Candlemas

Candlemas is a named feast-day used as one possible date for a journey, but its force in the narrative exceeds ordinary scheduling. Set beside Easter and Saint Tibble’s Day, it belongs to a calendar whose dates slide through wordplay and whose seasons, dances, and historical periods seem to recur rather than pass away.

The Feast as a Moving Date

In a passage of festal song and courtly display, a prince is said not to be going to Cork until Cantalamesse, perhaps later still, at Rose Easter or Saint Tibble’s Day. Candlemas thus marks a postponement rather than a fixed arrival: the journey remains deferred among several possible feast-days. The sequence makes the calendar sound at once familiar and unstable, its dates recognizable but transformed by the surrounding invented names and rhythms.

Calendar, Season, and Recurrence

Elsewhere, the text places dances across Chapelldiseut, Ballybough, and Grangegorman, then observes that currencies and races have changed while the revels return, “as lithe and limbfree limber as when momie mummed at ma.” Against that long succession, Candlemas belongs to a temporal order in which the old and the new overlap. Named occasions do not simply measure forward motion; they help make recurrence legible, even as the language continually alters what each date can mean.

Time in the Book’s Verbal World

The book repeatedly folds chronology into verbal transformation. Its opening moves by “a commodius vicus of recirculation,” while another passage describes the “meandertale, aloss and again” as a chain in which knowledge leads through desire and death to birth. Candlemas participates in this larger pattern as both a specific calendar reference and a point in a mutable cycle: a journey can be postponed to it, but the surrounding prose refuses to let time settle into a single, linear sequence.