"BE a warm day I fancy," said Leopold Bloom to himself as he began his famous Odyssey crossing "to the bright side avoiding the loose cellar flap of number seventy five". Had our protagonist had the advantage, however, of being able to view a weather chart before he began his peregrinations on the morning of Thursday, June 16th, 1904, it would have shown him a deep depression centred between here and Iceland, with a brisk, mild, humid southwesterly airflow over Dublin. The forecast would have been for a rather windy day with perhaps a little drizzle, but with broken skies allowing the sun through now and then. The cloud would have been expected to thicken from the west towards evening, with rain approaching Dublin during the night.
Joyce, however, tells a rather different story. According to him, that famously uneventful day was the climax of a long drought, such that "a bargeman coming in by water a filly mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won't sprout, fields athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily". But as Bloom put his head out of the window of the carriage, crossing the canal, there came the first indications that the weather might be just about to break: he felt a drop of rain upon his hat. "He drew back, and saw an instant of shower sprays over the grey flags. Apart. Curious. Like through a colander. I thought it would. My boots were creaking I remember now."
This little sprinkling, however, turned out to be only a precursor. Obsequies completed, Bloom proceeds down Grafton Street past the Provost's house at Trinity while "the sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the silverware in Walter Sexton's window opposite". Even by nightfall the weather still held good: "The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of the all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand."
But as Stephen Dedalus had remarked earlier in the day about Dublin's weather: "It's as uncertain as a child's bottom." "By and by, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in the west, biggish swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and the weather wise poring up at them and some sheet lightnings, past ten of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder". Thus ended Bloomsday - with a "black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled, back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammer hurler. Came now the storm that hist his heart."