Saturday, October 31, 2015

"How glad you'll be I waked you!"

(625.8-627.4)  And so I've reached the penultimate passage of this project.  ALP's monologue becomes clearer as the day grows brighter.  Outside, she can see "the muchrooms, come up during the night."  Dublin ("Eblanamagna") can be seen "loomening up out of the dumblynass," although it's "still sama sitta" (the same city, and, as Tindall points out, the same shit).  McHugh notes that the Liffey went completely dry for a minute or two in 1452, a fact that gives added dimension to ALP's instruction to HCE:  "If I lose my breath for a minute or two don't speak, remember!  Once it happened, so it may again."  

Looking back on her life, ALP has had her share of suffering and sadness, and she mourns the dead.  "Why I'm all these years within years in soffran, allbeleaved," she says.  "To hide away the tear, the parted.  It's thinking of all.  The brave that gave their.  The fair that wore.  All them that's gunne."  But, she says, "I'll begin again in a jiffey."  And when her life and her river begin to flow again, HCE will be rejuvenated as well:  "My!  How well you'll feel!  For ever after."

As the wind blows outside ("Wrhps, that wind as if out of norewere!"), ALP once again thinks about the past, when she met HCE as a child and they began their courtship.  "How you said how you'd give me the keys of me heart," she remembers.  "And we'd be married till delth to uspart.  And though dev do espart.  O mine!"  She senses, that HCE is changing now, though.  For a moment, she thinks it might be her that's changing ("I'm getting mixed," she says), but then it becomes clear:  "Yes, you're changing, sonhusband, and you're turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again."  HCE, whose position is being replaced by his sons, is undergoing another metamorphosis, and it's just in time for the Wake to conclude (and begin again).

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