The years keep rolling right along — WordPress reminded me this morning that I’ve posted something on every Bloomsday for the past three years, so I now feel like I have to keep the streak going.

On this Bloomsday, I find myself thinking about Joyce’s description of William Blake making breakfast, one that I think was the seed of Ulysses.

Joyce gave a lecture on William Blake and Daniel Defoe in 1912 — a decade before Ulysses was published. In the lecture, Joyce describes how Blake would see visions of “Elementary beings and spirits of deceased great men” and would “stay up through the long hours of the London night” to draw them and converse with them while his wife, Catherine, held his hand.

When the visions disappeared towards dawn, the wife would get back under the covers while Blake, radiant with joy and benevolence, would hurriedly set about lighting the fire and making breakfast for them both. Ought we to be amazed that the symbolic beings Los, Urizen, Vala, Tiriel, an Enitharmon and the shades of Homer and Milton should come from their ideal world into a poor room in London, or that the incense that greeted their coming was the smell of Indian tea and eggs fried in lard? Would this be the first time in the history of the world that the Eternal One has spoken through the mouth of the humble? That was how the mortal life of William Blake progressed.

Chapter 4 of Ulysses (“Calyspo”) finds Leopold Bloom similarly making breakfast while his wife sleeps in. But more than this, all of Ulysses can be seen an example of what Joyce finds in Blake: the Eternal speaking through the humble, the great myths of the Western literary epic tradition born again through the everyday and mundane. A man bringing his wife breakfast re-enacts Odysseus’s entrapment by Calypso. A kidney left on the fire too long recalls ancient burnt offerings. A trip to the outhouse…well, never mind.

These epic echoes throughout Ulysses are at once mocking — following Lord Byron in using epic allusions to ridicule modernity — and sincere, imbuing the commonplace with poetic grandeur and hearing the Eternal One in the humble.

In the context of this dual approach to the modern world, it’s worth considering the contrast between Bloom and Blazes Boylan, as articulated in Chapter 11 (“Sirens”). Boylan arrives and is greeted by Lenehan in a manner recalling epic tradition:

Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode. Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard and knew and hailed him:

—See the conquering hero comes.

Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered hero. See me he might. The seat he sat on: warm. Black wary hecat walked towards Richie Goulding’s legal bag, lifted aloft, saluting.

The musical narration of “Sirens” distinguishes Bloom as the contrary of Boylan: if the latter conquers as a ladykiller, the former is unconquered by virtue of cultivating equanimity, as he will contemplate in Chapter 17 (as he considers “futility of triumph or protest or vindication”). That is to say, there is something heroic in the meek, mild, and sort-of-pathetic Leopold Bloom, something that acts as a rejoinder to the brutish heroism of classical epic. At the same time, it’s hard not to see this passage as simultaneously mocking Bloom — and, through him, modern man. He avoids confrontation, he’s wary (twice), he thinks about (and maybe touches) the seat of the car that Boylan just got off (there’s something mildly homoerotic about this, or just longing to be close to his wife’s body through her lover’s), he figuratively becomes a “hecat” (inviting comparison to the bolder shecat of Chapter 4), and he greets Goulding and gets dinner with him mainly to keep an eye on Boylan (Bloom’s salute echoes Lenehan’s). Although Bloom will extol the virtues of equanimity later, telling himself he’s unbothered by Boylan — and maybe he does sort of eventually get himself into that headspace, or closer to it — here he’s anything but at peace. All of this is to say, the adjective “unconquered” seems ironic, even as it sincerely gestures toward a noble attitude, one that modern man might strive for but struggles to fully embody.

All of that and more is encapsulated by these few words, which hum along with a musicality that vibrates with the song of life itself.

Is it any wonder that Ulysses is one of the great artistic achievements of the twentieth century, right alongside Finnegans Wake, that other great myth of the everyday?

Anyway, this post started with the idea that Blake was an influence on Joyce. I think that when Joyce wrote and delivered that lecture in 1912, he had in mind the seed of Ulysses: in Blake, he imagined our first glimpse of Leopold Bloom, and the idea of the Eternal pouring through the everyday and the mundane. The debt that Joyce owes to Blake is, to my way of thinking, enormous.

A few years ago, I gave my own lecture on William Blake’s influence on Finnegans Wake, so this is as good a place as any to shamelessly promote it.

Happy Bloomsday!