The lines of seemingly nonsensical verse—"Won't you come
to Sandymount, / Madeline the mare"—that Stephen
imagines as he marches rhythmically along the strand ("Crush,
crack, crick, crick") do not appear to quote any preexisting
literary text, though perhaps one will eventually be
discovered. More likely, he is playing with sounds to make a
little poetic composition, as he will do later in Proteus
when he dwells on the sounds of "mouth
to her mouth's kiss." The second line refers punningly
to either of two French visual artists, and the punning
continues as Stephen thinks about the lines he has just
brought into consciousness.
Thornton notes that "This seems to be an Irish song or poem,
but I have not been able to locate it. D. Daiches calls it
'popular verse,' but does not identify it." Both scholars
appear to be responding to the fact that Stephen's lines sound
like ballad meter (iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic
trimeter), which is commonly used in English and Irish popular
songs and poems.
Regardless of whether Stephen is recalling a popular song in
the first line or making one up, his imagination is clearly at
work in the second line. Madeleine Lemaire, Gifford notes, was
a watercolor painter known for portraits, illustrations, and
floral compositions in the last decades of the 19th century
and the first of the 20th. Sometimes called The Empress of the
Roses, she was a fixture of the artistic salons in
Paris and was one of Marcel Proust's high-society intimates.
If Madeline the mare is Madeleine Lemaire, then Stephen—who
perhaps encountered her works or her reputation in Paris—may be wishing
that this elegant French artiste would come to
Dublin and lend some class to the local literary scene.
Alternatively, Gifford notes, the mare could be Philippe
Joseph Henri Lemaire, known as Henri, a sculptor who fashioned
the relief of the Last Judgment on the pediment (tympanum) of
l'Église de la Madeleine, or
church of the Mary Magdalen, in Paris in the 1830s. If
Madeline the mare is Lemaire who did the Madeleine, then
Stephen, Gifford observes, may be wishing that this impressive
sculptor could have come to Sandymount and improved the façade
of Mary, Star of the Sea,
the church that he has just passed in Leahy's Terrace on his
walk to the strand.
Of course, it is entirely possible that Stephen is thinking
of both Lemaires; nor do the verbal acrobatics stop
there. His linguistic imagination is still romping as he
contemplates the "Rhythm" of the lines,
fancying that his "catalectic
tetrameter of iambs" is "marching. No,
agallop: deline the mare." Lemaire is
now fully a mare, galloping along the shore of the mare
(Latin for sea).
