Episode XI
Sirens
Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.
4:00 PM, Ormond Hotel bar. Style: Fuga per canonem (music).
Summary
A chapter written like music. Bloom eats dinner alone as barmaids flirt and Simon Dedalus sings, while Boylan rides off to meet Molly.
- 1
The overture
The chapter opens with a strange fragmentary passage — phrases, sounds, near-nonsense — that turns out to be a kind of musical overture: every line will return later in the chapter as a theme.
- 2
Bronze and gold
The Ormond barmaids — Miss Douce (bronze hair) and Miss Kennedy (gold) — flirt, gossip, and serve drinks while watching the viceregal carriage pass.
- 3
Bloom dines
Bloom slips into the dining-room next door with Stephen's uncle Richie Goulding, orders liver and bacon, and writes a careful reply to Martha Clifford while he eats.
- 4
Simon sings
Simon Dedalus and others gather at the piano. Simon sings 'M'appari' from Flotow's 'Martha,' and Bloom — alone, listening through a doorway — is moved almost to tears.
- 5
Boylan rides off
Through the whole chapter Boylan's jaunting-car can be heard on the street outside, jingling its way to Eccles Street. Bloom hears it leave and stays in his seat.
- 6
Coda
Bloom leaves the bar, walking out past a print-shop window of Robert Emmet's last words and quietly farting in time to them. The musical pattern closes.
Gabler lines 11.1–1294
How Sirens unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Sirens opens with two pages of fragments that work like an overture, then plays them out as a scene in the Ormond bar while Boylan drives to Eccles Street. The map follows the music, the seduction, and the man eating liver in the next room.
Sixty-odd fragments — phrases, sounds, half-sentences — are fired off in sequence before the episode proper begins.
1. Bronze by gold
lines 1–20Disconnected phrases name the barmaids, a tapping cane, a jingling car and a sigh, with no context attached.
Why it matters:The reader is being tuned, not informed: every fragment returns later with its meaning attached.
Notice:Read it once and it is noise; read it after the episode and it is a programme note.
2. The motifs planted
lines 20–50Jingle, tap, Bloowho, a rose, a chip of horn — the recurring sounds of the hour are laid out in order.
Why it matters:Joyce is writing prose as counterpoint, and this is the theme statement.
3. “Begin!”
lines 50–63The overture breaks off with a single word of command.
Why it matters:The episode formally announces that it is a performance.
4. The barmaids laugh at the viceroy
5. Boylan's jingle
6. The songs: Goulding, M'Coy, Dollard
7. The letter to Martha
8. The tap of the blind stripling
9. Bloom's exit and the last word
The shape underneath
Sirens runs overture → performance → escape, written in fuga per canonem: themes announced, overlaid, and resolved. The episode's real event is not in the bar at all but in a bedroom across the city, heard only as a jingling car. Bloom survives the song by staying in the next room. See the Homeric parallel below for the mast and the wax.
In modern prose
Four in the afternoon. The bar of the Ormond Hotel. Two barmaids — one bronze-haired, one gold-haired — flirt with the customers; Simon Dedalus and a few friends gather round the piano and sing sentimental Irish ballads about love and loss and exile. Bloom comes in quietly for a meal in the dining room next door, where he can hear the music through the wall. He knows that at this exact hour Boylan is on his way to Eccles Street, to his wife, to their bed. He sits with that knowledge and listens to the singing, and the prose itself starts behaving like music — phrases repeat, echo, overlap, break apart. He writes a careful, slightly cowardly reply to Martha to take the edge off. The chapter is about the strange consolation of art at exactly the moment your life is going wrong: other people's songs about heartbreak are easier to bear than your own. Today we'd recognise the move instantly — putting on a sad playlist while the thing you can't face is happening across town. Bloom doesn't go home. He pays his bill and leaves.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Concert Room
- Hour
- 4:00 PM
- Organ
- Ear
- Art
- Music
- Colour
- —
- Symbol
- Barmaids
- Technic
- Fuga per canonem
- Correspondence
- Sirens
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Sirens.
- Beginner's guide to UlyssesWhere to start, and how to keep going.
- How to read UlyssesPractical ways through the book's hardest stretches.
- All 18 episode summariesSee where this episode sits in the whole day.
- Daily Companion, Day 79: The overture, and two barmaids at the OrmondThe episode opens with a strange overture — a scramble of fragmented phrases that will only make sense once you've read the whole chapter.
- Daily Companion, Day 84: Ben Dollard sings "The Croppy Boy"Big-voiced Ben Dollard performs the ballad 'The Croppy Boy,' the sad story of a young Irish rebel betrayed and executed.
- Daily Companion, Day 88: Robert Emmet's last words, and Bloom's flatulent exitPassing a shop window displaying a picture of the executed patriot Robert Emmet, Bloom silently recalls Emmet's famous last words about his epitaph not being written until Ireland takes her place among the nations — and, at that very solemn moment, quietly breaks wind, timed to a passing tram's noise..
- Who's who in UlyssesLeopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and the cast of Dublin.
- Themes in UlyssesThe ideas that run beneath every episode.
- Dublin locations in UlyssesWhere Ormond Hotel bar sits on Bloom's day.