James Joyce Chamber Music 9780231879514

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CHAMBER

MUSIC

qy

JAMES

JOYCE

CHAMBER MUSIC EDITED

W I T H

AN

I N T R O D U C T I O N

AND

NOTES

BY

W I L L I A M YORK T I N D A L L PROFESSOR

OF

ENGLISH

IN

OCTAGON A

COLUMBIA

BOOKS

DIVISION O F F A R R A R , S T R A U S AND New

York

UNIVERSITY

1982

GIROUX

C o p y r i g h t 1954, C o l u m b i a University Press. New York A c k n o w l e d g m e n t is m a d e to t h e Viking Press. P u b l i s h e r s of the Collected P o e m s of J a m e s J o y c e , f o r permission to include a n u m b e r of t h e m in this v o l u m e .

Reprinted 1982 hy special arrangement with Columbia O C T A G O N

University Press

B O O K S

A D I V I S I O N O F F A R R A R , S T R A I S & G I R O I X,

INC.

19 U n i o n S q u a r e W e s t N e w Y o r k , N . Y . 10003

Library of Congress C a t a l o g i n g in P u b l i c a t i o n D a t a Joyce, J a m e s . 1882-1941. C h a m b e r music. Reprint. Originally published: New York : C o l u m b i a University Press. 1954. ( C o l u m b i a bicentennial editions a n d studies) Includes indexes. 1. Tindall, William York, 1903 II. Title. III. Series: C o l u m b i a bicentennial editions and studies. PR60I9.09C5 1982 I S B N 0-374-94436-9

82I'.9I2

Manufactured by Braun-Brumfield, Inc. Ann A r b o r , Michigan Printed in the United States of America

81-22305 AACR2

GENERAL

EDITOR'S

PREFACE

THE modern university has become a great engine of public service. Its faculty of Science is expected to work for our health, comfort, and defense. Its faculty of Arts is supposed to delight us with plays and exhibits and to provide us with critical opinions, if not to lead in community singing. And its faculty of Political Science is called on to advise government and laity on the pressing problems of the hour. It is unquestionably right that the twentieth-century university should play this practical role. But this conspicuous discharge of social duties h a s the effect of obscuring from the public—and sometimes from itself—the university's primary task, the fundamental work upon which all the other services depend. That primary task, that fundamental work, is Scholarship. In the laboratory this is called pure science; in the study and the classroom, it is research and teaching. For teaching no less than research demands original thought, and addressing students is equally a form of publication. Whatever the form or the medium, the university's power to serve the public presupposes the continuity of scholarship; and this in turn implies its encouragement. By its policy, a university may favor or

hinder the birth of new truth. This is the whole meaning of the age-old struggle for academic freedom, not to mention the age-old myth of academic retreat from the noisy world. Since these conditions of freedom constitute the main theme of Columbia University's Bicentennial celebration, and since the university has long been engaged in enterprises of public moment, it was doubly fitting that recognition be given to the activity that enlarges the world's "access to knowledge." Accordingly, the Trustees of the University and the Directors of its Press decided to signalize the 200th year of Columbia's existence by publishing some samples of its current scholarship. A full representation was impossible: limitations of time and space exercised an arbitrary choice. Yet the Bicentennial Editions and Studies, of which the titles are listed on a neighboring page, disclose the variety of products that come into being on the campus of a large university within a chosen year. From papyrology to the determination of molecular weights, and from the state's industrial relations to the study of an artist's or poet's work in its progress toward perfection, scholarship exemplifies the meaning of free activity, and seeks no other justification than the value of its fruits. JACQUES

BARZUN

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION THE TEXTS OF

Chamber Music

Chamber Music NOTES TO THE POEMS ACKNOWLEDCM ENTS INDEXES M E N AND WORKS CHARACTERS AND IMAGES

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Chamber Music may be a minor work, but it is a minor work of a major writer, one whom André Gide called "le grand Joyce." 1 Although his poems do not compare in richness or depth with his prose, none of his works is to be neglected, and Chamber

Music proves on closer

inspection to be less trivial than we took it to be. Joyce's works form a whole, as T . S. Eliot says in a letter written on the feast of the Nativity of the B. V. M., 1949. 2 If different in degree from the works that follow it, Chamber

Music is not remarkably different in kind. A

first trial of the themes and methods that were to preoccupy Joyce throughout his life, his early poems are a functional part of the great work that his works compose. Several of these works celebrate his youth in Dublin from 1901 to 1904, the critical period of his development. The general outline of his life at this time is known to readers of A Portrait of the Artist,

Stephen

Hero, and Ulysses. That they are faithful on the whole to his experience is confirmed by Herbert Gorman, his biographer, who supplies facts and dates. W e know 1 James Joyce, sa vie, son oeuvre, son rayonnement (Paris, La Hune, 1949), item 10Ì—hereafter cited as La Hune Catalogue. 2 La Hune Catalogue, Introduction.

3

from Gorman's biography and these more or less autobiographical works that Joyce, having left Belvedere College in 1898, entered University College, from which he emerged a bachelor in 1902. In that year he attempted exile in Paris but, defeated by circumstance, returned to Dublin in 1903. Without money, bitter, arrogant, and gay by turns, he lived for a time with Oliver St. John Gogarty in a tower near Kingstown, seven or eight miles from Dublin. Late in 1904 Joycc finally abandoned country, religion, and home. ber Music

Cham-

is the product and the memorial of this

period. T h i s collection of poems is not his earliest work. In 1891, when nine years old, Joyce wrote, or at least is said to have written, a poem called Et Tu, Healy,

de-

fending Parnell from the politicians who had betrayed him. Pleased by precocity, Joyce's father had the poem printed as a broadside perhaps. No copy seems to have survived, but we may speculate about it. T h e sentiment seems to have been that expressed by Simon Dedalus at the Christmas dinner in A Portrait

of ihe

Artist.

According to Stanislaus Joyce, James's brother, this infant poem in the manner of Byron is parodied in Dubliners at the end of "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." 3 Others guess this a more faithful parody: 3 Recollections of James Joyce ( N e w York, James Joyce Society, 1950), p. 6—hereafter cited as Recollections.

4

—My Cod, alas, that dear olt tumtum home Whereof in youthfood port I preyed Amook the verdigrassy convict vallsall dazes. And cloitered for amourmeant in thy boosome shedel* W e can be certain, however, about some of the early works in prose: the essay on Ibsen which appeared April, 1900, in the Fortnightly insufferable pamphlet The

Review;

that proud,

Day of the

Rabblement,

1901; and the essay on James Clarence Mangan in a college magazine, May, 1902. Joyce also wrote unsigned book reviews for a Dublin newspaper.5 But for all this critical prose his heart was in his poetry. As John Eglinton uncharitably says, the young outsider maintained the illusion that he was a poet.6 What he wrote in pursuit of this illusion from 1899 to 1901 was copied in two manuscript volumes, entitled Moods and Shine and Dark, which Stephen in Stephen Hero says he burned.7 Apparently, however, Joyce gave these copybooks to his friend George Clancy, the Davin of A Portrait of the Artist, who became Lord Mayor of * James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York, Viking Press, 1939), p. 231. See John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1953), p. 3. 5 Richard M. Kain, "Two Book Reviews by James Joyce," PMLA, LXVII ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 291-94; Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography, pp. 91-93. 6Irish Literary Portraits (London, Macmillan, 1935), p. 142. 7 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York, New Directions, 1944), p. 226; cf. p. 214: Stephen published his poems "privately in a manuscript edition of one copy."

5

Limerick.8 When Clancy was shot down in his home by the Black and Tans in 1921, Joyce's manuscripts seem to have been lost in the confusion. Then or earlier they were lost. But we have some idea of what these verses were like. A sample is given in Stephen

Hero,

where Joyce also tells of a "Vilanelle of the Temptress," identical perhaps with the poem of the same name that Stephen composes in A Portrait of the Artist.9 Although based upon his immediate experience, these "hymns in honour of extravagant beauty" 10 assumed the most remote and artificial forms of France or the strictest quatrains. A passage in Stephen

Hero describes the

passion for limitation, for confining extravagance within traditional bounds, that inflamed his youth.11 From the two manuscript volumes that Joyce bumed or gave to Clancy about forty poems, according to Stanislaus Joyce, were saved. From these and others which * Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York, Fanar & Rinehart, 1939), pp. 58, 68; Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography, p. 149. 8 Stephen Hero, pp. 37, 211; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Portable James Joyce, edited by Harry Levin. (New York, Viking Press, 1947), pp. 484, 490-91. Stanislaus Joyce informs me (in a letter of March 15, 1953) that the "Villanelle of the Temptress" in A Portrait of the Artist is from the lost early manuscript. Hence it was written in 1901 or earlier. 10 Stephen Hero, p. 214. 11 Ibid., p. 78: the romantic temper "disregards limitations," but "the classical temper, ever mindful of limitations," works upon present things and fashions them. Stephen bumed his early verses after discovering that they were "romantic" (p. 226). Cf. A Por trait of the Artist, p. 349: Stephen "tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up . . . the powerful recurrence of the tide within him." One of Joyce's translations of Horace survives. See Gorman, James Joyce, pp. 45-46.

6

he composed later Joyce put Chamber Music together. "All of them," says his brother, "are poems written before the poet was twenty-one years old, most of them at the age of eighteen or nineteen." 12 This would mean 1900 or 1901, but in a letter to me (March 15, 1953) Stanislaus Joyce says that most of the poems of Chamber Music were written in 1901 and 1902. Herbert Gorman, on the other hand, says that the poems of Chamber Music were written "for the most part" in 1903 and 1904.13 The evidence, however, seems to lead to the conclusion that most of the poems from which the thirty-six of Chamber Music were selected were written in 1901 and 1902.14 Besides these thirty-six and those printed in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist at least two others survive: one in the collection of John Hinsdale Thompson, who kindly transcribed it for me,15 and the other in the hands of J. F. Byrne, who 12

Recollections, p. 12. James Joyce, pp. 115-16. " T h e MS of xxxv at Yale is dated 1902. The MS of xx, owned by Stanislaus Joyce, is dated 1903. The MS of xxi, owned by Constantine Curran, is dated September 30, 1904. In a letter to me (Ash Wednesday, 1953) Mr. Curran says: "I cannot speak with security on the precise dating. I can only say that I was aware in my degree class year, 1901-1902, that my class fellow was a poet and that VII and xxiv stick in my mind as the earliest I was familiar with." Stanislaus Joyce tells me (in a letter of March 15, 1953) that H belongs to the earlier collection before 1901. That makes it one of the earliest poems of Chamber Music, as xxi is the latest. The diary that Stanislaus Joyce kept during this period contained accounts of the poems as they were written, but Mr. Joyce has not preserved this diary. ls This poem begins: "Came out to where the youth is met." 18

7

does not open them. Mr. Byrne, the Cranly of Joyce's works, is suitably described in Stephen

Hero.16

Surrounded by friends like Cranly, the young artist saw himself as a romantic hero, lonely, dedicated, and exceptional, fighting "the tyranny of the mediocre" with verses that were "to be numbered among the spiritual assets of the State." 1 7 An image in

Stephen

Hero presents his idea and feeling of his condition: Stephen "would wander into the long lofty dusty drawing-room and sit at the piano," striking chords "that floated towards the cobwebs and rubbish." 1 3 As the boy in Dubliners

bore his chalice safely

through the crowd, so Joyce bore his poems through Dublin in an elegant roll. All who knew him agree about this symbolic gesture; but whereas some thought the roll parchment, others thought it paper. W h e n in the spring or summer of 1903 Oliver Gogarty, for example, met Joyce in a tram on the way to Glasnevin, the shy and formal poet was carrying a "roll of vellum" ti'ed with a string. A few days later Joyce "reluctantly" read him a poem, "My love is in a light attire," from this manuscript of twenty large pages: "In the middle of each page was a little lyric that looked all the more dainty from the beautiful handwriting in which it was

1« Pages 122-25, 144-45. « Stephen Hero, pp. 179, 202. 18 Page 162.

8

written; Tennysonian, exquisite things." 19 Richard Best, the librarian, who appears in Ulysses, recalls that on first visiting George Russell, Joyce shyly took out of his pocket "a great roll of expensive writing paper . . . and he unrolled it. And there in the very centre of each page were two or three little lines of verse, and Joyce read out these lines to him." 2 0 According to George Roberts, the hero of Gas from a Burner, Joyce carried his poems in an "ever-present American-cloth case under his arm, such as schoolgirls use to carry their music." 21 Padraic Colum says: "He gave me his poems to read in a beautiful manuscript. He used to speak arrogantly about these poems of his, but I remember his saying something that made me know how precious these beautifully-wrought lyrics were to him—he spoke about walking through the streets of Paris, poor and tormented, and about the peace the repetition of his poems had brought him." 2 2 Whether arrogant or shy, 1 9 Oliver St. John Gogarty, Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove ( N e w York, Creative A g e Press, 1948), pp. 41-42. This is a good description of the Beach-Gilvany manuscript of twenty-seven large pages, each of which contains a very small poem in the exact center. Not on vellum, but on expensive laid and watermarked paper, this manuscript may be one of the copies Joyce carried about with him in 1903 and 1904. 2 0 "Portrait of James Joyce," edited by W . R . Rodgers, produced by Maurice Brown, broadcast by the British Broadcasting Company, T h i r d Program, February 13 and 17, March 22, 1950—hereafter cited as B B C . 21 BBC. 22 The Road round Ireland ( N e w York, Macmillan, 1926), p. 316.

9

Joyce read these poems to all who would listen, showed them to all who would not, and made copies for his friends. Maybe he did these things with what John Eglinton calls a "seedy hauteur." 2 3 Not hauteur but assurance marked Joyce's relations with the established writers of the Celtic Twilight. Fiercely independent and aware of greatness, he was unable to conceal his impatience with the second-rate. George Moore, with a dozen or more books to his credit, was astonished that this young man, with so little accomplishment behind him, regarded him as an inferior. George Russell was puzzled. "Joyce looked on the work of A.E.'s poets, of whom I was one," complains George Roberts, "as beneath contempt." 24 T h e result was natural: as Joyce undervalued them so they him. T h e Scylla and Charybdis episode of

Ulysses

shows him alone confronting the displeasure of the company. Stephen may silently sneer at A.E.'s Hermetic society in Dawson Chambers, but the others pointedly discuss a "sheaf of our younger poets' verses," the anthology that A.E. is editing and George Roberts publishing. 25 Stephen has not been asked to contribute a poem. There is talk of a party at George Moore's that night. Stephen has not been invited. Buck Mulligan, Irish Literary Portraits, p. 131. « BBC. 25 Ulysses (New York, Modern Library, Random House, 1934), pp. 189-90. 23

10

who has been asked to that party, reports under the name of Gogarty, that Lady Gregory, the patron of twilit bards to whom Joyce had applied in vain for aid in 1902, did not consider him quite "out of the top drawer." 20 John Eglinton, another of the company, says that A.E. thought Joyce's poems " 'might have been written by almost any young versifying sentimentalist.' " 2 7 With reference no doubt to such slights Joyce spoke years later in F i n n e g a n s Wake of "the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea" and, what is worse, of the "cultic twalette." 28 But when he abandoned Dublin in 1904, he devoted an entire broadside, The

Holy

O f f i c e , to

their twattering: But I must not accounted be One of that mumming company— With him who hies him to appease His giddy dames' frivolities While they console him when he whinges With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes— This reference to Yeats and parody of one of his 26

Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove, p. 50. Irish Literary Portraits, p. 142. In the Slocum Library at Yale, however, there are several friendly letters from Russell to Joyce during this period. As editor of the Irish Homestead, A.E. asks for contributions in prose—patriotic, pathetic, and suitable for a rural audience. W h a t is more, if we are to believe what is said in Ulysses (p- 31), A.E. had lent Joyce money, as had Fred Ryan, a leading contributor to Eglinton's Dana. 28 Finnegans Wake, pp. 37, 344. 27

11

poems 29 brings us to Joyce's more complicated relationship with that poet. Their first meeting is fabulous. According to the traditional story, young Joyce intruded upon middle-aged Yeats and announced: " W e have met too late. You are too old to be influenced by me." This account is supported by a sentence in F i n n e g a n s Wake: "We have meat two hourly." 30 But this foody fragment may imply no more than Joyce's awareness of the legend. Oliver Gogarty's version, somewhat different, is the story as he heard it. On Yeats's fortieth birthday, which was the occasion of a general celebration, Joyce called upon the great poet at the Cavendish Hotel. " 'How old are you?' " asked Joyce—as if he did not know. " 'I am forty years old,' " Yeats replied. " 'Sorry,' " said Joyce insolently as he turned to leave, " 'you are too old for me to help.' " Yeats was enchanted, says Dr. Gogarty, by the youngster's audacity. 31 But according to another account, Yeats observed: " 'Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.' " 3a The trouble with the story is, not only that Yeats's fortieth birthday was celebrated in 1905, almost a year after Joyce had left Dublin, but that Joyce in later years denied it: " 'Even if I had thought it, it wouldn't have 29 W . B. Yeats, "To Ireland in the Coming Times," Collected Poems (New York, Macmillan, 1951), p. 49. 30 Page 60. Cf. p. 37: "I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early." 31 Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove, pp. 48-49. 32

Eglinton, Irish Literary Portraits, p. 137.

12

been polite to say it.' " 3 3 Joseph Hone's account, while less entertaining, is more credible. Joyce, he says, was introduced to Yeats in 1902 by a letter from George Russell, which is still extant. This letter, quoted by Hone, generously commends Joyce's intellect, his education, and his prose. George Moore, Russell adds, found an article "of this boy's . . . preposterously clever." 34 Joyce's attitude toward his elders, like that of Shaw, seems to have kept this side of insult as part of a deliberate plan to call himself to their notice and to secure their favors without sacrificing his independence. If that was the plan, it succeeded. Forgiving the attack upon his theater in The Day of the

Rabblement,

Yeats permitted Joyce to read him poems and sent the young poet a laudatory four-page letter. "You have a very delicate talent," said Yeats, "but I cannot yet say whether for verse or prose." 35 Consumed with admiration for this talent, Yeats became Joyce's principal patron.36 With George Moore he secured for Joyce a royal 3 3 BBC. F j r from denying the rumor of his first meeting with Joyce, Yeats repeated the traditional story to L. A. G. Strong ( T h e Sacred River, New York, Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1951, p. 16). But Yeats was an Irishman and his repetition of a good story fails to guarantee its truth as Joyce's denial fails to confirm its falsity. 3 4 Joseph Hone, W. R. Yeats ( N e w York, Macmillan, 1943), p. 184. 3 5 Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections, p. 13. 3 9 In a letter to me (March 15, 1 9 5 3 ) Stanislaus Joyce says that while his brother was in Paris in 1902, Yeats tried to place some of the lyrics for him. Possibly Yeats placed Joyce's poems in the Speaker, where Yeats had had poems of his own published. See

13

bounty during his years of poverty in Zurich; he introduced Joyce to Ezra Pound, to whom Joyce owed much of his success in finding publishers; and in 1932 he invited Joyce to join the Irish Academy. In refusing this honor, Joyce thanked Yeats for the helping hand he had extended thirty years ago. 37 Yeats extended that hand in 1902 when Joyce left Dublin for his first trip to Paris. T h e great poet met the young artist at Euston Station in London, fed him, showed him the sights, and introduced him to editors. As the climax of this tour, Yeats brought him to see Arthur

Symons,

who, while attempting

decadent

chords on his piano, allowed Joyce to read poems from that manuscript, his only baggage. Favorably impressed by the somewhat ninetyish air of Joyce's Muse, and by what he thought the young poet's "sinister genius," the famous critic resolved to support him. 3 8 On July 13, 1904, Symons wrote to Grant Richards, the English publisher: " I send you Joyce's book of lyrics. Duckworth thinks it too 'slight.' . . . T w o of the best poems were cut out by Garnett for the 'Speaker', & two new ones were sent on to me the other day." 3 0 Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W . B. Yeats (Lon don, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1951), p. 65. 3 7 Hone, W. B. Yeats, pp. 311-12, 457; La Hune Catalogue, item 136. 3 8 Gorman, James Joyce, pp. 84-86; Arthur Symons in The Joyce Book (London, Sylvan Press and Oxford University Press, 1933). 3 9 This unpublished letter is in the Jamrs Gilvarry collection. Gorman (James Joyce, p. 125) dates Symons's submission of the

14

Several letters passed between Richards and Symons, who undertook the entire negotiation. On September 15, 1905, he wrote: "A propos of Joyce, I am told that c/o Oliver Gogerty [sic], 5 Rudand Square, Dublin, might reach him. I am very anxious to see that book in print, and I will do my utmost for it if it appears." 40 Later, while urging Richards to publish Duhliners, Symons said: "This one I haven't seen, but if it has anything like the talent of the verse, I do hope you will see your way to bring it out. I certainly think he ought to have a chance, though from the very little I know of him I should think he is a difficult person to deal with." 41 Several letters from Joyce to Richards,42 filling out the story, make it plain that the trouble with publishers that was to plague Joyce throughout his early career had begun. On September 26, 1904, Joyce, writing from Cabra, says that according to Symons Richards has the manuscript of Chamber Music. Since Joyce is leaving Ireland in two weeks, he would appreciate a quick decision. Writing somewhat less hopefully from Trieste on January 16, 1905, Joyce tells Richards that if he has found the manuscript unacceptable, the poet manuscript autumn, 1904, and says nothing about the original submission to Duckworth. T w o of Joyce's poems appeared in the Speaker in 1904, but Joyce did not substitute others for them. 40 Gilvarry collection. In another letter to Richards (Gilvarry collection, dated July 28, no y e a r ) Symons calls Joyce's poems "uncommonly good." 41 October 2, 1906. Gilvarry collection. 42 Preserved in photostatic copies in the Slocum Library.

15

would be grateful for its return. Letters of May 2 and September 28, 1905, express sorrow over Richards's financial difficulties and allow the publisher to keep the manuscript until he is solvent. A postcard of December 2, 1907, more than three years after the time the manuscript was submitted, thanks Richards for returning it. The memoirs of Grant Richards, which deal with the important affairs of his publishing house, are silent about this one. 43 Symons remained the only hope. Elkin Mathews, the publisher, wrote to him, October, 1906: "I am very much obliged to you for drawing my attention to Mr. Joyce's work." Certain from what Symons has told him of its quality that it should be published, Mathews asks for the manuscript. Joyce sent him a manuscript, November, 1906; the agreement from the publisher reached Joyce early in 1907; and on April 6, 1907, according to Gorman, the book finally appeared in an edition of 509 copies.44 T h e contract between Elkin Mathews and James Joyce for the publication of Chamber

Music is dated

4 3 Herbert Gorman (James Joyce, pp. 141-45) prints other letters from Joyce to Richards and some from Richards to Joyce. The publisher has mislaid the manuscript, wants a subsidy, has doubts. Evidently Symons had also submitted the poems to Heinemann and T . Fisher Unwin, who rejected them immediately. "James Joyce, pp. 172, 174, 191. Joyce says in a letter to Mathews, May 30, 1912 (Slocum Library, Yale), that Chamber Music was published May, 1907. The English Catalogue gives June, 1907, as the date of publication. In their Bibliography (p. 6 ) Slocum and Cahoon agree with Joyce.

16

January 17, 1907.45 It provides that royalties start upon the sale of three hundred copies, after which a royalty of 15 percent will be paid, counting thirteen copies as twelve. T h e proceeds from musical setting will be divided equally by author and publisher and a statement will be rendered to the author once a year. T h a t Mathews made some effort to sell thirteen copies as twelve is apparent from a review or publicity copy that he sent to Wilfrid Meynell with an accompanying letter: "I wish to draw your special attention to the little volume entitled 'Chamber Music' by James Joyce. Arthur Symons who introduced the poet to me considers the work has [']the most genuine lyric quality of any new work I have read for many years.' " 4 6 In a letter to Mathews from Trieste, July 19, 1907, Stanislaus Joyce says that his brother, who is ill, would like to know if any reviews have appeared. 47 There were reviews in plenty and even an advance notice. Under "Particulars of Interesting Volumes Likely to be Published this Month," The Book Monthly

heralded

the poems: Mr. Elkin Mathews is issuing Chamber Music, a book of lyrics, by a young Irishman, Mr. James Joyce. Some time ago Mr. W. B. Yeats gave us ' T h e Tables of the Law," 45 Elkin Mathews's copy, signed by Joyce at Rome, is in the rare book room at Yale, the gift of J. W . Warrington. 48 Gilvarry colL-ction. 47 Slocum Library, Yale. In a letter dated September 9, 1907 (John H. Thompson collection), Joyce thanks Mathews for sending him copies of the reviews.

17

which contains two stories that had been privately printed. "I do not think I should have reprinted them," he wrote, "had I not met a young man in Ireland . .. who liked them very much and nothing else that I had written." The reference was to Mr. Joyce.48 This was good publicity. But the review in the Literary World, more typical of the reception accorded an unknown poet, dismissed Joyce's poems as wholesome and pretty: "pretty is, indeed the right word for them." 49 It is true that many of the leading magazines, the Saturday Review, for example, the Fortnightly Review, and the Spectator, the Athenaeum

failed to notice Chamber

Music; and

merely listed it among books received.

But Arthur Symons's promised review in the Nation, the first considerable response in print to Joyce's work, must have pleased the exiled brothers. No one who has not tried, says the eminent critic, can know how hard it is to write poems "so firm and delicate and yet so full of music and suggestion" as the thirty-six lyrics of Chamber

Music. These "tiny

evanescent things," remote from the concerns of Ireland, "evoke not only roses in mid-winter but the very dew on the roses": Sometimes we are reminded of Elizabethan, more often of Jacobean lyrics; there is more than sweetness, there is now and then the sharp prose touch, as in Rochester, which gives a kind of malice to sentiment.... There is almost no «» Vol. IV, p. 641, no date. « Vol. LXXIH, New Series (October 15, 1907), p. 432.

18

substance at all in these songs, which hardly hint at a story; but they are like a whispering clarichord that someone plays in the evening, when it is getting dark.. . . 5 0 T h e review in the Freeman's Journal,

Dublin, is by

Thomas Kettle, who married one of the Sheehy girls, Joyce's friends. 51 Kettle's friendly words should dispel the notion that Irish reaction to Joyce was entirely unfavorable: Those who remember University College life of five years back will have many memories of Mr. Joyce. Wilful, fastidious, a lover of elfish paradoxes, he was to the men of his time the very voice and embodiment of the literary spirit. 1 lis work, never very voluminous, had from the first a rare and exquisite accent. One still goes back to the files of "St. Stephen's," to the "Saturday Review," the "Homestead" . . . to find these lyrics and stories which, although at first reading so slight and frail, still hold one curiously by their integrity of form. "Chamber Music" is a collection of the best 5 0 Vol. I ( J u n e 22, 1907), p. 639. Gorman's version of this review (lames Joyce, pp. 1 9 2 - 9 3 ) differs considerably from the original because it is taken not from the Nation but from a later version, evidently made from memory, that Symons included in The Joyce Book. 5 1 Joyce's account of his visits to the family of David Sheehy, M.P., is given in Stephen Hero (pp. 4 2 - 4 3 ) . Several of the Epiphanies, preserved at the University of Buffalo, concern the Sheehy family and Francis SkefEngton (McCann in A Portrait of the Artist), who married another of the girls and whose essay on the university question shared the covers of Joyce's Day of the Rabblement. In May It Please the Court (Dublin, C. J. Fallon, 1951) Eugene Sheehy, who attended University College with Joyce, Kettle, Skei^ington, and Curran, tells of Joyce's visits to the home of his parents in Belvedere Place. Cf. Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce's Dublin (London, Grey Walls Press, 1950), pp. 71-73.

19

of these delicate verses, which have each of them, the bright beauty of a crystal. T h e title of the book evokes that atmosphere of remoteness, restraint, accomplished execution characteristic of its whole contents. T h e r e is but one theme behind the music, a love gracious and, in its way, strangely intense, but fashioned by temperamental and literary moulds, too strict to permit it to pass ever into the great tumult of passion. T h e inspiration of the book is almost entirely literate. There is no trace of the folk-lore, the folk dialect, or even the National feeling that have coloured the work of practically every writer in contemporary Ireland. Neither is there any sense of that modern point of view which consumes all life in the languages of "problems." It is clear, delicate, distinguished playing, of the same kindred with harps, with wood-birds, and with Paul Verlaine. . . . 5 2 T h e s e reviews by Symons and Kettle traced a pattern from which critics of later times, as if fascinated as hen by line, were unable to depart. L i k e any young author, J o y c e anxiously collected reviews. Despite his poverty h e issued a printed sheet of excerpts from the more favorable notices, like that which he was to issue after the publication of A of the Artist.

Portrait

Far less unenterprising ( i n an imprac-

tical w a y ) than h e has b e e n thought to be, h e intended these sheets for advertisement and sent tnem around to critics and publishers. 5 3 5 2 Saturday, June 1, 1907. This review was .ranscribed for me at the National Library, Dublin, by Miss Fedelma Nora Donnelly. 5 3 I have in my possession the sheet he had printed for A Portrait of the Artist, but I have not seen the scarcer sheet he issued

20

After he had finished collecting reviews, Joyce wanted to start collecting royalties. Three years after publication, in a letter to Elkin Mathews, he confesses himself astonished at the meagemess of the sales. In view of the favorable reviews, he thinks, the book could have been pushed a little more. Since eleven of the poems have been set to music by two composers, he expects Mathews to live up to clause five of his contract and pay him 50 percent of the fees. 54 Two years later he asks Mathews if Chamber

Music

has earned any

royalties at all. Surely more than three hundred copies must have been sold. Joyce himself knows of fifty copies in the hands of friends. 55 Maybe Mathews replied to these letters, but, according to Herbert Gorman, he sent no royalties. 56 He must have sold the edition out because in 1918 he reprinted it with minor revisions. Several of the poems of Chamber

Music appeared in

magazines both before and after the publication of the first edition. 57 In 1904, before Joyce left Dublin, three of his poems came out in the Saturday

Review and the

for Chamber Music. Herbert Cahoon, however, during his bibliographical investigations, came across a copy. He gave me the following list of periodicals (besides some of those already mentioned) from which Joyce quoted favorable comments: the Leader, the Daily News, the Evening Standard, the Manchester Guardian, the Nottingham Guardian, the Glasgow Herald, the Irish Daily Independent, the Bookman, the Scotsman, and Country Life. 5 4 May 15, 1910. Slocum Library. " M a y 30, 1912. Slocum Library. 56 James Joyce, p. 196. r'7 See T h e Texts of Chamber Music, p. 105, for bibliographical particulars.

21

Speaker and one appeared in Dana, an Irish of Independent

Thought.

Magazine

This short-lived periodical

was edited by John Eglinton, who complained that Joyce was the only one of his contributors who demanded and received pay.*8 T . W . Lyster, F. M. Atkinson, Padraic Colum, and Oliver Gogarty, all mentioned in Ulysses, were fellow and presumably unpaid contributors. Two poems appeared in the

Venture

( 1 9 0 5 ) , a kind of belated Yellow Book, published in the apparent hope of prolonging the aestheticism of the nineties. Oliver Gogarty, Joyce's rival, had two poems in the same issue of this soft, hard-covered annual. Three years after the publication of

Chamber

Music one of the poems was reprinted in George Russell's magazine for farmers, the Irish Homestead,

along

with pieces on "Management of the Breeding Sow," "Probable Price of Fat Pigs," and "Manuring." In 1914 Ezra Pound reprinted poem xxxvi in Des

Imagistes.

11 That Ezra Pound liked the poetry of the nineties, the more austere variety at least, is shown by his edition of Lionel Johnson and by that admiration of the early poems of Yeats which led him to seek the poet out and become his secretary. Joyce's clean, fin-de-siecle

verses

were likely to please him. Maybe Yeats, like Symons, 1

Irish Literary Portraits, p. 135. Cf. Ulysses, p. 211. In Instigations (New York, Boni and Liveright, 1920, p. 2 0 7 ) Pound praises Chamber Music for its "clean cut ivory finish." ss

1

22

was attracted to the poetry of Joyce because he found in it not only flattering echoes of his own early work but signs of the colder manner he was trying or about to try. Both Yeats and Symons loved Walter Pater. This love, shared by Joyce, 2 helped perhaps to impart to his verses a languid aesthetic air or a gemlike hardness that his elders found congenial. Ernest Dowson, the Paterite colleague of Yeats and Johnson, may have provided a model for wavering rhythms such as this from Joyce's poem

XXVIII:

Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough. Tidiness and the appearance of Mithridates in poem xxvn suggest acquaintance with Housman. Such reminiscences of the nineties are not surprising in verses written by a highly literate young man around the turn of the century. Verses by Oliver Gogarty in the Venture and Dana and by Seumas O'Sullivan in the latter magazine are so similar as to make it seem likely that they were imitating Joyce or he them or that all three—and this is the most likely—were writing what it was the fashion for young Dubliners to write at the time.3 2 Young Joyce's love of Pater is shown not only by the style of his essay on Mangan but by the long passages he copied out in Trieste from Marius the Epicurean and Imaginary Portraits. These transcriptions survive in a notebook labeled "Quademo di James Joyce," now in the Joyce collection at the University of Buffalo. * Gogarty, "To Stella," Dana (September, 1904); ' T w o Songs," The Venture ( 1 9 0 5 ) . O'Sullivan, ' T w o Songs," Dana (September, 1904).

23

Joyce's more considerable debt to Yeats becomes so apparent upon close inspection that only the kindliness of the elder poet could have kept him from numbering Joyce among "Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of . . . Mine," who, wearing his coat of embroideries,4 made him see the enterprise of going naked. Whatever his opinion of the course taken by Yeats's literary theater, Joyce was lost in admiration of the works of Yeats, in both verse and prose. Joyce had learned "The Tables of the Law" and "The Adoration of the Magi" by heart,8 and, as we are assured by the notice in the Book Monthly,

persuaded Yeats to make them available

again. Joyce translated The Countess

Cathleen

into

Italian and set "Who Goes with Fergus?" the wonderful song from that play, to music. In the first chapter of Ulysses, where Yeats detected "a cruel playful mind like a great, soft tiger cat," 8 lines from his poem on Fergus weave the image of Stephen's mother and serve Joyce as they had once served their author to present the charms of regression. During the course of Ulysses Stephen shows his familiarity with so many of Yeats's poems7 that we do not need the assurance of Stanislaus Yeats, Collected Poems, pp. 92, 125. Stephen Hero, pp. 176-78, 192. • Gogarty, Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove, p. 49. 7 Ulysses, p. 132, "They went forth to battle, but they always fell" is the original title of "The Rose of Battle"; p. 182, "The shining seven" is an intentional distortion of a line in "A Cradle Song"; p. 385, "a rose upon the rood of time"; p. 506, "I will arise and go"; cf. the parody of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" in Finnegans Wake, p. 605. There are many other echoes of Yeats in Finnegans Wake, and he is frequently mentioned. 4 5

24

Joyce 8 that his brother liked Yeats alone of all the moderns. In later years Joyce had copies of Yeats's major works on his shelves.9 And in The Day of the

Rabble-

ment, while blaming Yeats for his errors, young Joyce went out of his way to say: "In aim and form 'The Wind Among the Reeds' is poetry of the highest order." It was upon this collection that Joyce drew for Chamber Music. "Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty," from which Stephen quotes in A Portrait of the Artist,10 seems to have had no effect upon his poems; but "The Song of Wandering Aengus," mentioned in Ulysses,11

gave him the "dappled grass" for poem

xxrv. Yeats's jester in "The Cap and Bells" may have served Joyce for "Bright cap and streamers" in poem x. "Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace," which begins "I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake," seems to account for a line or two of Joyce's "I hear an army charging upon the land." 12 But cold, passionate effects like those in Joyce's poem xix ("As they deny, deny.") must have been more pleasing to Yeats as he entered his middle period. And he must have been astonished at the liberation of rhythm in Joyce's poem xxxvi and at his dissonance and asso8 Recollections, p. 8. • La Hune Catalogue, items 547-50. 10 Page 523. 11 Page 212. 12 Poem xxxvi. For other connections between the poems of Yeats and Joyce, see the notes to poems n, vi, xi, xv, xvm, xix, xx, xxii, xxrn, xxiv, xxvm, XXIX.

25

nance, 13 devices with which the great poet was about to experiment. Few young poets anticipate the course of their master. A concern with origin and resemblance, tiresome to critics, is not altogether without critical significance. It cannot give us the value of a work of art, which is essentially a timeless arrangement of materials from time, but it can save evaluators from error in attitude and help them see more plainly what they propose to make judgments about. It can prevent the error, common to critics, of saying that alone of Joyce's works Chamber Music is free from Irish connection or reference. And if a naked, quick look reveals Elizabethan song, a concern with what concerns art can help us see that Joyce is no more of an Elizabethan than an aesthete of the nineties could be—though certainly no less. Echoes of Yeats and maybe of Dowson and Pater serve only to warn us that Joyce's time may play a part in the tone, feeling, sense, and arrangement of these poems 14 and that we might look for what is there without allowing ourselves to be diverted entirely by what we expect to find. Before we consider the Elizabethans—and they are by no means unimportant—let us notice Joyce's ac1 3 For example, snood-maidenhood ( n ) ; kiss-is ( x x i x ) ; kneescharioteers, shore-alone ( x x x v i ) . 1 4 As Joyce says in Finnegatts Wake (p. 109): "to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is . . . hurtful to sound sense. . . ."

26

quaintance with romantics other and earlier than Yeats. From Verlaine, mentioned by Thomas Kettle in his review of Chamber

Music, Joyce may have caught that

union of economy with suggestiveness which gives distinction to his verse. One of his earliest exercises was a translation of Verlaine's "Les sanglots longues." 15 Poem xxxv, a harmony of sounds and rhythms, recalls the "chanson grise" of a master who, seeking the point where the precise encounters the imprecise, praises "la musique avant toute chose." But this poem, written in Paris and one of the last to be added to

Chamber

Music, suggests Verlaine no more than poem n, one of the earliest of the collection. Joyce's verses about the girl whose "old piano plays an air" as evening gives color to the trees outside her window seem an echo from Romances sans paroles: Le piano que baise une main frêle Luit dans le soir rose et gris vaguement, Tandis qu'avec un très léger bruit d'aile Un air bien vieux, bien faible et bien charmant Rôde.... Qu'as-tu voulu, fin refrain incertain Qui vas tantôt mourir vers la fenêtre Ouverte un peu sur le petit jardin? 15 Gorman, James Joyce, p. 59. In his essay on Mangan, Joyce compares the rhythmic expressiveness of Verlaine with that of Shakespeare. Joyce's use of 'literature" as a term of contempt (Stephen Hero, p. 7 8 ) is probably based upon Verlaine's "Art poétique." See Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (New York, Harrison Smith, 1934), p. 177, for Joyce's admiration of Verlaine.

27

As for English romantics: Stephen's quarrel with Heron in A Portrait of the Artist16 places young Joyce in the camp of Byron rather than in that of Tennyson, whom he dismisses as a "rhymester." That his opinion of Tennyson remained constant is apparent from Ulysses, where Stephen thinks as he walks the beach: "Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum turn tiddledy turn. Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet." 17 But Stephen's love for Byron did not last. Joyce attributes liis early love of the romantic exile to pathetic Little Chandler in Dubliners; and Molly Bloom in her monologue tells us that Bloom gave her the poems of Byion, with whom for a while she confused that potential poet. 18 From Byron, Joyce turned to Shelley, 19 who seems to have had more effect on Chamber

Music.

There are many resemblances, but, with due allowance for other possibilities, "From dewy dreams, my soul, arise," in poem xv inescapably suggests Shelley's serenade, which Joyce admired and, as Eugene Sheehy tells us, used to sing in his back parlor: I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, Page 329. Page 51. But see Finnegans Wake, p. 48 and note to poem v. 1 8 Pages 728, 760. 1 9 For Shelley, see Stephen Hero, p. 129; A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 346, 354; Ulysses, p. 192; Eugene Sheehy, May It Please the Court, p. 22. One of Byron's earliest poems, " T o Emma," on the decline of love, is a likely origin for the name of Stephen's girl, who may owe her last name to Arthur Clery, a classmate, who attacked Joyce's paper on aesthetics at the college. 19 17

28

When the winds are breathing low, And the stars are shining bright: I arise from dreams of thee, And a spirit in my feet Hath led me—who knows how? To thy chamber window, Sweet! It is clear that at least one of the moods of Joyce's nocturnal, chamber-window-haunting lover in

Chamber

Music is not easily to be distinguished from that of Shelley. As for other poets: we know that Joyce liked the lyrics of James Clarence Mangan 2 0 and, if we may judge by references in Ulysses, that he disliked Swinburne's; but the English romantic poet to whom he turned with most respect after he had proceeded beyond Shelley was Blake. Ulysses and Finnegans

Wake

are filled with quotations from him and allusions to his works.21 That he attracted Joyce is only natural; for with one eye or maybe both on the Elizabethans, Blake wrote lyrics like Whether on Ida's shady brow, Or in the chambers of the East There can be little doubt that Joyce had Blake in mind when he sang the chambers of the West. The principal 20 That Joyce liked Mangan's "Veil not thy mirror, sweet Amine," is asserted by Gogarty (Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove, p. 4 3 ) and Colum (The Road round Ireland, p. 310). This poem does not appear in the edition of Mangan I consulted (Dublin, 1903), out Joyce claimed to have discovered it—in a newspaper perhaps. Eugene Sheehy (May It Please the Court, p. 2 8 ) says Joyce liked Mangan's "Nameless One." 21 For example, Ulysses, pp. 25. 34, 203, 388.

29

difference between Blake's union of contemporary and Elizabethan elements and Joyce's reunion of these elements a hundred years later is that Blake's is better. If under Elizabethan we include the Jacobean and the Caroline, we must agree that Joyce's

fin-de-siecle

verses have something of an Elizabethan air. The placing of the second verb, for example, in these lines from poem

XXIII

recalls that spacious period:

This heart that flutters near my heart My hope and all my riches is And in view of Joyce's love of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline song, we may agree that it was probably his intention to recover something of its quality, as antidote perhaps to his own time and as an expression of difference from his fellows. Interest in poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is abundantly displayed throughout his works. "A slight disorder in her dress" and "Bid me to live and I will live thy protestant to be," which occur in Ulysses,22 are respectively a distortion of and a quotation from Herrick, whose teacher, Ben Jonson, was more on Joyce's mind. In A Portrait of the Artist Stephen went around singing "the song by Ben Jonson which begins 'I was not wearier where I lay,' " which Joyce himself transcribed in the notebook he kept in Paris in 1902. 2 3 T h e trouble with this is that the song does not appear in the works of Ben " Pages 409, 645. 2S Portrait, p. 436; Gorman, James Joyce, p. 95.

30

Jonson, either in the first printings or in the latest and best editions. Although it is possible that this song was ascribed to him by some Victorian editor or anthologist, the chances are that it is not his. It does appear, however, in the Egerton manuscripts in the British Museum, dated around 1669, author unknown. 24 Evidence that Joyce knew something by Jonson himself is provided by Padraic Colum, who, in his memoir, tells how Joyce sang "Still to be neat," a poem not unlike some of those in Chamber

Music.25

That Jonson, the most classical of Elizabethans, was attractive to the young Dubliner, whose desire for limitation we have noted, is not unnatural. But he also liked the lyrics of Nashe and Shakespeare. In A Portrait of the Artist Stephen transposes Nashe's "Brightness falls from the air" into darkness falling, an image perhaps of what happened to Elizabethan song during its passage through Joyce's temperament and time. 26 Certainly the songs of Shakespeare, described in

Stephen

Hero* as "free and living, as remote from any conscious 7

purpose as rain that falls in a garden or as the lights of evening," are freer, more living, and more remote than those that Joyce wrote in possible imitation. His ad2 4 Ernest Brennecke, one of the principal authorities on Elizabethan song, located it for me. Where Joyce found it is a problem, possibly in a manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he read the works o c Jonson, 1902-3 (Gorman, James Joyce, p. 94). 25 The Road round Ireland, p. 310. In the long Buffalo manu script (p. 901) Joyce distorts a line from Jonson's "To Celia." 2« Portrait, pp. 501, 503. " Page 79.

31

miration of Shakespeare's lyrics, however, is beyond dispute. In Stephen

Hero he praises the rhythm of

"Come unto these yellow sands," Ariel's song, and in the same volume he defends "the two songs of the clown" in Twelfth Butt.

28

Night from the censorship of Father

Since the clown has four songs in that play,

Stephen's reference is uncertain, but clearly he has in mind some of the best lyrics in the language, good marks to shoot at however vainly. But according to Herbert Gorman, young Joyce remarked, " 'I have written the most perfect lyric since Shakespeare.' " 2 9 It is doubtful that a grammarian so nearly perfect as Joyce could have said that. But I am afraid that he said something of the sort. His admiration for what he called "the dainty songs of the Elizabethans" 30 extended to the works of the madrigalists and the lutanists. As Stephen walks the streets of Dublin or loiters on the steps of the library, he calls to mind "the age of Dowland and Byrd and Nashe," but not without some critical distance: What was their languid grace but the softness of chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart. And he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan: and saw with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in Covent 28 29 so

Pages 28, 184. James Joyce, p. 112. Portrait, pp. 437, 486; Stephen Hero, p. 155.

32

Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the poxfouled wenches of the taverns and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clipped and clipped again. The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure . . . 81 H e sees in the "old phrases" of these poets only "a disinterred sweetness," which, it may be, he also found at such times in his pious imitations of their "chambering." For certainly, as he admitted elsewhere, his style at this period was "over affectionate towards the antique, and even the obsolete." 32 In spite of these reservations, however, his affection for Elizabethan song was so fundamental that when drunk and weary early in the morning of June 17, 1904, Stephen incoherently lectures Mr. Bloom on the subject, praising Shakespeare's songs, at least of in or about that period, the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter Lane near Gerard the herbalist, who anno ludendo hausi, Doulandus, an instrument he was contemplating purchasing from Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, whom Bloom did not quite recall, though the name certainly sounded familiar, for sixty-five guineas and Farnaby and son with their dux and comes conceits and Byrd (William), who played the virginals, he said, in the Queen's Chapel or anywhere else he found them and one Tomkins who made toys or airs and John Bull.33 « Portrait, p. 502. Stephen Here, p. 27. 53 Ulysses, p. 646. For the songs set by William Byid and John Dowland, see E. H. Fellowes, English Madrigal Verse, 1588-1632 (Oxford, 1929). Joyce owned a copy of Fellowes's The English 52

33

That this discourse, which displays learning to the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time (like almost everything else Joyce displayed in Dublin), is based more or less upon actuality is confirmed by an extant letter from "Stephen Daedalus" to Oliver Gogarty, dated June 3, 1904, only two weeks before Stephen's speech to Mr. Bloom. 34 In this letter the poet asks his friend for the loan of a jacket and a decent pair of pants that he may undertake a tour of southern England, singing Elizabethan songs to a lute he hopes to get "Dolmetsh" to make for him. Arnold Dolmetsch, it will be recalled, is the antiquary who made Yeats a psaltery, the thing with which he was touring the English midlands at the time, chanting his own verses to quarter tones perhaps. 3 6 In the absence of sixty-five guineas Joyce had to content himself with singing Elizabethan songs to a cracked piano in the back parlor of the Sheehys, who were somewhat disturbed by the license of those lutanists. 36 School of Lutenist Song ( L a H u n e Catalogue, item 1 2 1 ) . Giles F a m a b y and his son, T h o m a s Tomkins, and John Bull, all composers of songs, may be found in the D N B . Stephen's Latin phrase is an anagram on Dowland, variously attributed: Johannes Doulandus. Annos ludendo hausi. T h i s also appears in the D N B , where Stephen may have found it before ungrammatically (perhaps drunkenly) distorting it. Some of the works of the lutanists were available in nineteenth-century editions. Photostatic copy in Slocum Library. Gogarty ( M o u r n i n g Became Mrs. Spendlove, p. 4 8 ) recalls receiving this letter. u Yeats, "Speaking to the Psaltery" (1907:), Essays ( N e w York, Macmillan, 1 9 2 4 ) . 88 Stephen Hero, pp. 4 2 - 4 3 . Stephen sings a song by Dowland at the home of M r . Daniels ( S h e e h y ) , but the company calls for

34

Sometimes cynical, sometimes a little wanton, the poems set to music by Byrd, Dovvland, and the others may have served Joyce as models when he undertook Chamber Music. This one, if confused sufficiently with Shelley's serenade, might have inspired rivalry: Shall I come, sweet love, to thee When the evening beams are set? Shall I not excluded be? Will you find no feigned let? Let me not, for pity, more Tell the long hours at your door. But to let such dangers pass, Which a lover's thoughts disdain, T i s enough in such a place To attend Love's joys in vain. Do not mock me in thy bed, While these cold nights freeze me dead.37 Except for the last line, which is breezier than anything in Chamber

Music or, despite the west wind, in Shel-

ley, this kind of thing was caught by Joyce as well as could be expected. Under his fingers in that back parlor the virginals proper to such song became what he calls in Finnegans Wake a "harpsdischord."38 Joyce liked these songs not only for the words but for the music. For a long time he thought himself a Irish songs (Stephen Hero, p. 155), of which, according to Eugene Sheehy, Joyce sang plenty. 37 Fellowes, English Madrigal Verse, p. 357. 3 8 Page 13. The pun, excellent in this context, implies a conflict among Irishmen.

35

tenor—as indeed he was. At this period, however, the songs of Tom Moore and Balfe and the ballads and come-all-yous of his country proved less fascinating than the measures of Dowland and Byrd—and much less suitable for exiles. By composing Chamber

Music

somewhat after the fashion of Elizabethans Joyce satisfied his desire for poetry, for all that seemed alien to Ireland, and for music. He himself composed music for one of his poems, and he improvised "liturgical" accompaniments for the rest.39 A letter to his brother, written at the time of publication, calls attention to the "open pianner" on the title page. Some of the verses so symbolized, Joyce continues, are "pretty enough to be put to music. I hope someone will do so, someone that knows old English music such as I like." 40 His desire was gratified. Various composers, including Geoffrey Palmer, with whom he carried on a long correspondence, set most of his poems.41 His open vowels, his breath-conscious rhythms, and his apparent emptiness were irresistible invitations to composers. It cannot be denied that his poems are songs. But this aspect, one of many, has limited and deceived many 3 9 Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections, p. 13; Gorman, James Joyce, p. 78 n. 4 0 Gorman, James Joyce, p. 175. 4 1 From the letters of Joyce to Geoffrey Palmer, 1909 (Slocum Library) it appears that Palmer had set eight of the poems. Joyce hoped a music publisher might bring out Chamber Music as a book of music. He tried in vain to have his songs sung at the 1909 Feis Ceoil in Dublin. For the settings of Chamber Music, see Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography, pp. 163-65.

36

critics. However musical, Chamber

Music is more than

a pleasing arrangement of sounds and rhythms for Irish tenors. It is a structure of references as well. T h e title, which at first glance seems to imply no more than intimate music, at once conceals and suggests regions of meaning under the surface.

hi T o his "passing glance," says a recent critic, avoiding a steadier look, Joyce's "plaintive and cloying little stanzas" are not only conventional but "empty of meaning." "Lyrics in the strictest sense," he continues, all of Joyce's poems have the practical virtue that they can be set to music and sung." 1 Another critic finds them little better than trivial finger-exercises. If these "gently archaic" verses reveal anything, he says, it is "that Joyce possessed musical training." One reads them "and in the mind's ear a harpsichord is faintly playing the quaint Elizabethan accompaniments." 2 I give these opinions, which conform to the "clarichord" school of Arthur Symons, not to defame the critics who held them but to illustrate the usual error, which, I confess, was once my own. When Sylvia Beach sold me a copy 1 Harry Levin, James Joyce (New York, New Directions, 1941), pp. 26, 27, 37. 2 Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, His First Forty Years (New York, Viking Pre*, 1924), pp. 9, 15; James Joyce ( 1 9 3 9 ) , pp. 68, 86: "To suggest "hat Joyce's passions were involved in them [the poems] would be absurd." Rebecca West finds nothing but "gross sentimentality" in Pomes Penyeach and the other works (TTie Strange Necessity, New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1928, pp. 1-3).

37

in 1928, I opened it with the expectation of finding something like Ulysses,

which she had sold me three

years earlier. M y disappointment, which is that of most readers conditioned by Joyce's later works, prevented a second glance at these empty or at best sentimental verses, and it was years before I could persuade myself to open that thin volume again. T h e reputed last words of James Joyce seem almost justified. "Does nobody understand?" he asked, and immediately expired. 3 W e should have guessed that the author of

Ulysses

intended more than exercise for voice or fingers. T o accept Chamber

Music

at the estimate of a passing

glance, we should have to explain how it was that the subtleties of Dubliners

suddenly emerged from noth-

ing. W e should also have to explain the value Joyce set upon his poems. A sane man does not inscribe nothing elaborately on large paper or vellum and, making a roll of it, carry it about with him to impress his rivals. "It is rumored," says Herbert Gorman, that Joyce "took his poems seriously." 4 In spite of such skepticism, rumor was right. T h e value Joyce set upon

Chamber

Music during his last years in Dublin shows that it involved what deeply concerned him. As Ulysses

was

the central expression of his middle years, so these poems were that of his youth. Stephen shortly after Chamber 3 4

Music,

BBC.

James Joyce, His First Forty Years, p. 15.

38

Hero,

written

makes it plain that

Joyce's verse presented or at least was intended to present his vision of reality. Enabling him to combine "the offices of penitent and confessor," his poems could not only "fix the most elusive of his moods" but "pierce to the significant heart of everything." The poet, he continues, "is the intense centre of the life of his age. . . . He alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music." Art (and to Joyce at that time poetry was his art) "is the very central expression of life." 8 To write poetry, he quoted from Ibsen, "is to hold judgment day over ourselves."8 Joyce thought of the poem as deliberately made, and what he made deliberately was in his own intricate image. "The poem is made not born," he observes in Stephen Hero. "The burgher notion of the poet Byron in undress pouring out verses just as a city fountain pours out water seemed to him characteristic of most popular judgments on esthetic matters."7 Indeed, the poem, as he saw it, is far from being the simple lyrical cry of his aesthetic theory. Lyrical only by the common definition, his kind of poem is rather what he called epic or even dramatic.8 No writer who used himself ' Stephen Hero, pp. 32-33, 80, 86. 6 Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections, p. 19. Cf. Finnegans Wake, p. 199: "holding doomsdag over hunselv," an echo of Ibsen's phrase. 7 Page 33. 8 Portrait, p. 480. When referring to Chamber Music as "pure lyricism" (Finnegans Wake, p. 164), Joyce is ironic.

39

as his material was ever more objective, and no writer was ever more aware of what he was about. As for his poems as imitations of Elizabethan song, it is sobering to notice that young Joyce thought of himself as modern entirely, and "the modern method," he said, "examines its territory by the light of day." 9 If in the absence of a more suitable form he made use of the Elizabethan lyric, he used it for his own purposes and with a difference. Stephen's love-verses gave him pleasure: he wrote them at long intervals and when he wrote it was always a mature and reasoned emotion which urged him. But in his expressions of love he found himself compelled to use what he called the feudal terminology and as he could not use it with the same faith and purpose as animated the feudal poets themselves he was compelled to express his love a little ironically. This suggestion of relativity, he said, mingling itself with so immune a passion is a modern note. . . . 10 But Chamber

Music itself is the best evidence that

Joyce "became a poet with malice aforethought": 11 For elegant and antique phrase, Dearest, my lips wax all too wise; Nor have I known a love whose praise Our piping poets solemnize, ixxvu] The arrangement of the poems in this collection is not casual. As Joyce says in Stephen

Hero, he had

"constructed . . . a garland of verse." "The Vita Nuova Stephen Hero, pp. 185, 186. Ibid., p. 174. 111 hid., p. 26. 9

10

40

of Dante," he adds, "suggested to him that he should make his scattered love-verses into a perfect wreath." 12 Both wreath and garland, which imply form, may refer to an arrangement of the verses in his lost manuscript; but in a letter to Oliver Gogarty he referred directly to Chamber

Music as a "suite." 13 This suite takes the

shape of a narrative. T h e thirty-six poems tell a story of young love and failure. At the beginning the lover is alone. He meets a girl and their love, after suitable fooling, is almost successful. Then a rival intrudes. T h e hero's devotion gives way to irony and, at last, despair. Alone again at the end, the lover goes off into exile. Roughly and with a few variations, this is the outline of A Portrait of the Artist, or, since the emphasis seems to fall upon a love affair rather than upon the development of an individual, of Stephen Chamber

Hero. Simpler than these novels,

Music is made of the same materials, and, as

we shall see upon closer inspection, it is not dissimilar in method. Two critics working independently of one another noticed this arrangement in 1932. In The Book, a volume of music for Pomes Penyeach, Colum says that the poems of Chamber

Joyce

Padraic

Music fall into

a dramatic sequence that anticipates Joyce's autobiographical novel.14 Meanwhile in Australia, John An"Ibtd., pp. 158, : 74. 13 14

June 3, 1904. Photostat in Slocum Library. T h e Joyce Book, p. 13.

41

derson concurred. 15 I ignorantly repeated their discovery in 1950, and around this time or later two critics, also working alone, came to the same conclusion, which when pointed out is so obvious that pointing it out seems unnecessary. 16 Joyce himself discussed the arrangement in a letter of July 19, 1909, to Geoffrey Palmer, who was setting some of the poems to music: The book is in fact a suite of songs.. .. The central song is xiv after which the movement is all downwards until xxxiv which is vitally the end of the book, xxxv & xxxvi are tailpieces just as i and in are preludes.17 W h y should poems i and H I rather than i and I I be preludes? W h y should the narrative begin with I I and, skipping HI, proceed with iv? And why are the last two poems tailpieces? Going of? into exile, their theme, 15 Some Questions in Aesthetics (Sydney, Australia, University of Sydney Literary Society, 1932), p. 21. Cf. Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections, p. 12: "These lyrics are arranged in a certain order, and they seem to tell the story of a love which did not last." Cf. Meredith's "Modern Love" and Heine's "Lyrisches Intermezzo," narrative sequences so similar in many respects to Chairber Music that we may wonder if Joyce had them in mind. 18 I discussed the arrangement with my class in Joyce at Northwestern University, in the summer of 1950, and at Columbia University, in the fall of 1950, and embodied the results of our discussions in "Joyce's Chambermade Music," Poetry, LXXX ( M a y , 1952), 105-16. Cf. Martin T . Williams, "Joyce's Chamber Music," The Explicator, Vol. X ( M a y , 1952), item 44. Captain Richard H. Johnson of West Point, who had been working on the poems for several years, presented his discovery in an unpublished essay ( 1 9 5 3 ) , which he kindly allowed me to read. 17 Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography, p. 16 J. I have also seen a photostat of this letter in the Slocum Library.

42

seems the logical end of the narrative. The answer to these questions seems to be that the present arrangement of the poems is not Joyce's own. Joyce wrote all the poems, of course; but in the arrangement that he preferred poem xxi came first, followed by I and HI, all three constituting the prelude. Poem xiv, which Joyce calls the climax of his story, came in the seventeenth place, exactly half way through the suite; lor in this arrangement there were only thirty-four poems. Poems xxxv and xxxvi, which Joyce had written apparently in 1902, did not figure in this scheme, and poem xxxiv, "vitally" the end of the sequence, was the end itself. This arrangement of thirty-four poems is to be found in an autograph manuscript now at Yale. Entitled "Chamber Music (a suite of thirty-four songs for lovers) by James Joyce," this manuscript, prepared in Trieste, Austria, is dated 1905.1H T h e few critics who, detecting an arrangement, devoted intelligence to the relationship of part and part were working in the dark. Unaware that an act of scholarship (such as visiting a library or writing a letter) might help, those critics, thinking they had to do Referring to this manuscript in an unpublished letter of November 23, 1946, to H e r b e r t Gorman ( n o w in possession of Mr. G o r m a n ) , Stanislaus Joyce says: "I have the original M S . with the verses in the order my brother preferred." T w o or three copies of this arrangement existed, one of which Symons sent to Richards. N o t h i n g is known of the copy Richards returned to Joyce. See Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography, p. 132.

43

with the beauties of Joyce, seem to have been commending the structural triumphs of his brother Stanislaus, who says: The arrangement of the poems in 'Chamber Music' is not my brother's; it is mine. He sent the ms. to me from Rome, telling me 'to do what I liked with it.' He practically disowned the poems. . . . I arranged them, now, in their present order—approximately allegretto, andante cantabile, mosso—to suggest a closed episode of youth and love. . . . So well as I remember only one reviewer noticed the arrangement. My brother accepted my arrangement of his poems without question and without comment. . . . In making my arrangement, I had, of course, in mind the last fateful year or so before he went into voluntary exile. I wished the poems to be read as a connected sequence, representing the closed chapter of that intensely lived life in Dublin, or more broadly, representing the withering of the Adonis garden of youth and pleasure. The arrangement... begins on a rather subdued note, a kind of adagio.19 Some students of Joyce are inclined to question the claims of Stanislaus Joyce, but I am not one of those. I find his claim acceptable. It is true that Stanislaus (whose full name is John Stanislaus) Joyce has confessed to serving as the model for Shaun in V'mnegans Wake20

and that Shaun is always claiming credit for

what Shem or Joyce has done, writing the letter in the 18 20

Letters to me, January 23, and February 6, 1953. Letter to Herbert Gorman, November 23, 1946.

44

dump, for example, or shooting the Russian general. But it is impossible to say that the "theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother" 21 or friend in Finnegans

Wake

and Ulysses

has reference to

Joyce's actual brother. It is plain, moreover, that "Stainusless," 22 as Joyce once called him, was only one of many models for Shaun. I find satisfactory support for his present claim not only in the text itself 23 but in the letter Joyce wrote to Geoffrey Palmer. It seems difficult if not impossible to explain Joyce's remarks about the arrangement on any other grounds. T h e poems were rearranged and the last two added in October, 1906, while Stanislaus was in Trieste and James in Rome. Joyce's impatience with his poems at this time is to be explained not only by his failure to get satisfaction from Grant Richards, who had had the earlier manuscript over two years, but by his preoccupation with Dubliners

and A Portrait of the

Artist,

which seemed to offer more satisfactory ways of expressing his central concerns. His interest in poetry had declined, and when he tried to recover it at Trieste, nothing would come. 24 In a letter, a few years later, he said that there was little likelihood of his writing

22 23 24

Ulysses, p. 209. Finnegans Wake, p. 237. See the notes to poems in, iv, vi, i x n , and Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections, p. 24.

45

XXXII.

poetry again unless something unfortunate happened to his head.25 On October 17, 1906, Joyce wrote from Rome to Elkin Mathews that he was revising his manuscript.28 This is not incompatible with the story told by his brother; for it is unlikely that Joyce would tell his publisher that the rearrangement was not his own. Revisions other than this were minor. W e know that Joyce did copy out the revised manuscript at Rome and that he sent it to Mathews. This copy, dated October 24, 1906, now in the Slocum Library at Yale, is that from which the first edition was set. While reading proofs Joyce wrote to his brother: "I don't like the book but wish it were published and be damned to it." 2 7 Stanislaus Joyce says: "At the last moment he tried to stop publication, but I overcame his objections." 28 In his Recollcctions

he adds that Joyce was moved only by the

argument that a book in print would impress futu;e publishers.29 Joyce may have "preferred" his own arrangement, as his brother says, but indifference and the merits of the 2 5 Letter to Geoffrey Palmer, July 19, 1909. Photostat in Slocum Library. 2 6 Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography, p. 132. 2 7 Gorman, James Joyce, p. 175. 2 8 Letter to me, February 6, 1953. Italo Svevo, who knew Joyce in Trieste, says in James Joyce (New York, New Directions, 1950) that Chamber Music "no longer seemed to [Joyce] to be what he really felt and thought," and corroborates what Stanislaus Joyce says about persuading his brother to proceed with the publication. " Page 26.

46

new arrangement made him accept it. The virtue of the present arrangement of thirty-six poems is dramatic. It begins concretely, not with discursive poem xxi, and after a little uncertainty near the opening proceeds clearly according to moods, as the musical metaphor of Stanislaus Joyce suggests. He grouped the happy poems with the happy, the ironic with the ironic, and the grim with the grim. T h e clear movement, so obtained, comes to a brilliant and dramatic end with the last two poems on exile. Adding these, with his brother's life and his Portrait of the Artist in mind, was his principal achievement. Joyce's own arrangement of thirty-four poems30 has other merits. However discursive the opening poem (xxi), it gains concreteness from the two that follow it. Though lacking the fine contour of his brother's ar rangement, the narrative proceeds with greater fidelity to actual experience. Throughout the latter half of the sequence moods alternate realistically from desire to ironic reservation and back to desire until the amorous sandwich wilts. Plainly Joyce had no idea of supplementing its layers with the garnish of exile. He was attending to that in A Portrait of the Artist. But when 3 0 Except for poem xxi, which had not yet been written, the arrangement of the first twelve poems in the Beach-Gilvarry manuscript, the earliest surviving sequence, is identical with that of the 1905 manuscript. Since the Beach-Gilvarry manuscript contains only twenty-seven numbered poems, the latter half, of course, is numbered differently. See The Texts of Chamber Music, pp. 102-3.

47

his brother made the sequence into a clear ¡ nticipation of that novel, Joyce was agreeable though unenthusiastic. After all, there is no perfect arrangement of these poems. Written perhaps without a sequence in mind, they lend themselves to various groupings. Joyce's "garland" of these separate songs conforms no doubt to the general movement of the actual experiences they celebrate. His brother's conforms to the larger outlines of Joyce's life. From the stock of poems at hand, about forty or so, each excluded certain poems as violation? of his plan. Joyce excluded xxxv and xxxvi, and, according to Herbert Gorman, 31 he considered and rejected "Tilly," which now serves as the opening of Penyeach.

Potties

This poem, written in Dublin in 1904 and

originally called "Ruminants," 3 2 concerns his relationship with his father or brother and the rest of the family at Cabra, a district of Dublin. If he considered it—and I know of no other evidence that he did—he excluded it as out of key with the rest of the sequence. T h e other surviving poems must have seemed equally irrelevant to the aspect of his career to which he limited the sequence. It is safe to conclude that the two arrangements before us were made equally coherent by the autobiographical nature of the poems. According to Stephen Dedalus in the library scene 31 32

James Joyce, p. 174. Manuscript of Pomes Penyeach at University of Buffalo.

48

of Ulysses, all literature is autobiographical. The artist, he says, weaves and unweaves his own image. And Richard Best, the librarian, who seems to parody many of the ideas of Stephen, speaks of Mallarmé's Hamlet, "lisant au livre de lui-même."33

This reference is sig-

nificant because Stephen, who is equated with Hamlet, insists throughout the chapter upon the autobiographical character of Shakespeare's plays. Confusing Shakespeare with himself was habitual with Joyce. But in the library scene the comment on Shakespeare serves various purposes, among which is the justification of autobiography as the basis for Joyce's art. W e know of course that Stephen Dedalus, Mr. Bloom, H. C. Earwicker, and Shem are self-portraits, more or less faithful to aspects of their creator. Many of the minor characters such as the blind piano-tuner, whom Mr. Bloom helps across the street as he is going to help weak-eyed, musical Stephen, are caricatures or surrogates of Stephen, hence of Joyce. Many of the principal characters of Dubliners,

which to some seems entirely

objective, are no less personal. Father Flynn, the greeneyed pervert, Little Chandler, Lenehan, James Duffy, and Gabriel Conroy are projections of what Joyce might have become had he stayed in Dublin. Even the twentytwo Epiphanies of the Buffalo manuscript are records of his experience. Since autobiography is the stuff out of which Joyce composed his works, it would be suras Ulysses,

p. 185.

49

prising if Chamber

Music were the sole exception. But

we are assured in the autobiographical chapter on Shem in Finnegans Wake not only that this hero writes with ink made of his own excrement but that

Chamber

Music is the basic pattern from which these apparently solipsistic works proceed. "If one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavels, distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands . . . a fair chance of actually seeing [Shem] . . . self exiled in upon his ego . . . writing the mystery of himsel in furniture."34 It is plain that the personal furniture of

Chamber

Music, however inverted or distorted, is that of the later works. It may be that Joyce is one of the most personal writers that the romantic movement produced, but he is also the most impersonal. T h e word "distortion" in this passage from Finnegans Wake implies the artistic process by which he transformed the personal into the general. In the aesthetic theory of Stephen Dedalus the center is the artist's own image. If he presents it in relation to himself, we have lyrical or personal art. If, detaching it from self, he presents it in relation to others, we have dramatic art. 35 Aesthetic distance has 3* Finnegans Wake, pp. 184, 185. "Chambermade music" is a polysemous phrase to which I shall recur. 35 Portrait, p. 480. Cf. Rimbaud's letter to Georges Izambard, May IB, 1871: "I is someone else." Cf. James Duffy, the hero of "A Painful Case" in Dubliners (in The Portable James Joyce), p. 119: "He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time

50

been achieved. Stephen and Bloom may be images of the artist but, distorted and distanced, they now serve general purposes in a structure beyond his particular concerns. T h e transformation of the autobiographical into the dramatic is achieved in many ways: by comedy, an art which is free from desire, by irony, and, in the case of the poems, by elegance, generality, and convention. T h e way in which Joyce made his lyrics dramatic is described in A Portrait

of the

Artist.

Stephen, who

has had a haunting encounter with his girl on the step of the last tram, sits down to write a poem about it: By dint of brooding on the incident, he thought himself into confidence. During this process all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trainmen nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. T h e verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. 36 T h i s process, which is clearly that of Chamber

Music,

results in something like those vague acts of the priesthood (Joyce called himself a priest of the imagination) that pleased Stephen "by reason of their semblance of reality i>nd of their distance from it." 3 7 His intimate poems, like the image of Gretta on the stairs in " T h e to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense." Duffy, it will be recalled, is one of Joyce's surrogates. 3 6 Pages 316-17. For Joyce on comedy, see Gorman, James Joyce, p. 97. " Portrait, p. 417.

51

Dead," become what Gabriel Conroy calls

"Distant

Music."

38

1v Gazing at Gretta on those stairs, Gabriel Conroy finds "grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. H e asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of." 1 S h e is a particular person; but, serving as symbol, she ascends to mystery and generality, beyond the power of discourse to define. T h i s opens the question of Joyce's symbolism. W e may assume that his personal materials and his narratives are two elements of a complex organization. Far from unimportant, these surfaces secure our interest, hold it while the whole organization works upon us, and carry further meanings. In Joyce's work, however, the surface—the appearance of Gretta on the stairs, for example—is not there for its own sake but always to reveal a reality beyond itself. It is so firm and wellobserved that many critics have mistaken Joyce for a naturalist. 2 A natural error at first glance, nothing could seem less natural at a second. At the opposite extreme from naturalism, Joyce is one of the principal Dubliners (in The Portable James Joyce'), p. 228. Dubliners, p. 227. 2 Harcy Levin, James Joyce, pp. 27, 37. Joyce, says Mr. Levin, reveals "a literal-minded subservience . . . to the school of . . . the naturalists," of which he is "a conscientious pupil." Cf. Ernest Boyd, Ireland's Literary Renaissance (New York, Knopf, 1922). p. 405. 38

1

52

symbolists of the romantic movement. And

Chamber

Music is one of his earliest experiments with symbol.3 T h e literary symbol is any concrete device, such as an image, a rhythm, or a relationship of parts, that immediately presents a complex of feeling and idea. At once concealing and revealing, as Carlyle says, it is the embodiment of what it presents or evokes and is inseparable from it. One symbol cannot replace another. In this respect it differs from a sign or a definite reference communicating knowledge. Indefinite in the sense that what it presents cannot be explained entirely, the symbol communicates only in so far as it contains a sign—as it generally does. Whatever its significance, however, it is less a way of knowing than a way of conceiving. "Man can embody truth," said Yeats, "but he cannot know it." 4 If discourse were equal to all areas of experience, there would be no need of going beyond it to nondiscursive devices. Convinced of the inadequacy of discursive reason and science, men of letters since the time of Blake have tried to recover the neglected areas of feeling and spirit. What Coleridge called imagination, the creative and unifying power, has employed the 3 For Joyce as a symbolist, see the fourth chapter of my James Joyce ( N e w York, Scribner, 1 9 5 0 ) , particularly pp. 116-18 on Chamber Music. Cf. my "Joyce's Chambermade Music," Poetry, L X X X (May, 1952), 105-16, a further study of the symbolism of these poems. * A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats ( N e w Haven, Yale University Press, 1 9 4 9 ) , p. 297.

53

symbol (which literally means putting together) not only to shape a reality beyond the capacity of science but to unite the divided worlds of feeling and fact. Not image or rhythm alone but their organization into symbolic forms or works of art has served the imagination best in this romantic endeavor. That Joyce liked English romantics from Blake to Yeats we know already. That he was no less familiar with the French symbolists is suggested by one of his notebooks, in which he copied passages from Mallarmé and Rimbaud.8 For his Epiphanies, written at about the time of the poems, he used daily experience and dream to show forth feelings and ideas which cannot be separated from these embodiments. He was not a discursive writer. If we are to discover the nature of his symbolism, we must rely more upon such examples than upon what he says about them. But in

Stephen

Hero, the most discursive of his narratives, he says enough about art to prove his acceptance of evocative method. It is true that the word symbol, which he not unnaturally associated with transcendentalism, was sometimes distasteful to him. 6 But by epiphany and radiance, more congenial terms to one of his background, he meant what we mean by symbol. His radiance, produced by a harmony of parts, is a more poetic * "Quaderno di James Joyce," MS at University of Buffalo. Cf. Stephen Hero, p. 32: "He read Blake and Rimbaud." 4 Stephen Hero, p. 210: Stephen "even thought of explaining the audacities of his verse as symbolical allusions."

54

way than ours of defining symbolic evocation. In Stephen Hero, after dissociating himself from naturalistic "portrayal of externals," he says that the artist goes "beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered." T h e supreme artist must "disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances . . . and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office." A song by Shakespeare or Verlaine, he continues, approximating a definition of the symbol at last, "discovers itself as the rhythmic speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, or at least not so fitly."7 As "priest of the eternal imagination," Stephen in A Portrait of

the

Artist sees himself "transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life." 8 It is not without significance that this proud thought occurs to him during the composition of a poem. But before we get to these symbolic poems let us consider one of the stories of Dubliners, which because it deals with city life in its less attractive aspects has been considered naturalistic. W e must remember, however, that the surface, his daily bread of experience, is transmuted into something else. With Joyce, as George Russell says, "One suspects," or at least should suspect "some truly profound idea, some dark heroism of the imagination, burrowing into the roots of conscious71 bid., pp. 78, 79. The reference to Verlaine is from a parallel passage in the essay on Mangan. • Page 488.

55

ness." 9 Guided by this suspicion, we can see that Dubliners is no more naturalistic than Mann's Death in Venice or Flaubert's Madame

Bovary. Like them it

employs facts, not for themselves or to account for conduct or personality, but to embody states of mind and to create feelings. A story of Dubliners is "an organized composite structure, a thing in fact." And when as in one of these stories "the relation of the parts is exquisite . . . its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment ot its appearance. T h e soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. T h e object achieves its epiphany." 10 "Araby," the third story of Dubliners, is a radiant harmony of this kind. From a "blind end" of a "brown" street and a back yard containing a dead priest's "rusty bicycle-pump," the innocent hero bears his "chalice" through the streets amid the "litanies" of shop boys. Mangan's sister, whom he adores from a distance, suggests a journey to Araby, the splendid bazaar across the town. N o Freemason affair this, its magical name promises "Eastern enchantment" of the most harmless sort. But when, after delay and growing desire, he gets there at last, it is closing time. Struck by the darkness and by "a silence like that which pervades a church after a 9

The Living Torch (London, Macmillan, 1937), pp. 139-40. Stanislaus Joyce (Recollections, p. 29) says that Joyce, always faithful to his method, "tries to suggest much more than he says," and endows his realism with a "universal symbolic meaning." 10 Stephen Hero, p. 213.

56

service," he notices two men "counting money on a salver" while a young lady converses inanely with her friends. " T h e light was out. T h e upper part of the hall was now completely dark." Blaming his vanity, the deflated boy gazes up into the darkness. If that is a "straightforward" story, as one critic saw it, then so is Kafka's "Burrow." By a conspiracy of urban and ecclesiastical images, in which every word is functional, Joyce creates the vision of a wasteland from which mother Ireland (surely Mangan's sister implies not only Dante's Beatrice but Mangan's Dark Rosaleen) invites refuge in her church. Once there, darkness, emptiness, and the little epiphany of the inane conversation reveal the "paralysis" of what she promises. These ideas, reduced to discourse, are among those created by evocative allusions and by the relationship of images and tones, but the feelings also created can be expressed only by what created them. T h e poems of Chamber

Music,

written a year or

two earlier than the first draft of this story, are of the same kind. As the disarming surface of the story almost successfully conceals the meanings it is designed to embody, so the innocuous melody of the poems. As the story of the little boy's disappointed quest is there to occupy our minds while its implications work upon our feelings, so the narrative of young love in

Chamber

Music is there not to illustrate that exciting season but, carrying deeper meanings, to be their symbol. "It is 57

not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive," said Joyce as he read the proofs.11 But that remark could not have signaled the coming into consciousness of an unconscious process. The poems have all the marks of deliberate design. And in the course of Joyce's development Chamber

Music must be regarded as the first trial

of a method that was to produce his poetic, musically organized stories and A Portrait of the Artist, an even more musical work, which, for treatment of theme, rhythm, and tone may be called symphonic.12 Without the intimate music of the poems that symphony might have lacked assurance. T h e commonest kind of symbol in Chamber

Music

is so ordinary that it has escaped all but recent notice. Like many writers before him, Joyce used images sanctioned by tradition in order to support his narrative, to make individual experience general, and, by working below the level of awareness, to give immediacy to his meaning. His gates, winds, rivers, and valleys might seem unconscious had he not referred in his notes for Exiles to analogies of that kind as "attendant images." 13 In these notes, written during November, 1913, he lists chains of images that will serve him as keys to situations and around which he plans to build the scenes Gorman, James Joyce, p. 175. " In "The Symbolic Novel," A.D. (December, 1951), I include an analysis of thematic imagery in A Portrait of the Artist and some account of the way in which Chamber Music anticipated that novel. "EarOes (New York, Viking Press, 1951), pp. 117-22. 11

58

of his play. Many of these images, such as garden, piano, window, and the color green, had served him for Chamber

Music.

O f one character in Exiles he says,

"His symbols are music and the sea." And he calls the hair of another "the softly growing symbol of her girlhood." Music, sea, and hair had also played a part in his poems. T o symbols of water and bird, like those in the poems, A Portrait of the Artist owes something of its effect. Thematically recurrent, they weave in and out of the narrative to carry and connect the central meanings. In themselves images of this sort have little interest. They put on their traditional burden and assume a new one when transformed by context and recurrence. As the context enriches them, so they it. T h e play between conventional significance and particular suggestion works upon mind and feeling at once. Knowledge of Freud is unnecessary for interpreting images as simple and archetypal as these, but meanings beyond significance, depending as they do upon context, lequire what T . S. Eliot used to call sensibility. Clearly an image of desire, the wind that blows throughout the poems takes on particular character, now seductive, now inimical, as the developing suite imposes upon its elements. Gardens, nests, and valleys, traditional symbols of enclosure, embody feelings of fulfillment, longing, or retreat as the organization demands.

59

Both Joyce's arrangement and his brother's generally follow the curve of the day and the four seasons. Joyce may have written the poems without a sequence in mind, but since he associated a time of day or a season with each of his moods or experiences, any biographical arrangement creates a temporal cycle which expresses waxing and waning love. Beginning at twilight, the hero's love progresses through night to dawn, finds encouragement in the light of morning, proximate fulfillment at noon, and then declines through twilight to darkness. It is true that a little confusion of noon with, dawn around the middle of the curve impairs its sym mctry but maybe the arrangers were less interested in curves at that point of climax than in psychological veracity. As for the seasons: the lovers start with spring, enjoy cach other in summer, lose heat in autumn, and separate in winter. Colors seem no less promising than seasons. W e begin with blues, greens, and yellows and end with reds and browns. Important in Joyce's works, colors are functional here, but compose no spectrum. Not attendant images, however, but major symbols are what we are after. Let us consider one of the poems; for the poem, a relationship of symbolic parts, is the major symbol. 14 Looking intently at one in its setting 1 4 Joyce's use of poems as symbols is made plain by Little Chandler's quotation of a poem by Byron (Dubliners, pp. 9 4 - 9 5 ) , which because of context assumes domestic import, and by Ste phen's references to "Pange lingua gloriosi" and "Vexilla Regis" CPortrait, pp. 4 7 5 - 7 6 ) which suggest that like David. Stephen, as prophet, seer, and poet, is expounding mvsteries.

60

of other poems and in the light ol what we know about Joyce's other works, we may be able to approach the explicable part of what it evokes. T h e first poem ol Chamber

Music is not only a convenient specimen but

a suitable one. First in the present arrangement, this poem came second in the 1905 version, preceded by xxi and followed by HI. These three poems constituted

the

prelude. Poem i discovers Love wandering quietly by the river. A personified abstraction, borrowed no doubt irrom the lutanists, he recurs throughout Joyce's suite to project allegorically one aspect of the lover as the jester projects another. T h e jester, gaily descending into valleys, is bold whereas Love is generally either idealistic or impractical. H e r e he is distinguished by the somewhat surprising pre-Raphaelite decorations of "pale flowers" and "dark leaves" as he walks among willows. Surely this is a curious place for Love and curious those decorations—especially on his hair. T h e river, as in all of Joyce's works, suggests life. T h a t is normal enough. But walking beside river or sea, as Stephen walks the beach in Ulysses or J. Alfred Prufrock in Eliot's poem, suggests separation from life. Willows, the traditional image of sorrow and death, arch the river. Love, deprived of the necessary companion, is alone and his head is bent—not only to see his instrument but to express sadness and loneliness no doubt. W h y does Love, his hair and mantle funereally deco61

rated, wander alone in that funereal landscape? Why are the sounds and rhythm of the poem so monotonous and relaxing and why is the tone so melancholy? What, moreover, is that instrument? It is not entirely clear whether the music that seems to unite earth and air exists independently of Love, produced as in poem HI by the wind, or whether it comes from his instrument. But it is likely that Love is incapable of the music that promises to join above and below. In poem xxi, which preceded this poem of loneliness and sadness, loneli ness is mixed with defiance, and the lover has a com panion for his comfort. T h e rhythms and sounds art hard and defiant. T o see all that Love and his decorations suggest we must turn for a moment from the first poem to parallel passages in the later works. Like Mozart, Joyce knew what he was about from the beginning. His works, as T . S. Eliot remarked, are the same work, written again and again with increasing complexity. For this reason we can profitably compare one work with another and expect news of Chamber

Music from Ulysses and

Finnegans Wake, as from Chamber

Music we can ex-

pect news of them. T o understand Love's condition we must recall that one of Joyce's constant themes is the effect of ego and pride upon the creator. It is not until, abandoning pride, Stephen discovers humanity at the end of Ulysses that he becomes complete and capable. By sympathy with Mr. Bloom and by seeing the light of Mrs. Bloom, as he

62

looks up at her window, he realizes his oneness with mankind. T h e botanical name of Mr. Bloom's cocoa, the symbol of that communion and the climax of Ulysses, is theobroma

or god food, a name that probably

explains Joyce's selection of that beverage as symbol. Receiving Mr. Bloom's humanity and his god food, Stephen becomes at last the creator he has longed to be, the nail-paring god of A Portrait of the

Artist.

T o present the condition of the young man whose egocentricity still prevents creation, Joyce used masturbation as symbol. T h e plainest example of this is in ihe library scene of Ulysses.

Here Stephen, who has

not yet encountered Mr. Bloom, is clever but impotent. T h e emptiness of one who calls himself an artist without having art to show is revealed by Buck Mulligan, Stephen's rival and deflator, who, seizing upon Stephen's unfortunate remark about "an androgynous angel, being wife unto himself," 1 5 introduces the subject of masturbation. T h i s passage, not there for the sake of indecency or decoration, is strictly functional. Mulligan's litde play, Everyman His Own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three orgasms) by Ballocky

Mulligan,16

15 Ulysses, p. 210. In A Portrait (p. 4 0 1 ) Stephen confesses to "sins of impurity" with himself. 18 Ulysses, p. 214.

63

points to the artistic incapacity of Stephen. Not to be taken literally, it is a symbol of his trouble. But Mulligan's parody of Yeats is even more amusing: 1 hardly hear the purlieu cry Or a Tommy talk as 1 pass one by Before my thoughts begin to run On F. M'Curdy Atkinson, That never dared to slake his drouth, Magee that had the chinless mouth. Being afraid to marry on earth They masturbated for all they were worth.17 The Wake

same symbol occurs throughout

Finnegans

to suggest isolation, youth, and preoccupation

with self. Jarl van Hoother, alone in his lamphouse, is "laying cold hands on himself," before the Prankquean comes along to pull a rosy one and his troubles begin. l s A few pages later, guilty Earvvicker, accosted by the Cad in the park, says: " M e only, them five ones, he is equal combat." Five to one commonly implies masturbation; and " M e only" implies ourselves alone, the motto of Sinn Fein, a reference corroborated by Earwicker's "sinnfinners" or his self-centered sinning fingers. Joyce's 1018-page manuscript, now at the Univer17 Ibid., p. 213. The poem parodied is "Baile and Aillinn" (Col lected Poems, New York, 1951, p. 393): "I hardly hear the curlew cry." F. M. Atkinson conducted the "Literary Causerie" in Dana. the magazine to which both Gogarty and Joyce contributed. Magee, of course, is John Eglinton. 18 Finnegans Wake, p. 21.

64

sity of Buffalo, contains among its enigmatic scribbles, the following note: "self=onanism." 1 9 Now we can return to Love in poem i of

Chamber

Music with some understanding of what he is about: All softly playing, With head to the music bent, And fingers straying Upon an instrument. T h e point of the poem, however, is not that Love is youthfully employed. Onanism is a symbol suggesting that the innocent hero, centered upon himself, is incapable of reproducing the music he hears in earth and air and of uniting by art the regions of reality. His conduct is affirmed by the deathly, colorlcss foliage that surrounds him as well as by the feeling and tone of the sounds and rhythms by which the symbol is completed. Love in his original condition is less love than death. But meeting the girl or catching sight of her window in the second poem promises resurrection and maturity as the sight of Mrs. Bloom's window in Ulysses

gives

Stephen the heavenly vision that Dante had and he needs. W e can now understand why Joyce refers to Chamber Music ti on music. "

in Finnegans

Wake

as "shamebred

Under the solemnity and guilt of this strange organization of tores there is a kind of outrageousness, typ19 20

Ibid., p. 36. Buffalo manuscript, p. 53.

Page 164.

65

ical of Joyce, that is inescapably comic. But poem xxxvi of Chamber

Music is no laughing matter. Different in

character from the rest of the suite, it breaks through the deceptive elegance that he had maintained. For this poem instead of bland quatrains, melodious meters, and rhyme he used assonance and free verse of the most troubled sort. This rupture of surface is dramatic, but in the directness of his cry he approached for the first time what Stephen called lyric art. For all its nakedness, however, poem xxxvi, by far the best of the suite, is symbolist in method. Joyce sometimes abandoned distance in his termina) pieces. Directly confronting the horrors that obsessed him, he opened his heart in " T h e Dead," at the end of Dubliners,

in the diary at the end of A Portrait of the

Artist, in the last act of Exiles, and in the last poem of Pomes

Penyeach,

which for direct expression of an-

guish is comparable to poem xxxvi. T h e monologues of Molly and Anna, however moving, are of another kind, less expressive of agony than of affirmation and acceptance. But here, at the end of Chamber

Music,

despair, like that of the "terrible" sonnets of Hopkins, is unrelieved by technical dexterity. None of the gaiety that Joyce associated with his Norman name (Joyeux) remains. In this black moment, like the Hilary of Finnegans

Wake,

he became a "tristian." 2 1

2 1 Page 21. T h e Prankquean converts Hilary CBruno's to Tristopher (Bruno's "tristis") or Tristan.

66

"hilaris")

Poems xxxv and xxxvi, connected by the repetition of "I hear" and by congruity of image and feeling, were probably written in 1902 during the first exile. Clearly these desperate poems, which Joyce dismissed as "tailpieces,"' were not intended as part of his elegant arrangement. But their presence at the end, through his brother's intervention, gives Chamber

Music the drama

and immediacy it would have lacked and adds humanity to what, for all its psychological revelation and conflict of tones, would have remained a little remote. Poem xxxvi owes immediacy and terror to the atmosphere of nightmare and the condition of passivity. As for the second of these, the hero is passive in both the original and the derivative senses of the word. Menaced by the whips (and this image is significant) of the arrogant charioteers, he submits to their triumph. A similar and almost feminine attitude is disclosed in poem xx where the girl's kiss descends upon the hero, evidently supine, who longs, like Yeats, to be tented by descending hair. In the last poem of Pomes

Penyeach

Joyce calls upon the nameless horror who has stolen his strength away to "bend deeper" on him, offering submission as Hopkins, under the foot of his terrible God, once offered it. W e recall the masochism of Mr. Bloom and of Richard in Exiles,

both of whom invite their

suffering. In this connection the key word of poem xxxvi is "anvil." T h e charioteers are the masculine hammer and the hero's heart the feminine anvil. Placed 67

at the end of a line, acquiring horror from position, this word, lacking the grace of rhyme or even of assonance, is the second and the more important of the two feminine endings of the poem. T o a rhetorician like Joyce the placing of words was not casual. Transformed by place from metaphor to symptom, this awful word shows why Joyce found Venus in Furs congenial. 22 Although whip and anvil may point to him, his troubles, however attractive, arc not our real concern. Functioning in a work of art, his symptoms become elements of a form that would be different without them. T h e quality of the horror created by this combination of peculiar elements proves their aesthetic efficiency. As for nightmares, Joyce collected them. From his earliest years he took notes of his dreams and tried to interpret them. 23 Two of his Epiphanies, those of the arctic beast and of the two sisters, are records of dreams.24 Less symptom than symbol, dreams, revealing the depths of the mind, offer a means of embodying reality. That Joyce consciously used dream as symbol is proved by the emergence of dream at three crucial 2 2 Joyce refers to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's book, a fantasy of whips, anvils, and hair, in connection with Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (p. 4 5 8 ) during his masochistic abandonment. Cf. p. 232. It is perhaps to Masoch that Bloom owes his first name. In the notes; to Exiles, p. 124, Joyce calls his play "a rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher Masoc'a. . . . Richard's Masochism needs no example." T h e image of the anvil at the end of A Portrait of the Artist (p. 5 2 5 ) is active. Hopkins uses the image passively in "No worst," one of the "terrible" sonnets. 2 3 Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections, p. 12.

68

points of A Portrait of the Artist. Stephen's dream of Parnell's death at the beginning, that of the goatish wasteland in the middle, and that of the cave and the stone images at the end of the book present his attitudes toward country, religion, and home more immediately than all his discourse. In Ulysses both Stephen and Bloom have prophetic dreams, and Haines's dream of the black panther is symbolic preparation for Leopold Bloom, the black Leo pard (for leopard and panther are the same), whose black back precedes Stephen from the library with "step of a pard." 2 5 Finnegans

Wake

is

a dream which evokes all reality. Plainly poem xxxvi, written at about the time of the Epiphanies, is an early and successful experiment with dream as symbol. Parallel to the dream at the end of A Portrait of

the

Artist, which suggests parents by cavern, gallery, and giant stone kings, 2 6 this poem, less narrowly limited by context, is more indefinite. But since the general bearing of the suite is autobiographical, the poem suggests the forces of oppression that the young must struggle against, not only parents in this case but society. Alone, - 4 No. 7 and No. 10 in the Buffalo manuscript. 2S Ulysses, p. 215. A. M. Klein in " T h e Black Panther," Accent (Spring, 1 9 5 0 ) , identifies the panther with Jesus but fails to identify it with Bloom. T h e "Leap, pard" of Finnegans Wake (p. 4 8 3 ) refers to one of the twins and back to Leo-pard Bloom, who turns out to be a partner q j pard of Stephen. 2 0 Cf. Ulysses, p. 29: "Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of . . . our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned." This is clearly a reference to parents. Cf. Yeats, " T h e Wanderings of Oisin," Part II (Collected Poem«. New York, 1 9 5 1 ) , p. 364, for the same image.

69

as at the beginning of the suite, the hero, who has tried to remedy his condition by love, submits to circumstance. Poem xxxvi is a poem of failure, of the defeat of youth, and of all horrors. T h e final question inescapably suggests the question Jesus uttered on the cross. Joyce had black moments, but his friends report him full of fun, likely to caper down the street in a loosejointed pas sail at midnight, dawdle over a limerick, or do tricks in the parlor. Gloomy Dedalus is only one aspect of Joyce. As we might expect, Chamber

Music,

a suite of moods, has many that are sunny, and even the solemn poems sometimes reveal a strange mixture of humor. If we are to read them right, we must be on the watch for ambivalent structures, comic and serious at once. Even the title of Chamber

Music

is a case in

point. Serious at first glance, it seems to imply nothing more than music suitable for a room rather than a hall. If we look at it again, we may connect it with "chambering," the Elizabethan word for wantonness that Joyce used twice in A Portrait of the Artist.21

Chamber-

ing music or amorous music, however wanton, is serious enough. But if we accept M r . Bloom's interpretation of the title in Ulysses,

then Chamber

Music

be-

comes chamberpot music, at once indecorous and gay, but not without serious implications. Thinking of music in the Ormond bar and listening to it, Bloom thinks: 17

Pages 437, 502.

70

Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. . . Drops. Rain. Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle. Hiss.28 This extraordinary passage looks forward to Mrs. Bloom on her pot in the last chapter. But since Joyce never wasted anything so good on a single reference, we may take it, I think, as a clue to one of the meanings of his tide. This inference finds more or less support in the stories told about the naming of Chamber Music. According to Herbert Gorman, who informs me that he had the story from Joyce himself, the poems owe their title to a visit Joyce paid in company with a wit to the room of a "hot-blooded widow." Joyce proceeded to read her his poems. After a time, pleading necessity, she retired behind a screen to her pot, whence came a melodious tinkle. " 'My God!' " cried the wit, " 'She's a critic! You hear how she appreciates your poems?'" Critic or not, Joyce replied, " 'She has given me a title for my book. I shall call it Chamber Music.' " 29 Maybe this happened in the spring of 1904. According to Oliver Gogarty, who was present on this occasion, he and Joyce emerged from their tower one Sunday in order to have a couple of quick ones at 28 29

Ulysses, p. 278. Gorman, James Joyce, p. 116.

71

Davy Byrne's with Sweeney the greengrocer, Cocky Meade, and Vincent Cosgrave, and to see what was doing at A.E.'s Hermetic society in Dawson Street. When they got to that holy place at last, they found it empty, but behind the door Joyce came upon a suitcase full of ladies' drawers belonging to George Roberts, manager of Maunsel's publishing house, Hermetic adept, and traveling salesman in underwear. Taking the suitcase along, they went to the room of Jenny, a friend of Sweeney the greengrocer. As Joyce advanced with his gift of drawers, his foot struck "a night jar, which rang sonorously like a gong." Jenny was delighted with the drawers and immediately tried them on. Later, as the two observers sat in the last tram for Sandycove, Joyce announced, " 'At last I've got a title for my collection of lyrics.' " This version of the story is partly confirmed, as Dr. Gogarty points out, by Joyce's allusions in Gas from a Burner to "a one-handled urn" and to "Maunsel's manager's travelling-bag." 3 0 According to Stanislaus Joyce, however, the "trivial incident," inflated by unfortunate publicity, is this: his brother along with Oliver Gogarty and some other students visited two "non-professional women of easy virtue." One of them asked Joyce to sing. The other, lamenting the absence of a piano, "fetched a chamber3 0 Gogarty, Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove, pp. 53-55, 57-60. Cf. Ulysses, p. 189. Gorman's version, says Dr. Gogarty (in a letter to me, February 1, 1953) "may be discounted." Maybe the "one-handled um" of Gas from a Burner is a well-tempered urn.

72

pot and holding it like a guitar, offered to accompany my brother on it. When the story was retailed to me, I—not my brother—said that it was 'an omen.' " 3 1 Elsewhere he observes: "The variants of the chamber-pot incident are 'good stories' freely treated in Gogarty's best style. . . . My account is less amusing and has the further disadvantage of being true." 32 In any case, he says, the story is of no importance, for Joyce had the title before the incident: "It was I who chose the title for the little volume of verses." 33 It is likely that he did, but it is no less likely that this "raffish incident of student life," whether one account or another is more nearly factual, gave another meaning to the title. It was Joyce's habit to read additional meanings into what he already had. Fascinated with chamberpots, as with drawers, he must have welcomed this disclosure as he welcomed all epiphanies. With this new dimension of his title in mind, did Joyce proceed to justify it by adding suitable poems to his suite? Two of the poems appear to deal with micturition. Poem vn, "My love is in a light attire," was first published in August, 1904, in Dana, but it is one of his earliest pieces. He read it to Oliver Gogarty shortly after their first meeting, and Constantine Curran recalls hearing it in 1901 or 1902. Poem xxvi, "Thou leanest to the shell of night," which was pub31 32 3S

Unpublished letter to Herbert Gorman, November 23, 1946. Letter to me, January 23, 1953. Letter to Gorman, November 23, 1946.

73

lished in the Venture

in 1905, may have b e e n written

after the incident of the pot. 3 4 It is not necessary, however, to insist u p o n this; for Joyce's interest in the subject was so f u n d a m e n t a l that we may suppose h i m to have written verses on it before h e h a d the title in mind or h a d t h o u g h t of its possible meanings. It is likely, moreover, that the incident of the pot, far f r o m being the first time the m e a n i n g h a d occurred to him, was only his c h a n c c to make it k n o w n . Let us t u r n to poem v n to see what we h a v e there. T h e poet's love in light attire attends to her shadow in the grass while eager winds, a t t e n d i n g to the leaves, provide an example of more sociable conduct. And where the sky's a pale blue cup Over the laughing land, My love goes lightly, holding u p Her dress with dainty hand. M a y b e the land laughs because it receives h e r shadow— a n d something of h e r substance as well. T h a t the sky is a c u p seems relevant to our theme; but that the girl holds u p h e r dress seems no less p r u d e n t t h a n relevant. T h i s interpretation is corroborated by a passage in the first chapter of Ulysses a n d by another in the third. In the first of these Buck M u l l i g a n , discussing pots, re34 Poem xxvi does not appear in the original sequence of twenty-seven poems in the Beach-Gilvarry manuscript ( 1 9 0 2 - 3 ) . It is included, however, among the six poems added to this sequence at a later date ( 1 9 0 3 - 4 ) .

74

cites verses about old Mary Ann, who "doesn't care a damn,/But, hising up her petticoats. . . ." 3 5 T h a t she does this to do what we think she is doing is established by a recurrcnce of the motif as Stephen pauses to relieve himself on the beach. As "long lassoes from the Cock lake" flow on the sands, he sees "the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats." 36 It is unclear whether the "two quitewhite villagettes" of Finnegans

Wake,

"so giggle-

vomes min.xt the follyages" ol that "charmful waterloose country," even bother to lift them. 37 Poem xxvi is more explicit. Leaning not to the grass but to "the shell ol night," the dear lady, listening to "that soft choiring of delight," is suddenly terrified by the thought of "rivers rushing forth / From the grey deserts of the north." There are no two ways of taking that. But before we proceed to the second stanza of this poem, which may be a celebration of Gogarty's incident, let us look more steadily at Joyce's concern with urine and see, if we can, the reason of it. Joyce's "cloaca! obsession," as it has been called, has been attributed variously to the humors of the rectory, Irom which Joyce narrowly escaped, to infantilism, and Ulysse\, pp. 1 4 - 1 5 . Mary Ann nn her pot in the first chapter anticipates Marion on hers in the last. 30 Ibid., p. 50. ST Finnegans Wake, p. 8. Those waterloosing girls are at their pure ablutions throughout the enormous book. " M i n x t , " of course, suggests mingo, mingere, minxi, mictum.

75

to u n n a t u r a l d e p r a v i t y . 3 8 T h a t it p e r v a d e s his works is obvious. W e h a v e only to recall that w e t t i n g t h e bed o c c u r s o n t h e first p a g e of A Portrait

of the Artist

and

that M r s . B l o o m ' s going to pot is t h e only e v e n t of t h e last c h a p t e r of Ulysses.

M a n y h a v e w o n d e r e d , since

n o t h i n g in t h e book is c a s u a l , w h y M r s . B l o o m , t h e " P r i d e of C a l p e ' s rocky m o u n t , " 3 " c o m e s f r o m C a l p e or G i b r a l t a r . T h e a n s w e r is by n o m e a n s simple. B u t as t h e l c x i c o n i n f o r m s us, C a l p e , identical with

calpis,

m e a n s a n u r n or w a t e r pot. M o t h e r G r o g a n ' s tea a n d w a t e r pot in t h e first c h a p t e r of Ulysses40

m a y s e e m an

u n n e c e s s a r y c o n f u s i o n , b u t w h e n w e r e m e m b e r that t h e botanical n a m e of tea is thea o r goddess, t h e conn e c t i o n of M o t h e r G r o g a n with potted M r s . B l o o m , 3 8 Ezra Pound says (Instigations, p. 2 1 0 ) that Chamber Music is "an excellent antidote for those who . . . fly to conclusions about Mr. Joyce's 'cloacal obsession.'" That is a queer idea. In 1952 John Hinsdale Thompson read a paper to The Research Club of Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri, on "The Cloacal Obsession of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake." Among innumerable examples he discovered these seem relevant to Chamber Music: "potting the po to shambe" (p. 6 2 2 ) , "the Jug and Chambers" (p. 2 4 6 ) , "a jordan vale teaorne" (p. 2 1 0 ) . Cecil Maitland in a review of Ulysses (quoted by Gorman, James Joyce, p. 2 9 7 ) saw Joyce's humor as the "cloacal humour" of the Catholic clergy. In a letter to Joyce (La Hune Catalogue, item 138) H. G. Wells charged him with preferring excrement to reality.

An obsession with urine may be regarded as an infantile fixation at the urethral stage, between the anal and the genital during tluadventures of the libido in search of an object. As with masochism, so with fixation: Joyce accepted his symptoms and converted them to symbols, making the private general and the pathological aesthetic. But his transfiguration of symptom is in the work of art, not in his life, where symptom may have remained symptom for all wc know. 39 Ulysses, p. 314. "Ibid., p. 14.

76

the goddess of earth, is clear. Mr. Bloom whose "high grade ha" lacks "t" or tea, spends his day in quest of it.41 Both tea and urine are forms of water, and water is a natural symbol of life. If water is life, making it is creation. This brings us back, by commodious recirculation, to poem xxvi. In the second stanza the mood of the timorous lady is that of the poet Who a mad tale bequeaths to us At ghosting hour conjurable— And all for some strange name he read In Purchas or in Holinshed. Coleridge's verses on the sacred river that ran through caverns measureless to man, not inappropriate in this context, were inspired in part by Purchas; but Holinshed inspired Macbeth,

from which there is a quotation

in poem xxxiv. Although Joyce may have had Coleridge in mind, he must have intended Shakespeare, who serves in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as an example of creative power. Whoever that creator, the girl on her shell of night, suddenly apprehensive of responsibilities, is another. Yeats, who was to use "great-bladdered Emer," as an image of fertility, is said to have wondered 41 Ibid., pp. 56, 70, 119, 159, 659, 714. As Bloom contemplates "family tea" in the window of the Oriental Tea Company (p. 7 0 ) , he looks into his "high grade ha." Cf. "Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant" (p. 119), the goal of Bloom's symbolic quest. Cf. "Anne Lynch's choice tea" (p. 6 5 9 ) . Anne Lynch becomes Anna Livia. Bloom's final regret (p. 7 1 4 ) is his failure to obtain Keyes's advertisement and tea from Kernan. Tea is one of the principal motifs of Finnegans Wake.

77

after reading Chamber fountain or a cistern."

Music 42

whether Joyce was "a

T h a t would be hard to say,

but composing these images, poem xxvi is plainly a "jocoserious" symbol of creation. 4 3 Stephen, whose aesthetic theory was a way of replacing one world by another, more harmonious and radiant, compares himself to Shakespeare and Shakespeare to God. 4 4 T h e young creator, who urinates in Mr. Bloom's back yard to signify his full assumption of power, also compares himself to Lucifer, bringer of light and faller, as Rimbaud, one of Joyce's models, had compared himself to Prometheus. 45 W h e t h e r with God or God's enemy, whether with creative Daedalus or falling Icarus, the analogies are alike in implying creation; for in the fall Joyce saw the dcscent of spirit into matter to inform it. As god or angel needs matter to shape, so the poet or maker needs woman as receptacle and "temptress." During his moment of poetic creation in A Portrait

of the Artist

Stephen thinks of word,

angel, and chamber: "In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph 4 2 Colum, Road round Ireland, p. 316. A.E. (Living Torch, pp. 1 3 9 - 4 0 ) wished that Joyce "had tried to penetrate into the palace chambers rather than into the . . . sewers of the soul." Joyce's concern, of course, was always more with chambers than with sewers. 4 3 See notes to poems VII and ix. 44 Ulysses, p. 210. Cf. "Shapesphere" in Finnegans Wake, p. 295. A.E. wondered, after reading Chamber Music, whether Joyce had "enough chaos" in him to create a world. He had plenty, and he did. 4 5 Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871.

78

had come to the virgin's chamber." 4 6 T h e poet is the word and chambered woman the imagination and the Muse. In one sense, Mrs. Bloom, the rose of Ulysses, is an embodiment of the artist's creative power. Stephen in the capacity of Penrose, his surrogate, will celebrate the rose with his pen. Mr. Bloom's inability to remember the name of Penrose is significant; for that penman, one of Molly's lovers, is a rival to be suppressed.47 But that Molly in her chamber or on it is less a separate person than an aspect of Stephen is implied by a passage in A Portrait of the Artist. As he is about to encounter the girl who, lifting petticoats, displays drawers and wades in water, he succumbs to ecstasy: "Yes! Yes! Yes!'' he exclaims as if he were Mrs. Bloom. " H e would create. . . ," 4 8 W h e n he sees the wading girl "gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither . . . hither and thither, hither and thither," he anticipates tr.e "hitherandthithering waters" of Anna Livia Pluraber.e.49 That she too is the Muse is proved when as Kate the janitor she guards the gate of the womblike mu4 6 Cf. Ulysses, p. 385: "In woman's womb word is made flesh but in ti-e spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away." 4 7 For Penrose, who has escaped notice by commentators, see Ulysses, pp. 153, 179, 508, 716, 739, 7 6 0 - 6 1 . For Mrs. Bloom as the rose and the Virgin, see W . Y. Tindall, "Dante and Mrs. Bloom," Accent (Spring, 1951). Cf. Portrait, p. 516: " I want to see Rosie first, said Stephen." It is not until the end of Ulysses that he sees her and understands what Cranly means by love or charity. 48 Portrait, p. 430. 49 Ibid., p. 432; Finnegans Wake, p. 216.

79

seum or "Museyroom." 5 0 W e may now conclude that in one of her aspects the creative girl of

Chamber

Music is the first sketch of Mrs. Bloom and Anna. T h e hero's affair with her is the story of a frustrated attempt to woo his Muse or to open the gates of his creative imagination—in short, to become an artist. That is why in poem iv he is singing at her gate and in poem vi why he is knocking on it. Maybe we have another meaning now for chamber. It may be that it suggests the creative imagination and chamber music the music that always attends Stephen's moments of creative ecstasy. But the symbolic girl of Chamber

Music is various.

T o see her in all her aspects we must consider Joyce's idea of woman. If we may judge by A Portrait of the Artist and Stephen

Hero, his idea of her was ambiva-

lent—as whose is not? She is either something ideal like Mercedes or the Blessed Virgin or something real like a whore. His trouble with Emma Clery, his lxst girl in these novels, is that, trying to idealize her or to make her real, he is equally disappointed. From his position between unattainable Virgin and attainable whore Joyce did not move until finding Mrs. B'oom, he was able to embody the two in a single person.' 1 At Finnegans Wake, p. 8. Cf. Portrait, p. 311: "He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld." They would meet perhaps "at one of the gates." Gate is one of the important images of Chamber Music. 50

51

80

once deplorable and adorable, this creature, like Polly in Gay's opera, is where all flowers are united. But before Joyce arrived at this reasonable synthesis, he was forced to explore the varieties. T h e girl of

Chamber

Music, a principal symbol of the suite, is the result of this preliminary exploration. When his brother Maurice (or Stanislaus) asks him who the woman of his poems is, he answers that he does not know. 52 "Am I bringing her beyond the veil?" he asks in "She, she, she. What she?"

53

Ulysses.

That is a good question,

and the answer is all of them of course, together or by turns. T h e girl of Chamber

Music is not only particu-

lar Emma and general imagination. She is also the indefinite archetype, like Jung's anima, of all that man supposes, suggesting by turns the mistress, the mother, the church, Ireland, and maybe the soul itself. T h e girl as mother is apparent in poem vi: "I would in that sweet bosom be/ . . . Where no rude wind might visit me." This desire to be out of the amorous wind is a momentary regression like Yeats's retreat to the Land of Youth in " W h o Goes with Fergus?" a poem that Stephen, as we have noticed, associates with his mother in the first chapter of Ulysses. Joyce was haunted by two maternal images: his own mother and the Virgin Mary, whose office he repeats in A Portrait of the Artist: "Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Libanon et quasi cupres52 Stephen Hero, p. 36. »» Page 49.

81

SMS in monte Sion,"64

These maternal images, both of

which evoke the church, seem to be united in poem xiv, the climax of the suite: My dove, my beautiful one, Arise, arise! The night-dew lies Upon my lips and eyes. I wait by the cedar tree, My sister, my love. T h e Virgin Mary may account in part for the cedar tree, but that image and the other images of the poem unmistakably recall the Song of Solomon: "Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove . . . for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night." 65 As if in commentary upon poem xiv Joyce says in A Portrait of the Artist: . . . the imagery of the canticles was interwoven with the communicant's prayers. An inaudible voice seemed to caress the soul, telling her names and glories, bidding her arise as for espousal and come away, bidding her look forth, a spouse, from Amana and from the mountains of the leopards; and the soul seemed to answer with the same inaudible voice, surrendering herself: Inter ubera mea commorabitur. « Portrait, p. 356. Cf. the distortion of the office in Wake, p. 470. " 5:2.

82

Finnegam

This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind. . . .5C In the Vulgate, as in the Douay and King James versions, the love of Solomon is allegorized as that of Christ for his spouse, who, says the gloss of the Douay version, "is the church: more especially as to the happiest part of it, viz., perfect souls, every one of which is his beloved, but above all others, the immaculate and ever blessed virgin mother." T h i s interpretation suggests the method of Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Joyce's favorites. If Joyce was employing it, as he seems to have been, poem xiv tells literally of the hero's love for his girl. Allegorically he identifies himself with Christ, confesses attachment to his mother, and, most important of all in this context, tells of his affair with the church, which, as in A Portrait of the Artist, rises to a climax and declines. 57 "Since the literal sense is that which the author intends," says Saint Thomas, "and since the author of Holy W r i t is God, who by one 5 6 Page 410. "Inter ubera mea commorabitur" is from Canticum Canticorum Salomonis, 1:12. Joyce's preoccupation with the Song of Solomon is shown in his other works, for example, Ulysses, p. 4 6 8 : "Schorach ani wenowwach, benoith Hierushaloim" ( I am black but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem). Cf. notes to poems

XIII, x i v , x x x i v .

5 7 In Stephen Hero (p. 6 4 ) Joyce refers to "Mother Church." In Ulysses (p. 2 2 ) he calls the church "A crazy queen, old and jealous." That love is necessary for creation ( l i t e r a r y a s w e U a s cosmic) is implied by Stephen's apprehension of the world as "one vast symmetrical expression of God's power and love" (Portrait p. 407).

83

act comprehends all things by his intellect, it is not unfitting . . . if even according to the literal sense, one word in Holy Writ should have several senses." 58 That applies to Joyce in his degree. In the passage on the Song of Solomon in A Portrait of the Artist Joyce speaks not of Stephen but of his soul. T h e many references to it make that novel seem a progress of the soul,59 which is invariably feminine: "His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes." 60 Love or charity, the greatest mystery and for Stephen the most difficult thing in the world, is the soul's virtue. 01 Plainly Chamber

Music is

the story of his attempt at love and its failure. T h e poems that concern the soul are references to his own, but one of them ( x v ) is doubtful. "From dewy dreams, my soul, arise" may refer to hers as well as his. In Stephen

Hero

the young man examines Emma for

some spiritual principle worthy the name of soul 62 and fails to find it. For a time in Chamber

Music

(xxn)

he is under the illusion that "soul with soul lies prisoned." But in poem xxi, once the first poem of the prelude, lamenting his failure to find "any soul to fellow his," he is forced to be content with a companion. Summa Theologica, Pars I, Qu. 1, Art. 10. ' For example, pp. 356, 484. 6 0 Page 430. 61 Portrait, pp. 406-07. Love, says Stephen (Stephen Hero, pp. 175-76), is a name for "something inexpressible." But "Love can express itself in part through song." 6 2 Pages 156, 210. 58

r9

84

It may be, if we go beyond the literal sense of this disappointing affair, that the girl of Chamber

Music is an

embodiment of the hero's feminine soul and that his failure is a failure to possess it. That the poems do concern his soul is indicated by a postcard from Joyce to J. F. Byrne, written from Paris on December 12, 1902. 03 On this card, alongside a photograph of himself as attenuated exile in a long black overcoat, he inscribed poem xxxv and observed that with this poem the second part, the journey of the soul, begins. If this poem marks the second part of the soul's history (his exile no doubt), then the earlier poems compose the first.64 T h e business of birds and bats is even more definite. In both Chamber

Music and A Portrait of the Artist

the girl by analogy is either a bird or a bat. T h e wading girl is a seabird or a dove, and he thinks for a moment that Emma may be one or the other too. But he concludes after close inspection that, like Davin's peasant woman, she is "a batlike soul," whose darkness, secrecy, and loneliness make her "a figure of the womanhood of her country." 85 Her parallel, the girl of

Chamber

A lusic, is compared once or twice to a bird, but toward the end of the sequence, in poem xxxi, she becomes a Slocum Library, Yale. Stephen notes in A Portrait (p. 4 0 6 ) that the symbols of the Holy Spirit are "a dove and a mighty wind," two of the important images of the poems. A little confused by this possibility, I prefer not to pursue it. « Portrait, pp. 4 3 1 - 3 2 , 444-45, 483, 488. 63

64

85

bat, not only a kind of vampire but a symbol of Ireland. 68 If she embodies these ideas, then the three loves of poem xxxvi, "My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?" acquire another meaning. No longer exclamatory and redundant, or no longer these alone, the three loves represent country, church, and mother. As for the companion with whom he has to be contented in poem xxi there is evidence that she is Nora Barnacle, who became his wife. W e know that he associated her with these poems. For Christmas, 1909, he presented her with a copy of Chamber

Music, inscribed

in his hand on vellum and elegantly bound.1'7 Shortly before her death, Mrs. Joyce said that this copy of the poems was the only book of Joyce's that she still owned: " 'I will not part with Chamber

Music because Joyce

made this copy in his own writing for me. Once, when I needed money badly I sent it off to America to be sold, but I missed it so much that 1 wrote and said to send it back.' " 6 8 When Joyce parted from her on his visit to Ireland in 1909, he gave her a chain with a 6 6 Ireland is commonly personified as a woman: Kathleen Ni Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen, T h e Poor Old Woman. Joyce's milk woman in the first chapter of Ulysses is the last of these. Cf. Gummy Granny, Ulysses, pp. 5 7 9 - 8 0 . For more on bats, see note to poem xxxi. 9 7 La Hune Catalogue, item 65. 6 8 Sandy Campbell, "Mrs. Joyce of Zurich," Harper's Bazaar, October, 1952. Cf. Kees Van Hoek, "Vignette: Mrs. James Jovci-." The Irish Times, November 12, 1949.

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medallion on which he engraved " L o v e is unhappy when love is a w a y " from poem i x . c a B u t there is some difficulty here. If the poems, taken literally, concern his love for E m m a Clery or some other girl h e knew before he met his wife, why should h e have associated them with her? H e could do that apparently because the girl is less particular E m m a than w o m a n in all her aspects, both actual and symbolic. T h a t h e did associate N o r a with the poems is proved by a manuscript of poem x x i that Joyce gave to Constantine C u r r a n . 7 0 T h i s poem, the first in Joyce's arrangement of 1 9 0 5 , is headed: Dedication T o Nora T h e manuscript is dated 3 0 . I X . 0 4 , about four months after h e had met her. 7 1 Since this was the first poem of the suite, added long after he had written the others, La Hune Catalogue, item 66. Mr. Curran kindly made me a copy of this manuscript, which is still in his possession. 71 Dr. Gogarty says (in a letter to me, January 8, 1953) that Joyce began "walking out" with Nora in 1903 and that he was jealous of Vincent Cosgrave, his friend, who praised her hair. It was Cosgrave, Dr. Gogarty thinks, who spread the apochryphal rumor that when Nora eloped she made off with the plated ware of the hotel where she worked under the impression it was sterling. Most of the other observers agree that Joyce met Nora in 1904. I tried to get in touch with Vincent Cosgrave, but my Dublin agent, Miss Fedelma Nora Donnelly, reported that Cosgrave would be about 120 years old if still alive—as her cousin Willy Fallon (who used to know Joyce at the Sheehy's) told her with a twinkle in his eye when she met him in Grafton Street. Cosgrave is Lynch in A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. 69

70

87

it is clear that in dedicating this poem to her he was dedicating the whole suite. Instead of finding "any soul to fellow his," he found Nora. In Finnegans

Wake,

as we have already noticed,

Joyce refers to his poems as "chambermade music." 72 In one sense, of course, this means that the poems were deliberately made, created in the imagination, but in another it implies that they have something to do with a chambermaid, that Chamber

Music perhaps is cham-

bermaid music. That is so. When Joyce first met Nora in June, 1904, or perhaps a little earlier, she was a chambermaid in Finn's Hotel in Nassau Street, near Trinity College. "It was quite a respectable place," Dr. Gogarty informs me. 73 His news about Finn's Hotel is corroborated by Stanislaus Joyce and by Herbert Gorman, who has in his possession a copy of a letter written by Joyce immediately after his elopement, asking how the manager of that hotel reacted to the departure of his maid.74 Finn's Hotel occurs in Ulysses in connecPage 184. In a letter to me, January 8, 1953. Miss Donnelly informs me that Finn's Hotel was actually in Leinster Street, a continuation of Nassau Street, that Mr. Finn, the proprietor, is dead, and that the building that once served him as hotel now serves accountant as office. 7 4 Stanislaus Joyce, letter to me, January 23, 1953; Herbert Gorman, letter to me, January 14, 1953. Biographers and critics of Joyce have been silent about Nora Barnacle's position in Dublin. Some of Joyce's friends maintain that she was a barmaid in order perhaps to protect Joyce's respectability. Apparently a barmaid is several degrees higher than a chambermaid in the social scale of Dublin. Nora may have been a barmaid too, but if she was not a chambermaid, it is hard to explain references in Finnegans 72

75

88

tion with Blazes Boylan and "My little Yorkshire rose." 75 In Finnegans Wake

it reappears in a context

of elopement and marriage: "He goat a berth. And she cot a manege." It was in that hotel that Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle "pulled down the kuddle and . . . made fray. . . . Which was the worst of them phaymix cupplerts?" 70 If the girl of Chamber

Music, straining her trivial

capacity, embodies or at least was designed to embody all these meanings or had them imposed upon her, what about the rival who steals her love away? This mysterious figure, once a friend, appears around the middle of the suite. The poems that present him are hard and bitter. W e are reminded of the young priest who distracts Emma in Stephen

Hero, of Cranly in

A Portrait of the Artist, whom Stephen suspects of designs on her, and of Robert, who seduces the wife of Richard in Exiles. Mulligan, Blazes Boylan, and Shaun a.e other varieties of the same figure, under whose spell girls are inconstant, wives unfaithful. Perhaps there was ground for Joyce's suspicions of rival, mistress, and wife. But we know that he liked to torture himself, and we may suppose that the cuckold as hero is the projecWake to "charmermaid" (p. 1 4 8 ) and "chambermate" (p. 4 6 1 ) . That Ibsen, upon whom young Joyce patterned himself, also loved a chambermaid may suggest that Joyce's selection of that object was more than coincidental. C f . the excellent chambermaid in Yeats's suite of poems " T h e Three Bushes" ( 1 9 3 6 ) . ™ Page 250. 7 8 Pages 330-31.

89

tion of a benign paranoia. Like the Shakespeare of Ulysses, Joyce may have "found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible."77 In the notes for Exiles, a fascinating study of these possibilities, Joyce refers to Moltere's he Cocu inaire.

78

imag-

So much for the hero perhaps. The rival in

Chamber Music, the first sketch of that obsessive figure, must serve almost as many purposes as the girl. If she is the mother, he is the father. If she is the church, he is the priest. If she is the soul, he is God. The last role is most abundantly supported by the text. The hero, who disregards the divine at first (xii), is described later on as "He who hath glory lost" (xxi). What glory? Certainly not that of earth. v Although we have not considered all the images and relationships of Chamber Music, it should be plain by now that the innocuous surface of these poems serves as the symbol or the shape of an "idea" in the sense a painter or musician would give the word. This symbolic shape presents Joyce's deepest concerns. Like his other works, Chamber

Music draws matter from the

conflict between self and world or country, parents, and religion. It draws matter too from Joyce's concern with fall, creation, and renewal. It owes feeling to his sense of guilt and betrayal. As the seemingly mild and " Page 210. ™ Exiles (New York, 1951), pp. 115, 124-25, 127.

90

objective surface of Dublitiers

at once conceals and

reveals the obsessions from which he composed his major works, so does that of Chamber

Music.

The trouble with symbolic forms like Dublitiers and Chamber Music is that they conceal too well what they are supposed to reveal. The disarming surfaces convey almost nothing to general readers or critics, who dismiss the stories as naturalistic and the poems as traditional but empty. Readers who know something about Joyce may penetrate the shape a little or allow it to work upon their feelings and minds. But if communication is a virtue of art, then Chamber

Music is a failure.

If, on the other hand, art is an enigma as Mallarmé thought it and independent of reference, then Chamber Music may be a success—though a small one. Ulysses is an enigma, but the surface warns the commonest reader or critic that something is there. The elegant and impenetrable exterior of the poems, giving almost no sign of ulterior presence, defeats its purpose. The trouble with Chamber

Music, however, is not

that it fails to communicate. In spite of I. A. Richards and John Dewey it is not entirely certain that communication is the virtue of art. Symbolic art in particular may present or create more than it communicates1 and what it does communicate is hardly knowledge. T h e trouble with Chamber Music is that the form 1 For Stephen in A Portrait (p. 322) music, and that might include Chamber Music, evokes an "incommunicable emotion." As for the "intentional fallacy" in this section: I intend it.

91

is inadequate for the burden it seems meant to carry. If the girl of these poems, for example, is designed to present Joyce's ideas about woman, religion, and imagination, she does the job less satisfactorily than Mrs. Bloom. She lacks the body to embody these suggestions. If Joyce was dissatisfied with his poems shortly before their publication, it was because he had discovered in the poetic novel and story a more congenial and spacious form for embodying what obsessed him. Chamber

Music

remains the dense yet somewhat

meager monument of the first way he found for doing it. T o talk of monuments or their parts, however, is to pursue metaphors, not poems. Let us face a poem as poem to see what it is like—and to please critics. Poem xxi, the one we have been examining for references, will do: He who hath glory lost, nor hath Found any soul to fellow his, Among his foes in scom and wrath Holding to ancient nobleness, That high unconsortable one— His love is his companion. What strikes, or maybe should strike, us first about it is the rhythm. Joyce tells us in Stephen

Hero that a

poem is "the simple rhythmic liberation of an emotion," 2 and in A Portrait of the Artist, while writing 2

Page 176.

92

his villanelle, Stephen makes it plain that rhythm precedes, accompanies, and determines the images; 3 for rhythm, he tells us elsewhere, is not only equivalent to gesture but a way of showing "an inner world of individual emotions." 4 Stephen and his brother scan poems in Stephen

Hero to prove that verse should be

read "according to the stresses; that is neither stricdy according to the feet nor yet with complete disregard of them." 5 If we scan the poem before us, we find its rhythm not unlike that of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As "sprung" as Joycc could spring it, counterpointing meter with freedom, the rhythm shows forth irregularity of feeling or else trouble of some sort, probably serious. Since sound is the substance of rhythm, we should consider that as well. Stephen in Stephen

Hero and

A Portrait of the Artist makes nonsense verses out of sounds and repeats words to himself until they lose all sense and become "wonderful vocables," his way, no doubt, of purifying the language of the tribe until, like Mallarmé, he can renew its meaning. 6 From Rimbaud's sonnet on the vowels he learns their value and spends hours permuting or combining them.7 Poem xxi is a 3 Pages 484, 489. * Stephen Hero, p. 184; Portrait, p. 426. 5 Pages 25-26. Pastimes of James Joyce (New York, Gotham Book Mart, 1941) contains a facsimile of Joyce's scansion of Tom Moore's "At the Mid Hour of Night." •Stephen Hero, pp. 30, 31; Portrait, pp. 439-40. 7 Stephen Hero, p. 32.

93

conspiracy of back or, as Joyce would say, "black," vowels. In themselves they are solemn enough, but together with the sense they create feelings suitable for desperate baritones. T h e profound symphony is interrupted, however, by "high," the one word out of key with the others. T h i s break serves to set off and give dramatic impact to "unconsortable," the central word of the poem and perhaps of the whole suite, a word which lacking that bright, sharp introduction would have been almost as dark as the rest. "Unconsortable" owes its effect less to juxtaposition, however, than to other qualities. It is a long, uncommon word among comparatively simple ones. By its place in the line it produces an emphatic ripple in the rhythm, which in turn makes it stand out. T h e rhythmic and phonetic triumph here is like that of Ben Jonson's "Goddess excellently bright" or Yeats's "proud, majestical multitude." But the triumph is also semantic. By its sense this great word not only summarizes the hero and his failure, but, taken togedier with "companion," constitutes a paradox. Incapable of consorting, he who has no consort has one. If we know about the reference to Nora, the paradox is plain. If we remain within the limits of the poem, as we are told we should, "His love," becoming self-love may seem reason for the hero's unconsortability. But even if we remain within the limits of the poem or the suite, some ambiguity remains. "His

94

love," referring now to himself and now to another, produces an oscillation of feelings, temporarily stilled by sound and tone, which prove to be less nearly final than they seemed at first. On second reading, the poem remains ambiguous. Does it celebrate a Lucifer, who, having fallen from divine glory because too "high" to consort with it, sits proudly alone? Or does it concern one, so fallen but still high, who has found companionship on earth in spite of all his pride? Both readings are possible. W e who know about Nora may prefer the latter, but the poem itself allows us choice. There is also choice of tones. Is the paradox of "unconsortable" and "companion" pathetic, defiant, or comic? It may involve seeing through an amateur Lucifer as Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist saw through Stephen. T h e dissonance of "his" and "nobleness" may symbolize comic reservation, scorn and defiance, or the misery of one who has to make the best of things. Is it an accident that unless each vowel receives unnatural emphasis, "companion" must be cut off short as if it were something not to be lingered over? Revealing a hero in need of Bloom to teach him humanity and of Mrs. Bloom to teach him love, the poem seems a form for presenting insufferable pride and its difficulties. T h e intensity of that pride may be a little frightening. Although the conflicts within this form remain unappeased and the effect of their organization is kinetic rather than static, as Joyce wanted his art to seem, the

95

poem, creating a troubled vision, is successful enough. The better poems of the sequence are no less successful. But that Joyce in later years found them inadequate, suitable for Irish tenors or for any tenors careless what they sang about, is proved by comments both ironic and direct. "It is a young man's book," he said in a letter about Chamber

Music. "I felt like that." 8

His remarks about Hosty, the poet of Finnegans

Wake,

clearly apply to himself and his poems: . . . poor Osti-Fosti described as quite a musical genius in a small way and the owner of an exceedingly niced ear, with tenorist voice to match, not alone, but a very major poet of the poorly meritary order Che began Tuonisonian but worked his passage up as far as the we-all-hang-together Animandovites) no one end is known.9 Later in Finnegans Wake Joyce describes his poems as "the first rattle [childish riddle] of his juniverse," 10 a comment that takes account of their symbolic character, their scope, and their failure. He proceeds to say that although he thought himself a Shelley, he turned Gorman, James Joyce, p. 175. * Page 48. "Animandovites" includes anima and dove, two of the elements of Chamber Music. Tuonisonian" probably includes Malay tuan or lord as well as emphasis upon harmonized sound. See note to poem v. "We-all-hang-together" refers to the "moral" of Ulysses. For other passages on his poems, see Finnegans Wake, pp. 114, 192. I am indebted to Nathan Halper, the principal authority, for locating some of these passages. 1 0 Page 231. Joyce calls Chamber Music "a Caseous [or cheesy] effort" (Finnegans Wake, p. 164), and parodies the "pathos" of these "shoddy pieces," which in the banquet of his works are "pudding the carp before doevre hors." 8

96

out to be a kind of Dennis Florence M'Carthy, whose poetical works Mr. Bloom, another small poet, has in his library.11 Even in A Portrait of the Artist

and

Ulysses Joyce seems to accept, as he records, the comments of his friends. MacCann calls him a "minor poet" and Cranly, rather ambiguously, a poor one. 12 And Lynch looks forward to a time "when something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father." 13 Joyce became a great poet in prose as the last pages of Finnegans Wake proclaim. His great poems in prose contain examples of verse that show what his mature genius could have done in that form had it been inclined. 14 Hosty's "Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" at the end of the second chapter of Finnegans Wake15

is one of

" Ulysses, p. 693. 12 Portrait, pp. 461, 518. Ulysses, p. 408. Cf. Mulligan's remark (p. 245): "He can never be a poet." 14 Except for limericks, come-all-yous, doggerel, and "Ecce Puer," the thirteen poems of Pomes Petty each (1927) constitute his production in lyric form from 1904 to 1924. Written when the need for naked sentiment or ejaculation overcame impersonality and distance, they are more lyric than dramatic. Sometimes they echo themes in the prose that remained his central expression: for example, "She Weeps over Rahoon" (1913) is a reworking of the last pages of "The Dead," even down to "falls softly, softly falling." That this traumatic episode, involving Nora and his ego, haunted him that year is proved by his notes to Exiles (pp. 117-18, 122). It is not easy to understand why after embodying the experience in a great story he tried to recapture it in a minor lyric. 18 Pages 44-47. At once God and enemy, Hosty is "on the verge of selfabyss" (p. 40). Cf. the poem on ALP at the end of the fourth chapter of Finnegans Wake (pp. 102-3). 13

97

the best dream poems in our language, and the verses concealed in the Circe episode of Ulysses are no less excellent : You may touch my . . . May I touch your? O, but lightly! O, so lightlyJ16 This poem of a chamber perhaps is better than any of the poems of Chamber

Music. But those poems in their

degree do create feelings, if not ideas, or maybe order feelings we already have, by rhythm, sound, and the ghosts of ideas. Ulysses, p. 561.

98

T H E

T E X T S

CHAMBER

OF MUSIC

OF THE manuscripts of Chamber Music three are principal and there are several of the several poems. The principal ones reveal the gradual expansion of the sequence from twenty-seven poems at first, to thirty-four, and finally to thirty-six. In most of the earliest surviving manuscripts the poems are virtually as they are in print. Variants may appear here and there, an unfamiliar word, a line waiting to be recast, and everywhere a variety of punctuation bewildering enough to make us suppose young Joyce indifferent to the marks with which he was so liberal. But all the manuscripts are fair copies, not work sheets. Joyce copied them out in his precise early hand for display or publication or as gifts to friends.1 These documents therefore, except for a few of the earliest, tell us less about the genesis and development of the poems than about their arrangement. For testimony on this point they are of value. Aside from that, however, the appeal of most is to sentiment and curiosity. 1 In a letter to me (April 22, 1 9 5 3 ) Stanislaus Joyce speaks of the way Joyce wrote the poems: " H e composed them in his head first, during his wanderings about Dublin, and then wrote them out without corrections, often in odd places." Among these he lists the National Library, post offices, and "the snug of some pub."

99

My record of the variants is complete or as nearly so as may be for one without practice in an enterprise of this kind and with litde inclination to it. The eye slips, the mind wanders. My collation of some of the manuscripts was made perforce without the aid of photostats. When checking and rechecking those originals that I was able to see again revealed fresh variants, I knew the folly of mechanical endeavor without machine. For some variants I had to rely upon the assurance of others in Dublin, Missouri, or Trieste, places where I could not go. I am sure their collations are as reliable as mine. But although not altogether satisfied with my collation, I am unable to persuade myself that it is inexact. Of editions of Chamber Music there are two principal kinds, English and American. The former contain Joyce's revisions and the latter the casual deviations of the printer. T h e first English edition is the basic text. Joyce read the proofs and accepted the indention and punctuation of the editor. Also published by Elkin Mathews, the second edition differs a little from the first in ways that suggest the intervention of the author, who was beginning to see the importance of punctuation. T h e extensive changes in the Egoist Press edition were made, as Harriet Weaver assures me, by Joyce himself. The Cape edition follows the Egoist with one or two trivial exceptions. Although all the American editions are based upon the English first, the only faith100

ful reproduction of it is the Comhill edition, and that was pirated. In the authorized versions, published by Huebsch and Viking, some of the corruptions are verbal, "cry" instead of "sigh," for example, in poem xxix, and some are matters of punctuation like the misleading comma after "Oread" in poem xxv. 2 Between the current English and American editions, therefore, there are differences—inconsiderable perhaps. Even such differences, however, may seem considerable when one has been concerned too long with inconsiderable things. For my text I have returned to the first English edition. Variants, both designed and accidental, in the other editions appear in the textual notes. Editions of Chamber

Music are hard to come by.

Few libraries have more than one or two. But my friend James Spoerri of Evanston, Illinois, who has the richest collection of Joyce's works in private hands, has all the editions. He kindly collated them for me and after that lent me the lot. Sometimes our collations agreed, but more often he found things that I missed and I that he. Rebuking one another's incapacity, we pursued the task until we found ourselves agreeing. MANUSCRIPTS

T

(Thompson) This manuscript of poems i, v, xxiv, XXVIII, xxxiv is proved by the state of the text to be

among the earliest known at present. Between 1901 2 M r . B . W . Huebsch, to whom I pointed out these accidental variants, tell.; me that in the future the Viking Press will follow the text of the Egoist Press edition.

101

and 1903 Joyce copied out these poems for friends on ruled paper torn from notebooks. Each page is signed with initials. This manuscript, now in the collection of John Hinsdale Thompson of Columbia, Missouri, was acquired from Sylvia Beach. P

(Byrne)

The first appearance of poem xxxv is on

a postcard addressed to J. Francis Byrne, December 15, 1902, from the Hotel Corneille, Paris. It is now in the Slocum Library at Yale. J

(Stanislaus

Joyce) An early state of poem xx, signed

by initials and dated 1903. This manuscript, on half of the tom-off second sheet of a letter, is now in the possession of Stanislaus Joyce, Trieste. C

(Curran) Joyce gave these copies of poems xxi (dated September 30, 1904) and xxvn to Con-

stantine Curran of Dublin in 1904. They are still in the possession of Mr. Curran. B

(Beach-Gilvarry) The earliest of the sequences, this manuscript is described as follows in the Cata-

logue of a Collection Containing Manuscripts & Rare Editions of James Joyce . . . Belonging to Miss Sylvia Beach and offered for sale at her shop Shakespeare Company,

12, Rue de L'Odèon,

and

Paris-VIe [1935]:

"Chamber Music. The original manuscript of 33 of the 36 poems that compose this work. 27 are written on large sheets, 17 x IIV2 ins., of handsome laid paper with a watermark representing a shamrock and a sun etc., and 6 on inferior paper, 1 3 x 8 ins. It was from 102

this manuscript, specially prepared for the occasion, that in 1902 the youthful James Joyce read aloud his poems to W . B. Yeats." Far from being the original manuscript, this fair copy, which may or may not have been intended for Yeats, was made by Joyce between 1902 and September, 1904. It consists of two groups of poems, one numbered in pencil on large paper as described and the other on smaller paper, separately numbered. Two of the poems, one on large paper and one on small, are numbered 13. The larger group on large paper, numbered 1 to 27, consists of the following poems in the following order: i, iii, ii, iv, v, vm, VII, IX, XVII, XVIII, VI, x , XIII, XIV, XV, XIX, XXIII, XXII, XXIV, XVI, XXXI, XXVIII, XXIX, XXXII, XXX, XXXIII, XXXIV.

These twenty-seven poems, which seem to have been copied out in 1902 or 1903, may be the manuscript described by Oliver Gogarty in Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove. That Joyce's order was followed in the numbering is proved by comparison with the 1905 arrangement. T o this sequence the following poems, evidently copied out somewhat later (in 1903 or 1904) on smaller inferior paper were added, perhaps by Miss Beach: xi, xn, xx, xxv, xxvi, xxvu. The manuscript is now in the James Gilvarry Collection. Y (Yale) This arrangement of the first thirty-four poems, acquired from Stanislaus Joyce by John Slocum and now at Yale, is entitled "Chamber Music (a suite of thirty-four songs for lovers) by James Joyce." 103

It is dated at Trieste, Austria 1905. For the arrangement of the poems see the textual notes. The dimensions of the manuscript are approximately 2 1 x 1 7 cm. S

(Slocum) This manuscript, owned by John Slocum and now deposited in the Slocum Library at Yale,

is that from which the first edition was printed. It consists of thirty-six poems on thirty-six sheets (approximately 21 x 17 cm.) with an extra sheet for the title, bound in stiff blue paper by a copper pin. The tide page reads "Chamber Music by James Joyce MS. 24 October 1906: Rome." After the final poem Joyce added: "Jas A Joyce 24 October 1906 Via Trattina 52. II Rome." The manuscript on velum that Joyce presented to his wife for Christmas, 1909, although listed in La Hune Catalogue, is not in the Joyce collection at the University of Buffalo. It was in Mrs. Joyce's possession until her death. I do not know its present whereabouts. As this book was going to press, I had the good fortune to see proof sheets of J. F. Byrne's Silent Years, an Autobiography

with Memoirs of James Joyce and our

Ireland (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Young). Mr. Byrne says that before 1902 Joyce gave him manuscripts (written on slips from the National Library) of many of the poems of Chamber

Music. These early

manuscripts, later sold to John Quinn, have not been located. In his book Mr. Byrne publishes the poem by Joyce that I mention on page 7 of the Introduction. 104

MAGAZINES

Saturday Speaker Dana Speaker Venture Homestead

1904, May 14. Poem xxrv. The Saturday Review, XCVII, 619. 1904, July 30. Poem xvm. The Speaker, N.S., X, 408. 1904, August. Poem vn. Dana, I, 124. 1904, October 8. Poem vi. The Speaker, N.S., XI, 36. 1905. Poems XII and xxvi. The Venture, an Annual of Art and Literature, 92. 1910, September 17. Poem i. The Irish Homestead, XVII, 785. EDITIONS

First Mathews Cornhill

Elkin Mathews, London, 1907. Elkin Mathews, London, 1918. The Cornhill Company, Boston, 1918 [pirated],

Huebsch B. W . Huebsch, New York, 1918. Huebsch 2 B. W . Huebsch, New York, 1923. Egoist Egoist Press, London, 1923. Cape Jonathan Cape, London, 1927. Collected Collected Poems, New York, Black Sun Press, 1936; New York, Viking Press, 1937.

Portable

The Portable ]ames Joyce, edited by Harry Levin, New York, Viking Press, 1947. 105

For translations of Chamber Music or of individual poems from it into French, Italian, Polish, and Japanese, see Slocum and Cahoon, Bibliography. The following text is that of the first edition, Elkin Mathews, London, 1907. Arabic numbers in brackets over the variants indicate Joyce's arrangement of the poems in the Yale (1905) manuscript. The symbols used for textual variants are to be found in the margins of the preceding list of manuscripts and editions.

106

CHAMBER

MUSIC

i

[2] 2. T, B, Y, S have comma after sweet Homestead

has colon after sweet

3. Strings] T reads And strings strings but And is crossed out 4. T lacks period after meet 8. T, B, Y, S have comma after hair 9. Y, S lack comma after playing 10. T , B, Y, S lack comma after bent 12. T , B, Y lack period after instrument

108

B reads And

I

Strings in the earth and air Make music sweet; Strings by the river where T h e willows meet. There's music along the river For Love wanders there, Pale flowers on his mantle, Dark leaves on his hair. All softly playing, With head to the music bent, And fingers straying Upon an instrument.

109

il

[4]

2. y has semicolon after blue 5. B lacks comma after air 7. Y has semicolon after keys

110

II

The twilight turns from amethyst To deep and deeper blue, The lamp fills with a pale green glow The trees of the avenue. The old piano plays an air, Sedate and slow and gay; She bends upon the yellow keys, Her head inclines this way. Shy thoughts and grave wide eyes and hands That wander as they list— The twilight turns to darker blue With lights of amethyst.

Ill

in

[3]

2. B lacks comma after skies 3. night wind ] B, Y, S read night-wind 8. B, Y, S lack comma after way 9. night wind ] B, Y, S read night-wind 11. Egoist, Cape lack comma after Love 12. S has comma after aglow 13. S lacks comma after go

112

Ill

At that hour when all things have repose, O lonely watcher of the skies, Do you hear the night wind and the sighs Of harps playing unto Love to unclose The pale gates of sunrise? When all things repose do you alone Awake to hear the sweet harps play To Love before him on his way, And the night wind answering in antiphon Till night is overgone? Play on, invisible harps, unto Love, Whose way in heaven is aglow At that hour when soft lights come and go, Soft sweet music in the air above And in the earth below.

113

IV

[5]

1. B,Y,S

have comma after heaven

8. B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after calling 9. muse: W h o ] B reads muse, who 12. B lacks period after visitant

114

IV

When the shy star goes forth in heaven All maidenly, disconsolate, Hear you amid the drowsy even One who is singing by your gate. His song is softer than the dew And he is come to visit you. O bend no more in revery When he at eventide is calling, Nor muse: Who may this singer be Whose song about my heart is falling? Know you by this, the lover's chant, T i s I that am your visitant.

115

V

[6]

2. Goldenhair ] T, B read Golden-hair T has semicolon after Goldenhair 5. was ] Mathews,

Egoist, Cape read is

Y has colon after closed 9. Egoist, Cape have colon after book 10. T , B, Y, S lack comma after room Egoist, Cape have colon after room 12. T, B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape have comma after gloom 14. T , Y, S, Egoist, Cape have period after air 16. Goldenhair ] T , B read Golden-hair

116

V

Lean out of the window, Goldenhair, I heard you singing A merry air. My book was closed; I read no more, Watching the fire dance On the floor. I have left my book, I have left my room, For I heard you singing Through the gloom. Singing and singing A merry air, Lean out of the window, Goldenhair.

117

VI

[12] Lines two and three are transposed in Speaker.

3. Speaker has semicolon after me 5. Y lacks period after be 8. Speaker has semicolon after part 10. B lacks period after heart

118

VI

I would in that sweet bosom be ( O sweet it is and fair it is!) Where no rude wind might visit me. Because of sad austerities I would in that sweet bosom be. I would be ever in that heart ( O soft I knock and soft entreat her!) Where only peace might be my part. Austerities were all the sweeter So I were ever in that heart.

119

VII

[8]

2. apple-trees ] B, Dana read apple trees Cape read appletrees Y lacks comma after apple-trees 4. B lacks period after companies 7. S has comma after to 8. Dana has period after grass 10. B, Y, S lack comma after laiid

120

Egoist,

VII

My love is in a light attire Among the apple-trees, Where the gay winds do most desire T o run in companies. There, where the gay winds stay to woo T h e young leaves as they pass, My love goes slowly, bending to Her shadow on the grass; And where the sky's a pale blue cup Over the laughing land, My love goes lightly, holding up Her dress with dainty hand.

121

Vili

[ 7 ]

1. green wood ] Y reads greenwood 2. B, Y, S have dash after her 3. green wood ] Y reads greenwood 6. B, Y, S have dash after footfall 14. Y has exclamation mark after wear and before dash 15. Y, S lack comma after love

122

VIII

W h o goes amid the green wood With springtide all adorning her? W h o goes amid the merry green wood T o make it merrier? W h o passes in the sunlight By ways that know the light footfall? W h o passes in the sweet sunlight With mien so virginal? The ways of all the woodland Gleam with a soft and golden fire— For whom does all the sunny woodland Carry so brave attire? O, it is for my true love T h e woods their rich apparel wear— O, it is for my own true love, That is so young and fair.

123

IX

[9]

2. ring-around ] Y reads

ring around

Egoist,

Cape read ringaround 3. B, Y lack comma after furrow to furrow 4. B, Y, S lack comma after garlanded 7. Welladay! Welladay! ] B, Y read Welladay, welladay 9. B lacks exclamation mark after away

124

IX

Winds of May, that dance on the sea, Dancing a ring-around in glee From furrow to furrow, while overhead T h e foam flies up to be garlanded, In silvery arches spanning the air, Saw you my true love anywhere? Welladay! Welladay! For the winds of May! Love is unhappy when love is away!

125

X

[13] 3. come ] Y has Come 4. Y" has exclamation mark after love

10. B has comma after bolder Y has period after bolder 14. Y has colon after over

126

X

Bright cap and streamers, He sings in the hollow: Come follow, come follow, All you that love. Leave dreams to the dreamers That will not after, That song and laughter Do nothing move. With ribbons streaming He sings the bolder; In troop at his shoulder The wild bees hum. And the time of dreaming Dreams is over— As lover to lover, Sweetheart, I come.

127

XI

[16]

1. B lacks comma after third adieu 2. B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape have period after days 6. Mathews,

Egoist, Cape have comma after hair

128

XI

Bid adieu, adieu, adieu, Bid adieu to girlish days, I lappy Love is come to woo Thee and woo thy girlish ways— T h e zone that doth become thee fair, The snood upon thy yellow hair. When thou hast heard his name upon T h e bugles of the cherubim Begin thou softly to unzone T h y girlish bosom unto him And softly to undo the snood That is the sign of maidenhood.

129

XII

[26]

6. Capuchin ] Egoist, Cape have capuchin 7. Venture has semicolon after wise 8. Y, S, Venture lack comma after divine Egoist, Cape have period after divine 9. those ] Venture reads these Venture, Huebsch, Egoist, Cape, Collected, Portable have comma after eyes 10. starlight. Mine, O Mine! ] B, Y, S read starlight. . . Mine, O mine! Venture reads starlight. . . . Thine, O mine!

130

XII

What counsel has the hooded moon Put in thy heart, my shyly sweet, Of Love in ancient plenilune, Glory and stars beneath his feet— A sage that is but kith and kin With the comedian Capuchin? Believe me rather that am wise In disregard of the divine, A glory kindles in those eyes Trembles to starlight. Mine, O Mine! No more be tears in moon or mist For thee, sweet sentimentalist.

131

XIII

[ 1 5 ]

1. B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after courteously 5. B, Y lack comma after O 6. B, S have comma after sea 7.

lands

]

Huebsch,

Huehsch

2, Collected,

read land Collected,

Portable lack comma after us

8. Y has exclamation mark after me 9. B lacks comma after now 10. Y, S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after go 12. y has comma after window 13. B has comma after Singing 14. Love ] S has love B has colon after noon y lacks semicolon after noon S has period after noon 15. y has period after you 16. y has exclamation mark after second soon

132

Portable

XIII

Go seek her out all courteously, And say I come, Wind of spices whose song is ever Epithalamium. O, hurry over the dark lands And run upon the sea For seas and lands shall not divide us, My love and me. Now, wind, of your good courtesy I pray you go, And come into her little garden And sing at her window; Singing: The bridal wind is blowing For Love is at his noon; And soon will your true love be with you, Soon, O soon.

133

XIV

[17]

3. night-dew ] B has night dew have nightdew 5. odorous ] B has odourous 6. B has semicolon after sighs Y has period after sighs 9. cedar tree ] Y has cedar-tree 10. Y, S have comma after love 11. S lacks comma after dove 14. B has dash after head

134

Egoist,

Cape

XIV

My dove, my beautiful one, Arise, arise! The night-dew lies Upon my lips and eyes. The odorous winds are weaving A music of sighs: Arise, arise, My dove, my beautiful one! I wait by the cedar tree, My sister, my love. White breast of the dove, My breast shall be your bed. The pale dew lies Like a veil on my head. My fair one, my fair dove, Arise, arise!

135

XV

[19]

2. B, V, S lack comma after death 3. Y has comma after lo 6. softly-burning ] Y, Egoist, Cape have softly burning B, Y, S lack comma after appear 8. y, Egoist lack period after gossamer 9. B, y, S lack comma after secredy 10. stirred ] y reads

heard followed

"stirred?" in another hand Y has period after stirred

136

hy

query,

XV

From dewy dreams, my soul, arise, From love's deep slumber and from death, For lo! the trees are full of sighs Whose leaves the morn admonisheth. Eastward the gradual dawn prevails Where softly-burning fires appear, Making to tremble all those veils Of grey and golden gossamer. While sweetly, gently, secretly, The flowery bells of morn are stirred And the wise choirs of faery Begin (innumerous!) to be heard.

137

i

[22] B has comma after go

138

XVI

O cool is the valley now And there, love, will we go For many a choir is singing now W h e r e Love did sometime go. A n d hear you not the thrushes calling, Calling us away? O cool and pleasant is the valle y And there, love, will we stay.

139

XVII

[10]

8. Who ] Y, S read That

140

XVII

Because your voice was at my side I gave him pain, Because within my hand I held Your hand again. There is no word nor any sign Can make amend— He is a stranger to me now Who was my friend.

141

XVIII

[ 1 1 ]

1. Sweetheart,] B, Y, S have sweetheart

B, S lack

comma after sweetheart 2. B, S have comma after tale Y, Speaker have period after tale 4. W h e n friends him fail. ] B reads W h e n friends do him fail. 6. Speaker has comma after untrue 10. Speaker has comma after move 14. B, Y, S, Speaker have period after breast

142

XVIII

O Sweetheart, hear you Your lover's tale; A man shall have sorrow W h e n friends him fail. For he shall know then Friends be untrue And a little ashes Their words come to. But one unto him W i l l softly move And softly woo him In ways of love. His hand is under Her smooth round breast; So he who has sorrow Shall have rest.

143

XIX

[18]

2. Y has period after you 4. dishonour ] Htiehsch has dishonor

144

XIX

Be not sad because all men Prefer a lying clamour before you: Sweetheart, be at peace again— Can they dishonour you? They are sadder than all tears; Their lives ascend as a continual sigh. Proudly answer to their tears: As they deny, deny.

145

XX

[14]

1. pine-wood] ], B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape have pinewood 2. I would we lay, ] ) reads T h e r e , O there, B, Y, S lack comma after lay 3. In deep cool shadow ] ) reads Beside you, dearest, 4. At noon of day. ] J reads I would I were! 5. H o w sweet to lie there, ] J recids For the night is

still there, 6. Sweet to kiss, ] ] reads Still and grave, B, Y, S lack comma after kiss 7. W h e r e the great pine-forest ] ] reads Repose in the shadows pine-forest ] Egoist, Cape have pine forest 8. Enaisled is! ] J reads Should we have. B has period after is 9. T h y kiss descending] J reads In the dark pinewood, 10. Sweeter were ] ) reads T h e r e , O there, 11. W i t h a soft tumult ] ] reads Beside you, dearest, 12. Of thy hair. ] } reads I would I were! 13. O, u n t o the pine-wood] J reads T h e kindly elves the pine-wood ] B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape have pinewood 14. At noon of day ] J reads T o revel go, 15. Come with me now, ] J reads And peace, sweet peace there 16. Sweet love, away. ] ] reads Should we know. 146

XX

In the dark pine-wood I would we lay, In deep cool shadow At noon of day. How sweet to lie there, Sweet to kiss, Where the great pine-forest Enaisled is! Thy kiss descending Sweeter were With a soft tumult Of thy hair. O, unto the pine-wood At noon of day Come with me now, Sweet love, away.

147

XXI

1. 2. 3. 5.

L I ]

C has Dedication / To Nora C,Y, S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after lost C lacks comma after his foes ] Y reads friends C has comma after high

148

XXI

He who hath glory lost, nor hath Found any soul to fellow his, Among his foes in scorn and wrath Holding to ancient nobleness, That high unconsortable one— His love is his companion.

149

XXII

[24]

2. Y has c o m m a after 5. Egoist,

Cape

have

fain c o m m a after

8. B, Y, S lack c o m m a after 10. B, Y, S, Egoist,

Cape

there

tremulous

lack s e m i c o l o n after us

150

XXII

Of that so sweet imprisonment My soul, dearest, is f a i n Soft arms that woo me to relent And woo me to detain. Ah, could they ever hold me there Gladly were I a prisoner! Dearest, through interwoven arms By love made tremulous, That night allures me where alarms Nowise may trouble us; But sleep to dreamier sleep be wed Where soul with soul lies prisoned.

151

XXIII

[ 2 0 ]

4. B, S have dash after second kiss Y has comma after second kiss 5. yes!— ] Y has yes, 8. divers ] B, y , S read many S lacks comma after keep 9. those ] B, Y, S read the y has comma after possessed 10. Ere that mine eyes had learned to weep. ] B, S read Where love sighs not from sleep to sleep, y reads Folded in fragrant gloom asleep.

152

XXIII

This heart that flutters near my heart My hope and all my riches is, Unhappy when we draw apart And happy between kiss and kiss; My hope and all my riches—yes!— And all my happiness. For there, as in some mossy nest The wrens will divers treasures keep, I laid those treasures I possessed Ere that mine eyes had learned to weep. Shall we not be as wise as they Though love live but a day?

153

xxiv

[ 21 ]

3. T,B,Y,S

lack comma after graciously

6. B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after grass 8. looking-glass ] Egoist, Cape have lookingglass T lacks period after looking-glass 10. B, Y, S lack comma after hair 12. Y, Saturday

lack comma after air

14. and ] Saturday reads or 15. Saturday lacks comma after fair 16. T, S lack period after negligence

154

XXIV

Silently she's combing, Combing her long hair, Silently and graciously, With many a pretty air. T h e sun is in the willow leaves And on the dappled grass, And still she's combing her long hair Before the looking-glass. I pray you, cease to comb out, Comb out your long hair, For I have heard of witchery Under a pretty air, That makes as one thing to the lover Staying and going hence, All fair, with many a pretty air And many a negligence.

155

xxv

[29]

I. B has comma after go Y, S have period after go Egoist, Cape lack colon after go 3. B, Y, S lack comma after sun 4. Huebsch 2, Collected, Portable have comma after run Huebsch,

Huebsch

2, Collected,

Portable have

comma after Oread 5. Till ] B , Y , S read And 6. hair ] S reads air 7. B lacks colon after so Y, S have period after so 10. B,Y, S have comma after are Mathews, Egoist, Cape have colon after are II. song-confessed ] Egoist, Cape have songconfessed

156

XXV

Lightly come or lightly go: T h o u g h thy heart presage thee woe, Vales and many a wasted sun, Oread let thy laughter run T i l l the irreverent mountain air Ripple all thy flying hair. Lightly, lightly—ever so: Clouds that wrap the vales below At the hour of evenstar Lowliest attendants are; Love and laughter song-confessed W h e n the heart is heaviest.

157

xxvi

[25]

3. choiring ] S, Venture read quiring 6. north? ] B, Y, S, Venture have North? 8. Y, S lack comma after his B, Y, S lack comma after well 10. Venture has comma after conjurable

158

XXVI

Thou leanest to the shell of night, Dear lady, a divining ear. In that soft choiring of delight W h a t sound hath made thy heart to fear? Seemed it of rivers rushing forth From the grey deserts of the north? That mood of thine, O timorous, Is his, if thou but scan it well, W h o a mad tale bequeaths to us At ghosting hour conjurable— And all for some strange name he read In Purchas or in Holinshed.

159

xxvii

[ 27 ]

1. Mithridates ] B, Y read Mithradates

In S

Mithradates is corrected in pencil by editor or printer C, B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after were 2. poison-dart ] Egoist, Cape have poisondart C, B, Y, S lack comma after dart 4. C, B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after heart 6. Y lacks period after tenderness 7. C, S lack comma after phrase Y has semicolon after phrase 8. wax ] C, B, S read are

Y reads grow

C, B, Y, S lack semicolon after wise 9. a ] C, B, Y, S read the 10. Our ] C, B, Y, S read T h e solemnize, ] C has solemnise: emnise—

Y, S have solemnise

B has solEgoist,

Cape have solemnise, 11. Neither a love where may not be ] C reads But this I know—it scarce could be

B reads But

this I know: it scarce could be 12 Ever so little falsity. ] C, B read Dearer than is thy falsity.

160

XXVII

Though I thy Mithridates were, Framed to defy the poison-dart, Yet must thou fold me unaware To know the rapture of thy heart, And I but render and confess The malice of thy tenderness. For elegant and antique phrase, Dearest, my lips wax all too wise; Nor have I known a love whose praise Our piping poets solemnize, Neither a love where may not be Ever so little falsity.

161

xxviii

[28]

6. Y, Egoist, Cape lack comma after dead 7. B,Y have semicolon after sleep Egoist, Cape have period after sleep

162

XXVIII

Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love; Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough. Sing about the long deep sleep Of lovers that are dead, and how In the grave all love shall sleep: Love is aweary now.

163

XXIX

[ 3 0 ]

2. B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after upbraid 5. clear ] B, Y, S read deep 6. sigh ] Huebsch,

Huebsch

2, Collected,

read cry B, Y, S lack comma after second kiss 10. wild ] B, Y, S read dark 11. love ] B, Y read heart

164

Portable

XXIX

Dear heart, why will you use me so? Dear eyes that gently me upbraid, Still are you beautiful—but O, How is your beauty raimented! Through the clear mirror of your eyes, Through the soft sigh of kiss to kiss, Desolate winds assail with cries T h e shadowy garden where love is. And soon shall love dissolved be W h e n over us the wild winds b l o w But you, dear love, too dear to me, Alas! why will you use me so?

165

xxx

[32]

4. Love ] S has love 5. B has colon after lovers 6. B, Y, S have dash after hours B, Y, S, Egoist, Cape have period after one

166

XXX

Love came to us in time gone by W h e n one at twilight shyly played And one in fear was standing nigh— For Love at first is all afraid. W e were grave lovers. Love is past T h a t had his sweet hours many a one; Welcome to us now at the last T h e ways that we shall go upon.

167

xxxi

[23]

3. Y, Egoist, Cape lack semicolon after together 6. murmuring—O, happily!— ] Y has murmuring CO, happily!)

168

XXXI

O, it was out by Donnycarney W h e n the bat flew from tree to tree M y love and I did walk together; And sweet were the words she said to me. Along with us the summer wind W e n t murmuring—O, happily!— But softer than the breath of summer W a s the kiss she gave to me.

169

xxxii

[ 31 ]

1. Egoist, Cape lack period after day 2. B, S have comma after trees Y has semicolon after trees Egoist, Cape have period after trees

170

XXXII

Rain has fallen all the day. O come among the laden trees: The leaves lie thick upon the way Of memories. Staying a little by the way Of memories shall we depart. Come, my beloved, where I may Speak to your heart.

171

xxxiii 1. B,Y,S

[ 33 ] lack c o m m a after second

2. B has c o m m a after

now

make

4. Egoist, Cape lack c o m m a after sake 6. W h i c h ] B, Y, S read A n d 8. Y, Egoist, Cape lack semicolon after tree 13. B,Y,S

lack c o m m a after second

14. vilanelle ] Collected,

Portable

now have

B, S have semicolon after r o u n d e l a y Y has period after r o u n d e l a y

172

villanelle

X X X 111

Now, O now, in this brown land Where Love did so sweet music make VVe two shall wander, hand in hand, Forbearing for old friendship' sake, Nor grieve because our love was gay Which now is ended in this way. A rogue in red and yellow dress Is knocking, knocking at the tree; And all around our loneliness T h e wind is whistling merrily. T h e leaves—they do not sigh at all W h e n the year takes them in the fall. Now, O now, we hear no more T h e vilanelle and roundelay! Yet will we kiss, sweetheart, before W e take sad leave at close of dayGrieve not, sweetheart, for anything— T h e year, the year is gathering.

173

xxxiv

[ 34 ]

3. "Sleep now" ] B, S, Cape have 'Sleep now'

Y

has 'Sleep now!' 6. T has dash after door 7. S, Egoist lack comma after sleep 8. "Sleep no more." ] B, S have 'Sleep no more' Y has 'Sleep no more.' more!"

Egoist has "Sleep no

Cape has 'Sleep no more!'

10. Y has period after heart 11. Y lacks comma after now

174

XXXIV

Sleep now, O sleep now, O you unquiet heart! A voice crying "Sleep now" Is heard in my heart. T h e voice of the winter Is heard at the door. O sleep, for the winter Is crying "Sleep no more." My kiss will give peace now And quiet to your h e a r t Sleep on in peace now, O you unquiet heart!

175

3. sea-bird ] S, Egoist, Cape have seabird Egoist, Cape lack comma after is 4. P, Egoist, Cape lack comma after alone 6. S lacks period after Monotone Mathews has comma after Monotone 8. P has semicolon after go 10. P has comma after below 11. P, S lack comma after night

176

XXXV

All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan, Sad as the sea-bird is, when going Forth alone, He hears the winds cry to the waters' Monotone. The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing Where I go. I hear the noise of many waters Far below. All day, all night, I hear them flowing To and fro.

177

1. S, Egoist, Cape lack comma after land 2. Egoist, Cape have period after knees 4. reins ] S has rains 5. batde-name ] Egoist, Cape have battlename S has period after name 6. when ] S reads as 9. S has period after hair Egoist, Cape lack comma after long

178

XXXVI

I hear an army charging upon the land, And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees: Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand, Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers. They cry unto the night their battle-name: I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter. They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame, Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil. They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair: They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

179

N O T E S TO T H E

POEMS

i LOVE, a personification common in the poems of Ben Jonson and the lutanists, also appears in Dante's Vita Nuova. In Joyce's first poem Love, an aspect of the lover, is an autist. Like the "young egoist" who suffers from "pride of the intellect" in Stephen Hero (pp. 125, 126, 134), Love is a little "inhuman." His consequent trouble is the infertility to which Joyce devotes his chapter on " T h e Oxen of the Sun" in Ulysses. Centered upon himself, Love becomes Death. His "mantle," funereally decorated, is not unlike Mulligan's "cloak" QUlysses, p. 398), another symbol of death. For the details of this theme, see Introduction, p. 61. Love's head is "bent." T h i s word is significant throughout the poems. In n the girl bends upon the yellow keys as Love bends over his instrument. In iv she bends in revery, in vii she bends to her shadow on the grass, and in xxvi she "leans" to the shell of night. These postures, connecting her with Love, imply concern with herself rather than with the lover. T h a t she is as narcissistic as he may help to account for the failure of their affair. By repetition and crossreference "bend" and "lean" acquire a meaning which, although absent in the first poem at first reading, becomes clear after reading and rereading the suite. Compare the narcissistic girl at her mirror in xxiv. T o Joyce, egocentricity, his dearest sin, was the deadliest—as, indeed, it is.

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Ulysses is the story of how Stephen replaced it at last by charity and humanity. The present poem presents the image of a young man before that transfiguration. Music is no less significant. Uniting earth and air, river of life and willow of death, the music of nature inspires Love to imitation. Music is a symbol of union and harmony. Love's instrument, whether musical or phallic, is creative or, at least, should be. Ineffectual as yet, it represents on the obvious or musical level an attempt to reconcile above and below by art. (Compare Wallace Stevens's blue guitar.) The harps of m summon Love to more effectual imitation, either by art or humanity. Throughout the poems singing at gates, choiring, and other varieties of music suggest the need or desire of harmonious relationship, the central requirement not only of life but of Stephen's aesthetic in A Portrait of the Artist. Joyce also uses music as symbol in "The Dead," the last story of Dubliners. "Music sweet" in the second line of the first poem looks like a conventional inversion. In Instigations ( N e w York, Boni and Liveright, 1920, p. 207) Ezra Pound pardons such unfashionable inversions in Joyce's poems because of "the interest of the rhythms, the cross run of the beat and the word, as of a stiff wind cutting the ripple-tops of bright water." It may be, however, that "sweet" is not an inversion but a predicate adjective. At once respectable and ambiguous, that possibility should please critics. In the Thompson, the Beach-Gilvarry, the 1905, and the 1906 manuscripts there is no indention. T h e lines are flush. For the remaining poems I shall not notice indention unless Joyce observed it in his manuscripts—as he did once in awhile. 182

II

Twilight, the reconciliation of night and day, as in Yeats's Wind among the Reeds (Collected Poems, New York, 1951, pp. 60, 64), seems to suggest the union of opposites. Distracting the autist of the first poem, the girl holds out to him the possibility of union. Colors, always obscure in Joyce and more or less arbitrary, have no definite meaning without a key; but blue and green are generally benign. The shades of blue in this poem may suggest the Virgin, and green, as on the first page of A Portrait of the Artist, may imply the creative, the immature, or the Irish. Yellow, like brown, generally serves Joyce as a sign of decay. (See note to XXXIII.) The "yellow keys" of the instrument by which the girl invites the lover may indicate something repulsive beneath apparent sweetness or, implying no more than old, may mean that invitation and instrument alike are of great antiquity. Avenue, the first of many images of road or way in these poems, is hopeful here. For the girl's bending over her piano, see the note to i. Compare Stephen's visit to the home of Mr. Daniels (Sheehy) in Stephen Hero (pp. 42-43): "There was an old piano in the room and . . . one of the daughters used to come over to Stephen and ask him to sing them some of his beautiful songs. The keys of the piano were worn away and sometimes the notes would not sound but the tone was soft and mellow." The girl's music on a similar piano, more potent than Love's, unites through her window the inner and the outer if not the above and the below. Stanislaus Joyce informs me that this poem, originally part of Joyce's earlier collection of poems, was once entitled "Commonplace."

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111 Imagery connects this poem more closely with the first poem than with the second. The strings of earth and air, now identified as wind-harps or nature itself, invite Love, who is "lonely," to open the gates of sunrise or, if we may translate these commonplace images, to make love like a man. It is notable that he is watching sky, not earth, and that sunrise, however sexual, is as pale as the flowers that once adorned his mantle. However pallid his hope of love, its possibilities are multiple as the second stanza proves. Here "sweet harps," anticipating the puns of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (for example, "sweet tarts" Finnegans Wake, p. 116), suggest not only sweethearts but, since the harp is connected with Ireland, Irish sweethearts or Ireland herself. "Antiphon," a word with liturgical associations, suggests that the possible girl may be the church as well. But the dissonance of "alone," "antiphon," and "overgone" makes it probable that girl, church, and country are not altogether satisfactory as objects of love. Returning to rhyme, however, the third stanza holds out hope that the music of sweetharps, somehow uniting above and below, will end the lover's loneliness. With his eye on heaven alone, Love is still indifferent to the natural wind that asks him to include earth in his view. T h e images of gate, wind, music, instrument, way, and light, important here, recur throughout the poems. Gate and wind are obvious images of desire; sunrise implies renewal; and way, although lonely here, leads into the pale green avenue of n, which follows in in the arrangement of 1905. Pale, sigh, soft, and sweet, the conspicuous words of this poem ;ind, alas, of others in the suite, are neither as senti184

mental nor as repulsive as they would seem if this all but pre-Raphaelite confection stood alone. By the time Joyce wrote the later poems, fully aware of the air these words give his poems, he made the best of it and them. For their recurrence and their development by context and tone, see the note to xxxi. Iv Plainly this poem was intended to follow n as it does in the 1905 arrangement. It is still evening, not night as in III. T h e lover's song answers the girl's piano as he fumbles at her gate. T h e "shy star" of the opening line recalls the "Shy thoughts" of the girl in n. Obviously ideal, located by him in the heaven upon which he keeps an eye, she is his evening star, probably Venus, greatest of the "soft lights" he observes in III. She is a maiden. Stephen Dedalus knows in A Portrait of the Artist (p. 3 5 6 ) that the emblem of the Virgin is the morning star; but although morning and evening star are astronomically identical and serve equally to suggest a union of earth and air, the identity of maiden and Virgin here is no more than possible. "Disconsolate" might seem what grammarians call a squinting modifier or what Mr. Empson calls an ambiguity of the second type perhaps. Nothing of the sort. It is a simple connective, which by looking both ways joins star and girl. One of the two outstanding words of the poem and made more emphatic by the pauses that precede and follow it, "disconsolate" takes its place with "visitant," the other. One of them referring to the girl and the other to the boy, these words unite them better than discourse could and, by casting radiance upon the other words, serve to elevate the poem a little above mediocrity. By the aid of

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"visitant" the final lines, however archaic and precious, become almost final. Compare the gate at which the lover sings with the one at which Stephen longs to meet Mercedes, the ideal girl of A Portrait of the Artist (p. 311): "They would m e e t . . . perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place." However plain the sexual fantasy here, Mercedes bears one of the names of the Virgin. It is unlikely, however, that "muse" in the second stanza suggests that the girl is the poet's Muse, although in some of the later poems she is clearly that. That what is singing at her gate is a pot, though possible, is no less unlikely, but see the note to xxvi and the relevant passage in the Introduction. V

The theme is simple, perhaps deceptively so: still at her gate, lover asks girl to lean out of window. Compare the leaning girl of xxvi. Window is no less amatory than gate. "Goldenhair" connects the girl with the yellow-haired thing of XI. That her singing (at an instrument no doubt) has drawn him to her establishes the girl as one of Joyce's temptresses, in this case a Siren, and music becomes not only a means of uniting opposites but of solicitation. Compare the more definite allusion to a Siren in "Simples," a poem on his daughter in Pomes Penyeach: Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear To shield me from her childish croon. Need I mention the chapter on Sirens in Ulysses? If music is also a symbol of art in Chamber Music, the singing of the girl identifies her as his Muse, calling him away from 186

his room (home and mother) as art calls Stephen from home in A Portrait of the Artist. If music also means celestial harmony, the girls song may be that of his soul, calling him from earthly concerns. For an admirer of Dante, as young Joyce was, the simple situation held many possibilities. But the dominant meaning is amatory, as the imagery of light suggests. Whereas in III vague lights glow in heaven, here fire dances on the floor. See note to VIII. In the margin of the Beach-Gilvarry manuscript, alongside "I have left my book,/ I have left my room," someone inscribed the following lines from Tennyson's "Lady of Shallott": She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro' the room. These lines may indicate either an accidental echo or a functional allusion. If the former, it is something of which Joyce, contemptuous of Tennyson, should be ashamed. If the latter, it may be the recognition of Joyce's poem as a parody of Tennyson's. As his Lady in her room, separated from reality by wall and mirror, is called into the dangerous world by the knight's song, so Joyce's lover, remote from reality among his books, is called into the world by the lady's song. The reversal of roles is typical of Joyce. If the echo of Tennyson is as functional as it seems, it implies for Joyce's lover an issue no less ominous than that confronting Tennyson's Lady, and of an apparently simple love song it makes something complex and dark. Compare the passage on his poems in Finnegans Wake (p. 48): "he began Tuonisonian. . . ." In the Beach-Gilvarry, the 1905, and the 1906 manuscripts Joyce observed indention as in the printed text. 187

V I

T h i s maternal fantasy, misplaced in the present sequence, belongs not with the poems of spring but with a later group, after the lover has had trouble with the rival. T h e theme is regression to the mother's bosom after disappointment in the world of adults. T h e repetition of "sweet" and "soft," less decorative than functional here, provides conflict with "sad austerities" and "rude wind," which represent the world outside the sweet, soft door on which he softly knocks for admission. "Sad austerities" may mean either repentance (like that in A Portrait of the

Artist)

after walking out with the girls or else the discipline of art or maybe life itself. T h e "rude wind" is the old wind of desire from another point of view. In mother's bosom adult or even adolescent winds will no longer trouble him. T h e theme is that of Yeats's " W h o Goes with Fergus?" a poem Joyce admired. Compare the "desolate winds" of xxix, after love is over, and the "gay winds" of early love in vn. T h e knocking in x x x m , though apparently more sinister than the knocking here, is far healthier than this soft exercise. "Peace," the frustrated lover's goal, is equivalent to death. See the note to xxxiv. W h e n printed in the

Speaker,

this poem was entitled "A Wish." But the poet's wish to retreat is qualified by the repetition of "that," a distancing word that occurs four times in the short poem. Implying more than distance, "that" means that he is still outside, still independent, and not without reluctance to yield to his impulse. In the significant use of this pronoun (see the note to x x i ) Joyce anticipated Yeats, who, desiring detachment and impersonality, became the poet of the demonstrative pronoun (for example, "That great rogue Alcibiades"). In A Portrait of the Artist Ste-

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phen, frustrated by the sad austerities of life at school, longs for his mother but is warned off by the image of the "square ditch," which performs there the function of "that" here. His mother, identified by context, is that ditch (square not in shape but because it receives the drainage of the college "square" or urinal) and Stephen is the rat jumping into it (Portrait, pp. 249, 285). The maternal bosom, subject of these ambivalent feelings, may include suggestions of church, country, and Muse. For breast, compare The Song of Solomon, 1:13, a passage Joyce quotes in a context of self-surrender in A Portrait of the Artist (p. 410). See note to xiv. This poem is distinguished from others in a neat and economical suite by neatness and economy. Composed of few elements, it re-employs for the second stanza the elements of the first. Neatness and felicity seem a form embodying the finality and peace the poet desires. The two exclamatory parentheses improve the impression of tightness by temporary interference with formal progress. T h e two feminine rhymes of the second stanza, softening the rhythm of the first, support the feminine implications. VII In the 1905 arrangement this poem, one of the springtime group, followed vm. For the suggestion of making water, see Introduction, p. 74. For water and apple trees, see the description of life in A Portrait of the Artist (pp. 5 2 2 - 2 3 ) : "Dark stream of swirling bogwater on which appletrees have cast down their delicate flowers." Bog water, peculiarly Irish, is associated with bath water and urine (Portrait, p. 263). For the sky, see Finnegans Wake (p. 627), "My great blue bedroom," and Ulysses (p. 89), "It's as uncertain as a child's

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bottom." The sky is a cup, not because of Omar, but because a cup pours. For "pale," an adjective of reservation in these poems, see i and HI. For blue, literally the color of the sky and symbolically that of the Virgin, see n. Apple trees in Joyce's works usually imply Eden, Eve, and temptation. As the willows in the first poem establish Love as Death, so the apple trees of this poem establish the girl as temptress. Compare The Song of Solomon, 8:5, "under the apple tree." See note to xiv. Note the echo of this poem in The Holy Office (The Portable James Joyce, p. 659): At night when close in bed she lies And feels my hand between her thighs My little love in light attire Knows the soft flame that is desire. This echo of "My love is in a light attire" does not necessarily mean that the girl under the apple trees is in her shift unless orchard is a metaphor for bedroom. For the girl's narcissistic bending, see the note to i. As in the first few poems air and earth are being united, there by strings, here by the girl's activity, obviously creative. Although self-centered, she is an image of creative power. However much a temptress, Eve was creative—as are Muse, church, mother, and country. The meaning of wind is made clear by the support of "gay," "run in companies," and "woo." The leaves, young here, may be compared to the autumn leaves of X X X I I I . Leaves and grass are common images of mortality. In the Beach-Gilvarry manuscript the poem is followed by "Yah!"' a commentary in pencil, possibly in Joyce's hand. Indention is observed in the Beach-Gilvarry, the 1905, and the 1906 manuscripts. 190

VIII

Following v originally, this poem of love in spring celebrates emergence of girl from chamber. The greenness of the wood, the season, and the sunlight suggest hope and fertility. The girl's "virginal" mien may imply that the merry month of May is Mary's month. For the image of "ways," compare n, HI, xxx, and XXXII. Here it implies the possibilities confronting youth. Compare the "soft and golden fire" of young love with the floor-reflected fire of v, "the soft flame that is desire" of The Holy O f f i c e , and the "softly-burning fires" of xv. The wood carries "brave attire" and "rich apparel" wears to adorn the lady. ("Rich attire" occurs in both Milton and Coleridge to describe nature.) Compare "raimented" in xxix. The image of clothing, implying external manifestation, appears throughout Finnegans Wake. In this poem the implication may be that nature is clothing for the soul. Sunlight, one of many images of light in these poems (for example, star, fire, lamp, and sunrise), not unlike the symbol of light in Dante's Comedy, may have almost as many meanings as Dante's image. It is possible that this poem, addressed to the poet's soul, uses the wood as nature, by which soul is adorned, and light as what the soul aspires to. Wood and light would also serve the senses of church, country, Muse, and mother. On the most obvious level, of course, girl, wood, and light are girl, wood, and light. Pseudo-Elizabethan song, this poem owes something of its archaic air to "brave," "merry," and "green wood," and something to the use of "that" in the last line as a relative pronoun. 191

IX

T h i s poem belongs with vm and VII, which it follows in that order in the 1905 manuscript. T h e month is still Mary's month; the winds, unlike the "rude wind" of vi, are still gay. T h e sea, frightening in xxxvi, is benign, female, and creative here. Consorting with the female furrows of the sea, the masculine winds of May fulfill desire. From their congress come garlands of foam, uniting sea and air. That these garlands are works of art, on one level, is likely. In this connection it is possible that the poem is one of the chamberpot or creative poems of the suite. Compare vn and xxvi. T h a t possibility seems hardly improved by the absence of a girl to employ the thing. His "true love" (compare v m ) has strayed, but only for a moment perhaps to find relief in a bush or in something draftier at any rate than a pot. Not to be taken literally, the image of wind and sea may present her creative occupation. Note Mrs. Bloom's concern with foam (Lllysses, p. 7 5 5 ) : " O Lord how noisy I hope theyre bubbles on it for a wad of money." That the lover is not too wretched about the girl's absence is implied by "Welladay! Welladay!" Pseudo-Elizabethan and either solemn or pathetic at first glance, this exclamation at a second is comic. T h e following line, "Love is unhappy when love is away!" which Joyce associated with Nora, acquires ambivalence from what precedes it. Maybe Nora never knew, as Joyce's readers never know, how to take him. T h a t the temporary departure of the girl is more sinister than the lover thinks or than the tone of "Welladay!" implies is to be inferred from the appearance of the rival in XVII, the poem that immediately follows this one in the 1905 arrangement. T h e meeting of girl and rival may take

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place while the lover, decorously turning his back, enjoys his little comedy. Joyce followed the present indention in the Beach-Gilvarry, the 1905, and the 1906 manuscripts. x T h e image of the jester with bright cap and streamers, definitely phallic, introduces physical love. Compare Yeats's jester in "The Cap and Bells" and Buck Mulligan, the jester, fertilizer, and incubator of Ulysses. Opposite to Love, the dreamer of dreams (see note to xxvi), the jester is an embodiment of the sensual, practical, and mocking aspect of the lover. He boldly enters the feminine hollow, attended by bees, which serve in Ulysses as symbols of fertility and which, though epicene as Mr. Eliot says, unite staminate with pistilate. (Compare "valley" in xvi.) T h e last two lines of the poem suggest making love by an obvious play on words. If, as his costume suggests, the jester is a fool, those who follow him are convicted of folly. If he is a pied piper, those who follow him are rats or children. His singing introduces a more physical meaning for song, which already means temptation, art, and the union of opposites. ' T h a t will not after," an ellipsis, may imply urgency by form. Compare Mangan's "Noon-Day Dreaming" (Poems, Dublin, 1903): There danceth adown the mountain T h e child of a lofty race. . . . Some Fairy hath whispered "Follow!" And I have obeyed her well: I thread the Blossomy Hollow. 193

In the Beach-Gilvarry, the 1905, and the 1906 manuscripts every fourth line is indented. T h e other lines are flush. XI Joyce was particularly fond of this one. Taken as an organization of sounds, it is admirable. That is why perhaps he set it to music himself. One of Joyce's cousins told Patricia Hutchins Qames

Joyce's

Dublin,

p. 9 0 ) : ' " I re-

member the time Jim wrote that poem "Bid Adieu" in my mother's kitchen, on a white Becker's tea-bag.' " I have been unable to locate this manuscript or to date it more precisely. Compare the tea-stained letter in the dump (Finnegans

Wake,

pp. I l l , 118).

After our interlude with the jester, Love is back, asking the girl to let down her hair and remove her stays, bold things to ask—but maybe the example of the jester has taught him this or that. Hence his happiness. Announcing him upon bugles of cherubim implies, if we may credit the celestial hierarchy of the Pseudo-Dionysius, that Love is at least a seraph, if not God Himself. (Compare xn where he treads glory and stars beneath his feet.) Like Gabriel, the seraph, in A Portrait of the Artist (p. 4 8 4 ) , he has "come to the virgin's chamber." Since "in the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh," as we are told in the same passage, this poem may concern the moment of poetic inspiration. Joyce's seraph does not come to announce. Cherubic bugles attend to that. T h e seraph is the fertilizer, like God or the artist, whose word fills the creative imagination of the Muse—or like the jester. Webster confirms Joyce's claim that a snood is worn by unmarried women as a sign of their condition. See Joyce's notes to Exiles (p. 120), where, referring to this poem, he

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repeats " 'the snood that is the sign of maidenhood' " during a discussion of hair as symbol. Compare Yeats's "Fasten your hair with a golden pin" and his "loosen your hair" 0Collected Poems, New York, 1951, pp. 61, 6 5 ) . The two dissonances of the second stanza (upon-unzone, snood-maidenhood) are not easy to explain unless on the assumption that the lover is secretly averse to what he demands. This is the first poem marked by conventional poetic diction: thee, thy, thou, doth, hath, and the like. Is this sort of speech suitable to the annunciation and the exalted condition of Love? Joyce uses similar diction in XII, xv, xxv, xxvi, and XXVII. Sometimes the subject seems to demand it as in XII or xxvi, but sometimes, as in xv, it seems to be demanded by the rhyme or, what is worse, the practice of minor poets of his time. In the 1905 arrangement this poem immediately preceded xiv, the climax. XII

This comparatively difficult poem, which belongs with xxvi and xxvii in the ironic group, was attracted to its present place perhaps by the cherubim of xi. "Hooded" is the basic image. The hooded moon, veiled in mist, develops into the hooded Capuchin and the mist of sentimentality. The poem that Stephen writes about the girl on the step of the last tram, an incident that haunts him (Portrait, pp. 315-18, 325; Stephen Hero, pp. 6 7 - 6 8 ) , may have been an early version of this. The girl at the tram wears a shawl or hood (Portrait, pp. 331, 520). Emma's cowl, which seems the basis of the present image, implies avoidance of reality (compare Portrait, p. 489, where Stephen makes a cowl of bedclothes). As for Capuchins,

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Stephen confesses to one in A Portrait of the Artist (p. 398); and fascinated by them in Stephen Hero (pp. 17677), he reads Joachim of Flora, attends a Franciscan church, wants to read Yeats to one of them, and reasonably concludes that, unlike Jesuits, they are not "men of the world" (compare Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections, pp. 8 - 9 ) . T h e word Capuchin, from cappuccio or hood, means by extension a woman's cloak or a monkey. Akin to the Capuchin, the sage of the fifth line is identified with the hooded moon. Like the moon the Capuchin is sterile as well as hooded. "Comedian Capuchin," a phrase recalling the mood of Verlaine's F êtes galantes, could refer to God or back to the capped jester of x were either sterile. The sense of the poem seems to be this: the unrealistic moon has advised the girl to follow ideal Love. The worldly wise lover, who disregards the divine and all other ideals, advises her to follow him to bed or else to precede him. If she does so, the glory that ideal Love treads down beneath his feet will kindle in her eyes as she replaces the sterility of plenilune or of hooded moon with starlight, which like the sunlight of the earlier poems is direct, hot, and real. The lover, disregarding the divine, is hostile to hood, moon, Capuchin, and Love. Like Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist he now prefers "mortal beauty," but like Emma in Stephen Hero the girl is too conventional to yield to his demands. Although a sentimentalist, indifferent to reality and refusing responsibility, she is a sweet thing. His uncertain attitude toward her is that of Stephen toward Emma, whom he pursues despite her refusal to face things as they are. Allegorically the girl of this poem could imply the church, which failed to conform to Joyce's idea of what a

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church should be, or else Ireland, which failed him in many ways. Compare the veiled moon maiden of Dowson's "Pierrot of the Minute." Joyce's "plenilune" suggests the decadent nineties rather than the Elizabethans. For Joyce's idea of the moon as barren or immature, see A Portrait of the Artist (p. 317), "the maiden lustre of the moon," and (p. 346) the passage on Stephen "drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon. Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless? He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment." Compare the veiled moon in Dubliners, pp. 62, 63. Note Meredith's definition of the sentimentalist, quoted by Stephen in Ulysses (p. 197): ' " T h e sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.' " (Richard Feverel, chap, xxiv.) XIII

The wind of spices announces Love's coming as bugles announced it in xi. Like Mercedes in A Portrait of the Artist (p. 350), the girl occupies a house in a little garden, a traditional image of enclosure and love, made familiar by Dante, Spenser, and the book of Genesis. Compare T h e Song of Solomon, 4:16, "Awake, O north wind . . . blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out," and 4:12, "A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse." For Joyce's dependence upon the imagery of Solomon, see the note to xiv. Compare xxix where "desolate winds" assail "the shadowy garden." Bridal now, the wind unites land

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and sea, as it enters the girl's window or at least sings at it. Although it is night, Love is "at his noon," opposite to sterile Love in "plenilune" (XII). "Epithalamium" and "courteously," extraordinary words that shine out from among the simple words of the canticles, provide an Elizabethan air and by that discord serve to complicate the harmony. Without these two words the poem would be commonplace. A trick of rhythm and rhyme also helps to elevate the poetic organization. Joyce daringly rhymes accented "go" in the second stanza with unaccented "window," an offbeat which anticipates some of the technical experiments of the 1930s. T h e rhythmic subtlety of the next to the last line of the second stanza is also notable. XIV

According to Joyce this poem of dawn, which once occupied the seventeenth place in his sequence, is the climax. U p to this point the movement rises and after it declines. T h e shape of the suite is pyramidal. For the arrangement, see section HI of the Introduction. T h i s poem is climactic not only because it celebrates the nearest approach to fulfillment but because it is the most successful embodiment of the girl in all her capacities, those of church, mother, M u s e , nation, and soul. T o present his approximate possession of these, Joyce chose T h e S o n g of Solomon again. ( C o m p a r e notes to x m and x x x i v . ) " M y dove, my beautiful o n e , / Arise, arise!" may owe something to Shelley but more to Solomon's "Rise up, my love, my fair one" ( 2 : 1 0 ) and " O my dove" ( 2 : 1 4 ) . As I pointed out in the Introduction, Joyce's third and fourth stanzas are a variation upon Solomon's " O p e n to me, my sister, my love, my dove . . . for my head is filled with dew, and my

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locks with the drops of night." Joyce may also owe his images of cedar, breast, chamber, and window to Solomon. The wading girl of A Portrait of the Artist is also a dove (p. 432). "Veil" in the fourth stanza, unlike the hood in xn, has no implication of unreality. "My breast shall be your bed" in the third stanza anticipates the lover's inferior position in xx, where her kiss and hair descend upon him and he receives what he should give. XV This poem of dawn, obviously connected with xiv, combines familiar elements. The first line recapitulates xiv. As winds are full of sighs in xiv, so trees here. For leaves, see vn and xxxm. Compare the "softly-burning fires" with those of V I I I and the "veils of grey and golden gossamer" with the veils of dew in xiv and the veil of greygolden moonlight in "Alone" of Pomes Penyeach. W e have already noticed the omnipresence of soft and sweet. "Admonisheth," archaic for the sake of rhyme perhaps, increases the conventional appearance. But the poem is raised above the convention to which these elements seem to condemn it and assured a place among those of declining love by qualifications in the last two lines. The parenthesis, a form which presents qualification, is the chief agent by which the poem is transfigured. A polysyllable set off by strangeness and by parentheses from the common words around it, "innumerous," while suggesting innumerable, means not numerous. But the literal meaning survives only after the mind has entertained the other possibility, and the last lines leave us with a feeling of uncertainty rather than of finality. This feeling is strengthened by the slight dissonance of the terminal rhymes, stirred and heard, which only a very British treat-

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ment could bring into full accord. These faint uncertainties and disharmonies, suggesting that the love of those two lovers is less straightforward than the opening stanzas imply, are made stronger by the falseness of "faery." Surely figments from the Yeats country lack qualification for Joyce's choir. Our suspicion is strengthened by the implications of "wise," both literal and ironic. Simple flowers of morn may be stirred by the sight of such lovers but if "innumerous" choirs as "wise" in either sense as these ambiguously celebrate such concord, the whole poem becomes uncertain and ironic. T h e opening mood, carefully built of elements to which our responses have been fixed by earlier poems, is dramatically broken. As irony disappoints our expectations, the decline of love becomes apparent and dawn, gradual and trembling, holds threat of sundown. In the Beach-Gilvarry manuscript this poem too (compare note to v n ) is followed by a penciled "Yah!" Maybe by Joyce in later years, this commentary, his briefest essay in criticism, is not inadequate. XVI

In Joyce's 1905 sequence this poem falls between xxiv and xxxi, both ironic. Is the cool valley identical with the presumably warm hollow of x, into which the jester, leaving dreams to dreamers, once descended? "Where Love did sometime go" suggests that Love and jester are now the same or else that one followed the other. Does the coolness of the valley imply the weather or the cooling of passion? Obviously the lovers are not in the valley where many choirs, an augmentation of the innumerous choirs of xv, sing of concord perhaps. T h e more closely one examines these poems the less apparent the success of the lover. Despite the disharmony of innocent surface and possible

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meaning the present poem remains almost as slight as it seems. The allusion to a valley of thrushes may connect this poem with Glenasmole (Glen of the Thrush), near Dublin. Once the hunting ground of Finn MacCool, Glenasmole was not unsuitable in Joyce's day for other sports. XVII

Brevity alone commends these verses on the rival. "I gave him pain" implies that the lover, justly annoyed, started the quarrel; and "again" implies a brief separation from his beloved. Important only because it is Joyce's first attempt at what became one of his principal themes, this poem calls to mind the host of rivals in the later works: Michael, Heron, Father Moran, Cranly, Mulligan, Boylan, Robert, and Shaun. Allegorically the rival here could be Joyce's father or his God. Compare Elizabethan poems on the same theme, especially Thomas Campian's "While another holds your hand," in E. H. Fellowes, English Madrigal Verse (1929), p. 525. Originally this poem followed ix, but it functions as well in its present position, where it provides reason for the decay of love. In the 1905 and 1906 manuscripts the lines are indented as in the printed version. XVIII

Inversions in the first stanzas and the woodenness of "Friends be untrue" give stiffness and perhaps intentional awkwardness to the first half of these verses on betrayal, one of Joyce's favorite themes. The contrast between the halves of this trivial poem is dramatic. Back vowels, the recurrence of "softly," and the rhythm of feminine endings in the last stanza are fitting embodiments of rest on breast. 201

Compare Yeats's poem on rest and breast;

"Michael

Robartes Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods" (Collected

Poems,

New York, 1951, pp. 6 3 - 6 4 ) . Joyce's

insistence upon breast as refuge from the annoyance of reality emphasizes the maternal aspect of the girl. XIX

Concision and neatness contending with mystery of sense make this poem more pleasing than its immediate predecessors. T h e first mystery is the identity of "sweetheart." In

XVIII

she is plainly the girl, but here, although we may

be inclined at first to put her down as that, we begin to wonder if she is not the lover himself in his capacity of egoist or maybe his soul. A man in love with himself, as Benjamin Franklin observed, need fear no rival. As the address of a proud self-centered man to himself the poem makes more sense than if we assume it to be addressed to a girl, unless of course she is the victim of gossip. If "sweetheart" is a girl, taking her allegorically as church or country also improves the sense. "All men," the college of rivals perhaps, threaten sweetheart's peace by preferring lying clamour, by weeping, and by encouraging their lives to ascend like a continual sigh. T h e last of their pursuits is unclear nor is it clear why they weep unless for their condition as enemies of truth, gaiety, and life. These sad ones (compare Tristopher, an embodiment of the rival in Finnegans

Wake,

p. 2 1 ) are negative.

T h e splendid last line, the hardest, coldest, proudest, and wittiest in all these poems, constitutes an affirmation of great force. If the denial of a denial means yes, the poem might seem to be addressed, did not chronology forbid it, to Mrs. Bloom herself. T h e effect of neatness owes something to the rhymes.

202

T h e pattern of rhymed and identical words in the first stanza, reversed in the second, suspends the meaning in one place to make it final in the other. (Compare similar tricks with identical words instead of rhyme in vi, v m , xvi, and the subtle interlinking of rhymes in the last two stanzas of xiv.) T h e last line would be less brilliant without the contrast of what precedes it. T h e long, wavering movement of "Their lives ascend as a continual sigh" and its softness of sense and sound are dramatic preparation for the end. Perhaps this admirably organized and courageous poem, which anticipates some that Yeats was to write, owes something to his "Aedh T h i n k s of Those W h o Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved" (Collected Poems, 1951, p. 6 5 ) on the proud great ones who "have spoken against you everywhere." "Their children's children shall say they have lied." Joyce's treatment of the theme is more economical and, I think, better. XX

T h e tenses assure us that far from enjoying the favors of his girl, the lover only wants to. T h i s fantasy of desire is supported by the feminine imagery of "dark pine-wood" and aisle. T h e confusion of light and shadow, heat and cold, in the first stanza prepares us a little perhaps for the reversal of masculine and feminine roles in the third. As the lover lies flat on his back, the girl's kiss and hair descend upon him. T h e dark wood may imply by way of Dante, with whom Joyce, of course, was familiar, that the lover's dream is not centered in the trees. If the dark wood, not to be taken literally, represents the world, it hardly constitutes a refuge however full it may be of aisles or ways through and out. T h e real refuge of this dream fantasy is a tent of hair. Free from snood (compare x i ) , the girl's hair,

203

descending around him, keeps the dark wood out. In one of his earliest poems, quoted in Stephen Hero (p. 37), Joyce exclaims, "hide me, heavy hair!" Note Joyce's classification of Chamber Music under "criniculture" (Finwegans Wake, p. 164). Yeats, another great one for hair tents, may have encouraged Joyce by example. In "Michael Robartes Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods" (Collected Poems, 1951, pp. 6 3 - 6 4 ) Yeats asks his girl to create an "odorous twilight" for the two of them with her "dim heavy hair." T h i s twilight. i balance of night and day, is parallel to Joyce's twilit ¡od where darkness and sunlight contend. In " T h e T r a . 1 of Passion" (p. 6 8 ) Yeats's spirits say, " W e will ber : down and loosen our hair over you.' But "Michael Ro: utes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace" (pp. 59-60) is evt ; closer to Joyce: Belc d let . . . . . . . ur hair fall over my breast, D r c . ling love's lonely hour in deep twilight oi >:st. T h i s poem, 1 Joyce's, conspicuously displays the word "tumult." In . ats it means the noisy disorder of the external world. >r Joyce, who applies it surprisingly to his hairy refuge, i .nay mean a sweet disorder without sound. But tumultuv . peace, a paradox, may indicate the ambivalence of 1- : love, his awareness of it, and his despair of finding peact The assonance of "kiss" and "is" (used by Yeats several jars later in "Never Give All the Heart" [1905], Colh ?d Poems, 1951, p. 77) supports the paradox. T h e la? tanza of Joyce's poem, a coda, serves to soften and hi. . the meaning of the rest. If we derr. : d localization, the pine wood is probably

204

Glendhu or the Pine Forest in the Dublin Mountains, not too far away for a picnic and a suitable spot for letting hair down. Compare "Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley" and "the M'Conifer of the Glands" ( U l y s s e s , p. 321). XXI

For most of what I have to say about this poem, see Introduction, pp. 92-95. Plainly misplaced in the present sequence, it presents the lover in the proud, gloomy role of Byron, Monte Cristo, Lucifer, or Prometheus. For Stephen as romantic rebel and lover of Byron, see A Portrait of the Arti*; p. 329). For Monte Cristo, lover of Mercedes, see A Pc ;rait (p. 308). For Stephen's confusion of himself with L i. .ifer ("Brightness falls from the air") and other fallen ai :1s, see A Portrait (pp. 370, 389, 432, 484, 503, 509; I