This episode begins just after the 3:30 p.m. opening of the bar at the Ormond Hotel and ends at about 4:30 p.m., with the exit of Bloom and the reappearance of the blind stripling, the piano tuner, announced by the tapping sounds of his cane, who has come to retrieve the tuning fork which he had earlier left behind. Parallels with the Odyssey are very broad in this chapter. In Homer's epic, Odysseus stuffs his men's ears with wax so that they will not be seduced by the songs of the mermaids, who induce sailors to smash their ships on the deadly coastal rocks. Odysseus, however, wanting to hear the noted songs himself, has his men tie him to the mast and orders them to ignore him, even if he commands them to release him. The sirens here are Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, two barmaids, and an unappetizing prostitute that Bloom (as Ulysses) evades at the end of the episode. The most interesting parallel in this chapter with the episode in Homer's epic, however, is not the sirens themselves; it is the intoxicating power of music, whether it be sung by old men who wish to drown the memories of their failures in sentimental melodies that exalt Irish national failures or whether it is music that is heard by a middle-aged man (Bloom), who traces in the lyrics his own failures as a father and as a husband, and who will, during the course of this chapter, lose his wife to another man.
In "The Sirens," Joyce applies the intricate techniques of musical composition to literature — that is, at the beginning of the episode, he sets up a number of themes or motifs, approximately 57 of them, that are interwoven and expanded throughout this chapter. "Bronze by gold," for example, refers to the bronze-haired Miss Douce and the golden-haired Miss Kennedy. "Chips" in the third line of the chapter alludes to Simon Dedalus's habit of "picking chips off one of his rocky thumbnails," noted a few pages later. "Jingle jingle jaunted jingling" is an aural prefiguration of Boylan's mare-drawn trip to 7 Eccles Street to meet Molly. The "Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do" foreshadows Ben Dollard's rendition of "The Croppy Boy" near the chapter's end, and Molly once said that the hefty Ben had a fine "barreltone" voice; in addition, the "Wait while you wait. Hee Hee" looks forward to Bloom's thoughts about Pat the waiter: "Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee" (as a parallel, Bloom, unable to stop the cuckolding by Boylan, is also one who will passively wait until Boylan and Molly have finished having sex).
