At the end of II.3, as HCE cleans up his tavern, he hears the approach of the people singing the ballad that will destroy him. This is a version of the song that ends I.2, which was created and sung by Hosty (a variant of the Cad, the other side of HCE — from the Latin hostis, meaning stranger, foreigner, or enemy). Of course, the ballad is different now, so much later in the dream.

Read on for a few of my thoughts on one excerpt of this ballad. This will be a pretty brief close reading post, less ambitious in scope than some of my others. Perhaps as time goes on, I will make more frequent brief posts like this.

As Hosty and company approach — he is called “Ostia” here, which is Italian for the Eucharistic Host — we hear the ballad in fragments. “The humming, it’s coming. Insway onsway.” The ballad is coming the way of HCE’s inn and/or tavern. It’s on its way.

[Why is Hosty compared to the Eucharistic host? Apparently “hostia” is Latina for “sacrificial victim,” and of course HCE is usually the sacrificial victim in this novel…HCE can also stand for the words of the priest in the Mass when he holds up the Eucharist, Hoc Corpus Est, “This is the body.” It could simply be that HCE and the Cad are interchangeable, but it could also imply that the true, mystic Communion is the reintegration of all the parts of the self, including the parts represented by the Cad, the Unconscious material and/or the Jungian Shadow, or maybe just the Selfhood/ego or Oedipal fears about the next generation or the future]

A longer version of this post would look at the several sections of the ballad we hear. For now, I’ll focus on one that grabbed my attention:

From Dancingtree till Suttonstone There’s lads no lie would filch a crown To mull their sack and brew their tay With wather parted from the say.

Here, the tree and the stone are, as always, emblems of Shem and Shaun, the two sides of HCE.

Those lads would filch a crown — steal from their father his money (a crown coin), in the sawm way that the present day always pilfers from the past. Simultaneously, they steal his kingship (“a kingship through a fault!” cries Mercias/Shem in I.7).

The world of the present is built on the wreckage of the past.

The progression from dancing to set-in-stone suggests a movement from innocence to experience, the corruption of the historical cycle into calcification and decadence, until the whole cycle repeats (and until then dream world runs down and emerges into the solid, stony world of waking reality).

Tea throughout the Wake signifies the liquids of life: semen, breast milk, intermingled sex fluids. To “wet the tea” is slang for sex.

As it says in I.5 of the letter that is the Wake itself:

this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections has combled tumbled down to us fersch and made-at-all-hours like an ould cup on tay.

The sack is a scrotum, but also ALP’s “nab-sack,” where she gathers up and distributes pieces of the Fall to the next generation. It’s the mail sack of Shaun, who delivers the Letter and helps pass everything on to the next generation and start the cycle again.

The water parted from the sea is the source of everything: the semen and/or urine from HCE’s Fall. It’s the “riverrun” that is the novel itself, the flow of storytelling from time immemorial.

The word “Wather” turns water into “father,” and  the fallen Father is the source of all tales told, the “say.” The children are the tailors — the tale-ers — weaving the fate of the past by telling the tales that carry it on into the present.

Perhaps the true Communion is incorporating all of the ideas expressed by this Ostia, taking in the ballad and allowing it to transform oneself.