ABSTRACT
To reread the poems is to recall the rich associations of literary history during the last thirty years and to be aware that the poems of Chamber Music owe their existence to young Stephen Dedalus, who leaned over the turrets of Buck Mulligan’s tower, gazing outward to the sea, on a certain memorable summer morning in 1904. The poems were to wait another three years for publication, and their author’s long exile from Dublin had not yet begun. To read Chamber Music in 1936 is to see how closely young Dedalus followed in the wake of W.B.Yeats’s ‘tragic generation,’ and is again heard speaking to Buck Mulligan: ‘History’, Stephen said, ‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ And from this remark the thirty-third poem of Chamber Music seems to follow: [quotes the sixth poem, ‘I would in that sweet bosom be’]
As from a great distance the lyric seems to echo the prevailing mode of a late Victorian twilight which held William Morris’s refrain of
an ‘idle singer of an empty day.’ In Joyce’s early poems the mode remains unbroken, yet I believe that there is warning of a time to come in the closing lines of ‘I heard an army’ [xxxvi]:
In Pomes Penyeach the images of fear increase; ‘black mold and muttering rain’ descend and
The nightmare of history is re-entered and as it closes the melodic clarity of Joyce’s line seems to deceive the ear; the verse is no longer the very antithesis of the prose in Ulysses. The poet who was once Stephen Dedalus is no longer gazing seaward from a Dublin tower. Again at the close of Pomes Penyeach ‘A Prayer’ is said and, though the words are spoken with the clear reverberations of late Elizabethan music, the mode of the 1890s is replaced by the style of Joyce’s later prose, which had become an influence greater than any single poem in contemporary literature.
