The ditty probably
originated in the 18th century. Its most familiar modern verses
go as follows:
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing—
Wasn't that a dainty dish
To set before the king?
The king was in the counting-house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes;
Along came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.
The two most disturbing events of the song are the baking of
live birds in a pie (an Italian recipe for such culinary
entertainments survives from the 16th century, and there are
contemporary reports that some were prepared for the wedding
of Marie de' Medici and Henry IV of France in 1600), and the
mutilation of the maid's face. But Joyce focused on three
other, seemingly benign details, finding in each one elements
of Bloom's intimate adult concerns.
One allusion to the song comes when Bloom is preparing to sit
down in the outhouse: "He kicked open the crazy door of the
jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for
the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel.
Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash and
stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he
peered through a chink up at the nextdoor window. The
king was in his countinghouse. Nobody." With no one
visible next door, the paterfamilias takes his seat upon the throne and voids his bowels,
reflecting with satisfaction that the constipation from which
he suffered on the previous day has now lessened its grip.
It is surely relevant here that Sigmund Freud, in "Character
and Anal Eroticism" (1908), argued for an association in the
unconscious mind between feces and money. Joyce had already
displayed an interest in the ideas of this essay when he wrote
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Joyce
Between Freud and Jung (Kennikat Press, 1980), Sheldon
Brivic applies some of them to reading the sentences in which
Stephen, newly enriched by school prizes, tries to order his
world by controlling the flow of money: "In his coat pockets
he carried . . . chocolate for his guests while his trousers'
pockets bulged with masses of silver and copper coins. . . .
the money ran through Stephen's fingers. . . . He had tried to
build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid
tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules . . .
interests . . . and new filial relations, the powerful
recurrence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as
from within the water flowed over his barriers" (45).
In Bloom's recollection of the line about the king counting
his money, this association between the flow of money and the
flow of excrement becomes more directly connected with
sexuality. The complex, according to Freud, is rooted in
childhood experiences. Training children to use the toilet
constitutes a crucial moment in the "anal phase" of their
psychosexual development. Prior to this moment, children have
an attachment to their own feces, as things that they have
produced. (In Finnegans Wake Joyce presents Shem the
Penman as an artist whose works are written with excrement on
his own body.) But in potty training children are wheedled and
shamed into relinquishing these precious parts of themselves.
If they resist the adult instructions, the experience of
retaining the excrement within the anus may produce sexual
pleasure, and such individuals mature into adults who derive a
quasi-sexual pleasure from holding onto money. Leopold Bloom,
it may be noted, is notoriously tight with a ducat, and his eroticism is distinctly anal.
Given Bloom's anal eroticism, given his wife's disinterest in
it ("its a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time
living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes
when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I suppose who
he has any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at
him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we havent 1
atom of any kind of expression in us all of us the same 2
lumps of lard before ever Id do that to a man pfooh the dirty
brutes the mere thought is enough I kiss the feet of you
senorita theres some sense in that"), given the sexual
dysfunction that consequently exists in the marriage, and
given the alienation that will result from Boylan's visit on
this day, it seems appropriate that Bloom thinks of the
nursery rhyme at a moment when he and Molly are in separate
rooms, doing separate things. In Lotus Eaters the
lines about the queen float back into Bloom's head as he
remembers Molly lying in bed eating the slices of toast he
brought her and reading Boylan's letter: "Mrs Marion
Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread
and."
Bloom of course has his own extramarital fascinations, and
the nursery rhyme manages to embrace those as well. Its
picture of the maid "in the garden, / Hanging out the clothes"
is reproduced physically in the actions of the young woman
whom Bloom stands beside in the butcher's shop. He recognizes
her as "the nextdoor girl," a servant recently employed by his
neighbours on Eccles Street: "His eyes rested on her vigorous
hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish.
New blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking
a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by
George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack."
When Bloom exits his back door to go to the outhouse, this
attractively aggressive young woman enters his thoughts again
via the strains of the nursery rhyme: "He went out through the
backdoor into the garden: stood to listen towards the next
garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry. The
maid was in the garden. Fine morning." His
voyeuristic delectation of this "nextdoor girl" that he has
seen in the backyard anticipates his looking up from the yard
"at the nextdoor window" later in Calypso, forming
a perfect circularity among the three figures in the song.
"Sing a song of sixpence" describes an unhappy love triangle
as evocatively as do any of Bloom's thoughts about Boylan and
Molly later in the novel.
