In Eumaeus, as Bloom listens to the old sailor talk
about going home to Queenstown to see "my own true wife I
haven't seen for seven years now," he thinks of the various
literary works that have been written "on that particular
Alice Ben Bolt topic." Ben Bolt is a 19th century
poem, and song, about a sailor who returns to the town of his
childhood after twenty years and learns that Alice, who
apparently loved him, is dead.
American author, songwriter, and politician Thomas Dunn
English wrote the poem in 1842, and American composer Nelson
Kneass set it to music in 1848. (The work is not English, as
Thornton supposes––though the poet's name is.) Both poem and
song proved extremely popular, and their popularity was
renewed by the publication of George du Maurier's Trilby
(1894), a novel whose plot centers on a woman's inability to
sing the song properly.
The first of the poem's eight-line stanzas provides all the
information one needs to understand the allusion:
Don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt––
Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown,
Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile,
And trembled with fear at your frown?
In the old church-yard in the valley, Ben Bolt,
In a corner obscure and alone,
They have fitted a slab of the granite so grey,
And Alice lies under the stone.
In the remaining four stanzas, the speaker tells Ben Bolt about
other changes that the passing years have brought to the town
they grew up in. He concludes by affirming the unchanging
friendship that binds him to "Ben Bolt of the salt-sea gale."
This final line is the only indication that Ben Bolt has been a
sailor, and the first stanza is the only one that mentions
Alice.
Nothing in the song suggests that Alice and Ben had a
significant relationship. Bowen is therefore mistaken to say
that "Bloom rightly thinks of the song as representative of
such stories of husband's [sic] absence and eventual
return as Enoch Arden and Rip Van Winkle."
Either Bloom is wrongly thinking of the poem in this
way, or he is thinking in more general ways of men returning
to see people they have loved. Caoch O'Leary is
about an old man returning to see a young man whom he knew as
a child. But Enoch Arden, whose
imprint can be seen throughout the paragraph in which Bloom
thinks of Ben Bolt, is about a husband's return to his
wife, and Rip Van Winkle
tells a similar story, so Bloom may well be thinking of Ben
Bolt in this way.
The poem was included in anthologies of verse like Rufus
Wilmot Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America,
first published in 1842 and reissued in many subsequent
editions. Song versions, especially the one by Kneass, were
frequently performed in the US and the UK––it was one of
Abraham Lincoln's favorites––so Bloom might have heard one in
a music
hall, concert hall, or home
parlor. After the appearance of du Maurier's novel in 1894, a
popular stage play of Trilby debuted in Boston in
1895. Herbert Beerbohm Tree mounted successful UK productions
later in the same year, in a tour that began in Manchester and
ended in London after visits to Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh,
Liverpool, Dublin, Newcastle, and Birmingham. The show ran for
one week at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre, 7-12
October 1895. Films were also made in 1914 and 1915.
Bloom could conceivably have gained familiarity with the work
in many different formats––poem, song, novel, play––but the
strange way in which he refers to it as "Alice Ben Bolt"
(Alice and Ben Bolt are two people, not one!) makes it seem
likely that the song is playing in his head. These three words
appear together in the first line of the poem, and in the
musical setting by Kneass they make up a single musical
phrase, with falling pitches and sequences of eighth notes and
quarter notes conspiring to make the two names stick together
in the ear. It seems that they have stuck so effectively in
Bloom's ear that now he simply recalls the song as Alice Ben
Bolt.
