Rot a peck of pa's malt

• Not a peck of malt → Rot a peck of malt → Rot a peck of pa's malt
  • A first-draft version of Finnegans wake
  • see pa in past Eve and Adam's and had passencore rearrived

• Rot: (German) red → the colour at one end of the rainbow → see line 4, violer d'amores, for the violet at the other end
  • Genesis 9.12 ff: the rainbow is a sign of the Covenant God made with Noah after the Flood → in FW the rainbow appears after the Flood which ends the novel

• Joyce's letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver of 15 November 1926: "Willy brewed a peck of maut; Noah planted the vine and was drunk"
  • Willie Brew'd A Peck O' Maut: a song composed by the Scottish poet Robert Burns in the gardens of a house on the site of the Coach House in Waterside, Moffat, Dumfriesshire. The song celebrates whiskey as well as beer. Whiskey and beer are "twins"

• rot → The expression rot a peck varies the phonology of not yet, continuing the series of negative clauses... n → r for alliteration with following words (brewed ... arclilght ... rory .... regginbrow ... ringsome)

• rot ... pa's malt: HCE's rotten urine in the commode's (commodius in line 2) chamber-pot recycles the alcohol that he has drunk → thus this, the sixth of seven clauses in the second paragraph, corresponds to "commodious vicus of recirculation" in the first paragraph → the 6th of 7 elements in a second circuit of HCE's bedroom

• pecker: penis