ABSTRACT
Yet in spite of all rejection and negation, the Irish mode is manifest in this book: one does not easily absolutely deny one’s blood. It is here in the last poem in Chamber Music:
which reminds one of Yeats’s ‘Hosting of the Sidhe’: ‘Caolte tossing his burning hair and Niamb calling Away, come away.’ It is here also in the moan of the vowels, in the Irish fondness for keeping one vowel open all through a lyric:
But for the most part for all that they come out of the Irish landscape these lyrics are more Elizabethan English than Irish Renaissance. All are slight in thought, sentimental in feeling the young poet seeking in remembered moods of love a solace for hurt pride. What gives them distinction is an almost glass-like perfection of form, fastidious use of ‘elegant and antique phrase,’ including the polysyllable, a subtlety of cadence which haunts the ear. Melancholy as a Chopin Prelude, these lyrics like George Moore’s sentimental Lady of the Fountain, sing their sorrows to the moon. Chamber Music was first published in 1907. The handful of lyrics published twenty years later under the title Pomes Penyeach show little change. The wind in the grass, rain falling on the black mould, a birdless sky at twilight-such landscapes evoke an evanescent mood perfectly expressed and cadenced:
Little of Joyce’s abundance has gone into his verse. These collected poems are no fat volume but a thin book of only fifty lyrics, not one of which overruns its page. But they will doubtless be long read, both for their delicate attenuated music and because they were written by the author of Ulysses. That a man whose prose is so contrapuntally many-voiced should write lyrics which are simple song, a melody piped on a single pipe; that he who has led the vanguard of the novel should in his verse linger behind in the asphodel fields of Fulke Greville and Sir Philip Sidney-such antitheses pose a pretty critical question. Perhaps it means that Ulysses was achieved only by deliberately sinking the sentimentalist in the satirist, that these lyrics, which are sometimes little more than an exquisite sigh, are to James Joyce what Swift’s ‘little language’ was to the author of Gulliver.
