Figure of speech. In Aeolus Bloom thinks of a pair of lines from the opera Martha that later, in Sirens, he will hear sung: "Co-ome thou lost one, / Co-ome thou dear one." The division of the vowel reflects the fact that it straddles more than one note in the song, an effect known in musical theory as melisma. But the division also embodies the rhetorical principle of diaeresis, a sub-type of metaplasm in which a syllable is added to the pronunciation of a word.

Diaeresis or dieresis (dye-AIR-uh-sis) is Greek for separation (dia- = apart + hairein = to take). Among other meanings, it can refer to "taking apart" adjacent vowels, pronouncing them as two syllables. The word can also denote a diacritical mark placed over the second vowel to indicate the start of a new syllable, like the strange one (not an umlaut) used by The New Yorker to spell words like "naïve," "reëlect," and "zoölogy." Alternatively, words that have been compounded from a prefix and a stem will sometimes be printed with hyphens as in Joyce's text––"co-operate," "re-elect"––to indicate that two syllables should be pronounced.

Joyce's use in Aeolus apparently differs from the standard rhetorical meaning, as "come" contains only one "o." Nevertheless, diaeresis seems like a valid principle to apply to it. The ancient rhetoricians presumably came up with the term to indicate that in certain circumstances an orator might wish to take a word normally pronounced with one undivided syllable and deliver it with two. Gideon Burton (rhetoric.byu.edu) gives as an example the sentence, "The professor's self-importance could be measured by the way he pronounced 'medieval' as 'medi-eval'." It is difficult to imagine situations where such mincing articulation would be an oratorical asset, but the effect must have been comparable to the one encountered frequently (and quite naturally) in vocal music, where melodic needs often demand that a syllable be prolonged across notes.

As a professional singer Molly is intimately familiar with this melismatic extension of syllables. In Penelope she thinks repeatedly of "the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng." The final line of the refrain requires the singer to think about how she will deliver not only those final two words but also "looooves old." Molly thinks too of melisma in the song's opening line: "dear deaead days beyond recall." In Aeolus, Joyce brings these musical considerations into the realm of rhetoric, adding diaeresis to his bag of verbal tricks.

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