The poems in Chamber Music have all that a musician looks for in a poet’s arrangement of words – syllables that can be articulated, range of expression within little compass, situation, contrast; and, above all, the charm that is in a spontaneous rendering of some stirring mood – a charm which, being akin to melody, musicians readily feel.
PADRAIG COLUM: ‘James Joyce as Poet’, in The Joyce Book (1933)
James Joyce, though celebrated for prose works such as Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), began and ended his literary career with poetry: at the age of nine he wrote a poem (only a fragment survives) in honour of Charles Stewart Parnell, and his final poetic achievement was the tribute to Anna Livia Plurabelle that closes Finnegans Wake. For his earliest volume of verse, Joyce gathered in the mid-1890s many of his schoolboy pieces, called the collection Moods, and later incorporated some of the poems into his next volume, Shine and Dark (c.1900), the title used by Aribert Reimann for his cycle for baritone and piano (left hand), composed for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
Like Milton, Joyce suffered from poor eyesight throughout his life, as we read in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which records the humiliation he felt when he broke his glasses and was unable to do his lessons. He possessed a fine tenor voice, and his knowledge of Italian opera and opera singers was legendary. Many composers have been drawn to Joyce’s verse, attracted by his use of repetition, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia and a penchant for open vowels – as we see in his best-known collection, Chamber Music (1907), which comprises thirty-six poems that chart, obliquely, the development of a relationship in a manner that harks back to Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo, Müller’s Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise, and Stefan George’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. And just as these poems inspired wonderful music by Schumann, Schubert and Schoenberg, so James’s verse has proved a catalyst for composers such as Barber, Bax, Bliss, Bridge, van Dieren, Head, Muriel Herbert, Howells, Ireland, Moeran, Palmer, Reimann, Reutter, Roussel, Warlock and many others. The poems deal with the poet’s love for a young woman, his rising passion, his seduction of her (‘Lean out of the window,/Goldenhair’), the fading of desire and, eventually, loss. Only one of the poems, the final ‘I hear an army charging upon the land’, depicts any anguish, and nor do they linger much on the beloved’s beauty. The poems are highly stylized and the language throughout is surprisingly unadventurous, with a predominance of adjectives such as ‘sweet’ and ‘soft’, with musical imagery that is reminiscent of Elizabethan poems of courtly love – Joyce had a deep love of Elizabethan music.
Yeats noted that the poems of Chamber Music read as the work of ‘a young man who is practising his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops’, and Joyce later reacted violently against the work, calling it a ‘young man’s book’. His enthusiasm for the volume had waned as early as 1906, and it was his brother Stanislaus who was chiefly responsible for the order of the thirty-six poems, expressing the hope that it would ‘suggest a closed episode of youth and love’. Joyce gave no titles to his Chamber Music poems – composers chose their own. The poems were published in 1907, thanks to the enthusiasm of Arthur Symonds, and though the volume earned Joyce no royalties, it gained him a place, alongside Eliot and Pound, in the Imagist Anthology. ‘Words for Music, Perhaps’, the title that Yeats gave for some of his own poems, is also an apt description of Joyce’s Chamber Music.
The prose poems of Giacomo Joyce, written in Trieste at the time when he was completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and beginning Ulysses, could not be more different, and reflect Joyce’s erotic feelings for a girl pupil to whom he was teaching English in Trieste. Anthony Burgess called Giacomo Joyce an ‘essay in private onanism’. Gone are the gallant, gentle gestures of Chamber Music, and instead we experience a sensuality summed up by a single paragraph: ‘Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost! – Nora! –’ There is no evidence that Joyce ever wished to publish this erotic journal, and the manuscript, saved from oblivion by his brother Stanislaus, was finally published by Faber and Faber in 1968 in an edition by Richard Ellmann.
The thirteen poems of Pomes Penyeach appeared in 1927 and display a sharper tone and more adventurous sense of rhythm than the earlier Chamber Music. They were written in Trieste between 1913 and 1915 at a time of emotional turmoil, as we see in ‘She weeps over Rahoon’. It was not long before the idea of The Joyce Book (1933) was born. Each of the collection’s poems was to be set to music by a different composer. Moeran, Bax, Roussel, Herbert Hughes, Ireland, Roger Sessions, Bliss, Howells, George Antheil, Edgardo Carducci, Goossens, C. W. Orr and van Dieren were the composers involved – Holst, Lambert, Walton and Warlock were invited but failed to contribute. Herbert Hughes, who co-ordinated the tribute to Joyce, explained in the Introduction to The Joyce Book that the idea of a collaborative song book arose during a conversation with Arthur Bliss in Paris. He wrote that ‘the subjective association of chamber music – that is, of intimate music – with the poetry of Joyce was to us like the association of wind and wave, of light and heat’. The Joyce Book also contained a portrait by Augustus John, an essay by Padraic Colum and an appreciation by Arthur Symons.
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I heard you singing
A merry air.
My book is 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.
(Hart, Head, Herbert, Reutter, Szymanowski)
Though Moeran selects a mere seven of the thirty-six poems from Chamber Music, he does not alter the order of the poems, and retains the outline of a love affair that burgeons in the first five songs, falters in the sixth and fades in the seventh.
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.
(Berio, Burrows, Reutter)
Who goes amid the green wood
With springtide all adorning her?
Who goes amid the merry green wood
To make it merrier?
Who passes in the sunlight
By ways that know the light footfall?
Who passes in the sweet sunlight
With mien so virginal?
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
The woods their rich apparel wear –
O, it is for my own true love,
That is so young and fair.
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.
O cool is the valley now
And there, love, will we go
For many a choir is singing now
Where Love did sometime go.
And hear you not the thrushes calling,
Calling us away?
O cool and pleasant is the valley
And there, love, will we stay.
(Goossens)
O, it was out by Donnycarney
When the bat flew from tree to tree
My love and I did walk together
And sweet were the words she said to me.
Along with us the summer wind
Went murmuring – O, happily! –
But softer than the breath of summer
Was the kiss she gave to me.
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.
(Barber)
Now, O now, in this brown land
Where Love did so sweet music make
We 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
The wind is whistling merrily.
The leaves – they do not sigh at all
When the year takes them in the fall.
Now, O now, we hear no more
The villanelle and roundelay!
Yet we will kiss, sweetheart, before
We take sad leave at close of day.
Grieve not, sweetheart, for anything –
The year, the year is gathering.
(Goossens)
THE JOYCE BOOK (1933)
He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voice they know,
He drives his beasts above Cabra.
The voice tells them home is warm.
They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.
He drives them with a flowering branch before him,
Smoke pluming their foreheads.
Boor, bond of the herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough!
I heard their young hearts crying
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
No more, return no more!
O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return.
Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.
Rosefrail and fair – yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.
(Dallapiccola, Moeran)
Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,
Where my dark lover lies.
Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,
At grey moonrise.
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.
(Herbert, Moeran)
A birdless heaven, seadusk, one lone star
Piercing the west,
As thou, fond heart, love’s time, so faint, so far,
Rememberest.
The clear young eyes’ soft look, the candid brow,
The fragrant hair,
Falling as through the silence falleth now
Dusk of the air.
Why then, remembering those shy
Sweet lures, repine
When the dear love she yielded with a sigh
Was all but thine?
Wind whines and whines the shingle,
The crazy pierstakes groan;
A senile sea numbers each single
Slimesilvered stone.
From whining wind and colder
Grey sea I wrap him warm
And touch his trembling fineboned shoulder
And boyish arm.
Around us fear, descending
Darkness of fear above
And in my heart how deep unending
Ache of love!
O bella bionda,
Sei come l’onda!
O cool sweet dew and radiance mild
The moon a web of silence weaves
In the still garden where a child
Gathers the simple salad leaves.
A moondew stars her hanging hair
And moonlight kisses her young brow
And, gathering, she sings an air:
Fair as the wave is, fair, art thou!
Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear
To shield me from her childish croon
And mine a shielded heart for her
Who gathers simples of the moon.
Goldbrown upon the sated flood
The rockvine clusters lift and sway.
Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
Of sullen day.
A waste of waters ruthlessly
Sways and uplifts its weedy mane
Where brooding day stares down upon the sea
In dull disdain.
Uplift and sway, O golden vine,
Your clustered fruits to love’s full flood,1
Lambent and vast and ruthless as is thine
Incertitude!
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.
Seraphim,
The lost hosts awaken
To service till
In moonless gloom each lapses muted, dim,
Raised when she has and shaken
Her thurible.
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.
(Reimann)
The moon’s greygolden meshes make
All night a veil,
The shorelamps in the sleeping lake
Laburnum tendrils trail.
The sly reeds whisper to the night
A name – her name –
And all my soul is a delight,
A swoon of shame.
They mouth love’s language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love’s breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat’s breath,
Harsh of tongue.
This grey that stares
Lies not, stark skin and bone.
Leave greasy lips their kissing. None
Will choose her what you see to mouth upon.
Dire hunger holds his hour.
Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears.
Pluck and devour!
The eyes that mock me sign the way
Whereto I pass at eve of day,
Grey way whose violet signals are
The trysting and the twining star.
Ah star of evil! star of pain!
Highhearted youth comes not again
Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know
The signs that mock me as I go.
Again!
Come, give, yield all your strength to me!
From far a low word breathes on the breaking brain
Its cruel calm, submission’s misery,
Gentling her awe as to a soul predestined.
Cease, silent love! My doom!
Blind me with your dark nearness, O have mercy, beloved enemy of my will!
I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread.
Draw from me still
My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,
Proud by my downfall, remembering, pitying
Him who is, him who was!
Together, folded by the night, they lay on earth. I hear
From far her low word breathe on my breaking brain.
Come! I yield. 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!
See above, under Moeran.
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!
(Reutter, Szymanowski)
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 battlename:
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?
(Goossens, Herbert)
Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers, was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could. […] She was alone. All her nubied companions were asleeping with the squirrels. […] She tried all the winsome wonsome ways her four winds had taught her. She tossed her sfumastelliacinous hair like la princesse de la Petite Bretagne and she rounded her mignons arms like Mrs Cornwallis-West and she smiled over herself like the beauty of the image of the pose of the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande and she sighed after herself as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissimus. But, sweet madonine, she might fair as well have carried her daisy’s worth to Florida. […]
Oh, how it was duusk! From Vallee Maraia to Grasyaplaina, dormimust echo! Ah dew! It was so duusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by three and fours, at last by fives and sixes of sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep now with them. O! O! O! Par la pluie! […]
Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy, cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone.
Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary.
What?
In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen’s hotel, Queen’s hotel Queen’s Ho …