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244 J A M E S [ 1907 ]A few months after expressing this annoyance, while Joyce and NoraBarnacle were living in Trieste in 1905, Joyce received another impulsiontoward The Dead.' In a letter Stanislaus happened to mention attendinga concert of Plunket Greene, the Irish baritone, which included one ofThomas Moore's Irish Melodies called 'O, Ye Dead!' 2The song, a dialogueof living and dead, was eerie enough, but what impressed Stanislauswas that Greene rendered the second stanza, in which the deadanswer the living, as if they were whimpering for the bodied existencethey could no longer enjoy:It is true, it is true, we are shadows cold and wan;And the fair and the brave whom we loved on earth are gone;But still thus ev'n in death,So sweet the living breathOf the fields and the flow'rs in our youth we wandered o'er,That ere, condemn'd, we goTo freeze, 'mid Hecla's snow,We would taste it awhile, and think we live once more!James was interested and asked Stanislaus to send the words, which helearned to sing himself. His feelings about his wife's dead lover found adramatic counterpart in the jealousy of the dead for the living in Moore'ssong: it would seem that the living and the dead are jealous of each other.Another aspect of the rivalry is suggested in Ulysses, where Stephen criesout to his mother's ghost, whose 'glazing eyes, staring out of death, toshake and bend my soul, ... to strike me down,' he cannot put out ofmind: 'No, mother. Let me be and let me live.' 3That the dead do notstay buried is, in fact, a theme of Joyce from the beginning to the end ofhis work; Finnegan is not the only corpse to be resurrected.In Rome the obtrusiveness of the dead affected what he thought ofDublin, the equally Catholic city he had abandoned, a city as prehensileof its ruins, visible and invisible. His head was filledwith a sense of thetoo successful encroachment of the dead upon the living city; there wasa disrupting parallel in the way that Dublin, buried behind him, washaunting his thoughts. In Ulysses the theme was to be reconstituted, inmore horrid form, in the mind of Stephen, who sees corpses rising fromtheir graves like vampires to deprive the living of joy. The bridebed, thechildbed, and the bed of death are bound together, and death 'comes,pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea,mouth to her mouth's kiss.' 4We can be at the same time in death aswell as in life.*By February 11, 1907, after six months in Rome, Joyce knew in generalwhat story he must write. Some of his difficulty in beginning it was"The converse of this theme appears in Ulysses (115 [146]), when Bloom, walking inGlasnevin, thinks, 'They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullbloodedlife.'