"I am leafy speafing."

(619.20-621.8)  I've now officially hit the home stretch in this project.  The final paragraph of Finnegans Wake begins on page 619 and stretches almost nine full pages to the book's end.  I've got a busy week coming up here, so I may not be able to meet my goal of finishing by the end of the month.  If I don't, though, I'll finish for sure on Sunday, which is November 1.  I think Joyce would be pleased with me finishing the Wake either on Halloween or All Saints' Day.

On to the text.  The final paragraph begins with light finally shining down on Dublin:  "Soft morning, city!"  Our narrator for the rest of the book is ALP, who tells us, "I am leafy speafing" (she's both Anna Livia and the River Liffey).  It is silent around the house and city.  "Not a sound, falling," she says.  "Lispn!  No wind no word.  Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves."

She tells HCE, who is on the bed beside her, to wake up:  "Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!  Or is it only so mesleems?  On your pondered palm.  Reclined from cape to pede."  ALP says that there's "a great poet" in HCE, but lately he has "bored me to slump."  Still, they're both "good and rested."  She gathers his clothes, which have freshly arrived from the laundry and once again urges him to wake up:  "And stand up tall!  Straight.  I want to see you looking fine for me."  She says that HCE reminds her "of a wonderdecker I once," a man who was perhaps one of her old lovers or someone who featured prominently in her dream of the previous evening (she calls back to figures featured throughout the Wake, like Wellington, "the Iren duke's").  The children are still sleeping, for there's "no school today."  The boys are "so contrairy," and take too much after HCE, it seems:  "When one of him sighs or one of him cries 'tis you all over.  No peace at all."  We learn that HCE desperately wanted a daughter:  "[W]hat you wouldn't give to have a girl!  Your wish was mewill.  And, lo, out of a sky!"  ALP says that her and HCE won't "disturb their sleeping duties," but it's time for them to journey into the day.  "Come!" she says.  "Step out of your shell!"