1n6xZiV

[Aetat. 25 ] J O Y C E 251use of the fireplace in ivy Day,' of the streetlamps in 'Two Gallants,'and of the river in Finnegans Wake. It does not seem that the snow canbe death, as so many have said, for it falls on living and dead alike, andfor death to fall on the dead is a simple redundancy of which Joyce wouldnot have been guilty. For snow to be 'general all over Ireland' is of courseunusual in that country. The fine description: it was falling on everypart of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon theBog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinousShannon waves,' is probably borrowed by Joyce from a famous simile inthe twelfth book of the Iliad, which Thoreau translates: 22'The snowflakesfall thick and fast on a winter's day. The winds are lulled, and the snowfalls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and theplains where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they arefalling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolvedby the waves.' But Homer was simply describing the thickness ofthe arrows in the battle of the Greeks and Trojans; and while Joyce seemsto copy his topographical details, he uses the image here chiefly for asimilar sense of crowding and quiet pressure. Where Homer speaks of thewaves silently dissolving the snow, Joyce adds the final detail of 'the mutinousShannon waves' which suggests the 'Furey' quality of the west.The snow that falls upon Gabriel, Gretta, and Michael Furey, upon theMisses Morkan, upon the dead singers and the living, is mutuality, asense of their connection with each other, a sense that none has his beingalone. The partygoers prefer dead singers to living ones, the wife prefersa dead lover to a live lover.The snow does not stand alone in the story. It is part of the compleximagery that includes heat and cold air, fire,and rain, as well as snow.The relations of these are not simple. During the party the living people,their festivities, and all human society seem contrasted with the coldoutside, as in the warmth of Gabriel's hand on the cold pane. But thiswarmth is felt by Gabriel as stuffy and confining, and the cold outside isrepeatedly connected with what is fragrant and fresh. The cold, in thissense of piercing intensity, culminates in the picture of Michael Fureyin the rain and darkness of the Galway night.Another warmth is involved in 'The Dead.' In Gabriel's memory ofhis own love for Gretta, he recalls incidents in his love's history as stars,burning with pure and distant intensity, and recalls moments of his passionfor her as having the fireof stars. The irony of this image is that thesharp and beautiful experience was, though he has not known it untilthis night, incomplete. There is a telling metaphor: he remembers a momentof happiness, his standing with Gretta in the cold, their looking inthrough a window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace, and hersuddenly calling out to the man, is the firehot?' The question sums uphis naive deprivation; if the man at the furnace had heard the question,his answer, thinks Gabriel, might have been rude; so the revelation on