"O weep for the hower when eve aleaves bower!"

(387.32-389.29)  After a relatively straightforward first four pages of this fourth chapter of Book II of the Wake, I've hit a denser -- or perhaps more accurately, a more obscure -- passage today.  The reading begins by resuming Johnny's address.  He's still on the subject of Merkin Cornyngwham's drowning.  Johnny says that the "arzurian deeps" have covered Cornyngwham's bones, and he adds that his widow is preparing her memoirs in tribute to him.  As we've seen throughout the Wake, this is another example of the father being displaced by the son:  "Where the old conk crusied now croons the yunk."  In this sense, Cornyngwham is another example of King Mark and HCE, and Johnny elaborates on this at the conclusion of his address.  Stating the names and some other words backward (for instance, "Kram of Llawnroc" is Mark of Cornwall), Johnny says that Mark exited through a door and Tristan entered the room, where he proceeded to cause Iseult to tumble into an embrace.  Johnny's address ends with him sobbing ("Sobbos.") and asking for salvation ("Sabbus.").

Immediately following Johnny's address comes the address of Marcus, who takes up the theme of death on the sea.  He reminds his peers of the "Flemish armada, all scattered, and all officially drowned" off the coast of Ireland after having converted "our first marents" and "Lapoleon."  Next, he brings up "the Frankish floot of Noahsdobahs," which disembarked "from under Motham General Bonaboche."  After the Frankish fleet appeared, a man (Napoleon?  HCE?  Mark?  Tristan?) arrived and conquered, "poghuing her scandalous and very wrong, the maid, in single combat, under the sycamores, amid the bludderings from the boom and all the gallowsbirds in Arrah-na-Poghue."  This seduction/invasion occurred near the Queen's Colleges, which, as Marcus recalls, served as the site for "grandest gloriaspanquost universal howldmoutherhibber lectures on anarxaquy out of doxarchology."  These lectures were received by the collegians, the saints, the sages, and the religious dissenters.  

After going off on a long tangent related to those lectures (a tangent I'm not having the easiest time following on this read through), Marcus returns to the seducer/invader near the Colleges and/or Tristan in the boat, who the four old men (and perhaps those in attendance at the lectures) hear "kiddling and cuddling her, after the gouty old galahat, with his peer of quinnyfears and his troad of thirstuns, so nefarious."

In a sense, the address Marcus gives is just as much a recycling as it is a continuation of Johnny's address.  Both have as their major themes the scandal of Tristan and Iseult's affair and the almost sentimental yearning for the days of old.  More to come tomorrow . . . .