Episode 11 — Sirens

Four p.m., the Ormond Hotel bar on the north quay of the Liffey. The chapter is structured like a fugue. The opening two pages — sometimes called the "overture" — are a list of fragmentary phrases that will appear in the episode proper, the way a composer states his motifs. "Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing." It is one of the most aggressively formal openings in modern fiction, and it does what an overture does: prepares the reader's ear for the patterns to come.

In the bar the two barmaids, Miss Douce (bronze hair) and Miss Kennedy (gold), are flirting with the customers. Boylan comes in for a quick gin, jingling his watch and his confidence. He flirts with Miss Douce; she snaps an elastic garter for him on her thigh. He pays and leaves at four-fifteen on his way to 7 Eccles Street. Bloom enters at the same moment with Stephen's uncle Richie Goulding to dine in the side restaurant. He sees Boylan crossing the bar. He says nothing. He sits at a table that lets him see, through the open arch, the bar and the men around the piano.

In the next room Simon Dedalus, Ben Dollard the bass, and Father Cowley have gathered around the piano. Simon sings "M'appari" from Flotow's Martha — about a man searching for the woman he has lost. Bloom listens with the weight of Boylan's carriage outside, jingling away toward his house, in the back of his mind. Ben Dollard then sings "The Croppy Boy," a ballad about an Irish rebel betrayed by a priest. Bloom writes his reply to Martha in pencil at his table. The chapter ends with Bloom walking out into the late afternoon, the closing sentence quoting the last words of the executed Irish rebel Robert Emmet. The fugue lands on a comic chord.