Greenish
- greenish → contains an allusion to glaucoma
Commentary
Joyce suffered from glaucoma, a disease of the eye which leads progressively to blindness. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (20 September 1928), he wrote:
"The complete eclipse of my seeing faculties ... I am warding off by dressing in the three colors of successive stages of cecity as the Germans divide them; namely, green Starr; that is, green blindness, or glaucoma; grey Starr; that is, cataract, and black Starr, that is dissolution of the retina. This therefore forms a nocturnal tri-color connected by one common color, green, with Shaun's national flag of peas, rice, egg yolk. The grey of evening balancing the gold of morning and the black of something balancing the white of something else, the egg probably."
Green, then, symbolizes the first stage of Joyce's progressive blindness, as well as being the national colour of Ireland.
