Max "Bunny" Sparber

CHAMBER MUSIC IS A VERY SLIM COLLECTION OF POEMS by Joyce, who was not primarily known for his poetry, although he published a second collection of poems between Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. This collection was published in 1907, seven years before Dubliners came out, although both were written more or less contemporaneously, as Joyce was already contacting publishers to offer Dubliners in 1905. As would often happen with Joyce, getting Dubliners published was a Homeric task, and so, for a while, the author was mostly a failed poet. I say failed because Chamber Music only sold about half of its printing run, or about 250 copies.

Joyce's poetry had admirers, however, and not the least among them was Ezra Pound, who was hen in the midst of rejecting Victorian poetic conventions in favor of something that was collectively dubbed "Imagism." Broadly speaking, this was an approach to poetry that favored clear, concise descriptions and promoted the direct treatment of a subject, inspired, somewhat, by the Japanes haiku, and Pound decided to collect together poems that he considered appropriately imagist into an anthology called Des Imagistes. He included Joyce in the collection, which is interesting, because Joyce wasn't self-consciously imagist, but instead seemed to draw his inspiration from the songs of Elizabethan lyricists. Nonetheless, part of Pound's conception of imagist poetry was that it shouldn't be too constrained by meter, but instead should present its rhymes in a looser, more natural metrical form, like song lyrics do. Joyce had always conceived of his poems in Chamber Music as being set to music, so it was a natural, if imperfect, match. Additionally, Joyce's poetry was economic, often consisting of only one or two quatrains, and Joyce tended to directly describe his subject, rather than launch into the extended metaphoric descriptions that many Victorian poets favored.

But Chamber Music, with its deliberately Elizabethan tone, is a bit of an oddity among the poetry of his contemporaries. More than that, it's an oddity among the rest of his writing. For one thing, it isn't set in Dublin. Well, it might be, but Joyce spends most of his descriptive passages on bucolic scenes of rivers and woods and glens and sea shores, as though the whole collection of poetry is set in Oberon's forest. Secondly, the collection of poems is almost completely bereft of wit, although it is possible that some of the earlier poems, which teem with melodramatic romantic imagery, are meant satirically, as a parody of the exaggerated sentimentality of immature love -- a theme he would return to later, as I understand it, both in the youthful writing of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist and the Gerty McDowell scene in Ulysses. In both instances, as I hear it, the satire is clearer.

There is a story that you'll hear now and then that the title of the poetry collection is itself satiric, as "Chamber Music" in fact refers to the tinkling of urine in a chamber pot. Unfortunately, this story isn't true. The title was suggested by Joyce's borther Stanislaus, and Joyce didn't like it (he described at as "too complacent"; he was actually a bit ambivalent about the whole undertaking, calling the book "a protest against myself"). So how did we end up with this notion of the title as a pun? I'll quote the blog How Books Got Their Titles:

Joyce and his friend Oliver Gogarty visited the house of young widow called Jenny, and Joyce read his poems aloud. After the performance Jenny retired behind a screen and made use of a chamber pot. As the men listened, Gogarty commented: 'There’s a critic for you!' Joyce told Stanislaus the story, and he agreed it was 'a favourable omen'. The incident is echoed in a line from Ulysses: 'Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that.'

Although the book is a bit unusual for Joyce, and while I would agree that it is a minor work, I've been finding it useful in getting ready to read Joyce, for a few reasons. Firstly, many of the poems demand close reading, and demand to be read aloud. Chamber Music isn't merely a collection of poems connected by a common theme -- in this case, love -- but it's a series of connected poems, linked by images and word choices, that constructs a narrative of youthful love aging into betrayal and loneliness. Joyce doesn't narrate from a single point of view, but, instead, chooses a variety of narrative voices, sometimes speaking as an omniscient (albeit often giddily romantic) observer, and sometimes telling the tale in first person, alternating back and forth between the voice of the male lover and the voice of the female lover. It's an effect that I understand Joyce made extensive use of later, and it's very interesting here; it's as though the love story were being told by three different people at once, with the female viewing voice often using simple and cliched romantic tropes to describe herself, while the make views himself in heroic terms (and, in one poem, seems to chide the female for gushing about moons and stars and the like), and the narrator sets the scene, often framing it in music and lush vegetation, as though it were a stage set for a theatrical romance.

Joyce is often also stingy with his narration, hiding the point of a story in its details, rather than stating them outright. Let me demonstrate with the poem titled XXVI:

Thou leanest to the shell of night,
Dear lady, a divining ear.
In that soft choiring of delight
What sound hath made thy heart to fear?
Seemed it of rivers rushing forth
From the grey deserts of the north?

That mood of thine
Is his, if thou but scan it well,
Who a mad tale bequeaths to us
At ghosting hour conjurable -- -
And all for some strange name he read
In Purchas or in Holinshed.

It helps to know that this poem comes in the middle of a section of poems in which the male lover has been responding angrily to rumors of his wife's infidelities, ruining friendships and fantasizing about running off to the woods to be alone with his bride, where rumors won't bother him. Here, in elliptical language, Joyce creates a scene in which his wife, in the midst of pleasant conversation, has been frozen by the sound of a name. The suggestion, especially in the last rhymed couplet, is that what has frozen her is her husband saying aloud a name he heard elsewhere. Suddenly, as Joyce says , the mood is his.

If I am reading it right, what Joyce is describing is a scene in which the suspicious husband has said aloud the name of the rumored lover to gauge his wife's reaction. And becomes she freezes in fear, he knows the truth of it. She has been betraying him.

From this poem on, the poems will be about the relationship ending, and the poems will increasingly be written in first-person, from the point of view of the betrayed husband, who tries to be magnanimous and fatalistic about the whole thing. But Joyce's narrator is as unreliable in betrayal as he was in romance, where he pictured himself a dashing figure calling out from the woods with a chorus of bees swarming around him, likewise calling his name. Despite the male lover's attempts to be sanguine about his relationship's end, the collection ends with a nightmare. The narrator dreams of an invading army, rising up out of the sea to attack, and they hardly seem human. The narrator either wakes or doesn't at the end of the poem, but, regardless, the last line betray his true feeling about the loss of his love in heratbreakingly clear language: My love, my love, my love,my love, why have you left me alone?

It's a terrific, and terrifically sad, moment: The image of experiencing a nightmare and waking to be reminded that your bed is empty, and there is nobody there to comfort you. It's a moment that is very intimate and human, and yet tragic, in the way real people experience tragedy, rather than the heroic figures of classical tragedies; as I understand it, this is also to be a recurring theme in Joyce's work.

There's is in this collection that is interesting. He makes occasional use of the seasons, with the collection starting in the spring and ending in the winter, with attendant suggestions that his characters are aging from youth to old age. The natural world constantly seems to comment on the stories, with the male narrator's most vaulting romantic moments taking place in the woods, and his most uncertain moments taking place at the sea. And many of the poems have a moment of clarity, when something that was unknown or not understood, becomes suddenly clear; Joyce called these epiphanies, and they define his work. For instance, in poem XXIV, Joyce presents an image of the female lover combing her hair. Hair has been a recurring image in the poems, representing the girl's sexuality, and, as the narrator watches her, he realizes she's paying a lot of attention to her hair, and begins to suspect that this attention is not meant for him. After several poems in which the male lover has aggressively denied suggestions of infidelity, it's this simple act that causes him to realize that, in fact, he may have been betrayed; it's a sad epiphany, and happens in an unexpected way at an unexpected moment. I expect we'll see a lot more of that from Joyce.

If you'd like to read Chamber Music, which is in the public domain, you can download a copy here, or read it online here.

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