From swerve of shore to bend of bay

• swerve off sure: if "Eve and Adam's" refers to "even atoms" in the Epicurean sense, the word "swerve" has a special meaning; it refers to what the Roman poet T. Lucretius Carus calls the clinamen, or the "swerve" ever so slightly from a true plumb line as atoms fall perpetually downward through the void; this is the principle that animates the universe. Hence "swerve of shore" = "swerve off sure" (sure = true, straight, plumb). See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things"), Book II, lines 216-224: "In this connection there is another fact that I want you to grasp. When the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you can call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like rain-drops through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything." For clinamen, see Book II, line 292.

• Schwert: (German) sword; hence "swerve of shore" = sword offshore = foreign invader
  • Swords: A small suburb just north of Dublin
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• door → Joyce's artificial rhyming slang, referring to the door of HCE's bedroom? → the 4th of 7 elements in a circuit of the bedroom

• swerve of shore ... bend of bay → these two expressions both refer to the curving shoreline of Dublin Bay, seen from two different points of view: that of the embattled native on the shore and that of the foreign invader (or returning exile) at sea → cf. Giordano Bruno's coincidentia oppositorum ("identity of opposites")

• from swerve of shore to bend of bay: One can see an allusion to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire: swerve of shore → sword of shore (Romulus and Remus twins, sons of Mars, the god of war) → the city of Rome; bend of bay → Constantinople built on the banks of Golden Horn bay in Asia Minor; "bay" and "bey" phonetical equivalence implies the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks
  • Excerpt from Zosimus' Historia Nova about the foundation of Constantinople [1]: "The city stands on a rising ground, which is part of the isthmus inclosed on each side by the Ceras and Propontis, two arms of the sea." [emphasis added]