A reading of ‘Chamber Music’ the first published collection of James Joyce.

James Joyce, was born 2 February 1882 (to 13 January 1941). This weekend 14,15 & 16th of June, 2024 was about Joyce; June 16th is the particular day celebrated as ‘Bloomsday’ from his famous novel Ulysses. Celebrated in Dublin, in Ireland and all over the world.
Joyce may be remembered worldwide as a novelist but he did write poetry at the start of his career, admittedly only 52,  and two of those were circulated privately. But they are quality! Two collections were written some 120 years ago. Chamber Music, published 1907 and Pomes Penyeach published in 1927 though poems here were written some ten or more years earlier. Ecce Puer, his last poem, written in 1932 on the death of his father, was published separately. Two circulated privately, ‘To friends and enemies in Dublin’ were: Holy Orders (1904) and a couple of years later, Gas from a Burner,(1912). These two are in a style that would be much more familiar with readers of Ulysses.

Chamber Music:  was published with the support of Arthur Symons and was Joyce’s first book although it was not successful in its sales and ‘made no royalties’. However, Ezra Pound wrote of Chamber Music: “the quality and distinction of the poems in the first half … is due in part to their author’s strict musical training … the wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times suggesting Herrick.” 
Ezra Pound, with T S Eliot, labelled Joyce an Imagist poet, partially, perhaps, to enhance this developing genre as his (Pound’s) own discovery from a naturally occurring development of new-century, pre world-war-one, poetry. Usefully, they included him in the Imagist Anthology and helped publicise him.

With Chamber Music Joyce is also regarded as lyric poet, or perhaps lyricist!  He was himself a distinguished singer and considered it as a career option. He based some of his poems on tunes of the day and the collection seems designed as a ‘song cycle.’

I
Strings in the earth and air
Make music sweet:
Strings by the river where
The 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.

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 thought and grave wide eyes and hands
That wander as they list –
The twilight turns to darker blue
With lights of amethyst.

The poems are slight, formal and designed to be musical to the ear. i.e. to be sung. They are written with clarity and space, carefully using words and rhythm for clear pronunciation when sung. His models are of the Elizabethan style yet lack their pretentiousness and perhaps lean more frequently towards the poetry of love. Some remind me of love songs by John Clare who wrote in the first third of the 19th century, two hundred years ago. This may tie in with melodies/tunes that filtered down the years.

Poems from Chamber Music have been set to music by composers including Geoffrey Moyneux Palmer, Ross Lee Finney, Samuel Barber, and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, as well as the group Sonic Youth.

Poem 11

XI

Bid adieu, adieu, adieu,
Bid adieu to girlish days,
Happy love is come to woo
Thee and woo thy girlish ways –
The zone that doth become the fair,
The snood upon thy yellow hair,

When thou hast heard his name upon
The bugles of the cherubin
Begin thou softly to unzone
Thy girlish bosom unto him
And softly to undo the snood
That is the sign of maidenhood.

XII

What counsel has the hooded moon
Put in thy heart, my shyly sweet,
Of love in ancient plenitude,
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.

The next few poems lead you gently on to the hope of an evening outdoor, rendezvous, into and through the night and the suggestion of continuing love where ‘…O cool and pleasant is the valley/And there, love, will we stay.’

But, never (for Joyce) is love (life) a smooth course. Self-knowledge or the culture of the day popping up?

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

Perhaps this song cycle, simply called Chamber Music might be sub-headed ‘The Seasons of Love,’ or ‘The Passage of Love,’ for surely the rhythms of love, from first, through all moods and turmoils to anguish are like seasons. The poems can be interpreted as personal to Joyce but are also covering the external expressions of temptation, new love, ambivalence, affairs, doubt and despair. Trials and emotions that are variously ‘suffered’ by male and female alike.

XXIV

Silently she’s combing,
Combing her long hair,
Silently and graciously,
With many a pretty air.

The 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.

Song XXI is another evening walk, by Donnycarney, he says, and the poem talks of a pleasant walk, a summer wind murmuring ‘But softer than the breath of summer/Was the kiss she gave to me.’ However, the feeling of soft summer love is overshadowed by the second line of the poem: ‘When the bat flew from tree to tree.’

The bat may signify the flitting from lover to lover, casting a shadow over any relationship. The first line of XXII is: ‘Rain has fallen all the day.’ and ‘..leaves lie thick upon the way/ Of memories. You might read this as a feeling of separation or loss of intimacy.

Song XXXIV

Sleep now, O sleep now,
O you unquiet heart!
A voice crying “Sleep now”
Is heard in my heart.

The 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 heart –
Sleep on in peace now,
O you unquiet heart!

In the book of his letters, he writes to Nora Barnacle, 19th of August 1909: (He in Dublin and Nora, in Paris). This is the simple fact, their life is so much more complicated.

‘Goodnight my dearest, my precious.  A whole life is opening for us now. It has been a bitter experience and our love will now be sweeter.
Give me your lips, my love.’
And continues to quotes some lines from his poem Thirty four (above).
‘My kiss will give peace now
And quiet to your heart.
Sleep on in peace now,
O you unquiet heart.’

So, as well as an Imagist and lyricist he was in part a Romantic too.

On the 21st August, Joyce wrote again to his : Nora Barnacle Joyce:

‘My dear little Nora I think you are in love with me, are you not? I like to think of you reading my verses (though it took you five years to find them out).    
When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy, walking about by myself and thinking that someday a girl would love me.    But I never could speak to the girls I used to meet at houses.  Their false manners checked me at once.    Then you came to me……..     You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you find now so enchanting. 
She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imaginatio) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her……….         But then I saw that the beauty of your soul outshone that of my verses………And so for this reason the book of verses is for you.
It holds the desire of my youth, and you, darling, were the fulfilment of that desire.

He writes further, which I have not quoted but then:

‘Be happy, my simple-hearted Nora, till I come’……… and in another sentence…….
‘Do you remember the day I asked you indifferently ‘Where will I meet you this evening?’
And you said without thinking ‘Where will you meet me, is it?    You’ll meet me in bed, I suppose’.

Poems 35 is on the moaning of the sea, a sad sea-bird, grey, cold winds and ‘noise of many waters……… flowing to and fro.’

Poem 36:  The last of the collection: The poems throughout have been light, airy, lyrical but have dealings of the infatuations, difficulties of love, duplicity, actual or contemplated. Content has, however, been slipping darker images into the later poems. this may be intentional or accidental, or just the readings of students with knowledge of Joyce. This last poem had a quote attached to it as ‘a lyrical lamentation.’ Strictly true, but it seems to me to be a ‘strictly old-fashioned’ term related more to early Victorian critics, retreating to the labels given to translations of the Greek poets.
A massive change in tempo and content to his previous thirty-five poems, this has the feeling of an emotional nightmare. Despair, anguish, the loneliness of being alone, without love and seemingly tormented by others. More significantly, is that which is so beloved gone or grasped for, yet unobtainable? To which he has no answer.

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?

His second collection, Pomes Penyeach. Was published in Paris in 1927 and by faber and faber in 1933. This is subject to an earlier post.