In Sirens, strains of a 19th century popular song
called Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye float out of the
Ormond bar. Although fragments of the song lyrics appear in
the text, they are supplied from someone's memory (the
narrator's? Bloom's?), because the song is paradoxically
"voiceless": "A voiceless song sang from within." It quickly
becomes clear that someone is playing the song on the bar's
piano, and after the last strains sound the identity of that
person becomes clear.
John Liptrot Hatton
composed the song in the early 1860s, with words written by Jane
Williams. Seven phrases are reproduced in order in the text of
Sirens,
flagged by purple links in my online edition of the chapter: "
The
bright stars fade . . . the morn is breaking
. . . The dewdrops pearl . . . And I from
thee . . . to Flora's lips did hie . . . I
could not leave thee . . . Sweetheart, goodbye!"
These appear at intervals corresponding fairly realistically to
the time it takes for the notes to sound in the piano (there is
a large gap of time between the lines from the beginning of the
first stanza and those from the end of the second), though one
phrase, "
Flora's lips," is inexactly remembered:
- The bright stars fade, the morn is breaking,
The dew-drops pearl each bud and leaf,
And I from thee my leave am taking,
With bliss too brief, with bliss, with bliss too brief.
How sinks my heart with fond alarms,
The tear is hiding in mine eye,
- For time doth thrust me from thine arms.
- Goodbye, sweetheart, goodbye!
- For time doth thrust me from thine arms.
- Goodbye, sweetheart, goodbye!
- The sun is up, the lark is soaring,
Loud swells the song of Chanticleer,
The leveret bounds o'er earth's soft flow'ring,
Yet I am here, yet I, yet I am here.
For since night's gems from heaven do fade,
And morn to floral lips doth hie,
- I could not leave thee though I said
- Goodbye, sweetheart, goodbye!
- I could not leave thee though I said
- Goodbye, sweetheart, goodbye!
After the words of the first line are heard, the text describes
the medium of the performance, a piano accompaniment calling for
a singer: "A duodene of birdnotes chirruped bright treble answer
under sensitive hands. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked,
all harpsichording, called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy
morn, of youth, of love's leavetaking, life's, love's morn." No
singer answers this call, apparently, but after the final words,
Simon Dedalus walks through the bar and is invited to sing:
"Sighing, Mr Dedalus came through the saloon, a finger soothing
an eyelid. / — Hoho, we will, Ben Dollard yodled jollily.
Come on, Simon. Give us a ditty.
We heard the piano."
Simon resists the invitation—"I was only vamping, man"—but he is
soon persuaded to sing another song, "
M'appari."
It appears, then, that the person playing the tune was Simon
Dedalus. At the end of the novel Molly thinks of his "delicious
glorious voice" and how naturally he used to sing the title
words of
Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye, as opposed to the
ludicrous artificiality of Bartell Darcy: "
goodbye sweetheart
sweetheart he always sang it not like Bartell
Darcy sweet tart goodbye.
"
Zack Bowen observes that the opening strains of the song
are heard as Blazes Boylan approaches the Ormond, and that he
leaves at the song's conclusion:
— ... Sweetheart, goodbye!
— I'm off, said Boylan with impatience.
Despite whatever the song may mean to Bloom, then (he is
present in the dining room for part of it), it is associated
much more strongly with his antagonist, and the association is
ironic: a Casanova saying his goodbyes to a flirtatious
barmaid in order to hurry off to an adulterous conquest is
serenaded by a tender song about a lover having to part from
his sweetheart.
The chapter's overture plays four of the seven phrases. Here
too, the phrases appear in order, with a brief interval
between the two taken from the first stanza and the two taken
from the second.
