“How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed.
All these here once walked round Dublin
In both Ulysses and The Waste Land, there is a sense of respect to the spectre of history over the living. Bloom thinks to himself, “All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed” (6.960). These words were not in the original version published in The Little Review. Why did Joyce later add it? The phrase “Faithful departed” carries weight in the Catholic tradition, evoking All Souls’ Day, a day of remembrance and prayer for the dead, returning back to previous reference to “All souls’ day” (6.933).
The sentiment “all these here once walked round Dublin” was previously visited in The Dead. In the final words of the story is offered the concluding reflection: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe… upon all the living and the dead.” The reader is again confronted with the scale of mortality, and also the commonality of such feelings. In connecting different works, Joyce also connects the city of Dublin to the larger system of the universe. Indeed, through his novel, Joyce connects present readers to the past. Those who have walked around Dublin, those who have watched a silent snowfall, and those who have read the words of Ulysses, are connected in a shared experience across space time.