“Hwaet” is an utterance you often see in Old English poetry. It means something like “listen!” and is I suppose the Teutonic equivalent of a drawn-out Hellenic invocation. (It doesn’t appear in Ulysses so far, but it seemed appropriate; read on.) I don’t know much about Old English poetry, but I do remember that much from a survey course I took in college. I also remember something vague about the common use of “ubi sunt,” which means “where are” in Latin. The translated form is used in lamentations in Old English poetry, to ask things (rhetorically) such as where one’s dead companions-at-arms are. It also happens to appear (well, “ubi” does) in Ulysses (386) alongside other archaisms like “ywimpled” and “yclept.” These forms too I recognized from an English literature survey course, dating I believe to something closer to medieval times. I suspect you find “yclept” (which means “named” or “called”) in Chaucer and possibly as late as Spenser. Early in “Oxen of the Sun” we also find lots of alliteration. It turns out in many cases not merely to be alliteration but to be balanced alliteration. That is, it’s often alliteration with a sort of symmetry of sounds:
Before born babe bliss had.
Within womb won he worship.
Whatever in that one case done commodiously done was.
Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes his word winning.
The first two examples demonstrate pure symmetry (this is my term, not a technical term), four syllables starting with the same sound in a sentence. The third demonstrates what I guess you might call a-b-a-b symmetry. You have a /k/ sound and a /d/ sound, and then the pattern repeats. The fourth example demonstrates a-a-b-b symmetry, two /b/ sounds followed by two /w/ sounds.
Yet another fact I remember from that old survey class is that Old English poetry was alliterative. It tended to be written in lines that had alliterative syllables split by a caesura, or pause. This is what Joyce is doing for a lot of this episode.
It was really rough going for me at first, but once I grew accustomed to the mode in which he’s writing, I began to really enjoy it. The dense, archaic first part of the episode was in a way easier for me to read than the last part. There are moments that provoked audible laughter. For example: “And the traveller Leopold went into the castle for to rest him for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in diverse lands and sometimes venery.”
I’m not sure what other modes Joyce sprinkles into this episode. At times it felt briefly Victorian again. At times it seemed later than middle English but not quite modern (I’m thinking of his use of words like “eftsoons,” which means “after” or “again” and appears in English as early as 950 but has many more citations in the OED in the 1400s and later. The paragraph after the opening incantations read to me like modern parodic corporate speak.
It is in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of The Odyssey that Odysseus loses all of his shipmates. The opening of that venerable poem Beowulf plunges us into a tale at the end of which the warrior has lost his comrades-in-arms. One of the standard (alliterative) Old English poems read in survey classes — “The Wanderer” — tells of the loss of friends. All of these address the transitory nature of life. This episode about abortion, birth, and the death of children does the same. Joyce is creating an association. He’s also probably showing off a little, and I think he’s having fun. Although parts of this episode were hard to get into (Sarah notes that my first reaction in a comment to her post on the prior week’s reading was an “arrgh”), parts of it were also very fun for me. But then I’m a language nerd and admired translation into archaic forms. Why I enjoyed parts of this but not the lofty passages a couple of episodes back I’m not sure. Maybe there was more room to stretch my legs and get into the proper mood for it this time around.