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Chapter 5 - The plants: This chapter has a drugged feeling. Images of eating, perfume and flowers, allusions to the inert and the impotent Bloom gets his mail under the name of Henry Flower Leopold Blooms father Rudolph Virag came from Hungary . . . Virag=Flower in Hungarian Henry="ruler of the house"(Heimrich)(from the old high German) Saxifraga Stolonifera called mother of thousands because it spreads by runners that seem to float it's flowers, Ground cover in moist, shady places in the south of England and Ireland. Some of Odysseus's men ate the Lotus and longed "to stay forever, browsing on that native BLOOM, forgetful of their homeland" >From the last line of the book. "Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body. He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower" Uses of flowers in the letter from Martha: Tulips= Dangerous pleasures, Two people. Man Flower= a pun on itself Cactus= Phallus, Touch-me-not Forget-me-not=Love(and as the name suggests) Violets=Modesty Roses=Love and beauty(when he throws the pin down it becomes thornless) Anemone=Frailty, anticipation Nightstalk= Phallic Pun(Ulysses is about the day) Nightshade=Falsehood
Mike |