I am not the first to admire James Joyce’s Paean to Water. This ode to water is sublime as it is, but I could not resist the temptation to try to identify and link the text with the water-based ecosystems on the ecosphere.
Here is my contribution and modest tribute to a great writer.
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean1 of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench2 of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard3: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps4, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin5 : its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells6, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers7, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations8, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea9: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams10, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords11 and minches and tidal estuaries12 and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes13: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable14, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes15, pestilential fens16, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
James Joyce - Ulysses, 1922. 17th Chapter Ithaca, pages 624-625
Footnotes
Most probably referring to the whole M2 Pelagic ocean waters biome↩︎
The deepest ecosystems in the marine floor are the M3.6 Hadal trenches and troughs↩︎
The surface of the ocean is part of theM2.1 Epipelagic ocean waters↩︎
Part of the T6.1 Ice sheets, glaciers and perennial snowfields↩︎
I guess this refers to the M3 Deep sea floors biome↩︎
Mostly in TF1.4 Seasonal floodplain marshes but also in TF1.5 Episodic arid floodplains↩︎
Most dramatic in F3.1 Large reservoirs, but more commonly in F3.2 Constructed lacustrine wetlands or in F3.5 Canals, ditches and drains↩︎
Referring here to the T6.1 Ice sheets, glaciers and perennial snowfields and M2.5 sea ice↩︎
All of F1.7 Large rivers and some in the rest of the F1 Rivers and streams biome↩︎