Walking southward toward Trinity College in Lestrygonians, Bloom steps off the sidewalk where Westmoreland Street meets College Street and crosses the intersection in front of a statue, passing "under Tommy Moore's roguish finger." He thinks, "They did right to put him up over a urinal." This and another irreverent allusion to "Tommy Moore" in Cyclops are the novel's only mentions of Thomas Moore, a major romantic poet in the manner of Robert Burns, but his songs pervade Ulysses. The capacious index to Gifford's annotations lists no fewer than 18, many of which appear in multiple chapters. In only a handful of chapters (Telemachus, Nestor, Calypso, Hades, Ithaca) does no character think of lines from one of these highly popular lyrics.

Dubliner Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was one of the first Catholics to attend Trinity College—hence the location of his statue—and his romantic celebrations of Irish experience endeared him to people on both sides of the sectarian divide. In ten separate volumes from 1808 to 1834 he published Irish Melodies: poems set to old Irish tunes. Within his lifetime he became known as Ireland's national Bard, much like Scotland's beloved Robert ("Rabbie") Burns, who was a generation older and whose choice to set eloquent original verses to traditional Scottish melodies must have given him inspiration and a model. This musical strategy made both men something more than simply poets. Their lyrics take up uncommonly powerful residence in memory because people can sing them, hear them, feel them.

Moore was a nationalist. As a young man he sympathized with the 1798 Rebellion and opposed Union with Great Britain, and the poems that he published starting in his late 20s praised ancient Irish culture and lamented its suppression by English conquerors. Countless Dublin households owned copies of the Melodies and performed them in their parlors, and Moore's emotionally charged vision of Irish nationhood inspired generations of anti-imperial feeling. But their author was no revolutionary. He left Ireland in 1798 and became an accomplished man of letters in the Whig circles of 19th century London. Gifford remarks, probably too harshly but with some justice, that "His laments for 'poor old Ireland' were, therefore, not vital Irish rebellion but sentimental complaints acceptable to English ears." Joyce's many echoes of the Melodies in Ulysses suggest that he responded warmly to their lyrical beauty, but his references to the author convey a certain acidity that can perhaps be read as criticism of Moore's temporizing softness.

Bloom thinks of the greenhouse near Moore's statue because of a "Great song" published in the 1808 Melodies and set to the traditional air "The Old Head of Dennis." This lyric celebrates a place in County Wicklow called the Meeting of the Waters where the Avonmore and the Avonbeg join to form the River Avoca. It is about enjoying nature with good friends:

There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet;
Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart,
Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart.

Yet it was not that nature had shed o’er the scene

Her purest of crystal and brightest of green;

’Twas not her soft magic of streamlet or hill,

Oh! no—it was something more exquisite still.

’Twas that friends, the belov’d of my bosom, were near,

Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear,

And who felt how the best charms of nature improve,

When we see them reflected in looks that we love.

Sweet vale of Avoca! how calm could I rest

In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best,

Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease,

And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace.

Bloom once heard Julia Morkan beautifully perform "The Meeting of the Waters," and he recalls its opening line: "There is not in this wide world a vallee." But the most striking association his mind throws up is the anti-romantic image of waters meeting in a urinal. In a London Review of Books article (27 July 2017) John Barrell observes that the English travel writer John Barrow visited the Vale of Avoca in 1835 and entertained similarly dyspeptic thoughts: "As for the 'meeting of the waters', as the Irish are pleased to call the confluence of two little streams, pompously or poetically as you may please to decide, I think more has been made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve."

In Cyclops, the narrator snarls his contempt for the Citizen's patriotic blather about "Robert Emmet and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sara Curran and she's far from the land." Emmet, whose grisly execution is parodied several paragraphs later, was one of the leaders of the 1798 Rebellion. He was a close friend of Moore's and secretly engaged to a woman named Sara Curran. In volume 4 of the Irish Melodies Moore published "She is Far From the Land," set to the tune of the old Irish air "Open the Door." It celebrates Sara, Robert, and Ireland:

She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
And lovers are round her, sighing;
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.

She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,
Every note which he loved awaking;
Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking.

He had lived for his love, for his country he died,
They were all that to life had entwined him;
Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried,
Nor long will his Love stay behind him.

Oh! make her a grave where the sunbeams rest,
When they promise a glorious morrow;
They'll shine o'er her sleep, like a smile from the West,
From her own loved island of sorrow.

Here as in many other places Joyce allows the tender strains of one of Moore's poems to enter the fabric of Ulysses. He was by no means hostile to sentimental songs, and his own early efforts as a lyric poet were often marked by soft romanticism. (For that matter, his nationalism too was unmarked by any kind of inclination to dangerous action.) But in this instance, as in Lestrygonians, he allows one of his characters to mock Moore's feel-good glow. For all their brutality the Citizen's patriotic exclamations are just as ineffectually escapist as Moore's, and the Cyclops narrator derides this man downing pints while spouting off about Emmet dying for his country and Sara Curran mourning "far from the land."

I do not know how common it was in 1904 (or is today) for Irish people to refer to Moore as "Tommy," but after encountering this intimate diminutive for a second time it is hard not to hear in it some subversive familiarity on Joyce's part. In a gesture simultaneously friendly and needling, the nickname seems to knock Moore off his pedestal of Trinity-educated, London-refined respectability and remind him of his roots as a Dublin Mick. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note one other irreverence: "The phrase 'roguish finger' also alludes to a tongue-in-cheek article by Francis Mahony (Irish humourist and journalist, 1804-66), 'Rogueries of Tom Moore' (1834), which asserted that some of Moore's most popular songs were copied from French and Latin sources."

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John Hunt 2025