After quoting from "Algy" Swinburne's poems twice in Telemachus and echoing him quietly in Scylla and Charybdis, Mulligan goes on quoting him in Wandering Rocks and Oxen of the Sun, now as an example of artistic achievement that Stephen Dedalus could never possibly attain. He cites a line from the Victorian aesthete's "Genesis"––"One thing the white death and the ruddy birth"––as exemplifying a "note" that all true poets strike. He deems Stephen's Christianity-twisted consciousness to be incapable of grasping its insights, but the novel shows him to be wrong.

"Genesis" was published in Songs Before Sunrise (1871), Swinburne's third book of poetry. It asserts a kind of non-Christian cosmogony focused on the contrary forces of "life and death" (8). Anticipating Wallace Stevens's proclamation that "Death is the mother of beauty," Swinburne argues that these contraries coincide, "For if death were not, then should growth not be" (41):

For the great labour of growth, being many, is one;
One thing the white death and the ruddy birth;
The invisible air and the all-beholden sun,
And barren water and many-childed earth. (33-36)

In his Hellenising fashion, Mulligan hears these lines embodying an "Attic" wisdom antithetical to the Christian war between good and evil. Stephen's jesuitical "visions of hell" blind him to Swinburne's pagan wisdom, so he will never draw on the life force of creation. But in fact Joyce did come to write about ruddy births: Rudy's face was "mauve" with poorly oxygenated blood, and his burial sweater is echoed in the "ruddy wool" that Stephen imagines wrapping the fetus in the midwife's bag. He wrote about white deaths as well: Bloom thinks of "Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste like raw white turnips." This mind trained in the abstractions of Christian theology turned toward studying life in the body as intensively as any writer ever has. Joyce also regularly played with the coincidence of contraries, as in Circe: "Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah!"

Read More