Episode XIV
Oxen of the Sun
Deshil Holles Eamus.
10:00 PM, National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street. Style: Embryonic prose history.
Back to your filtered episode list
Summary
Bloom visits a friend in labour. Medical students drink upstairs; the prose grows from Anglo-Saxon to modern slang, mirroring the development of a child.
- 1
Opening incantation
The episode opens with three triple chants — a kind of incantation in Latinate prose — before settling into pastiche of old English chronicles.
- 2
Bloom enters the hospital
Bloom calls in at the maternity hospital on Holles Street to ask after Mina Purefoy, who has been three days in labour. He is shown into a common room of carousing medical students.
- 3
Drinking and arguing
Stephen is there, drunk, with Buck Mulligan, Lenehan, Lynch, and others. They argue about birth, contraception, motherhood, and religion in a thickening cloud of beer and bad jokes.
- 4
The styles of English
The prose moves chronologically through English style — Anglo-Saxon, Mandeville, Malory, the Authorized Version, Bunyan, Defoe, Sterne, Dickens, Carlyle — as if the chapter itself were gestating in real time.
- 5
Birth and storm
Mina Purefoy is finally delivered of a healthy boy. A thunderstorm breaks over Dublin. The pastiche fractures into a Babel of modern slang — pidgin, evangelical preaching, street English.
- 6
Off to Burke's, then Nighttown
The students pour out to Burke's pub, then on toward the brothel district. Bloom follows Stephen, worried for him, into the next chapter.
Gabler lines 14.1–1591
How Oxen of the Sun unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Oxen of the Sun sets a simple scene — men drinking in a maternity hospital while Mina Purefoy gives birth upstairs — and tells it through a sequence of English prose styles running from Latinate incantation to modern slang. The map follows the growth of the language alongside the birth.
Three ritual invocations open the episode, then the prose walks forward through Latin, Anglo-Saxon and medieval English as Bloom enters the hospital.
1. The threefold invocation
lines 1–60Three chants — a call to the sun-god of fertility, a shout of Hooray for the baby boy, and a Latin-shaped sentence — repeat three times each before any scene begins.
Why it matters:The episode declares its subject as generation itself, in a form older than narrative.
Notice:Nine invocations for nine months. The episode's structure is gestational from the first line.
2. Bloom arrives at Holles Street
lines 60–275In heavy Latinate and Anglo-Saxon prose, Bloom comes to ask after Mina Purefoy and is admitted by nurse Callan.
Why it matters:Bloom's errand is pure concern for a woman he barely knows — the plainest act in a wildly stylised chapter.
3. The medical students at table
lines 275–500Lenehan, Madden, Lynch, Costello and Dixon drink and talk obstetrics and doctrine in Mandeville- and Malory-flavoured prose.
Why it matters:The drinkers' loud fertility talk is set against the silent labour overhead.
4. Stephen's drunken theology
5. The crime against fecundity
6. Bloom remembers and abstains
7. The child is born
8. Carlyle's hymn to fertility
9. Burke's, and the end of English
The shape underneath
Oxen of the Sun runs invocation → gestation → delivery → dispersal, with the history of English prose standing in for embryonic development. Under all the pastiche the plot is small and decisive: Bloom decides to look after Stephen. See the Homeric parallel below for the cattle the crew should not have touched.
In modern prose
Ten at night. Bloom drops in at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street to ask after Mrs Purefoy, a friend who has been in labour for three days. In a back room he finds Stephen drinking with a rowdy gang of medical students who are talking, with varying degrees of seriousness, about birth, contraception, infant mortality, what the Church says about sex, what nature says about sex, whether women exist mostly to suffer. The trick — and it is a trick — is that Joyce narrates the whole chapter by impersonating, in chronological order, the entire history of English prose: medieval, Elizabethan, Restoration, eighteenth-century, Victorian, all the way up to modern slang. The style itself 'gestates' as the baby is born. Eventually a healthy boy arrives upstairs, the men spill out into the rainy street roaringly drunk, and Bloom, sober, watches Stephen heading off with the worst of the crew toward the red-light district. He decides, without any drama, to follow him and keep him out of serious trouble. Underneath the literary fireworks the chapter is a moral one: a room full of clever men talking flippantly about reproduction while, in the next room, a woman is actually doing it — and Bloom, the only one paying attention, deciding to act as a father toward a young man who isn't his son.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Hospital
- Hour
- 10:00 PM
- Organ
- Womb
- Art
- Medicine
- Colour
- White
- Symbol
- Mothers
- Technic
- Embryonic development
- Correspondence
- Oxen of the Sun
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Oxen of the Sun.
- 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 111: Arrival at the National Maternity HospitalBloom makes his way to the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street to check on Mina Purefoy, who has been in labour for three days.
- Daily Companion, Day 116: Sterne, Gibbon, and eighteenth-century witThe prose grows wittier and more self-conscious, echoing Sterne's playful digressions and Gibbon's grand historical sweep.
- Daily Companion, Day 120: The students spill out toward Burke's pub in a rush of slangThe episode closes in a sudden, chaotic burst of modern slang and half-finished shouts as the drunken students pour out of the hospital and head for Burke's pub to keep drinking.
- 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 National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street sits on Bloom's day.