Finnegans Wake

I mentioned a passage in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," four or five pages into the next-to-last chapter, "Spring." Warmer weather thaws the ice-bound railroad cuts (viaducts on which the tracks are laid). As the snow and ice turns to water, the sand in the cut begins to flow. "Few phenomena gave me more delight than t observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented." The sand and clay "flow down the slopes like lava," taking "the forms of sappy leaves or vines" and other vegetable shapes. "It is a truly grotesque vegetation." Seeing this vegetable forms in the soil, Thoreau is "affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,--had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body." The analogy between soil, vegetation, and animal body leads eventually to language. "No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardliy. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo [Greek], labor, lapsus [Latin], to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, ouble-lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit."

I don't whether Joyce read Walden, but it seems possible. What seems more certain is that both felt the way the analogous flows and transformations of the natural world found analogues in the sound patterns formed by throat, tongue, teeth, and lips that are the organs of human speech.