Goldsmith's knobby poll

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Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) was an Anglo-Irish playwright, poet, and novelist who attended Trinity College in the 1740s. His academic career was extremely undistinguished, but the brilliance of his later writing prompted the institution to erect a statue in his honor, executed by sculptor John Henry Foley, in 1867. In contrast to the commanding statue of his friend Edmund Burke that stands on the opposite side of Trinity's front gate, Goldsmith's more introspective monument reflects his informal manner, apolitical writing, and unimpressive physicality. The phrase "knobby poll" appears to refer to his bald dome (the OED documents the use of "poll" to mean "head"), but Gifford cites a couplet in David Garrick's Impromptu Epitaph on Oliver Goldsmith: "Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, / Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."

Stephen and Artifoni stand in front of the Trinity College railings, a little to the right of the entrance gate, and the narrative observes the musician gazing "over Stephen's shoulder at Goldsmith's knobby poll." Behind them on College Green, two jaunting cars full of tourists pass by, the men and women gazing alternately at Trinity's front and at the "blind columned porch of the bank of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed," to the north. Commenting on the strange adjective, Slote observes that "The architect James Gandon admired the colonnaded piazza of the Bank of Ireland for its 'deep recesses and imposing masses of shadow' (quoted in Christine Casey's Dublin, p. 382); hence its description here as blind: 'Enveloped in darkness; dark, obscure' (OED)."

A tram unloads some army musicians next to "the stern stone hand of Grattan, bidding halt." This statue of the great Irish orator and parliamentarian, also by John Henry Foley, is, as Gifford notes, actually made of bronze. It stands in the middle of College Green, just south of the bank building which began life as the home of the Irish Parliament, and west of the Trinity entrance. College Green was an important intersection for trams in 1904, and Joyce comically imagines the statue, hand raised in declamatory passion, as a traffic cop commanding the tram conductors. Artifoni is waiting for a tram from Dalkey, and when it appears he bids Stephen a hasty goodbye and runs after it, busily trying to get the conductor's attention by waving some rolled-up music. He fails, and Joyce echoes Dante's image of Brunetto Latini running to catch up and losing life's race.

But this image of futility does not end the story. Artifoni appears twice more in the chapter, once at the beginning of section 17 walking "past Holles street, past Sewell's yard," and once at the end of section 19 as the viceroy receives "the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door." Although the address of this door is never identified in Ulysses, Ian Gunn and Clive Hart plausibly surmise in James Joyce's Dublin that it is number 14 Lansdowne Road, the address of Benedetto Palmieri, a professor of singing who was one of Joyce's models for Artifoni. After rounding Trinity's southwest corner Artifoni would have a straight shot to Lansdowne Road via Nassau Street, Clare Street, Merrion Square North, Lower Mount Street, and Northumberland Road, each of them an uninterrupted continuation of the last. This southeasterly route would indeed take him past the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. Gunn and Hart also calculate Artifoni's pace: "The distance is about a mile and a half. He leaves Stephen at 3:24, is seen at the junction of Holles Street and Merrion Square at 3:35, and arrives home at 3:57. After his dash for the tram he therefore walks at a leisurely but credible speed of a little less than three miles per hour" (49).

Stephen's future movements after he says goodbye to Artifoni are similarly sketched by supplying his locations later in Wandering Rocks. In section 13 he is seen first in Fleet Street and then in Bedford Row. These are in the Temple Bar area near the river, a little northwest of his location in section 6. His likely route to get there would be to walk north into Westmoreland Street, and then turn west onto Fleet Street.

Another kind of patterning can arguably be found in the successive environments of sections 4, 5, and 6. The "closesteaming kitchen" in the impoverished Dedalus house, with its boiling shirts and pea soup, is followed by the much richer enclosed space of Thornton's, redolent with smells of ripe fruit and musky undertones of sex. Section 6, by contrast, shifts the focus to a large open space filled with sights and sounds.