0 Ulysses
name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile cohabitation! Give
her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary pande-
monium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions,
hayfever, bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire
neck, warts, bilious attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose
veins. A truce to threnes and trentals and jeremies and all
such congenital defunctive music! Twenty years of it, regret
them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and
would and wait and never—do. Thou sawest thy America,
thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine
bison. How saith Zarathustra? Deine Kuh Trübsal melk-
est Du. Nun Trinkst Du die süsse Milch des Euters. See! it
displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful!
Mother’s milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too
of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rain-
vapour, punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their
guzzling den, milk of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan’s
land. Thy cow’s dug was tough, what? Ay, but her milk is hot
and sweet and fattening. No dollop this but thick rich bon-
nyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! Per deam Partulam et
Pertundam nunc est bibendum!
All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street.
Bonafides. Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered
naggin. Like ole Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fam-
bly? Where the Henry Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo? Sorra
one o’ me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward to the ribbon
counter. Where’s Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the drunken
minister coming out of the maternity hospal! Benedicat vos
omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius. A make, mister. The Den-