Mother Grogan
"Mother Grogan" is a figure in the anonymous
Irish song Ned Grogan. She enters Ulysses
with Mulligan's clowning about urination in Telemachus:
"When I makes tea I makes tea . . . And when I makes water I
makes water . . . Begob, ma'am, says Mrs
Cahill, God send you don't make them in the one pot."
The song appears to have charmed Mulligan because of the old
woman's commendable frankness about sex.
Gifford and Seidman reproduce the first verse:
Ned Grogan, dear joy, was the son of his mother,
And as like her, it seems, as one pea to another;
But to find out his dad, he was put to the rout,
As many folks wiser have been, joy, no doubt.
To this broth of a boy oft his mother would say,
"When the moon shines, my jewel, be making your hay;
Always ask my advice, when the business is done;
For two heads, sure, you'll own, are much better than one."
This pragmatism about the copulative act also inspires
Mulligan to joke about infidelity. In Oxen of the Sun,
Dixon comments on his gravid belly: "For answer Mr Mulligan,
in a gale of laughter at his smalls, smote himself
bravely below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an
admirable droll mimic of Mother Grogan (the most
excellent creature of her sex though 'tis pity she's a
trollop): There's a belly that never bore a bastard."
JH 2016
19th century English chamberpot. Source:
www.sciencemuseum.org.uk.
Statue of Molly Malone, heroine of another
popular song called "Cockles and Mussels," on Grafton Street in
Dublin. Dubliners refer to the statue as The Tart with the Cart,
The Trollop with the Scallops, The Dish with the Fish, and so
on.