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 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, and , 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 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

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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 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

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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

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প্রতিধ্বতি the Echo ISSN 2278-5264

Meadows of England, shining in the rain, 19th century. This may be seen in A Spread wide your daisied lawns . . . . Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Rupert Brooke, ―Brumana‖ 2-3) where . . . occur pomposities of Or phrasing that nothing short of Ulysses Let me go forth, and share would cure. In somewhat the same The overflowing Sun manner did Picasso turn to Cubism, With one wise friend, or one Africa, and all the experiments that Better than wise, being fair . . . . (William Watson, ―Ode to May‖ 1-4) followed, to control an innate sentimentality and romanticism. It was who made the (Grose 47) youthful T.S. Eliot focus his images precisely, and so changed the course of Joyce did indeed use his poems as an English poetry: escape from the literalism of his Remark the cat which flattens itself in meticulously detailed and precisely accurate the gutter, exposition of the ordinary, in them be Slips out its tongue records his yearnings and his transient states And devours a morsel of rancid butter. of feeling. They are mood music. (T.S. Eliot, ―Rhapsody on a If Chamber Music is read Windy Night‖ 35-7) continuously form the beginning, a sequence And oddly enough it was Ezra Pound who of moods can be felt. Rather like some 'discovered' James Joyce through reading the romantic cycles of songs (Schumann's last poem of Chamber Music, ―I hear an Frauenliebe und Leben or Tennyson's Army charging upon the land‖. This poem Maud, for example), they pass from early does present a hard violent image, and could love, possibly through marriage or well at first be taken as an Imagist poem, consummations, to desertion and despair. like those of Wyndham Lewis or Richard The story is not explicitly told, each poem Aldington, who were heading the new can be read as a separate expression of movement; then in the last two lines it tries emotion. Their outstanding virtue is the to tie the image to the mood of the extreme delicacy of the verse. The words are despairing love-lorn poet. It is, however, chosen for their subtle sound, and there are very different from the others in the book, close associations with the scriptures, which all seem to lack energy. If Joyce was especially the Song of Solomon, and with to be a leader of any literary revolution, it Shakespeare and the English madrigalists, as was clearly not to be through his lyrical well as with contemporary poetical swoony poems. As Anthony Powell says (in language. Encounter, February 1973), talking of Pomes Penyeach do not make up a Picasso: whole. They are short lyrics, very like the One cannot help wondering whether earlier poems in style and content, but they violent experiment was not vital for appear to be celebrating events, significant Picasso, to avoid becoming trapped in moments or moods in Joyce's life. ―She personal emotions less profound than weeps over Rahoon‖, for example, is about his actual skill as a painter. A parallel Nora Joyce‘s first love who had died young might possibly be drawn with Joyce, (Grose 23). Another lyric (―A Flower Given fleeting from his earlier naturalism, in to My Daughter‖) talks of a flower given to

order to save himself from the his daughter Lucia, and seems with 166

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প্রতিধ্বতি the Echo ISSN 2278-5264 spiritual troubles that were to beset her probably for deserting Ireland and for not (Grose 17). ―On the Beach at Fontana‖ offering the willing financial support that his enshrines a moment of loving fear for his father had hoped James's brilliant career as a son Giorgio. Others refer to nothing doctor or professor would provide. identifiable, but all are short and poignant in A child is sleeping: expression, and clearly meant much to the An old man gone. poet, even if they communicate little to us O, father forsaken, beyond a vague gush of feeling encapsulated Forgive your son! in an image that relies rather on sound than (―Ecce Puer,‖ 13-6) sense. One short lyric printed in the present Coincidentally, the best poem— at Faber edition is supernumerary to the least the hardest and most vital – among the original baker's dozen: it tells of the near thirteen in Pomes Penyeach is the ―Tilly‖ coincidence of the death of Joyce's father that begins the collection, which refers to the with the birth of his grandson, and ends with death many years before of his mother. a prayer for his father's forgiveness—

Works Consulted:

Burgess, Anthony. Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader. London: Faber & Faber, 1965. Print. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: OUP, 1982. Print. Finneran, Richard J. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 2008. Print. Grose, Kenneth, ed. James Joyce: Literature in Perspective. London: Evans Brothers Ltd., 1975. Print. Jain, Manju. T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems. Delhi: OUP, 1998. Print. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2001. Print. ---. Chamber Music. ed. New York: Octagon Books, 1954. Print. ---. Collected Poems. Paris: Black Sun press, 1936. Print. ---. Poems Penyeach. London: Faber, 1966(1971). Print. ---. Ulysses. London: Bodley Head, 2008. Print. Untermeyer, Louis, ed. Modern British Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. Print.

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