Seas' ruler

The strains of the British patriotic anthem Rule, Britannia! sound in various parts of Ulysses. As Haines stands gazing over the bay with eyes as "pale as the sea," Stephen thinks of him as "The seas' ruler." The phrase comes back into his mind in Nestor, and more exact echoes of "rule the waves" occur in Eumaeus and Cyclops. The Citizen also alludes contemptuously to the rhyming phrase: "That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the earth. The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber on the face of God's earth and their land in the hands of a dozen gamehogs and cottonball barons. That's the great empire they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs."

John Hunt 2011

Decorated plate made in Liverpool ca. 1793-94, displayed at the Chateau de Vizille. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

British mezzo Sarah Connolly singing "Rule, Britannia" at the Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, September 2009. Source: YouTube.