.) that was scratched out of the midden by the slant-eyed hen. Is it authoritative and who is its author? In the earlier I.5 description the letter at issue reads as follows:

Dear whom it proceeded to mention Maggy well & allathome's health well only the hate turned the milk on the van Houtens and the general's elections with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thank you Chriesty and with grand funferall of poor Father Michael don't forget until life's and Muggy well are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now close it with fondest to the twoinns with four crosskisses for holy paul holey corner holipoli whollyisland pee ess from affectionate largelooking tache of tch (inkblot or teastain)

The notable point about the above letter is that despite a similarity in structure it does not seem to be even a partial reading of the final (full) version. It is perhaps rather a paradigmatic letter, the first of a series (history always repeating itself with variation) by Anna Livia and her ‘anticollaborators’. Is it ALP's first draft? Most commentators on Finnegans Wake accept that within the book the letter stands as synecdoche for the book itself. In this way, by discussing the letter, characters and/or narrators can talk freely about the book that they themselves are a part of without the narrative collapsing in paradox and self-reference. Other more formal correspondences also exist.

But to resume. The sun has come up. The laundry, breakfast, and the letter have turned up. Humphrey has been exhorted repeatedly to wake, wash, eat, and read. And yet he still lies abed with Anna beside him. It is the end of his dream. On waking, the memory of a dream fades and we begin to forget it. Yet those truths emanating from the unconscious that underlie and that are revealed through the dream are not thereby lost or forgotten. They will reveal (remember) themselves through the inevitable day-to-day return of the repressed: ‘from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word.’ Nevertheless these revelations will be involuntary and will find expression only through slips, sics, tics, and tendencies.

At 481.05 (614.23) we are asked ‘Have we cherished expectations? Are we for liberty of perusiveness?’^[405] Do we really expect the dawning day to be any better than the day that has passed? Do we even expect it to be any different? Do we truly seek revelation? Why? What is the dream? Where are we? ‘A plainplanned liffeyism assemblements Eblania's conglomerate horde.’ Anna Livia has put Humphrey back together again, the reassembled fragments constituting a new entity, resurrected literature, in the city on the plain of the Liffey (the ‘assemblements’), Dublin (called Eblana by Ptolemy), beneath the hill of Howth (the ‘conglomerate horde’).^[406]

It is time for breakfast. The passage which follows, 481.09-26 (614.27-615.10)_, gives a detailed account of the digestion of eggs and the formation of new tissue and/or excrements. In the process a multilayered metaphor illustrates several recurring motifs and notions of continuity through change found elsewhere in the text. To begin with, the stomach or perhaps the book/letter/baby-generator is likened to a churning mechanical contrivance, a ‘wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer’, clearly circular but also square. It is a ‘tetradomational gazebocroticon’ — a description that conjures up images of a four-domed multidimensional turreted house or perhaps a marriage bed (this last analogy is confirmed by the direct allusion to the four old men, the gospellers, the peeping bedposts Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). The machine is ‘autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process’, which is to say it runs itself and can absorb and mix just about anything. This in fact is its ‘verypetpurpose.’ When the input has been decomposed and its elements separated out by the method of diffusion through a membranous partition (dialysis), they are subsequently recombined. To what end? So that the food-fragments of Humphrey's breakfast may be converted into new tissue, restoring him; so that the sexual proclivities, recurrent situations and stock characteristics of H may be transferred through A (through the genes, the family environment, and story-telling) to his successor; and so that the detritus of old literature can be reworked into a new letter. The process of transmission inevitably involves some changes (genetic mutations, garbled messages, and small alterations in [geno]type, letters, words, and sentences); still, the basic structure — a dynamic network of cross-connections — holds together and comes out more or less the same. One might say that the hen that pecked the letter out of the dump laid the egg containing the message that H ate. One might also note that by the end of the present passage cause and effect, chicken and egg, eater and eaten, become hopelessly confused as H and A (HCE and ALP), letter-reader and letter-writer, are commingled.^[407]

We pass now to the letter which begins with ‘Dear.’ This ‘Dear’, lacking as it does a name or title to complete it, might as easily be a genteel exclamation or a whispered endearment. It continues: ‘And we go on to Dirtdump. Revered. May we add majesty?’ From this we may adduce that the addressee is, after all, the King. ‘Dirtdump’ represents dear dirty Dublin, a city notorious for gossip and character assassination (defence against which was the ostensible cause for the writing of the letter in the first place). The word also refers to the midden or dung heap where the letter's recorded history began. What is significant is that in both cases ‘Dirtdump’ is destination as well as point of departure, thereby completing an internal Wake cycle. The letter contains its own fair share of gossip and, if words could kill, character assassination. If, as in III.3, HCE wipes his arse with it or if it is looked upon as his breakfast excrements (input or output) then the letter is surely on its way back to the dungheap.^[408]

ALP deals seriatim with the principal charges laid against her husband and herself. Her writing is that of a plucky little woman, still vigorous though middle-aged, who gives as good as she gets. For herself she uses the royal pronoun ‘we’, her handsome husband Humphrey is ‘he’, while their chief enemy the snake, a cad known as Magrath or McGrath Bros (‘mucksrats’, ‘the brother me craws’, ‘Foon MacCrawl brothers’, etc.), is a curious amalgam of singular and plural.

She opens with a denunciation of the slander in general, declaring that those who brought it up shall come to no good. They ‘should be first born’ like Earwicker was. It was on top of the long car as it rolled towards Dublin on the road between Williamstown and Ailesbury^[409] that she first saw the love-light in his eye when he looked at her ‘as if to pass away in a cloud.’ When he woke up in a sweat beside her it was wishing to be pardoned he was and he said he dreamed she had a lovely face. Her husband is a man that never watered the milk, unlike his business rivals, those snakes in the grass the whispering McGrath Brothers with their overpriced butter and bacon!^[410] If she were to repeat what that creepy-crawly caffler said! Strictly it is forbidden by the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Commandments to spread false rumours, or to covet a neighbour's goods or hiss wife. The slimes, the liars, they had the shame to suggest… Never! So may the Lord forgive them (the McGrath Brothers) their trespasses against Mr O'Reilly (HCE) now about to get up. Why, for the fill of a pipe of tobacco or less couldn't she just pass the word and someone would make a corpse of somebody with the keenest pleasure by a private shooting and not leave enough of him for the peelers to pick up and make three fifths of a man out of.^[411] Peace! From childhood Humphrey had a hairy chest, hairy hands and hairy eyebrows. A right sight he was to behold and always attractive to women. Let all wriggling reptiles note that!

She passes into pseudo-legalese jargon and confuses in a blanket condemnation the snake (pest!) and the two girls (prostitutes!) involved in the park nuisance. More confusion follows as her thoughts accumulate and the letter approaches an etiolated and (as it turns out) premature conclusion. As with Molly in ‘Penelope’, it is less that she mixes up the men but that their images replace one another with unseemly rapidity. She reviews Magrath Brothers' business career and ponders how did the hen (the ‘coerogenal hun’) know the size of an egg?^[412] Magrath was a ‘skulksman’ at one time (presumably a Scottish store detective) and then he was fired from Cloon's (like Bloom from Cuffe's) for giving lip. The truth about sausages, she is proud to say, is that statistics show that the old firm's (HCE's) are ‘most eatenly appreciated by metropolonians.’ She draws attention to the Workman's Compensation Act and to the ‘magnets of our midst’ (the McGrath parasites) having been foisted on her (this suggests that Humphrey did the firing and that they're still paying for it). As for her husband setting a bad example in the sight of the military, did space permit she could show that what he intended was simply the ‘mitigation of the king's evils.’ After the alleged nuisance HCE had made a hasty exit, skipping up the steps of the Wellington Monument to hide behind its huge phallic obelisk: he ‘staired up the step after’ by the ‘power of the gait’ to the ‘giantstand of manunknown.’ He was safe, bulletproof and ballad-proof, and impervious to ‘haily, icy and missilethroes.’^[413]

Before closing, she adds a moral dialogue:

Mrs Stores Humphreys: So you are expecting trouble, Pondups, from the domestic service questioned?
Mr Stores Humphreys: Just as there is a good in even, Levia, my cheek is a compleet bleenk.

She wishes the king a hundred and eleven and a thousand and one blessings, then starts again. She cannot remember the persons involved, who was who; but she won't forget the arrangement. Whatever and whoever, who anyway would bother to lift her head from her pillow and try to visualise a mean stinker the like of ‘Foon MacCrawl brothers’, the mystery man of the Park murders.^[414] Cannonballs, she says, will empty the stomach out of him. One has to laugh! In her mind at least, McGrath is already as good as dead. He'll want all his fairy godmothers to redress him after that! And he'll need all his cutthroat thugs to piece him together again. The ‘foon’ is finished. He has literally stuffed his last pudding. ‘His fooneral will sneak pleace by creeps o'clock, toosday.’ It shall be a grand occasion with drinks provided. Royalty will attend in person. Photographs of the event will appear in the papers, in the Morning Post and in the Boston Transcript. Females will be predominant in the throngs gathered to listen to that lovely parson, a born gentleman, poor Father Michael. So let the King try not to forget about it. The grand funeral will soon shortly occur. McGrath's remains must be removed before ‘eaght hours shorp.’^[415]

She then smartly signs off: From Your Majesty's Most Duteous, etc.

But she goes on! Having settled to her satisfaction Humphrey's account, she turns her attention to the slanderous allegations laid at her feet. To fully comprehend this second stratum of ALP's letter, it helps to recall the following pertinent statements from III.4:

1) Magravius (the McGrath Brothers) knows from spies that Anita (ALP) has formerly committed double sacrilege with Michael (Father Michael), a perpetual curate.
2) Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla (Sully, McGrath's thug), an orthodox savage and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani.
3) Anita is informed that Gillia (Lily Kinsella), the schismatical wife of Magravius, is visited clandestinely by Barnabus (the ‘kissing solicitor’), an advocate of Honuphrius (HCE).

Well, she continues, apparently believing that such gossip has preceded her through an anonymous letter, about her alleged experiences with a clerical friend: well, what about it? Her shape as a juvenile was much admired from the rear. Her long auburn hair cascaded down o reach her innocent thighs. If all the MacCrawls would only handle virgins like Michael could! But never mind Michael. About the cad, she writes, the cad with the pipe's wife, Lily Kinsella (whom, she adds, only married that sneak to clear her name) and the kissing solicitor, well, now! And the thicks (the Boot Lane brigade), she writes, was got up by Sully. And Lily had a certain medicine brought her in a licensed victualler's bottle.^[416] For shame! As far as she knows the waxy (the shoemaker, Sully) is at present in hospital and may never come out. And if one^[417] were to look in through one's letterbox one day at about twenty-eight minutes to five, one would be surprised to see Lily on the sofa ‘pulling a low’ and one would begin to jump to see what goes on besides solicitor's business!

Alluding to the insinuations that she was treated ‘not very grand’ she asks how this could be when the police and everybody were always bowing to her whenever she stepped out. Furthermore, she was never chained to a chair or followed about by a widower. ‘Meet a great civilian’, she says of her husband, ‘as gentle as a mushroom and a very attractable.’ To whomever it may concern, she writes, let it be known that Sully is a thug ‘from all he drunk, though he is a rattling fine bootmaker in his profession.’ If she were to complain to the police steps would be taken to ensure that his health and head would be very effectively broken by the constables into a number of small pieces.

Well, she winds up, she will soon be resuming ‘more polite conversation’ with a hundred percent human (HCE) over the ‘natural bestness’ and lawful business of pleasure after his good few mugs of ale and a suck of his pipe. For whoever likes that ‘urogynal pan of cakes’ thanks are due to ‘Adam, our former first Finnlatter and our grocerest churcher’ (HCE as Adam Findlater, a notable protestant grocer) for this beautiful ‘crossmess parzel.’^[418]

Well, she at last concludes, she simply likes their damned cheek ‘wagging here’ (earwigging or eavesdropping as well as gossiping) about the rhyming couplet (HCE and herself) in their comfortable bed and about him being ‘as bothered that he pausably could by the fallth of hampty damp’ (being rendered deaf and a stutterer through his fall and his faults). Certain ‘reformed’ people are properly saying he is quite agreeably deaf.

Hence we've lived in two worlds. He is another he what stays under the himp of holth. The herewaker of our hamefame is his real namesame who will get himself up, erect, confident and heroic, whom, young as of old, for my daily comfreshenall, this wee one woos.

All my love to you, Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Her postscript refers to Issy, Soldier Rollo's sweetheart,^[420] who has grown up and, fed up with ‘nonsery reams’, is decked out regally and living it up.

Not ALP. She is in rags, and is worn out.

IV§5 ALP's monologue: Farewell, 2010 FW 486–493; 1939 FW 619.20–628

This final section is generally considered to be the most accessible, least arcane, and most lucid and emotive passage in all of Finnegans Wake and, after I.8 (the river chapter), probably the best known. It is structured to express the final stage in the river's movement, its running by quays through the city down to the open sea, to Dublin Bay and beyond. It is the final, deeply melancholy reflections of the Wake's great heroine, source and author of the ills that flesh is heir to. Her personal memory weakens. She forgets even as she traverses from age to youth the events of her own and her husband's life. She is a crone, wakening, rising, and exhorting an old man to get up, to dress, and to come with her and walk down memory lane. She is a mother, soothing, cleaning, and covering a man-child. She is a young girl lusted after by an aggressive suitor. She is a girl-child going in fear of a wild father.

Both in voice and in tone the passage is very different from the Letter that it follows directly, almost abruptly, without transitional or connective interlude. In style it is unique. We do not find in it the elaborate and dense textuality so much in evidence elsewhere; there are few qualifications and no parentheses. Rather, this continuous nine-page narrative paragraph consists entirely of short sentences, many (not excluding the last) foreshortened and truncated. The language is simple, straightforward, spoken rather than thought, and addressed to a silent (probably unconscious) auditor. Only towards the end when the river undertakes its final plunge into oblivion and namelessness does the monologue shift into true soliloquy — talking aloud to oneself — and on that last page we can at last detect the authentic and unmediated voice of James Joyce himself.

Soft morning! She greets the city, which is shrouded in a mantle of fine soft rain, hardly more than a fog.^[421] Lsp!, a water-sound, she is ‘Leafy, speafing.’ Lpf! A leaf falls on water; then another, and another, until slowly the river is dappled in a green mosaic of fallen leaves. The leaves are her dress. It is for her golden wedding. She tries to rouse Humphrey:

— Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!

He lies still, reclined from head to toe, after his nine hours' sleep. The long night is over. She is speaking, his golden one, as he called her, the exaggerater.^[422]

— You did so drool. I was so sharm.

Good and rested, she yawns in wakefulness, yawhawaw. She has his clothes all ready for him, the day-shirt just back from the cleaners, his neck cloth, collar, shoes, and scarf, even his coat and umbrella. So let him get up and stand up tall and look fine for her, blooming in the very latest fashion, second-to-none. He shall be ‘Proudpurse Alby’ to her ‘pooraroon Eireen’, swell England to timorous Ireland. She thinks how he reminds her of someone else, a sailor she once knew who had bangles in his ears. Perhaps it was someone else entirely, she can't be sure. Anyway, let him get up and come with her for an early morning walk.

The children are fast asleep and can be left as they lie. There is no school today. Shem and Shaun, ‘the sehm asnuh’, are so contrary yet so alike and so like him, two brothers as different as north and south. When one of him sighs and one of him cries 'tis you all over. Perhaps they owe their contrariness to the two old ‘crony aunts’, their godmotheres who held them out to the water font, ‘queer Mrs Quickenough and odd Miss Doddpebble.’^[423] He was as pleased as Punch, she remembers, that birth day, and boasting to everybody, but the night after he was wanton again, telling her what he wouldn't give to have a girl.

— Your wish was me will.

Issy was born, as she was herself before her, out of the blue. If only the poor child could make up her mind who to choose! Yet she's merry still and will marry yet. There's time enough for sorrow. But anyhow let him come now with her for their walk, their very own sentimental journey. There's light enough. She'll not need her lamp, which the wind would blow out in any event, nor need he bring his rucksack.

Look, the morning is so soft; it's the softest morning ever. It doesn't look like rain. Still, she'll wear her old plaid shawl. And afterwards they can have trout for breakfast^[424] with polony and black pudding to bring out the taste of the tea; something special. Not like the usual: Oatmeal time! All out of bed! The kids bawling and crying and cups and kettles chattering and clattering and the kitchen cluttered up.

Thinking of clothes, she reminds herself to ask him about the new girdle he promised her. But for all her exhortations he refuses to budge, even to stretch out his great big paw of a hand. She looks at him lying there, at the way he holds his head. Then she shuts her eyes so as not to see him as he is now, but to see him instead as he once was: a youth in his florizel, an innocent boy peeling a twig, a child beside a white steed, a child of hope. But he is old and innocence far. Leave it! They will take their walk before Fox Goodman the sexton tolls the bells in the church or the birds in the trees begin to sing. Yet she sees and hears them: white birds, gulls. Their far cries are for him lying beside her.

— Look, there are yours off, high on high! And cooshes, sweet good luck they're cawing you, Coole!

In her mind's eye, they are already on their amble, out walking. Not such big strides, huddy foddy! Don't crush my new shoes I saved so long for. Isn't walking good for the health, though? She is bringing him to a place they know well, by yonder Howth. She could bring him there and her eyes closed, ‘and I still by you in bed.’ They are alone and have lots of time on their hands, time before the events of the past are re-enacted. Before the hounds are let loose and the citizens go chasing him all over the countryside, wanting to entomb him after what he did in the park. Just because the two hussies thought they heard a cock crow and saw him standing there and the three soldiers behind him. But he came safe through. Enough of that old woman's gossip! They might call on the old Lord.^[425] He must remember to doff his hat when he steps into the presence! He must repeat, How do you do, your majesty? She will bow with graceful courtesy and say, What'll you take to link to light a pike on porpoise, plaise?^[426] Perhaps the Earl will knight him or make him the First Chief Magistrate. Her silly head is full of fancies.

They can be heading off now. He knows the way, surely. The route they are going has oft been traversed by others in cars and horses and carts. Lovers have lain there, giving the mare the fright of its life. They can just go and sit down there on the Head in the wild heather, alone, just the two of them again, side by side, just sit there in the peace of the early morning and scan the horizon and see if that letter he is always waiting for turns up, thrown ashore by the waves. She tells him how she made it up herself ‘with a prompt from a primer’, herself and Shem, stuffing into it all the bits of knowledge that she picked up. It was an arduous task.

— Every letter is a hard but yours is the hardest crux ever.

It will turn up all right, some day it will, she promises, today perhaps, as in her mind it divides in two: hers, buried again in the midden, and his, floating in a bottle on the waves: ‘bob, bob, bottledby. Blob.’

They could build that little cottage he always promised her and cohabit like respectable people. At night they could look through the window at the stars twinkling in the sky. But, sure, it's all nonsense. All his grand planning and plotting and the little it brought! What little she cares about it now! She has a home of a sort, a pub by a park. He had better not start his playacting again out there in the open — God forbid! — for the whole world to see. Some day he will simply have to reform, once and for all.

She has the loveliest dress to wear this morning and the most adorable perfume.^[427]

— Sm! I'm in everywince nasturtls. Even in Houlth's nose.

She'd be happy if she only knew who he was exactly, the grand old marauder, that she met when still a girl. It is well she remembers how on hearing that a captain had come to town looking for a suit of clothes she nearly fell of the pile of samples! Still, he wasn't the worst. He did her fine, the only man was ever known could eat the crusts of lobsters. Heavens, the night he twice took her, making the most royal of noises! Anyhow, she will point out all sorts of interesting places to him on their walk. Some of the old lot are still there yet, even those four old codgers, loitering as ever in the back of the snug, muttering about being the widows of Dan O'Connell and still writing their ‘Finglas Since the Flood’, their kingly work in progress.

— Snf?

Is it a turf-fire she smells? Just look at all the parish roofs of the blessed city! And all the mushrooms come up during the night, acres and rods and perches of them! Let him take care not to stumble. She's lapped so long. Tiredness is overtaking her, a tiredness like never before. Soon she must leave him, to part just where first they met so long ago.^[428] A sudden wind chills her. She shivers. She was but a teen, a tailor's daughter. And he was the ‘fiercest freaky ever followed a pining child round the sluppery table with a forkful of fat.’ It was long, long ago, all so long ago. Her memory grows dim as the light grows brighter. She senses death approach and knows her river water is mixing with the sea.

— I'm getting mixed.

She is passing out. In her place is another.^[429] A younger's there, a ‘whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing’ swimming in her ‘hindmoist.’ Let them be happy as she once was happy.

— Be happy, dear ones!

Let her reign now. Her time has come. She did her best when she was let. All her cares and all her troubles!

— And is there one who understands me?

Coldly she looks on life.

— How small it's all!

Even he.

— I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're but a puny!

Her destiny appears out of a mist before her, in the sea and the waves and the storms, a sea she loathes and yet longs for.

— O bitter ending!

She prays:

And its old and old it's weary I go back to you,
my cold father,
mother,
and old it's sad & weary mother
I go back to you,
my cold father
my cold mad father
My cold mad bleary father,
till the sight of him makes me saltsick
and I rush into your arms^[430]

Time and tide wait for no man. The inevitable efflux into the unknown, into the deepest sleep, the darkness of a night newly beginning, consumes her, stripped of memories, engulfed, passing through the fleeing years into oblivion.

A way, a lone, a lost, a last, a loved, a long, the^[431]