Bloom hears "A sudden screech of laughter" from inside the Telegraph
office and enters to find Ned Lambert reading aloud the Dan
Dawson speech that he had tried unsuccessfully to read from
his newspaper in the funeral carriage. The following section
of Aeolus, in which he hears the first of many
sentences from this speech in praise of Ireland's natural
beauties, receives a fitting headline: "ERIN, GREEN GEM OF THE
SILVER SEA." Commentators have identified many possible
inspirations for this phrase, but no one has yet remarked on
the political resonances that the image of a green gem carries
in the text of Joyce's novel.
Gifford notes the possible influence of three different
literary works. In Shakespeare's Richard II John of
Gaunt patriotically praises England as "This
precious stone set in the silver sea" (2.1.46). In Let
Erin Remember the Days of Old (1808) Thomas Moore
writes of a time "Ere the emerald gem of the western world
/ Was set in the crown of a stranger." Another Irishman,
orator and politician John Philpot Curran (1750-1817), wrote
in Cushla Ma Chree, "Dear Erin, how
sweetly thy green bosom rises! / An emerald set in the
ring of the sea!" In Curran's poem, Ireland is the
speaker's cuisle mo chroidhe, the "pulse of my
heart." Joyce's phrase does not precisely reproduce any of
these expressions.
In an essay on James Joyce Online Notes John Simpson
shows that there are still other possible sources for the
phrase, all of them likewise inexact fits. In an earlier poem,
Remember Thee, Moore called his country the "first
gem of the sea," and his phrase was taken up by many
Irish nationalists. Both England and Ireland were often called
"gem of the sea" or "gem of the ocean" in the 19th century,
and the American poet Ina Coolbrith, in a 1911 poem titled Tom
Moore, called "Erin" the "Green gem of the ocean."
Simpson believes that Joyce added Shakespeare's "the silver
sea" to some version of this "gem of the sea" meme,
observing that various writers had "commandeered it when
needed to Ireland."
All of this source-study seems plausible, but none of it
addresses the intratextual foundation of the image or the
diversity of its implications. In Telemachus, when
Haines takes out a cigarette and offers one to Stephen, the
narrative notes his "smooth silver case in which
twinkled a green stone." Given Stephen's resentment of
Haines and the English in general, it is difficult not to
regard this image as symbolyzing imperial conquest, and this
hunch is confirmed in Oxen of the Sun when English
subjugation becomes linked, via "an emerald ring," with
the papal bull that gave King Henry II dominion over Ireland.
The "GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA" strongly recalls Haines'
green stone set in a silver case, so readers are encouraged to
ask whether the nationalist feelings embedded in Moore's
"emerald gem" may carry over into Aeolus.
They most certainly do. When the headline first sounds it
seems to apply only to Dan Dawson's catalogue of natural
wonders, but an exchange at the end of this section and the
beginning of the next adds another dimension:
— What is it? Mr
Bloom asked.
— A recently discovered
fragment of Cicero's, professor MacHugh answered with pomp of
tone. Our lovely land.
SHORT BUT TO THE POINT
— Whose land? Mr Bloom
said simply.
— Most pertinent question,
the professor said between his chews. With an accent on the
whose.
Bloom's question and the professor's reply may be short, but
the "point" that Ireland's land is not its own will soon be
receiving a lot of attention in Aeolus.
