"Work your progress!"

(471.35-473.25)  The final pages of the second chapter of Book III of Finnegans Wake consist of a kind of salute to Shaun, coming from a general narrator, or perhaps Isabel (if we're thinking that Isabel delivered the final lines in yesterday's reading).  "[M]ay the good people speed you, rural Haun, export stout fellow that you are," the narrator says.  His time has passed, and the baby talk of the infants has turned into the wise language of the preachers:  "The googoos of the suckabolly in the rockabeddy are become the copiosity of wiseableness of the friarylayman in the pulpitbarrel."  

The narrator bids Shaun to return to Ireland, but recognizes that he may be gone for good.  "My long farewell I send to you, fair dream of sport and game and always something new," the narrator says.  "Gone is Haun!  My grief, my ruin!"  While Shaun's "paling light lucerne we ne'er may see again," dozens of people long for the day when Shaun might return again.  The narrator tells Shaun that "life will be a blank without you because avicuum's not there at all," and adds that we're all fated to fade into "the yesterselves we tread to turnupon."

The final paragraph further (and explicitly) ties this chapter detailing Shaun's departure into the overall structure of the book.  The narrator marvels at how Shaun did his "nine furlong mile in slick and slapstick record time" and emphasizes that "your feat of passage will be contested with you and through you, for centuries to come."  In other words, Shaun's journey will be replicated throughout the course of human history.  Just as the phoenix once rose from the ashes, "so too will our own sphoenix spark spirit his spyre and sunward stride the rampante flambe."  In fact, the narrator can in fact see a brighter moment in history approaching:  "Ay, already the sombrer opacities of the gloom are sphanished!"  With that in mind, the narrator offers Shaun words of encouragement:  "Brave footsore Haun!  Work your progress!  Hold to!  Now!  Win out, ye divil ye!"  Now is the time to act, for soon the day will come, the dream will end, Finnegan will wake, and the present will become the past:

Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep.  Amain.