The songlike lines that Bloom spouts about his daughter,
O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling,
You are my lookingglass from night to morning.
I'd rather have you without a farthing
Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden,
are in fact based on an Irish ballad, and it seems likely
that he used to sing them to Milly as a child. But Joyce
received similar lines on a Valentine's Day card, in a prank
played by a childhood playmate's father. That context
heightens the sense of triangulated desire created by Bloom
thinking of the song as he reads Milly's letter about meeting
a "young student."
In a book called Legends and Stories of Ireland
(Philadelphia, 1835), Samuel Lover reproduces a song with a
similar quatrain:
Oh Thady Brady you are my darlin,
You are my looking-glass from night till morning
I love you better without one fardin
Than Brian Gallagher wid house and garden.
When the Joyces lived in Bray,
James frequently played with a neighbor girl of his age named
Eileen, the daughter of the Protestant chemist James Vance.
Ellmann notes that Eileen Vance was pretty, "and the two
fathers often spoke half-seriously of uniting their
first-born. Dante Conway warned James that if he played with
Eileen he would certainly go to hell, and he duly informed
Eileen of his destination but did not cease to merit it" (26).
One Valentine's Day, the young Joyce received a card with the
following lines, supposedly from Eileen but actually written
by her father:
O Jimmie Joyce you are my darling
You are my looking glass from night till morning
I'd rather have you without one farthing
Than Harry Newall and his ass and garden.
"Harry Newall," Ellmann notes, "was an old and disquieting
cripple who drove his cart around Bray, so the compliment was
not so extravagant as it first appeared" (31). May Joyce
possibly intercepted the card, but James did see it, and
"Eileen, hearing of the trick that had been played on her,
became shy with her playmate and for years blushed at the
sound of his name. He in turn faithfully kept the verse in
mind and put it into Ulysses" (31-32).
The circumstances in which Joyce became aware of the
quatrain—a father involving himself in his young daughter's
romantic life—chime very closely with the uses to which he put
it in Calypso. Reading Milly's letter with its
mention of Alec Bannon, Bloom has thought in the preceding
paragraph of the teacup that Milly gave him as a "birthday
gift. Only five she was then. No, wait: four."
Like Vance posting a valentine for his daughter, he remembers
"Putting pieces of folded brown paper in the letterbox
for her." Papli's little "darling" is now of an age
to choose other men—in the following paragraph Bloom thinks of
"Sex breaking out" in her—but the song
affirms his continuing role as her first lover. It is the
first of several moments in Calypso when Bloom
indulges the same kind of regretful erotic revery toward both
wife and daughter.
