The summer morning dawned in morning gray,
As stately Buck Mulligan came out to pray.
He held up his bowl where the lather was white,
To mock the great church in the awakening light.
And Stephen Dedalus, bitter and lean,
Stood watching the sea with a memory mean—
The ghost of his mother, the guilt in his chest,
A restless young scholar who could not find rest.

They walked by the water, they spoke of the past,
Of shadows and exile and dice that were cast.
But Stephen walked onward, alone with his pride,
To teach in a school by the incoming tide.
He wrote on his slate of the history of man,
A riddle of words since the cosmos began,
Then walked on the strand where the seashells would cry,
A solitary figure beneath the Irish sky.

[…]

Meanwhile in the city, Leopold Bloom arose,
To tend to his kitchen and put on his clothes.
He fried up a kidney that tasted of zinc,
And paused by the bed where his Molly would think.
A letter had come from her musical man,
The bold Boylan’s shadow, where trouble began.
Poldy knew of the tryst that the afternoon held,
Yet stifled the grief that inside him had swelled.

He stepped to the streets in his jacket of black,
With a soap in his pocket and none to turn back.
He wandered through papers, through printing and ink,
To standard-bearer taverns where Dubliners drink.
He attended a funeral, weeping for Paddy,
And thought of his Rudy, his lost little laddie.
Through baths and through carriage, through church and through store,
The citizen paced by the Liffey’s gray shore.

[…]

The twilight descended on sand and on sea,
Where Gerty MacDowell was sitting so free.
Bloom watched from afar as the fireworks flew,
A silent exchange that the dark night well knew.
Then onward to maternity’s halls he did tread,
Where doctors and students drank deep to the dead.
And there sat young Stephen, carousing and loud,
The soberest mind in that blasphemous crowd.

Bloom watched o’er the youth with a fatherly dread,
And followed his steps where the wicked were led.
Through Nighttown’s dark labyrinth of sin and design,
Where hallucinations arose from the wine.
The ghosts of their pasts danced in costume and mask,
To strip the two wanderers bare for the task.
When Stephen fell down from a soldier’s harsh blow,
Bloom lifted him up from the gutter below.

[…]

They walked through the stillness of three in the night,
To Bloom’s quiet kitchen, by candlelight bright.
They drank of the cocoa, they spoke of the soul,
Two lost, drifting planets making each other whole.
The fatherless son and the son-less old man,
Had met at the place where the circles began.
Then Stephen departed into the dark air,
Leaving Bloom to return to his marital lair.

He crawled into bed where his Molly reposed,
And kissed her sweet feet as his weary eyes closed.
And Molly stayed waking, her thoughts spinning wide,
A river of memories flowing inside.
Of youth and Gibraltar, of clover and sun,
Of every wild race that her spirit had run.
“And I asked him with eyes to ask again yes,
And his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”