Although the De Quincey-like visions in Oxen show some affinity with images in The English Mail-Coach, most of the material comes from Joyce's own imagination. The first of the three scenes, depicting two horses in a misty landscape, very closely reproduces material that he had earlier put to paper in the unpublished sketches that he called Giacomo Joyce. The third vision draws on another passage in the same work.

Written in Trieste in the early 1910s and not published until after Joyce's death, Giacomo Joyce is a kind of notebook of artistic sketches—fifty highly poetic prose fragments, with a few interspersed lines of verse, carefully copied out on sixteen pages. It tracks Joyce's romantic infatuation with one of his English-language students in Trieste, or possibly an imaginative composite of several of them. Richard Ellmann, who saw the work into print, writes in his Introduction to the Faber and Faber edition (1968) that Joyce decided to "pillage rather than publish" the collection (xvi). Many bits of it appear, intact or rewritten, in A Portrait of the Artist, Exiles, and Ulysses.

Here is one: "Twilight. Crossing the piazza. Grey eve lowering on wide sagegreen pasturelands, shedding silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fine-boned skull" (3). Joyce changed these sentences very little in Ulysses: "A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull." In the original version Joyce imagistically renders a girl following her mother across a dusky Triestine plaza as horses in a grey-green field. In Oxen he offers only a vision of "phantoms" in some unknown cosmic "region," leaving it to readers to infer that they may have some connection to a human mother and daughter.

But that metaphorical connection is still very much implied. That Bloom is thinking about Molly and, especially, Milly becomes clear several sentences later when an "equine portent" rises in the heavens: "It is she, Martha, thou lost one, Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant." The girlish figure becomes "a queen among the Pleiades," wrapped in a transparent veil: "It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling." Once again, Joyce has reworked one of the visionary impressions in Giacomo: "She speaks. A weak voice from beyond the cold stars.... She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh" (15). This time the revisions are more significant, but the continued presence of "starborn flesh," "cold interstellar" wind, and "coiling" identify the source unmistakably.

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John Hunt 2025