I was interested by the following passage in Sirens (11.629-636)

“All is lost now.

Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he’s proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled. Fall, surrender, lost.”

I’ve already discussed considering repetition as a form of haunting, and I think that echo is an especially relevant kind of haunting repetition. An echo is a ghost of an utterance. Here it is intertwined with the language of loss and mourning. I was especially intrigued with the imagery of the blackbird in the hawthorn valley. Google tells me that cut hawthorn branches smell like decaying flesh and were a Celtic omen of death. Otherwise I’m not really sure what it signifies in conjunction with a blackbird. I did notice quite a few phrases and conventions that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in American southern gothic literature. Maybe the blackbird and hawthorn imagery hearkens to this? The text also seems to be linking Richie himself to a bird – his breath is “birdsweet” and at the beginning he “cocks” his lips.