A Study of James Joyce As a Poet
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প্রতিধ্বতি the Echo ISSN 2278-5264 প্রতিধ্বতি the Echo An Online Journal of Humanities & Social Science Published by: Dept. of Bengali Karimganj College, Karimganj, Assam, India. Website: www.thecho.in Poetical Noises of a Novelist’s Heart: A Study of James Joyce as a Poet Tanmay Chatterjee Research Scholar, Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi – 221005 Email: [email protected] Abstract James Joyce, who is mostly celebrated for his novels such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, also composed poetry. Two existing volumes of his poems are Poems Penyeach and Chamber Music. Although we are not likely to find in Joyce‘s poetry the artistic grace of his fiction, his poems are of much significance in the sense that they help us to explore Joyce, the artist as well as Joyce, the man. He seems to unlock his heart through his poems. They are saturated with his emotions and desires, frustrations and anger, disappointments and disillusions. Joyce himself conceived of his poems as musical noises interpreting moods. He used his poems as an escape from the literalism of his meticulously detailed and precisely accurate exposition of the ordinary; in them he records his yearnings and his transient states of feeling. They are mood music. The present paper intends to study various aspects of Joyce‘s poetry. James Joyce composed poetry during his Old Europe can hardly whole life, and especially in his early years. Find two pence to buy her. A good deal of it was comic and satirical; he Jack Spratt's in his office, was expert at composing limericks and Puffed, powdered and curled: scurrilous rhymes about his friends and Rumbold's in Warsaw – enemies; theses are dotted throughout his All's right with the world. correspondence. For instance, he vented his (1-8) spleen against Sir Horace Rumbold (whom Two longer and meatier satirical he called Sir Whorearse Rumhole) not only poems than such squibs as this are printed as by making him write the illiterate hangman's a makeweight in the present Faber edition of letter in Ulysses (301) but in the following Pomes Penyeach. They are ―The Holy parody of Browning's ―Pippa Passes‖: Office‖ of 1904 and ―Gas from a Burner‖ of ―The Right Man in the 1912. These are probably his best poems; Wrong Place‖ they are lively, witty and well-managed attacks on people who had annoyed or The pig's in the barley, injured him. The fat's in the fire: 163 Page Volume-I, Issue-IV, April 2013 প্রতিধ্বতি the Echo ISSN 2278-5264 The title of ―The Holy Office‖ Secondly, and probably more betrays Joyce's anti-clericalism, but the bitingly, he regarded their whole woolly poem's target is the 'mumming company' of philosophy as soft-centred, lacking in Irish writers who were engaged in a intellectual rigour. They shamble, crouch, resurgence of drama, poetry and novels in crawl and pray, whereas he stands erect, the Dublin that he was resolved to leave. boldly challenging all comers like a stage on According to him, they indulged in 'dreamy a mountain-ridge; they have ―. souls that dreams'— which is a reference not only to hate the strength that mine has / Steeled in the twilit Celtic legends that Yeats immersed the school of old Aquinas‖ (―The holy himself in, but also to Yeats's mystical office,‖ 81-2). interests (as expounded in A Vision) and This mixture of Byronic self-doomed pride, George Russell (A.E.)'s theosophy. Joyce mark of all romantic Cains, and intellectual attacked them for ignoring the physical side arrogance, is one of the dominant features of of life and, like his own Gerty MacDowell Joyce's character. The last two lines [―And (Ulysses 357), thinking only in romantic and though they spurn me form their door / My spiritual terms: soul shall spurn them evermore.‖ (95-6)], But all these men of whom I which were written in the heat of the very speak moment when he was leaving Ireland, make Make me the sewer of their an interesting contrast with the calmer clique. rationalization that he expressed when he That they may dream their looked back on Stephen Dedalus ten years dreamy dreams later: ―I go to... forge in the smithy of my I carry off their filthy streams soul, the uncreated conscience of my race‖ ................................................ (A Portrait 196). ―Gas from a Burner‖ he wrote in a Thus I relieve their timid rage when the publisher who has signed a arses, contract to publish Dubliners seemed finally Perform my office of to refuse to do so (Grose 18). It is a very Katharsis. (―The holy office,‖ funny but not greatly significant poem. It is 47-50, 55-6) written in the first person, as if by Roberts Of course, this is the 'holy office' that he the publisher, who boasts of how means in the title; and the purging broadminded he really is, having published (katharsis) is performed in a domestic office many avant-garde works; but he cannot furnished with a hole. allow Joyce —―that bloody fellow, / That [Whatever truth there may have been was over here dressed in Austrian yellow‖ in Joyce's ascription of spiritual (49-50) — to bring into disrepute the name bloodlessness to the poems of the early of Ireland: Yeats – such as ―The Lake Isle of Innisfree‖ This lovely land that always sent or ―Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths‖- Her writers and artists to banishment, it must be remembered that the later Yeats And in a spirit of Irish fun brought the physical side of love fully into Betrayed her own leaders, one by one. consciousness in such lines as: ―. Love (15-8) The end is masterly. Roberts says: has pitched his mansion in / The place of I'll burn that book, so help me devil excrement‖ (―Crazy Jane Talks With The .............................................................. Bishop‖ 15-6).] The very next Lent I will unbare 164 My penitent buttocks to the air Page Volume-I, Issue-IV, April 2013 প্রতিধ্বতি the Echo ISSN 2278-5264 And sobbing beside my printing press style. But Pomes Penyeach, put out by Joyce My awful sin I will confess. in his full maturity six years after Ulysses My Irish foreman from Bannockburn was finished, abounds equally in love-blown Shall dip his right hand in the urn bannerets, shy sweet lures (as in the And sign crisscross with reverent thumb villanelle of Stephen), moondew, lambent Memento homo upon my burn. (―Gas from a Burner‖ 86, 91-8) water, thurible, laburnum tendrils and This is not the James Joyce of his seraphim. Joyce therefore conceived of his serious poems, collected in Chamber Music poems as musical noises interpreting moods; (1970) and Pomes Penyeach (1927). The the man who wrote the Verlainesque lines: only feature the scurrilous poems share with All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan these is the technical excellence of the verse. Sad as the seabird is when going The lyrics seem to come from a completely Forth alone different pen, the pen which wrote the He hears the winds cry to the waters' precious pale effusion that Stephen Dedalus Monotone. composed in A Portrait. This is a villanelle, (Chamber Music xxxv 1-6) an example of a form which requires great is the composer of the miraculous 'Sirens' dexterity to its two rhymes and two chapter (XI) of Ulysses. alternating refrains: But he is also the mocking concocter Are you not weary of ardent ways, of the romantic sugariness that opens the Lure of the fallen seraphim? 'Nausicaa' chapter (XIII) in the words of Tell no more of enchanted days. Gerty MacDowell, devotee of women's (A Portrait 172) trashy magazines (Grose 105). There is thus a paradox. Joyce wrote these swooning The obvious characteristics of this lyrics, expended much time and artistry on poem are its abundance of highly-coloured perfecting them, launched them into a cold incense-laden words such as seraphim, world with every appearance of satisfaction Eucharistic, and chalice, and a concentration at the same time he denigrated their style on liquid phrases of small significance: and manner by calling one little book ‗languorous look and lavish limb', for Chamber Music, which could be and indeed instance. was a reference to the sound of water falling Of course one can dismiss this into a bedroom utensil, and the other Pomes technically accomplished poem as a prentice Penyeach, a possibly mock-modest assertion effort, and say that Joyce is looking that they were not worth very much— and mockingly if still affectionately at the callow he even offered a ―Tilly‖, a little extra one, youth who produced it. But chamber Music to give the customer thirteen, baker's dozen, abounds with lights of amethyst, night wind for the demanded shilling, or twelve pence answering in antiphon, reverie, sweet of the purchase price. bosom, light attire, virginal mien, welladay, The plain fact is that by our tastes zone, snood, cherubim, ancient plenilune, today, in the post-Pound-and-Eliot era, these epithalamium, grey and golden gossamer, poems are empty exercises in factitious soft tumult of thy hair, tremulous, divers emotion-mongering. They are as soft- treasures, witchery, soft choiring of delight, centred as anything written by the 'decadent' the waters' monotone. Well, you might nineties poets or the Georgians, with their argue that Chamber Music dates from the ripe sentiment, their hazy imagery and hazy same period of Joyce's development as A rhythms, and their reliance on the 165 Portrait, so is bound to share its poetical mesmerizing power of 'poetical' words: Page Volume-I, Issue-IV, April 2013 প্রতিধ্বতি the Echo ISSN 2278-5264 Meadows of England, shining in the rain, 19th century.