James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach and Their Literary Context

JJQ

“The Ache of Modernism”: James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach and Their Literary Context

Norbert Lennartz University of Vechta

wentieth-century poetry is more often than not regarded as a decisive break with traditions connected with earlier times— even as a tabula rasa that, in the wake of Ezra Pound’s impera- T 1 tive, promised to make everything new. When Queen Victoria died in 1901 after an unprecedented sixty-four-year reign, the effect— according to H. G. Wells—was that of a leaden paperweight suddenly being lifted from cultural life,2 and, consequently, new hitherto dormant ideas, concepts, and genres proliferated. The poet Rupert Brooke was even more emphatic when, in the first of his so-called “War Sonnets” in 1915, he visualized a caesura after the fin-de-siècle lethargy, using the image of an athlete who willingly leaps into the purifying cleanness of war: “Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,/And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,/With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,/To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,/Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.”3 Without mentioning explicitly what was meant by “a world grown old and cold and weary” or from whose clutches God was credited with having saved the new generation, Brooke relied on his readers to understand that his criticism was leveled against the last few decades of the nineteenth century. What was generally known as the “Yellow Nineties,” as represented primarily by Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Thomas Hardy, had, at the beginning of the twentieth century, become notorious for turning Victorian ideas of masculinity and purity into a pseudo-philosophy of decadence, skepticism, and neopagan hedonism.4 Brooke died at too young an age to take into account that, just as he was hailing a new (Fascist-tinged) awakening, writers like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence felt more indebted to Hardy’s notion of “the ache of modernism” than to any other concept of cultural regeneration.5 While modernism as a movement “was cen- trally concerned with the relations between literary form and modes of knowledge or understanding,”6 the Pomes Penyeach are meant to recapture the vague feeling of modernism that the late Victorians referred to when they saw their age in terms of loss, paralysis,

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anguish, and incertitude.7 In the wake of Charles Darwin’s shattering insights into man’s origin, most of the Victorian poets were compelled to visualize the existential void to which they suddenly felt exposed, and they invented images like forsaken gardens (Swinburne) or “deserted, moon-blanched street[s]” (Matthew Arnold),8 which, as expressions of loneliness and disorientation, stood in stark contrast to the Victorians’ self-fashioning as technological pioneers and invet- erate optimists. For the majority of writers, the step into modernity thus became synonymous with a painful initiation into a world bereft of the securities of faith and anthropocentricity. In pretending to offer his poems like a market trader selling apples (po[m]mes), Joyce adopts the role of a malicious vendor who supplies unsuspecting customers with cheap, disillusioned glimpses of modernism’s bleakness. Considered hardly fit for publication by Pound (JJII 591),9 even nowadays, the scanty collection Pomes Penyeach has the reputation of being merely an assortment of private emotions,10 or is thought to be only, as Adriaan van der Weel and Ruud Hisgen suggest, “an odyssey of Joyce’s emotional life.”11 No matter what the biographical component of these poems—Joyce’s relationship with Amalia Popper, sexual dissatisfaction, or the death of his mother (JJII 345)12—the thirteen poems in the collection are a major contribution to a culture of transition in which motifs of late-Victorian pessimism merge with the anxiety of twentieth-century literature and art. Read in terms of narrativity—an approach that Peter Hühn applies to a wide range of poetry excluding Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach13—the poems have a sequential quality and can also be understood as fragments or abor- tive dramatic monologues in which three major themes are constantly reiterated, modified, and reflected from different perspectives: the perpetual threat of death, death-bound youth, and the loss of faith. In this respect, the poems are loosely aligned with Joyce’s narratives from Dubliners to Ulysses while, at the same time, they are very much indebted to the late Victorians’ horror of modernism.

The first two stanzas of the poem “Tilly” give the reader the impression that the sequence is just another typically Georgian evocation of a bucolic scene revolving around a shepherd who “drives his beasts above Cabra” (CP 47). From the beginning, however, this rural atmosphere lacks the utopian notion of everlasting spring and subsequently becomes the illusive Irish counterfoil to an indefinite pain from which the speaker of the poem suffers.14 Although he is constantly exposed to the “cold red road” and the hardship of winter, the countryside “[b]oor” has not been deprived of the innocent joy that the warmth of his home and the “brute music” of his cattle prom-

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 198 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM ise (CP 47). In stark contrast to the rustic whose “flowering branch” hints at his strong ties with nature, the lost-generation speaker is characterized by injury and dismemberment when he exclaims that he is afflicted with a wound that bleeds incessantly: “I bleed by the black stream/For my torn bough!” (CP 47).15 As the almost expressionistic quality of the introductory poem shows,16 the praise of rural beauty and primitivism, which the Georgians recaptured in their anti-decadent nature poetry, indicates an escapism Joyce feels obliged to deconstruct. Hence, the collection of poems traces a painful process of disillusionment, a multi-voiced song of experience that not only subverts its prelude of Arcadian peace but also reveals that the speaker’s wound, the aching feeling of modernism, is a ubiquitous part of twentieth-century existence. The twelve-line poem “She Weeps Over Rahoon” succinctly shows to what extent the unseen but festering wound affects the relationship between the genders (CP 50). Written six years after “The Dead,” in 1913, it recollects the deadlocked situation at the end of the last story of Dubliners, where Gabriel, shown with a riveted gaze through the window, is compelled to realize in a moment of shattering epiphany that his marital happiness is founded on illusions and that he has always been the odd man out in a love triangle.17 The story ends with the apocalyptic image of Gabriel’s identity “fading out into a grey impalpable world” and of the solid world “dissolving and dwin- dling” in the snow (D 223). In the poem, it is not the snow but the “dark rain” incessantly falling on the cemetery of Rahoon that high- lights the theme of death as complete annihilation (CP 50). Closely connected with this nihilistic view of all-encompassing death is the theme of unrequited love. In contrast to the story, what proves to be vexingly open to conjecture here is the identity of the poem’s speaker. While the German translator Hans Wollschläger assumes that the speaker of the poem changes in the second stanza from a woman to a man addressing his female companion and reminiscing about a dead rival,18 it can also be argued that the poem is entirely the monologue of a woman whose mind is haunted by her “dark lover” in the grave (CP 50).19 In “The Dead,” the phantom of Michael Furey is conjured forth by a tune, whereas, here, it seems to be the monotony of the rain that reanimates the dead lover’s voice in the woman’s mind and thus makes him an audible revenant without hope of finding rest. Persistently calling his former beloved from the realm of the dead, his enticing voice from the past not only attempts to draw her into non-existence but, by dominating her imagination and gaining ascendancy in the love triangle, tries to eclipse her present lover in the same way that Gabriel is supplanted by the unseen presence of his rival from the “vague world” (D 220):

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Love, hear thou How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling, Ever unanswered and the dark rain falling, Then as now.

Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold As his sad heart has lain Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould And muttering rain. (CP 50)

In his story, Joyce weaves a complex web of images in which a caretaker’s daughter in a gaunt, skeleton-like house,20 a ghostly street lamp, a silent hotel, and an oppressively yellow light make up a topography of menace. In his poems, though, he conjures an atmosphere of decline and darkness with a few suggestive composites: unregenerative “dark rain,” “moongrey nettles,” and “black mould.” Next to the imagery, the sound patterns and rhymes of “falling” and “calling” strongly remind the reader of Hardy’s 1912 poem “The Voice” in which, although the genders are reversed, there is also a focus on a cemetery scene where a mourning individual is haunted by the voice of his dead lover.21 In the first line of the subsequent poem, “Tutto È Sciolto,” where Joyce refers to a “birdless heaven,” he cumulatively creates a locus terribilis in which, on the one hand, indications of death, vacuity, and decomposition abound and, on the other, the Romantic symbolism of birds as mediators between heaven and earth has ceased to be of any validity (CP 51). In Joyce’s poetry, as in the poems of many late Victorians, there are no longer what John Keats calls “light-wingèd Dryad[s] of the trees.”22 Instead, only weeds and fungi sprout in incessant rain, and, as if to aggravate the feeling of metaphysical loneliness, the heavens are uninhabited. The only wings Joyce refers to in the context of his poems are the “[v]ast wings . . . /Of sullen day” in the poem “Flood” (CP 54). Unlike the Holy Spirit in John Milton’s Paradise Lost who, “with mighty wings outspread/Dove-like [sits] brooding on the vast abyss” and fertilizes it,23 these brood over a “waste of waters” intent less on giving birth than on destroying all forms of life (CP 54). Precariously wedged in between the “sated flood” and the oppressive wings of day are the “[g]oldbrown” clusters of a “rockvine” whose swaying movements have often been interpreted against the backdrop of Joyce’s possible extramarital affair as an image of precarious harmony threatened by the intrusion of reality: “A waste of waters ruthlessly/Sways and uplifts its [the rockvine’s] weedy mane/Where brooding day stares down upon the sea/In dull disdain” (CP 54). Considering the profound theological background of Joyce’s narrative works, however, it is tempting to go beyond a merely biographical reading and to see the poem in terms of a tug-of-war between

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 200 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM religion and skepticism. As a time-honored symbol of Christ, the vine endures patiently the ruthless motion of the water, notwithstanding the fact that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is helplessly exposed to the “dull disdain” of the brooding day, which could also be interpreted as the relentless light of reason in the wake of positiv- ism and other phenomena of post-Enlightenment skepticism. In the last stanza, when the bleak monotony of the waves is interrupted by the speaker’s exhortation—”Uplift and sway, O golden vine,/ Your clustered fruits to love’s full flood” (CP 54)—the expectation of the triumph of redemptive love over silent indifference is, however, immediately thwarted. The subsequent polysyndetic repetition of adjectives—”[l]ambent and vast and ruthless” with which the poem ends, having previously been used in relation to the waves’ elemental repetitiveness—and the final word, “[i]ncertitude!” fill the last lines, highlighted by an exclamation mark in sharp contrast to all references to hope (CP 54). Inviting a comparison with Arnold’s mid-nineteenth-century poem “Dover Beach” (213-14), Joyce’s “Flood” unfolds a hidden layer of allegorical meaning. Thus, while in the Victorian poem the receding sea on Dover Beach epitomizes faith in the state of deplorable decline, Joyce, like Lord Byron and Swinburne,24 transforms the flood into a ruthless elemental power whose only aims are to obliterate the vine’s fruit and to intensify the feeling of incertitude. Although Joyce seems to have been at variance with Arnold’s ideal of humanism and educa- tion, as a poet, he certainly agrees with the Victorian’s apprehensive outlook on the modern world. Thus, the nightmarish image that Arnold conjures of a dark world, in which there is “neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” and in which “ignorant armies clash by night” (214), pervades Joyce’s poetry at the time of World War I and anticipates his notion of humanity’s existential wound. Like the other poems in the collection, “On the Beach at Fontana” is structured around the leitmotif of persistent threat. In contrast to “Flood,” however, it introduces the post-Romantic view of nature as a moribund creature (CP 52). The whining wind in the first line makes it obvious that all links with the Romantic age have been severed and that the wind has lost its positive connotations of divine inspi- ration. In order to emphasize the idea of loss and decay even more, the speaker of the poem invents an image depicting the ocean not so much in terms of destructive sublimity but as a senile person lost in decrepitude and mad soliloquy—a fact underlined by the numerous “s” alliterations in the first stanza: “The crazy pierstakes groan;/A senile sea numbers each single/Slimesilvered stone” (CP 52). The humanization of the sea as a sick person futilely fingering slime- covered stones captures Joyce’s concept of nature that, in contrast

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 201 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 2010 both to the Romantic idea of natura naturans and the aestheticization of nature in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, emphasizes the mortal- ity of everything. This anti-Romantic stress of the poems, which also explains the various images of nature in a state of mutilation (“torn bough”) or petrification (“Nightpiece”—CP 55), demonstrates Joyce’s affiliation with a tradition ranging from Charles Baudelaire’s “Une charogne” in Les fleurs du mal to Harold Pinter’s spasmodic poetry.25 Faced with anthropomorphic nature that is no longer man’s address- ee but a monster threatened by senility or agonizing death, modern man’s reaction is as variable as it is impotent: many speakers are locked in inertia, but others are afflicted with a Kurtzian cry of horror. While many twentieth-century poems culminate in fragmentary non-communication, Joyce’s personae—like those of Gottfried Benn or Paul Valéry, who never abandon rhymes and the ontology of stan- zaic structures26—still adhere to the articulation of an “ache of love,” which, remote from the solipsistic hells in which Byron or Baudelaire see mankind incarcerated, makes the speaker in the poem “On the Beach at Fontana” touch a child’s “trembling fineboned shoulder”: “Around us fear, descending/Darkness of fear above/And in my heart how deep unending/Ache of love!” (CP 52).

The feeling of anguish in some poems and the pervasive idea of an oppressive “descending/Darkness” are enhanced when Joyce repeatedly shows children’s initiation into wound-inflicted, withering adulthood. All the poems concentrating on the subsequent generation, whether they are Joyce’s children or fictitious boys and girls, lack the confident buoyancy that Romantic poems like William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” or Philipp Otto Runge’s paintings of the ruddy Huelsenbeck children have.27 Beset by a claus- trophobic atmosphere of darkness, the speakers in Joyce’s poems adopt an attitude towards children highly reminiscent both of Ernest Dowson’s decadent poetry and of Egon Schiele’s expressionist paintings, the most somber of which deal not only with children’s fragility but also with the idea of the womb as a tomb.28 Instead of highlighting the budding vigor of children, Joyce’s poems anatomize the speaker’s progeny and represent them only as bodily fragments (“fineboned shoulder” and “boyish arm”—CP 52) or diaphanous, “blueveined” objects of utmost delicacy, as in “A Flower Given to My Daughter” (CP 49). These short impressions of juvenile decadence convey the idea that hope for the future is brittle, and that, in their weakness and vulnerability, these descendants of the fin de siècle will always be at variance with strong-limbed characters like Lawrence’s gamekeeper Mellors.29 Not unlike various decadent children from Hardy’s Father

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 202 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM Time, Aubrey Beardsley’s withering fetuses, and Edvard Munch’s sickly children to Thomas Mann’s Hanno Buddenbrook, the children in Pomes Penyeach have reached a level of physical frailty that barely enables them to sustain the horror and excruciating pain of human existence. In poems like “The Dead Child” (100), which must have been known to Joyce, Dowson shows himself in line with the nineteenth- century Kindertotenlieder and the late Victorians’ artistic interest in children who fade before the squalor of life can corrupt and destroy their innocent beauty.30 Dowson uses this form to exorcise his unrequited love for a twelve-year-old Polish girl, but Joyce refrains from subscribing to the aestheticization of dead children, which, in the nineteenth century, paralleled tributes to numerous beautiful (and infantilized) female corpses. In Ecce Puer, a single poem written in 1932 and not included in Pomes Penyeach, he even gives the birth of his grandson a Christological implication, seeing the child as a light illuminating “the dark past” that was aggravated by the death of his father (CP 63). This unexpectedly positive attitude toward the child, however, is immediately retracted by the presence of death. Joyce’s notion of birth in this poem is not so much a celebration of life as an anticipation of Samuel Beckett’s grim view of the gravedigger as a midwife preparing to use the forceps.31 If one additionally takes into account the fact that the title of “Ecce Puer” is meant to be an allusion to Ecce Homo, the presentation of Christ as the homo doloroso, crowned with thorns before a frantic crowd, and to the impending Crucifixion—“O, father forsaken,/Forgive your son!” (CP 63)32—the reader cannot escape the subtextual pessimistic undercurrent of the poem clearly indicating that the child’s life will be a losing battle against the ubiquitous powers of darkness, death, and ignorance.

III

Next to the verses that either revolve around man being dwarfed by anguish or deal with children being menaced by death, there is a third level of poems focusing on the loss of religious security and the meaninglessness of theological conventions. The reader is at once reminded not only of “The Sisters,” the first story of Dubliners, but also of the church episodes in Ulysses that deal with Joyce’s struggles with Catholicism and his awareness of the hollow nature of theological rituals. Again, the biographical layers of the poems are strongly interlaced with literary traditions and pre-texts, which make it clear to what extent they are connected with the pervasive nineteenth- century culture of pessimism. In the poem “Nightpiece,” the speaker conjures up an ecclesiastical building solely defined by absence, darkness, and vacuity. Critics like Wilhelm Füger convincingly demon-

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 203 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 2010 strate that the text shows Joyce’s indebtedness to late Victorian poets like Lionel Johnson and James Thomson.33 In particular, the latter’s desperate poem The City of Dreadful Night, with its somber section on the demonic preacher delivering the sermon on atheism in the dark cathedral, must have influenced Joyce as it did T. S. Eliot and other twentieth-century poets.34 In Joyce’s poem, however, the speaker depicts not so much a fictitious church as a nocturnal heaven in terms of intimidating ecclesiastical architecture. In a poem of similar title, Wordsworth also imagines the clouded sky as an impressive piece of architecture, whose “black-blue vault” is illuminated by “multitudes of stars” (146). Percy Bysshe Shelley’s evocation of night as “the dome of a vast sepulchre” in “Ode to the West Wind” is also evoked here (48), but, in stark contrast to the Romantics’ description of night as a time of mystical encounters and sublime spectacles, Joyce’s “Nightpiece” describes a terrifyingly negative epiphany meant to capture the emptiness of night using imagery wavering between the solemnity of a derelict church and the horrors of a tomb:

Gaunt in gloom, The pale stars their torches, Enshrouded, wave. Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume, Arches on soaring arches, Night’s sindark nave. (CP 55)

Joyce converts night into an edifice of disturbingly anti-Romantic sublimity. In his attempt to emphasize the horror vacui induced by night, he reveals himself to be worlds apart from Wordsworth and Shelley and more aligned with Hardy, who, in “The Darkling Thrush,” reverts to architectural imagery to convey the idea of a winter’s eve- ning as a crypt (150). Although there is an unprecedented finality about the description of the world as a corpse in rigor mortis interred in the vault of a winter’s night, Hardy underlines the fact that the heaven in his poem is not yet “birdless” and that the “growing gloom” of the death-in-life scenery is challenged by the “full-hearted evensong” of an old thrush (150). Even if there is a parodic ring about the thrush in “blast-beruffled plume” because of its incompatibility with the Romantic birds of metaphysical consolation (150), Hardy nevertheless seems intent on counterbalancing the “ache of modernism” with some idea of hope. In Joyce’s poem, however, an impen- etrable gloom prevails, the whole iconography of the Christian faith either eroded or upset. The ecclesiastical nave mentioned in the first stanza is, on the one hand, qualified by the adjective “sindark” and, on the other, has lost its connotation of a ship steered by God as the beneficent helmsman (CP 55). Apart from a few random “[g]hostfires

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 204 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM from heaven’s far verges,” the nave is bereft of any orientation, for even the seraphim of the second stanza—once the highest order of angels in the chain of being and now the “lost hosts”—have been turned into a useless chorus conjuring up a world irretrievably lost: “In moonless gloom each lapses muted, dim,/Raised when she has and shaken/Her thurible” (CP 55). The rare word “thurible,” used instead of “censer,” which inad- equately rhymes with “till” in line 9, joins the clouds of incense mentioned in the third and final stanza (CP 55). In contrast to Thomson’s poem in which the absence of incense is explicitly stated, Joyce refers to a profusion of the substance but only to expose it as a meaning- less relic or a disconnected quotation in an irreligious wasteland. Originally meant to be both apotropaic and a “medium for wafting the soul to heaven,”35 the incense cited in Joyce’s poem is not only “bleak,” but has also lost its teleological direction (CP 55). Instead of effecting a connection between heaven and earth, it disappears in the wide expanse of nothingness, which, in the face of the poet’s inability to represent the utter void adequately,36 takes on the concrete dimen- sions of a room:

And long and loud, To night’s nave upsoaring, A starknell tolls As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud, Voidward from the adoring Waste of souls. (CP 55)

In this nocturnal meditation on nothingness—juxtaposing the void and the masses of deluded people in adoration—even the speaker seems to have disappeared in the vastness of sepulchral space. The inaudible knell of the stars is not only a modern reversal of the idea of spherical harmony, but it is chiefly a cosmic reverberation of the fact that, in the face of utter annihilation and all-effacing death, all rituals of worship are pathetically ineffective. Nihilistic images like these revolving around man’s ontological loneliness translate nineteenth- century pessimism into the twentieth century, thereby paving the way for later genres of absurdity.37

By the end of “Nightpiece,” when the voice of an individual male speaker re-emerges from an “adoring [w]aste of souls,” the poem becomes a self-indictment. Without the religious and amorous props of consolation, it is relentlessly directed at the moribundity of the speaker’s old body. In “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight,” the speaker fashions himself as an ugly memento mori that

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 205 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 2010 contrasts with the rhetoric of love theatrical performers used on the stage: “They mouth love’s language. Gnash/The thirteen teeth/Your lean jaws grin with. Lash/Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh” (CP 57). The self-lacerating mood of the aging speaker is reminiscent of W. B. Yeats’s persona in “Sailing to Byzantium,” who berates himself as “a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick” painfully aware of the gap that separates him from the “sensual music” of the younger generations.38 Mocking his skull-like reflection in the mirror, Joyce’s speaker echoes another Hardy poem, “I Look Into My Glass,” when he cynically comments on the incompatibility of the rapid loss of his teeth with the ineradicable itch of sexuality, which does not decrease in proportion to the decay of his body.39 With “[l]ove’s breath” having become stale in him, “[a]s sour as cat’s breath” (CP 57), the speaker cannot hope to be immortalized in a realm of pure art or to be gath- ered into Yeats’s “artifice of eternity” (301). Since it is reminiscences of the theatrical performance that kindle Joyce’s unbearably “quailing, nude greed of the flesh,” a relief from his bodily desires can only be expected from the “low word” that, in the final poem titled “A Prayer,” “breathes on the breaking brain” and, like an inverted call from a Muse, lures him into the complete surrender to death (CP 59). Echoing fin-de-siècle decadence, “A Prayer” is in line with a long tradition of inverted prayers ranging from Baudelaire’s litany in the Fleurs du mal to Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven.40 The manner in which it expresses the antithetical mixture of love and fear induced by death, however, has a masochistic quality that is interesting not so much in the light of Joyce’s relationship with Nora, as noted by Selwyn Jackson (18), as it is in comparison to John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV,” where the persona asks to be battered and assaulted by God.41 Having discarded his belief in God long ago, Joyce’s speaker translates Donne’s language of erotic violence via Thompson into the early twentieth century and, thus, enunciates his decadent yearning for death, for the “beloved enemy of [his] will”: “I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread./Draw from me still/My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head” (CP 59). While Donne’s concatenation of paradoxical imperatives is directed at a masculine God who makes the persona assume the feminine role of a besieged town, in Joyce’s poem, gender relations are clearly defined: the masculine speaker is exposed to the dangerous attrac- tions of a feminized death.42 Hence, when her “low word” finally prompts him to come (“Come!”) with all the erotic connotations of the imperative, the speaker yields to death as to an alluring femme fatale in expectation of an ecstatic Liebestod: “Bend deeper upon me! I am here./Subduer, do not leave me! Only joy, only anguish,/Take me, save me, soothe me, O spare me!” (CP 59).

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 206 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM The last line of the poem with its staccato rhythm reminiscent of Donne’s sonnet is characterized by an ambiguity and inconsistency showing the speaker wavering between the voluptuous attraction of death and a feeling of repulsion. Unlike Donne’s persona who implores God to ravish him and thus courts his own physical disin- tegration, Joyce’s speaker concludes his atheistic prayer for amorous death with the ultimate request to be spared. Critics tend to associ- ate the speaker’s shrinking from death with Doctor Faustus’s futile supplication to avoid the terrifying descent into hell in Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy,43 but the final line could also be read in the context of Hamlet’s dilemma, which, even at the beginning of the seven- teenth century, revolves around man’s fascination for death thwarted by the “dread of something after death,/The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns.”44 The plea “O spare me!” with which the slender collection of poems ends, is not so much unexpected as it is inconsistent: on the one hand, it is incompatible with the ideology of death frequently displayed in the poems and celebrated by numerous fin-de-siècle writers and artists, while, on the other, it has little in common with the conclusion that Leopold Bloom draws after his nihilistic descensus ad inferos in the “Hades” episode of Ulysses. Having come under the erotic spell of putrefying death and nothingness for a short period of time, Bloom eventually evades the lure of decomposition and readily returns to the world of sensual life: “Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time. . . . Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life” (U 6.995-1005). Bloom is a twentieth-century representative of the carnivalesque, who, after the descent into the maelstrom of death with its cold “maggoty beds,” more than ever relishes notions of regenerative sensuality and coital warmth. Although this vital position is never adopted in Pomes Penyeach, the very last line of “A Prayer” shows that the various suicidal and suffering voices are at least feebly contradicted and subjected to doubt. While, in this respect, Joyce succeeds in giving a slightly affirmative twist to his collection of poems that does not meet with the reader’s expectations, his poetic language nevertheless remains rooted in what can be called the late-Victorian tradition of decadent modernism. As an ardent reader of poets from Thomson and Dowson to Hardy, Joyce seems to have written Pomes Penyeach—rather than the anachronistic sequence of poems in Chamber Music—as sketches or episodes of modern life that show man bereft of certitude, dislocated, and threatened by a death that can actually have enticing qualities. In order to illustrate his idea of the late Victorians’ “ache of modern-

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 207 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 2010 ism,” Hardy invented the image of Tess as “a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length” (105), completely at the mercy of the relentless forc- es of fortune. Even though Joyce refrains from comparing mankind to ephemeral insects, he shows people exposed to the antagonism of nature and the vacuity of heaven, as are Tess and the numerous deracinated creatures in late-Victorian fiction. Transforming late-Vic- torian themes of disillusionment into a loose and episodic structure of covert intertextuality, he attains a narrative quality in his poems that is—despite its lack of formal avant-gardism—strongly aligned to his later experiments in prose. The result is a proliferation of voices and stunted monologues providing the missing link between the late- Victorians’ modernism as the feeling of ontological pain and the later multifarious evocations of the “[v]ast spiritual disorders” in the high modernist language of fragmentation and splintered mythology.45

NOTES

1 See Ezra Pound, “Canto LIII,” The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 265, and see Make It New: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). 2 H. G. Wells is quoted in Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. Wells (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 101. 3 Rupert Brooke, “1914: Peace,” The Poetical Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 19. 4 See Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 226-46. 5 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Tim Dolin (London: Penguin Publishers, 1998), p. 124. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 6 Michael Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 11. 7 These conditions are in accord with Matthew Arnold’s idea of the “strange disease of modern life”—see “The Scholar-Gypsy,” The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1897), p. 388. Further references to Arnold’s poetry will be cited parenthetically in the text to this collection. 8 See Algernon Charles Swinburne, “A Forsaken Garden,” Poems and Ballads, Second Series (London: Chatto & Windus, 1878), pp. 27-31, and Arnold, “A Summer Night” (p. 267). 9 When the collection appeared, Rebecca West also harshly criticized the poems for their “tastelessness and reactionary sentimentality”—West is quoted in Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), p. 206. 10 The verses in Pomes Penyeach were begun as early as 1913, with the exception of “Tilly,” and were published in Paris in 1927 by Shakespeare and Company. None of the various companions to James Joyce, including Derek

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 208 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), and Zack Bowen and James F. Carens, eds., A Companion to Joyce Studies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), nor Tracey Teets Schwarze’s Joyce and the Victorians (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2002), contain detailed comments on Pomes Penyeach. 11 Adriaan van der Weel and Ruud Hisgen, “The Wandering Gentile: Joyce’s Emotional Odyssey in Pomes Penyeach,” Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays, ed. Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1996), p. 165. 12 See the only monograph on Joyce’s poetry: Selwyn Jackson, The Poems of James Joyce and the Use of Poems in His Novels (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1978). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. Although Jackson does not fail to mention Robert Scholes’s approach, in “James Joyce, Irish Poet,” JJQ, 2 (Summer 1965), 255-70, which interprets the poems in terms of the literary tradition, he is nevertheless convinced that the inclusions in Pomes Penyeach “express nothing more than a moment of private emotion, the larger significance of which is to be seen against the background of Joyce’s life and work” (p. 18). 13 See Peter Hühn, “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry,” Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2005), pp. 147-72, and Hühn and Jens Kiefer, The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005). 14 The speaker’s pain is not unlike that experienced by the persona in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: John Slark, 1881), 3:48- 50. Further references to Shelley’s “Ode” will be cited parenthetically in the text to this volume of the collection. 15 Scholes shows that, for the image of the bleeding tree or bush, Joyce could draw on a rich heritage ranging from Virgil, Ovid, and Dante to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (pp. 263-64). In Joyce’s poem, however, the tree’s wound has been transferred to the deracinated speaker of the lost generation. 16 In comparing Pomes Penyeach to Chamber Music, Parrinder refers to the expressionistic force of the poem “Tilly,” which breaks with “the pastoral and musical decorum” of the previous poems (p. 29). Parrinder is also alert to the fact that the poems invite “symbolic interpretation” that goes beyond a simple biographical reading (p. 29). 17 In his introduction to Poems and Shorter Writings: Including Epiphanies, “Giacomo Joyce,” and “A Portrait of the Artist,” ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 3, Litz points out that Joyce’s 1912 visit to the grave of Nora’s Galway lover, Michael Bodkin, inspired the poem. The extent to which the poem also suggests an atmosphere of modern disillusionment is ignored by this biographical reading of the text. 18 Hans Wollschläger and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, trans., Gesammelte Gedichte/Anna Livia Plurabelle (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 87. 19 Like others who cannot resist the temptation of reading the poems within a narrow-framed biographical context (Nora lamenting the loss of her lover), Leo M. J. Manglaviti believes that the voice of the second stanza is that

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 209 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 2010 of the mediating woman, while the first stanza is spoken by the male poet assuming a female point of view—see Manglaviti, “Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach as Narrative: Tales of Lost Love,” Pacific Quarterly Moana (1982), 40. 20 Considering the fact that the Hades-like undertaker in Ulysses is referred to as the caretaker, Lily fits into the pervasive imagery of death in “The Dead.” The Oxford English Dictionary does not include this Joycean meaning of the word. 21 See Hardy, “The Voice,” The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1991), p. 346, my italics: “Leaves around me falling,/Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,/ And the woman calling.” Ernest Dowson’s poem “In a Breton Cemetery,” The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson, memoir by Arthur Symons (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), p. 113, also refers to dead people enticing the living into death: “And dear dead people with pale hands/Beckon me to their lands.” Further references to Hardy’s and Dowson’s poetry will be cited parenthetically in the text to these collections. 22 John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth: Penguin Publishers, 1987), p. 346. 23 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1984), 1:43. 24 Lord Byron—whom Stephen Dedalus passionately defends against Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (P 80-82)— ushered into literary history the image of the destructive sea symbolizing man’s utter helplessness in the face of God-forsaken nature. The apostrophe to the ocean in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV and the shipwreck episode in Don Juan II break with former representations of the sea and anticipate Swinburne’s “Forsaken Garden,” where “the slow sea rise[s] and the sheer cliff crumble[s]” in order to engulf the garden, which was a grim parody of the Biblical hortus conclusus (p. 31). 25 Charles Baudelaire, “Une charogne,” Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Poulet- Malassis et de Broise, 1857), pp. 66-68. In his 1983 apocalyptic poem “Before They Fall,” Harold Pinter, an ardent reader of Joyce, describes the stars as suffering from obesity and consumption and finally as choking in “a last heartburn of stunk light”—see Collected Poems and Prose (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 50. 26 See, for instance, Gottfried Benn, Die Gesammelten Schriften von Gottfried Benn (Berlin: n.p., 1922), and Ausgewählte Gedichte, 1911-1936 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1936), and Paul Valéry, Oeuvres I and Oeuvres II, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957, 1960), and see Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967), p. 115. 27 William Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 460-62. Further references to Wordsworth’s poetry will be cited parenthetically in the text to this collection. See also Philipp Otto Runge’s famous painting of the Huelsenbeck children in the Hamburg Kunsthalle. More than any other work of art, it epitomizes the Romantics’ adoration of children as emissaries from the realm of Platonic beauty. 28 See Egon Schiele’s painting Tote Mutter I (1910, Vienna, collection of Rudolf Leopold).

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Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 210 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM 29 In his poem “The Deadly Victorians,” D. H. Lawrence accuses the Victorians of “castrating the body politic” and of reducing the next generation to eunuchs—see The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (London: Heinemann, 1964), 2:627, and see Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Florence: Tipografia Guintina, 1928). 30 The Kindertotenlieder are a sequence of poems by Friedrich Rückert set to music by Gustav Mahler—see Rückert, Friedrich Rückerts Werke: 3, Vermischte Gedichte; 2, Heimat und Herd (Kindertotenlieder, Stilleben), Poetisches Tagebuch, Jahreszeiten (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1895). 31 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1954; New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 58. 32 For the Christological implications of the poem, see Scholes (pp. 260- 61). 33 Wilhelm Füger, James Joyce. Epoche–Werk–Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 1994), p. 197. 34 James Thomson, “B.V.,” The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), pp. 1-55. 35 See J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 87, s.v. “incense.” 36 See Karl Siegfried Guthke, Die Mythologie der entgötterten Welt. Ein litera- risches Thema von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971), pp. 15-22. Guthke argues that poets are unable to depict nothingness and therefore are compelled to revert to a diversity of images and analogies (“der Zwang zum Vorstellen, Bildmachen”) to convey the idea of the utter void (p. 15). Thus, Joyce conjures an ecclesiastical room in order to give expression to the lost generation’s feeling of nothingness. 37 For the context of absurdity and its nineteenth-century heritage, see Norbert Lennartz, Absurdität vor dem Theater des Absurden. Absurde Tendenzen und Paradigmata untersucht an ausgewählten Beispielen von Lord Byron bis T. S. Eliot (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1998). 38 W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1989), p. 301. Further references to Yeats’s poetry will be cited parenthetically in the text to this collection. 39 In Hardy’s poem, an aging speaker is appalled to see his “wasting skin” and notice the contrast between his juvenile desires and the body’s disinte- gration: “And shakes this fragile frame at eve/With throbbings of noontide” (p. 81). 40 Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven (1893; Philadelphia: Peter Reilly, 1916). 41 John Donne, “Holy Sonnet XIV,” Poems of John Donne, ed. E. K. Chambers (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896), 1:165. 42 See, for the context, Guthke, The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). 43 See Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (London: John Wright, 1610), and see Füger (p. 199). 44 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The River- side Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), III.i.77-79. 45 W. H. Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 205.

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