The sound of bells 

Just a few weeks before the publication of Ulysses on 2 February 1922 Joyce added a paragraph to the Ithaca episode that explicitly linked Stephen’s and Bloom’s reaction to the chimes of St. George’s Church at 1:30 a.m. (17.1228-33) on June 17th.1

What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?

By Stephen:

Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet.

Iubilantium te virginum. Chorus excipiat.

By Bloom:  

Heigho, heigho,

Heigho, heigho.

Whereas the reader knows that the bells triggered Heigho, heigho in Bloom’s mind, there was no indication till then that Stephen’s memories of Liliata rutilanium, a prayer said over his dying mother (1.276) and 1.736-39), were elicited by the sound of bells. To make the words go with the chimes Joyce left out “te Confessorum” after “Liliata rutilantium” thereby creating four bits separated by full stops.

Unless, and this remains speculative, Stephen walking up the path from the Fortyfoot heard the bell of St. Joseph’s Church, Glasthule, from about half a mile away. Bloom notices it is quarter to nine (“Quarter to.” 1.549) when he hears the bells chime at the end of Calypso. This might confirm an instance of synchronicity between the two characters among several others in the early six episodes. Stephen is supposed to teach at Mr Deasy’s school at nine o’clock. And the reader may rightly wonder why walking up the path from the Fortyfoot Stephen should think of that passage from the last rites again.

Bloom’s “heigho” has not received any attention by commentators: Too obvious probably seemed the association with bells, but oddly enough documentary evidence for this is strangely meagre. This may serve as a rare example:

Heigh-ho! rings now the marriage bell,

Ringing out gladness. Yes, I am a bride

(Margaret Tufts Yardley in The New Jersey Scrap Book of Women Writers

                             Vol. 1, 1893, p. 418)

“Sing heigh-ho” as an invitation to merriment is far more frequent and popular. “Hey ho”, as the OED defines a spelling variant, is “an utterance, apparently of nautical origin, and marking the rhythm of movement in heaving or hauling often used in the burdens [refrains] of songs”.

The chimes of loud, dark iron of St. George’s church, however, remind Bloom of “Poor Dignam!”, an acquaintance whose funeral he is going to attend later in the morning. The OED’s definition of the interjection “heigh-ho” reflects the standard meaning of the expression in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, and suitably reads: “An exclamation usually expressing yawning, sighing, languor, weariness, disappointment.” The corresponding noun is defined as “a loud or audible sigh” as in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (ii. i. 300). It was still popular in 1888 when Gilbert and Sullivan wrote The Yeoman Guard with its well-known song:

When maiden loves, she sits and sighs,

She wanders to and fro;

Unbidden tear-drops fill her eyes,

And to all questions she replies,

With a sad "Heigh-ho!"

In the context of the Odyssey, “heigho” would also be a plausible term for Ulysses, about to leave the nymph Calypso, to encourage his sailors to put their backs into it: heigh ho / heave ho. There are several shanties which use “heigh-ho” as a refrain. So Ulysses-Bloom’s “heigho” turns out, to use an epithet applied by Homer to Ulysses, to be polytropos or “much-travelled”.

Harald Beck