What does “the snotgreen sea” mean in Ulysses?
“The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” is Buck Mulligan's crude, comic description of Dublin Bay in Episode 1. He is mocking the grand Homeric phrase for the sea, “wine-dark”, by replacing it with two very bodily Dublin words of his own.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Episode 1, Telemachus. Buck Mulligan, looking out over Dublin Bay from the top of the Martello tower.
The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
What it means in plain English
Mulligan has just borrowed Stephen's dirty handkerchief to wipe his razor. Its colour gives him a new word: snotgreen. Then he turns to the bay and calls it a great sweet mother, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea, the way cold water feels to a swimmer.
In the same breath he quotes Homer in Greek, “epi oinopa ponton”, “on the wine-dark sea”, and tells Stephen he must read the Greeks in the original. The joke is that the high classical phrase and the low Dublin one sit side by side.
Literary context
Joyce coins compound words freely in Ulysses. “Snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening” are early examples of his habit of fusing words to catch a sensation exactly.
References
- Ulysses, Episode 1, “Telemachus”
- Homer, Odyssey (the recurring phrase “wine-dark sea”)
- Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (revised edition, 1988)
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Questions readers ask
Who says “the snotgreen sea”?
Buck Mulligan, on the roof of the Martello tower in the first episode.
Why does Joyce use such crude words?
To deflate Homer's grand style with an everyday, physical one. The mix of high and low is central to the whole novel.
Related terms
Epi oinopa ponton
“Epi oinopa ponton” is Homer's Greek for “on the wine-dark sea”, one of the Odyssey's best-known phrases. Buck Mulligan quotes it in Episode 1 just after calling Dublin Bay “the snotgreen sea”, mixing Homer's grandeur with Dublin slang.
Buck Mulligan
Stephen's witty, blasphemous flatmate, a medical student. He opens the novel parodying the Catholic Mass at the tower.
The first line of Ulysses
The first line of Ulysses is "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." It opens the novel at the Martello tower in Sandycove on the morning of 16 June 1904, with Mulligan mock-celebrating Mass using his shaving bowl.
The Odyssey
Homer's Odyssey is the ancient Greek epic of Odysseus (in Latin, Ulysses) and his ten-year voyage home from Troy. Joyce maps it onto one Dublin day: Bloom is Odysseus, Stephen is his son Telemachus, and Molly is his wife Penelope. Mulligan is the first to bring up the Greeks.