Nestor has already shown Stephen calling up The Rocky Road to Dublin
to rebut Deasy's recollection of his ancestor's ride to Dublin. A close reading
of Blake's poem suggests that he may be working the same trick
again. Auguries of Innocence (ca. 1803) begins with
the famous lines
To see a world in a grain of sand,
and a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
This assertion that all the
universe is contained in every particular of existence
functions as a kind of preamble to the main argument of the
poem: that all forms of cruelty, violence, abuse, and malice
are assaults on being itself. "A robin redbreast in a cage,"
say the next lines, "Puts all heaven in a rage." By the time
it gets to the lines that Stephen is recalling (115-16), the
poem is indicting institutionalized civic vice:
The Whore and Gambler, by the State
Licenc'd, build that Nation's fate.
The Harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave Old England's winding
sheet.
The Winner's Shout, the Loser's Curse,
Dance before dead England's Hearse.
In reply to Deasy's assertion that an alien ethnic population
is sapping the life out of England, then, Stephen may be
thinking that fashionable ethnic hatred like Deasy's wounds
the fabric of a nation, and the cosmos.
Or as Grace Eckley suggests in "Beef to the heel: Harlotry
with Josephine Butler, William T. Stead, and James Joyce," Studies
in the Novel 20:1 (Spring 1988): 64-67, he may be
thinking of government licensing of sex workers. Several
European governments in the 19th century attempted to control
the spread of venereal disease in the same way that they
confronted infections of livestock: by regular inspections and
by controlling the movements of the stock. Deasy's interest in
curtailing the spread of foot
and mouth disease may, in Stephen's labyrinthine
thoughts, trigger this dehumanizing association of cattle with
women that was assumed by many policymakers of the time.
If such readings seem farfetched, it is worth considering
that just after Stephen silently recalls Blake's lines he
confronts Deasy directly, turning his arguments back on him.
To the claim that "the jew merchants" are harming England, he reasonably replies that
a merchant "is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or
gentile, is he not?" And to the claim that "They sinned
against the light," he answers, "Who has not?"