SOURCE: "The Woman Hidden in James Joyce's Chamber Music, " in Women in Joyce, edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless, University of Illinois Press, pp. 3-30.

Joyce developed his suite of songs in an effort to create in words, like Stephen Dedalus forming his Mercedes, the "unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld." The youthful Joyce's interest, like that of young Stephen, focused primarily on his own soul, and only secondarily on that fragile and fragmented image which that not-so-constant soul sought to bring into unity. Thus the woman who emerges from Joyce's arrangement of his songs reveals in many ways her varied sources and the adolescent narcissism, insecurity, and ineptitude of her creator. Yet it is the young writer's artistic power that reveals this evanescent but constantly intriguing woman who, like a rainbow on the mist, shimmers with a mysterious radiance and power.

As with Stephen's "green rose," Joyce's ideal woman had not yet found her embodiment outside his imagination. This ideal would be fulfilled only in Nora Barnacle, to whom Joyce wrote in August, 1909: "You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you find now so enchanting. She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imagination) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her …" Joyce, in the smithy of his soul, "fashioned" this woman in delicate Elizabethan songs, and over some years evolved an arrangement of those songs in a two-part sequence building to and falling from the consummation of an ideal first love. Essential for retrieving the woman of Chamber Music is to establish Joyce's ordering of the songs—a difficult task, for when Chamber Music was published in 1907, the sequence which Joyce finally adopted (not without reservation) was arranged not by Joyce but by his brother Stanislaus.

In February, 1903, Joyce wrote to his brother about Chamber Music: "Dear Stannie, I send you two poems. The first one is for the second part …". The poems were "I hear an army" ("XXXVI") and "When the shy star" ("IV"). [In Selected Letters of James Joyce, editor Richard] Ellmann notes: "… Joyce planned to divide his poems into two parts, the first being relatively simple and innocent, the second more complicated and experienced. The second group would commemorate his departure from Dublin …". Ellmann's adjectives may hint at some echo of Blake's songs of innocence and of experience, and perhaps at a foreshadowing of the early simplicity and later complications of a love affair, as in Elizabethan sonnet sequences like Sidney's and Shakespeare's. Ellmann's suggestion that the second "group" would, like the ending of Portrait, commemorate Joyce's departure from Dublin does seem to accord with an aspect of "I hear an army"; however, as a description of Joyce's plan for his sequence, the suggestion appears to be too restrictively autobiographical. As I see Joyce's own arrangement of his poems (different from the arrangement Stanislaus constructed for the long-delayed publication), it aims at building on Joyce's own experience a universal expression of youthful human love in all times and places. I suspect that from the beginning of his planning Joyce worked for a motion upward to the poem of consummation, "My dove, my beautiful one" ("XIV"), and downward gradually through the subsidence of passion, external difficulties, ultimate disillusion, and finally, as in the two poems he calls "tailpieces" in the published version, an Arnoldian listening to the noise of embattled waters.

The earliest manuscript of the suite, now owned by James Gilvarry, was sold by Sylvia Beach in 1935. Twenty-seven of the thirty-three poems are, like those Gogarty saw in Joyce's hand in 1903, beautifully written in the center of large sheets, and Litz describes the arrangement: "In the Gilvarry sequence, "I" and "III" are the opening poems, "XXXIV" is the close, and "XIV" stands squarely in the middle, flanked by thirteen poems on either side. This perfect symmetry of musical and emotional effects was spoiled slightly as Joyce added later poems, until finally in the rearrangement for the 1907 edition it was almost entirely obscured."

Of the ordering of the poems in the 1905 Yale MS, " Chamber Music (a suite of thirty-four songs for lovers) by James Joyce, Via S. Nicolo, Trieste, 1905," Litz says, "This obviously represents a careful and long-considered plan." The climactic Poem "XIV" still stands as squarely as it can in the middle, No. 17 of the thirty-four poems. And this is Joyce's final sequence before Stanislaus rearranged the poems for publication.

From the beginning Joyce took his ordering seriously. In 1902, he had shown the poems to Lady Gregory, and his concern for the form of the whole suite appears in her comment: "I think, from what you said, that you would not like to publish those poems till the sequence is complete …". She was less frank than Yeats was a month or so later, when he commented on a poem Joyce had sent him. It was surely Joyce's original arrangement of his poems that Yeats had seen and that he found helpful to interpret the poem "in its place with the others": "Perhaps I will make you angry when I say that it is the poetry of a young man, of a young man who is practicing his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops. It went very nicely in its place with the others, getting a certain richness from the general impression of all taken together and from your own beautiful reading." It is an interesting possibility that Yeats here by his pointed repetition laid in Joyce's imagination a foundation for the shift from Stephen Hero as a title to the final title of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Evidence that Joyce was impressed by Yeats's words seems to me apparent in a letter to Stanislaus written more than four years after he had read Yeats's judgment: "By the same post I received from Elkin Mathews the proofs of Chamber Music. It is a slim book and on the frontispiece is an open pianner! Shall I send you the proofs to correct. I don't know whether the order is correct. I don't like the book but wish it were published and be damned to it. However, it is a young man's book. I felt like that. It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive." But the version that had gone to Mathews was not the arrangement Joyce had submitted to so many publishers for those exhausting years. On October 9, 1906, Joyce wrote to Stanislaus about Arthur Symons's advice to submit his poems to Mathews, and for some reason—I suspect a complex of reasons—agreed to change his own arrangement for one proposed by Stanislaus. Joyce sounds tired and discouraged—"Tell me what arrangement you propose for the verses. I will follow it perfunctorily as I take very little interest in the publication of the verses"—and perhaps felt that a change in his text might bring luck. If one could probe Joyce's psychological depths, one might perceive some perverse revenge on his often-rejected poems, some resentment at Yeats's patronizing but solidly based counsel, or some strange search for a co-author to share responsibility, like Joyce's later weird effort to recruit James Stephens to finish Finnegans Wake. There is no way to discover with rational certainty what motivations operated in Joyce's subconscious. He did accept Stanislaus's arrangement, in any case, and although that arrangement damages the "story line" of Joyce's own sequence, it offers decided advantages. In grouping the songs according to the music of the verse, and thus the mood, Stanislaus stressed the element Joyce valued most. And if a singer were to present the songs in an evening's entertainment, the arrangement by mood would be practical and effective.

But Joyce was certainly not comfortable with the book. If Stanislaus's recollection of Joyce's wanting to cancel the publication is accurate (Stanislaus had an Irish imagination), it would be added evidence that Joyce much disliked something about the book he had so vigorously sought to publish for four years. Since Joyce often showed great affection for individual poems, since he read them to friends and critics with full confidence, and since he spoke in Finnegans Wake with apparent satisfaction of "all this chambermade music," I suspect that the repulsive feature may have been the arrangement that he had "perfunctorily" agreed to.

Some evidence for my suspicion seems to emerge from Joyce's description of his sequence in a letter to G. Molyneux Palmer on July 19, 1909: "The book is in fact a suite of songs and if I were a musician I suppose I should have set them to music myself. The central song is "XIV" after which the movement is all downwards until "XXXIV" which is vitally the end of the book. "XXXV" and "XXXVI" are tailpieces just as "I" and "III" are preludes." Joyce still conceives of the movement rising to "XIV" and being "all downwards" to "XXXIV," where he sees the end of something vital—I take it the end of the love affair. That description fits Joyce's arrangement to perfection, but it does not fit the published arrangement. For example, between "XI" (Joyce's 16), which bids adieu to virginity, and "XIV" (Joyce's 17), where virginity gives place to consummation, Stanislaus places "XII" (Joyce's 26), which weeps for the loss of girlhood. The formal tone of "XII" does fit well with the other poems with which it is grouped, but its motion is distinctly downward, as the poet rejects the counsel of remorse which the Capuchin moon gives to the poet's repenting lover. Again, Stanislaus's arrangement inserts, between two poems of parting ("XXX" and "XXXII," 32 and 31 in Joyce's arrangement), a poem celebrating a uniting kiss ("XXXI," 23 in Joyce's arrangement), a rude dislocation of the downward motion.

"XVII," which speaks of the loss of a male friend because of the lady, was number 10 in Joyce's arrangement and thus appeared before the poem Joyce called "central" (his 17, "XIV"). In Stanislaus's rearrangement, however, "XVII" is placed after the original central song. Ellmann opines that Joyce retained this poem to help the "changed mood" of the later poems; but Joyce placed it among the early poems in his series, and in any case it seems to me that the poem was important to Joyce because it carries a faint echo of Shakespeare's alienation from his male friend (Finnegans Wake certainly stresses in Wildean tonality the shadowy presence of Mr. W H). If my opinion is correct, then such reference to the desertion of the male friend should belong to the upward movement, where Joyce originally put it, before the poet and his lady achieve consummation and a temporary exclusive union. The poem which follows in both arrangements ("XVIII" and 11) depicts the lady comforting the poet sorrowing over the loss of his friend.

But there is no certitude to be had here. Joyce did accept and publish Stanislaus's arrangement, and in effect repudiated his own previous arrangement, never published. Why not then let the matter rest there? Because, as I have experienced it, a close look at Joyce's arrangement reveals new things about the poems, and furnishes them with the kind of universal human context that Joyce found important in his works, as in his arrangement of Dubliners according to the development of human experience through childhood, adolescence, and maturity.

In Joyce's original conception, as I now see it, the relationship of the lovers (which begins with the appearance of the girl in 4 ["II"]) gradually develops from the first hesitant approach up to the act of consummation (celebrated with religious tone in 17 ["XIV"]) and declines (with a growing intellectualizing about the nature of love and a diminishing of passion) to the death of love in 34 ["XXXIV"]. In an effort to reconstruct Joyce's conception, I offer the following outline of the original structure, with my own notion of each poem's theme. I will attempt to justify questionable points in my fuller discussion of the individual poems:

Ascent of the Suite

Preludes—the poet speaking to himself.

1 [XXI]—The lonely poet defies the world.

2 [I]—The poet makes music by himself, sweet but funereal.

3 [III]—The lonely poet hears a prelude to human love.

Suite Proper—The lovers' relationship begins.

4 [II]—The lonely girl plays the piano at evening.

5 [IV]—In the evening the poet comes to her gate, singing.

6 [V]—His song: I leave my books, my loneliness, to see and hear you.

7 [VIII]—She brings light and love to the richly appareled spring wood.

8 [VII]—"My love" is now fully objectified in the light, graceful girl.

9 [IX]—He longs for the girl.

10 [XVII]—He has deserted his friend, and suffers.

11 [XVIII]—He seeks his comfort in her.

12 [VI]—Like the Bridegroom in the "Song of Solomon," he longs for peace in her arms, in her love.

13 [X]—Now a new lover's song, livelier than 6 [V].

14 [XX]—He longs for them to lie together in the woods (and in a grave).

15 [XIII]—He sends the wind as herald to the physical consummation of their marriage of souls.

16 [XI]—He urges the virgin to loosen her hair.

Zenith of the Suite (the noon, the summer)

17 [XIV]—His Song of Songs!

Decline of the Suite

18 [XIX]—He consoles the sad girl, shamed by unnatural dogmas.

19 [XV]—He himself hears nature's sighs and the wisdom of accepting mortality.

20 [XXIII]—He expresses his happiness, like the unweeping birds (but, like Shelley with his skylark, he is, unfortunately, more wise than they).

21 [XXIV]—Her negligence begins to justify his wisdom.

22 [XVI]—The lover wants to seek Love in a cool valley, where those wise choirs of birds sing (and Love may visit, as he did in the past).

23 [XXXI]—She kisses him (but overhead a bat flies).

24 [XXII]—He is allured to prison, to sleep (to death).

25 [XXVI]—She experiences the fear that only a poet can express.

26 [XII]—She has been hoodwinked into accepting the false doctrine of everlasting love, and he counsels her to be satisfied with the passing but truthful living light in her eyes.

27 [XXVII]—In his "wisdom," he suggests the true source of her fear, her own animal nature (maybe also some mysterious malice).

28 [XXVIII]—He counsels acceptance of human reality.

29 [XXV]—He more desperately calls for laughter and song.

30 [XXIX]—He complains that she is ruining their garden.

31 [XXXII]—As they prepare to part, he mounts his wise pulpit once more.

32 [XXX]—He recalls the whole course of their love.

33 [XXXIII]—Another lover's song (maybe to himself, as in the preludes): winter ends us.

34 [XXXIV]—Final lover's song: accept the sleep (which may be the "Out, out brief candle" of Macbeth).

([XXXV] and [XXXVI]—Never in Joyce's arrangement of poems, he called these "tailpieces," and they are not part of the "upward-downward" movement of the other verses.)

Joyce's plot is simple enough, but the complexities within it offer many insights into his youthful notions of love, of art, and of woman. A glance at some of the points of interest in each poem might clarify Joyce's conceptions.

In the three preludiai poems, the lonely poet addresses himself. In 1 ["XXI"], the problem, like the one which emerges occasionally in Shakespeare's sonnets, is to determine whether "his love" is subjective or objective. I incline to suppose that if the speaker really is unconsortable, then the only one he can possibly consort with is himself. In that case, "his love" is the love inside him. It is possible, no doubt, to find here what Joyce does suggest elsewhere, that he and his love become "one flesh," and then are in a position to face enemies as one being. But I find that difficult to merge with the lonely stag image which I see here, so I prefer to see this speaker "companioned" (that is, literally, "breaking bread," like a lonely Christ) with himself.

On Curran's autograph copy of the poem, given to him some months after Joyce had met Nora, the dedication "To Nora" is written, with the date September 30, 1904. But while the poem found a completion in Nora, more probably, according to the evidence I can now find, the song started out like the others, expressing the lonely "desire of my youth." (Joyce's reference to "my verses" seems to be inclusive of all). With this supposition, there is no difficulty in understanding the speaker's having found no soul to fellow his, and the inclusive nature of the stag image, so stressed in "The Holy Office," remains intact. Further, with this reading, the poem starts off the suite admirably, since the poet's desperate need for true companionship prepares the way for what follows.

Poem 2 ["I"] brings in "sweet" and "soft" music (the adjectives will be repeated ad nauseam), and the artist's exilic tendencies appear in the bent Narcissistic head. In 3 ["III"] that head assumes a more outgoing angle, looking up, longing for light and the dying fall of more "soft sweet music." The religious wind, apparently, is antiphonally causing those invisible harps to sigh for Love. The need for a soft, sweet girl is established.

Poem 4 ["II"] brings in the girl. The body of the suite gets under way with the girl playing an actual piano, not the fancied harp (or real penis, if Tindall's view has force) that the anemic love of 2 ["I"] is fingering. In a dim but lovely natural setting, she too bends her head, shyly thinking (surely of the lover she longs for) as her hands wander willfully over the keys. The trees of the avenue, lining the "way" which leads to the girl, are lighted by lamps similar to those ("like illumined pearls") which set the scene for "Two Gallants"—a grim undertone. The twilight, starting out amethyst, has at the end moved down to darker blue, approaching that violet which gives a bottom limit to the rainbow and merges with night (and which, in my imagination at least, will have a share in "violer d'amores" on the first page of Finnegans Wake). The girl is the central light in all this gathering dusk ("gathering" is the climactic word in 33 ["XXXIII"]).

The shy girl melts into the shy star of 5 ["IV"], which draws and guides the poet to the girl's garden. [John Henry Cardinal] Newman's "… but like the morning star, which is thy emblem, bright and musical" is twice quoted in Portrait, the image haunting Stephen's imagination. Mary as the morning star and as closely related to the Star of Bethlehem was even more familiar to Catholic imaginations (used to dwelling daily from earliest childhood, as Stephen demonstrates, upon the titles in her litany) than were the blessings of Guinness. To this young poet, who had probably, like Stephen, vowed not too long before he wrote this poem to be a knightly votary of his Lady Mary, the maidenly shy evening star in Song 5 ["IV"], like Mercedes, the lady of mercy, would surround his beloved too with the rhetorical aura reflected from Newman's undulating prose.

This modest star of Chamber Music receives expansion through Dubliners into Finnegans Wake. Its potentialities as a Star of Bethlehem, drawing the Magi to that manger which had become the center of creation (as Gabriel in "The Dead" is drawn westward, and as the Evangelists with their Ass gather, in the Watches of Shaun, at the marital bed where Holy Shaun gleams forth), can be more readily perceived in this suite of poems when one reaches the climactic biblical force of 17 ["XIV"]. Its epiphanic role stems from the kind of emotion Joyce expressed after his visit to Nora's former room in Finn's Hotel. This was in the Advent season of 1909, leading to the season of Epiphany celebrated in "The Dead," and Joyce's feeling and words to Nora foreshadow those of Gabriel in the more elegant hotel where he and Gretta spent the night:

Yes, I too have felt at moments the burning in my soul of that pure and sacred fire which burns for ever on the altar of my love's heart. I could have knelt by that little bed and abandoned myself to a flood of tears. The tears were besieging my eyes as I stood looking at it. I could have knelt and prayed there as the three kings from the East knelt and prayed before the manger in which Jesus lay. They had travelled over deserts and seas and brought their gifts and wisdom and royal trains to kneel before a little newborn child and I had brought my errors and follies and sins and wondering and longing to lay them at the little bed in which a young girl had dreamed of me…. I leave for Cork tomorrow morning but I would prefer to be going westward….

A similar sacred bed in the Watches of Shaun is the focus of "blue-blacksliding constellations" and the scene of "How culious an epiphany!"

The solitary, young wise man of this poem (his references to his "wisdom" weigh down the second, declining half of this suite of songs), sings as a visitant drawn from afar. And she, bent in revery like the Madonna who pondered marvelous things in her heart, would surely now look up as at the visit of a seraph.

His song follows in 6 ["V"]. "I have left … I have left" probably echoes the leaving of father and mother to cleave to a wife. He leaves the book and the possibly Rosicrucean and alchemical fire to plunge into the gloom which is then pierced by her song. The merry air, a contrast to his lonely, sad studies, brings him, longing for a sight of her, to her window.

In 7 ["VIII"] he revels in the sight of her in the green wood. Her light and love make the whole woodland gleam with a fire, soft and golden, far superior to the fire he left behind. She is light also in her movements, graceful, virginal, calling forth all that is beautiful and good in nature, which puts on its richest apparel and its sweetest sunlight to adorn and worship her. (This springtide, alas, will have been destroyed in the final song of the suite, and this brave attire all shed and ruined in 30 ["XXIX"] and 31 ["XXXII"]).

The girl in 8 ["VII"] becomes one with his love, the lonely love of 1 ["XXI"] now objectified fully in her. They join together, in the poet's mind, as the gay winds do, joining in companies. And as the winds woo the leaves, his desires woo the graceful girl.

But there is something odd about the girl's attitude. Like the Bride of the Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon and the Canticle of Canticles), she is among the apple-trees, but she seems interested in her own shadow rather than in the Bridegroom. And she goes slowly and lightly. [In Chamber Music, the editor William York] Tindall scents creative urine, sees the sky as cup as helpful to the thematic chamber tinkling, and finds the holding up of her dress "no less prudent than relevant."

It is surely true that "goes" for Joyce operated well in a context of wine and porter and urine and copulation. In a letter to Stanislaus on August 31, 1906, speaking about George Moore, he wrote: "Italy … where they drink nice wine and not that horrid black porter (O poor Lady Ardilaun over whose lily-like hand he lingered some years back): and then she goes (in all senses of the word) with a literary man named Ellis …". Lady Ardilaun was one of the Guinesses, and her lily-like hand may connect with a conditioned response in young Joyce's imagination, linking cups and chamber-pots with beef-tea and sacramental white wine and porter and urine. Then indeed the dainty hand of this song gains complexity and interest.

But more immediately applicable to this poem is Joyce's Epiphany 26, in which the girl "dances with them in the round—a white dress lightly lifted as she dances, a white spray in her hair; eyes a little averted, a faint glow on her cheek. Her hand is in mine for a moment, softest of merchandise." This suggests that in the song the girl's attention to her shadow may be shyness or calculation, or a combination of both, and thus might stem from a consciousness of and a reaction to her would-be lover.

In 9 ["IX"], the poet longs for the girl and speaks to the May winds, also light dancers. He asks them, with Verlainian delicacy, to find his true love and to make the divided loves of the last line truly one love.

In the midst of this longing, separated from the girl, he adverts in 10 ["XVII"] to his separation from his friend (like Stephen's from Cranly) because of her. This touch of the Mr. W H element of Shakespeare's sonnets suggests an alliance with Elizabethan sequences, and introduces the pain and betrayal motif of such interest to Joyce, enamored of romantic suffering. The soft "merchandise" of her hand, bought now with his betrayal of his friend, is again in his (the "again" suggests a more definitive grasp, I suspect, after some significant encounter with the friend). With his hand occupied, he cannot make any sign of amendment to his friend, nor, as she sings, speak a word. Her singing voice and willful hand have effectively destroyed his friendship with a man who was once at his side.

He seeks comfort for the pain, in 11 ["XVIII"], in her soft wooing. An immature, non-ancient mariner, he yet preaches a universal tale and knows that words are worthless. The union of bodies can express love as words cannot, and, like the Bridegroom, he can find in her breast comfort for the gnawing sorrow.

He sings, in 12 ["VI"], the Bridegroom's song, longing for peace in her arms, in her love. The "that" in the first line is, as Tindall beautifully develops, a distancing word, and indicates that the poet feels himself definitely outside that sweet bosom now, with rude winds threatening to visit him. The fourfold repetition of "that," Tindall further perceives, carries a suggestion that the poet, like Stephen in the villanelle, is reluctant to go along with the powerful impulse to plunge into the "lure." Thus an ironic undertone, quite alien to the Song of Song's surface, gives a faint ominous overtone to the soft knock in line 7, which seems to echo the Bridegroom's knocking (in Catholic liturgy applied to Christ knocking at the heart):

I slept, but my heart was awake.
Hark! my beloved is knockinge.
"Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one;
for my head is wet with dew….
Song of Solomon, V, 2

A rogue will knock loudly in 33 ["XXXIII"], with murder in the background. Here the stress is on peace. Austerities (those rude south winds) might creep in, but in that sweet softness, or soft sweetness, they would be made gentle.

He proves this, in 13 ["X"], by the new lover's song, livelier than the "softer than the dew" song of 5 ["IV"]. This song is full of motion, of gaiety, of contempt for musing dreamers who do not act. The lover of 1 ["XXI"] and 2 ["I"] was such a dreamer, sinking into the past, into himself. This lover, as honied as the fragrant Bridegroom, moves fast and sings boldly, with wild bees drawn to his sweet odors. But we surely note (as Bloom discovered, "Still gardens have their drawbacks"), that productive and hummingly musical as they are, bees may sting.

In March, 1902, Joyce gave a Byronic—Little Chandlerish verse to John Byrne. It mourns the death of a gentle lover with (naturally) a "soft white bosom" and "no mood of guile or fear" (both moods strong characteristics in the woman of Chamber Music). Its last stanza foreshadows the remarkably more mature 14 ["XX"]. The earlier verse reads

I would I lay with her I love—
And who is there to say me no?

(No one says "nay" because a rhyme with "below" is called for.) In the poem in CM, the dark pine-wood is primarily the lovely trysting park near Dublin (quieter than the Hill of Howth with its flamboyant rhododendrons), but it doubles well as a coffin. Part of the wisdom of this young poet, clinging like Buck Mulligan to an adolescent rationalism, is that human love is intimately involved with the constantly changing human organism, which will inevitably deteriorate ("… whose mother is beastly dead"). But like Byron, and in a far more subtle way like Jonson, this poet enshrines even mundane lips and hair in an inflated religious tonality:

Interestingly, as Tindall points out, the shallowness of the religious coating trickles through the uncertain rhyming of "kiss" and "is."

The ennui after the "I come" of the previous poem (13 ["X"]) prepares for the post-coital letdown following their actual consummation in 17 ["XIV"]. In 14 ["XX"], the long vowels delay and dwell on the rhythm, and the imagined kiss in stanza 3 descends like water as her hair, in Rossetti-like disorder, sweetly and softly endews the Bridegroom's head.

This small baptism takes place at noon. At that hour, the speaker (or dreamer) of chapter 7 of Finnegans Wake figures we might, through "inversions of all this chambermade music," get a glimpse … of Shem the elusive artist, "the whirling dervish, Tumult, son of Thunder …". If we do link "tumult" in this poem to that liturgical (the dervish) and Evangelical (St. John) context, then this flowing hair can suggest baptismal water (so feared by Stephen), as do the letters just before the full statement of the villanelle ("… the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain" [Portrait]); and if we compare this seemingly simple girl in the pine-forest with the luring and destructive witch of the villanelle; and if we recall the apparition of Stephen's mother in "Circe" ("… her face worn and noseless, green with grave mould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her blue-circled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word" [Ulysses]), then we can see why Shem is like St. John, the true Son of Thunder ("… whom we surnamed Boanerges, that is, sons of thunder …" [Mark, 3:17]), celebrator of the infinite and ineffable Logos. Shem too wants to find and utter the word and needs a divining woman to that end, somewhat as St. John needed the Blessed Virgin to see and hear the true Word. Thus Stephen begged his mother, who, like Hamlet's father, had come back from the dead, for the word known to all men; thus Joyce sought a woman for his clou to immortality. The fear that this woman of Chamber Music will feel in 25 ["XXVI"], rising from the mystery of her own being, is the same fear that inspires that artist to express the mystery of his own being (and thus of every human being) in imperishable ink. This noon poem, for all its prettiness, contains something of the threat of death and the dark and maybe even hell, the noonday devil's horrors. (Joyce is thinking of Psalm 91:6, the destruction in wait for those who rebel against God, "… nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.") Shem is "… noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom …". Some such torrent of contexts brings into my mind, as I skim over the sugared surface of this sweet noontide song, the feeling of threatening possibilities swirling deep below.

Approaching the climactic moment of their courtship, the "courtly" poet, more of a Jonson than a Spenser, in 15 ["XIII"] sends a courteous wind as herald of his coming as the Bridegroom. The wind of spices from the Song of Songs announces his coming, and it finds out her little garden and her window. Noon here is the climax of their love, the completion of the perfection of day. And the Greek "epithalamium" mingles the ancient sexual traditions of the Greeks with the greatest of Jewish love songs in preparation for the climactic song of this suite.

Now the voice of the lover himself, in 16 ["XI"], supplants that of the herald, and the lingering adieu to virginity comes from his seraphic lips. His address to the shy girl and his instruction to prepare for the loss of her maidenhood (and maidenhead) is translouted into turfish in Finnegans Wake:

As in Portrait, the lover has come as a seraph to the virgin's chamber, and as he dreamed of her wooing in 11 ["XVIII"], he now woos her. The name on the bugles of the cherubim may be just "Seraph," but more likely, considering Joyce's eucharistic treatment of the artist as Christ, it is "Logos," the Word. As the Word, this artist can be imagined as overshadowing the virgin to effect through her his own conception in transaccidentated ink (thus Joyce will deal with the Artist-Being-Made-Word, climaxing that image on FW). I am not suggesting that the youthful Joyce here foresees the sophisticated and faintly blasphemous meanings which he later developed for Stephen and Shem, but I do perceive that in suggesting the divine aspect of the poet (somewhat in contrast to his "disregard of the divine" in 26 ["XII"]), he opens the way for that development. The girl's veiled hair, enclosed as under the veil of a nun or in the formal cap of Hester Prynne, must come pouring down in what the poet sees as a sign of her surrender to him. That the surrender is a calculated one, like Molly Tweedy's among the Howth rhododendrons or like Hester Prynne's among the shadowy trees where she again lured the manipulated Dimmesdale, does not appear here—but the way is open for that too.

And now, in 17 ["XIV"], the climax, the celebration of Hymen! The Song of Songs provides all the material for this ecstatic expression of full, loving union, and the dew on the lover's lips and eyes foreshadows Stephen's soul "all dewy wet" as he pictures the seraph coming to the virgin's chamber.

Epiphany 24, having listed a dozen elements from the Song of Songs, focuses on "that response whereto the perfect tenderness of the body and the soul with all its mystery have gone: Inter ubera mea commorabitur." The mystery involved in human love (as in human poetry) is the focus of this lovely song too.

This poem corresponds to Stephen's vision of the girl in the water, a female seraph who called him to his true vocation, "to recreate life out of life!" As a result of that call, he would dare, as in drunken bravery in "Oxen of the Sun," to challenge even God, and to call his post-creation better than the creation of God, which Stephen judges to be mere material for the artist's sublime literary Eucharist. The girl in the water shares much imagery and language with the dove of this song—e.g., "soft white down," "dovetailed," "bosom was as a bird's soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove."

I wonder, though, if in the pale veil which lies on the poet's head (though the snood has fallen from hers), there is not some faint shadow of the demonie, some echo of the "ajew, ajew fro' Sheidam" cast backward here (Sheidim is Hebrew for demons), bouncing perhaps off the villanelle? There the demon-woman, the Shee, lurks in the liturgical smoke, the source of weariness for the uneasy lover. Weariness will come soon enough, in 28 ["XXVIII"], for this now ecstatic lover. Maybe this veil, in the fearful insecurity of the poet, is not altogether desirable.

But it would be hard to forecast, from the "beautiful one" of this song, the temptress of the villanelle, and, far more, the luscious but diseased (if that is the implication of the "injection mark" of Ulysses 512) Zoe of "Circe" and her enchanted days:

(… A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.)

Zoe

(Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.)

Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim

Zoe's Hebrew, I would guess, more likely emerges from Bloom's imagination recalling his father's chanting than from the actual Zoe (where would she have learned it?), but in any case it means, "I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem" (Song of Songs, 1:5). It will be a long journey from this Irish girl of Chamber Music to the battered, depraved Zoe, but within this perfect wreath of songs ("The Vita Nuova of Dante suggested to him that he should make his scattered love-verses into a perfect wreath …"), the poems which decline from the central poem point toward the lower circles where Bella and her women wait.

Sadness has come over the deflowered girl in 18 ["XIX"]—not, according to Tindall, because of the deflowering (as in the "curious rite" of Ulysses 392), but because of what people are saying about her. Tindall refers to Yeats's "Aedh Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved." If one judges that "all men" are actually talking about the Sweetheart of this poem, of course the text does become as puzzling as Tindall finds it. But I believe that the "lying clamour" is that which the Capuchin will whisper in her ear in 26 ["XII"], or a corollary to that—namely, the religious stance of Irish Catholicism (as young Joyce read it) that sexual activity is evil unless blessed by Church and State.

If that is true, then in the first stanza the poet is saying to the girl, "All men condemn you, like the woman taken in adultery, preferring the religious lie to the natural truth. But you must realize that their belief that you are a woman without honour does not make it so." "Before you" could also carry the implication, especially in light of what follows, that "they preferred that clamour before you did," thus touching the source of her sadness in herself. He appeals to her natural pride to condemn the false and wasted tears of the men, their calls to repentance, and as they deny their natures, she should, like the defiant poet of 1 ["XXI"], hold "to ancient nobleness" and deny their false doctrine.

In 19 ["XV"], the poet demonstrates his own acceptance of nature's sighs (here signs not of sorrow but, presumably, of satisfaction and fulfillment) and the wise admonitions of leaves and flowers to arise, like the Bride and Bridegroom, to a day of love. Something of the tonality of Titania and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream accompanies those veils of gossamer and those wise choirs of faery, votaries of the natural.

"Admonisheth," with its Elizabethan formality, probably means first of all an extension of the poet's counsel to his soul to arise from sleep and death (sleep as symbol of death will be stressed in 34 ["XXXIV"], as it is in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73). Joyce probably composed this song originally as an address to his own soul, like Stephen's "dewy wet" soul waking from ecstatic dreams or rising "from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes!" But as the poem fits into the suite, following 17 ["XIV"], "my soul" more naturally comes to mean the beloved lady lying at his side, who has just been sighing and, no doubt, trembling in sleep. The slumber-death of love at this point still seems to be only their former loneliness, now past. And the few faeries (or at least few choirs) who faintly celebrate their present union can be heard only by attentive and wakeful ears.

"Admonisheth," however, can also carry a warning, and maybe those sighs are not totally pleasant ones after all. Maybe the faeries are "innumerous" and faint because the wisdom they sing is to some degree specious. It may even be that among the veils threatened by the rising sun is that happy veil of dew on the Bridegroom's head in 17 ["XIV"]. The noonday devil may be preparing his attack. These "wise" choirs may be foreshadowing the later wisdom of the lover. Nature's sighs and gentle stirrings may signal not only the dawn's epithalamium but the evening's thanatopsis.

And sure enough, the wise birds of 20 ["XXIII"], who do not live very long, suggest an apothegm to the yet wiser lover. Like these prudent wrens, who store treasures in their nests, he has "laid" (another word of many helpful meanings) his own treasures also in "some mossy nest." The heart of his beloved "flutters" in the first line, preparing for the propriety of picturing her as a bird. His hope and riches and happiness, which he had lost when religion and other inimical chains had taught him, like Blake, to weep, he has regained and stored in her. Thus they are—or are they?—as wise as the prudent birds. But into this wisdom of the poet creeps a question, and the possibility that evening will bring the death of love.

His beloved begins to justify that questioning in 21 ["XXIV"]. She had let down her hair for him in 16 ["XI"], and now she combs it endlessly for herself and her mirror-image. That glorious sun, which in 7 ["VIII"] she had made more beautiful in the woods, she now uses only as a means to admire herself more. She prefers her mirror to her lover, to natural sunlit life. Like the temptress of the villanelle, she is a witch and a lure to the lover, who "prays" her to leave her selfishness, to stop being "enchanted" by herself beneath the luring "pretty air." The charming negligence of her gestures embodies her negligence of her lover, about which he will complain more bitterly in 30 ["XXIX"]. Her love is declining, and she foreshadows the pretty airs of the piping poets to come (in 27 ["XXVII"]), airs which hide the selfish and destructive witchery beneath their enchanting praises of perfect, lasting love.

The lover in 22 ["XVI"], proposing to return to the valley where they once found love, reveals his uncertainty in that wavering "sometime." Now the musical and productive birds are the wise choir, calling them both away from that mirror. Almost abruptly, in proffering his pastoral invitation, he somewhat flatly asserts, "When we get there, we'll stay there." Since the lovers are not birds, who are better designed to be at home in the valley, the hesitant rhythm of the final line finds realistic justification.

She kisses him in 23 ["XXXI"], and sweetness and softness encompass him. But "murmuring" can be suspicious, as the idiot murmuring in Bloom's gazelle garden demonstrates. Especially is this true when the murmuring educes a phrase like "O, happily!" and all the time there is a bat flying overhead. Tindall lists Joyce's numerous treatments of women as bats and of bats associated with love and sex, and the vampire bat fits fairly well with the poisondart looming up in 27 ["XXVII"].

The witch "allures" him into the prison of her arms in 24 ["XXII"]. The witch of the villanelle lures seraphs from heaven, and here the "dearest" woos the lover with her soft arms, seeking to overcome the reluctance, like Stephen's, "to relent," and seeking to hold him fast, "to detain." There may have been a wooing word too, like that Joyce once heard from Nora: "I remember the first night in Pola when in the tumult of our embraces you used a certain word. It was a word of provocation, of invitation and I can see your face over me (you were over me that night) as you murmured it. There was madness in your eyes too and as for me if hell had been waiting for me the moment after I could not have held back from you." Hell does wait for fallen seraphs, in Catholic as in Miltonic imaginations, and I suspect that the "lure" of the villanelle and of Chamber Music finds some roots in the "swallowed bait" of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, which also lands the prey in hell.

The demonic rivulets gyrate considerably below the surface of this saccharine song, starting with "sweet" and "soft" and ending with "sleep to … sleep … soul with soul." That last coupling seems to me allied to Newman's device as cardinal, "Cor ad cor loquitur, " heart speaks to heart. Some of the drooling prose of Stephen's dealing with Emma, under the aegis of the Blessed Virgin, seems allied to that same device:

She placed their hands together, hand in hand, and said, speaking to their hearts:

—Take hands, Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always my children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together, my dear children, and you will be happy together and your hearts will love each other.

[John Henry Cardinal] Newman's "The Glories of Mary for the Sake of her Son" is quoted in Portrait just before that passage and in length at the end of the section. And that passage, in Newman's sermon, is preceded by a quotation from the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin: "… and in the glorious company of the saints was I detained" (Newman's italics). As Atherton points out [in the introduction to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] in his note to Stephen's discussion of "detained" with the Dean of Studies, "Newman is translating very literally et in plenitudine sanctorum detentio mea (Ecclesiasticus, 24:16): 'My abode is in the full assembly of the saints…. '" In this song in Chamber Music (24 ["XXII"]), the word is used as Newman uses it, and it draws in the whole complex of Newman's praise of Mary's glories, among which her virginity and her heroic determination to preserve it shine brilliantly. Now we can fully evaluate the "lying clamour" of those who, as in 18 ["XIX"], assert that the loss of virginity is a shameful loss ("… those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself). These "arms / By love made tremulous" resemble Stephen's reaction in his supposed freedom from alarms after his "penitence": "His hands were trembling, and his soul trembled …." But Stephen's trembling stemmed from a lie, and so (we perceive as things develop) does this Chamber Music love. A clue lies in the ambivalence of "could" in "Ah, could they ever hold me there …": "I wish they could" balances with "they can't."

The basis for "I wish they could" from the artist is, I take it, his need to tap her "divining ear," to find there a clou to immortality. She listens, in 25 ["XXVI"], not to a choir of birds, but to the soft choiring of her own blood. And she hears there a sound which causes fear. The divining of this sorceress has tapped some mystery beyond her rational grasp. She may be fearing torrents of water rushing forth from grey deserts. It is her heart that fears, and north of the heart is that grey matter that, according to Molly, Bloom considered to be the actual phenomenon which some called "soul" ("he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter"). The poet may be asking his beloved if she fears not only the vague destructive evil but also the sterile, rationalistic floods from the brain which threaten to sweep away her divination of human delight welling from the loving soul and to drown out the dulcimers of the Pleasure Dome.

That it is a mystery she conjures forth, a source of fear and pain, is suggested by Joyce's cry to Nora in December, 1909: "O the sweet pain you brought into my heart! Ο the mystery your voice speaks to me of!" It is the lady's ear that hears the mystery from that full choir where, like the Virgin, she is "detained." Her sacred river of blood brings "a mad tale," or the basis for one, into her consciousness, like that of the Ancient Mariner, frightening and ghostly. The flow may lead, when the ghosts can be conjured up, to the Sacred River to which Purchas led Coleridge, or to the oceans of blood to which Holinshed led Shakespeare. The poet, through careful scanning of her mood, hopes likewise to be led to a mad tale, maybe as mad as Finnegans Wake.

But his "human only" wisdom first moves him to warn her about religious sentimentality. In one of the most complex and interesting poems of the suite, 26 ["XII"], Joyce, among many other things, reveals most obviously his debt to Ben Jonson. [In his Dublin's Joyce] Hugh Kenner, having expressed some brilliant insights on what Joyce learned from Verlaine, goes on, under the heading "Ironic Elegance and Ben Jonson," to see this poem as illustrating, in its "double-writing," the aim Joyce assigned to Stephen Hero:

But in his expressions of love he found himself compelled to use what he called the feudal terminology and as he could not use it with the same faith and purpose as animated the feudal poets themselves he was compelled to express his love a little ironically. This suggestion of relativity, he said, mingling itself with so immune a passion is a modern note: we cannot swear or expect eternal fealty because we recognise too accurately the limits of every human energy. It is not possible for the modern lover to think the universe an assistant at his love-affair and modern love, losing somewhat of its fierceness, gains also somewhat in amiableness.

The artist as a young man recognized those limits more accurately than did the far more mature author of Finnegans Wake, who adverted to the multitude of pesky "unfacts": "Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude …." Youthful faith in rational science and the certitude which results still impress this young artist. With these he attempts to insert an ironic modern undertone beneath the elegant Elizabethan surface of this song, and succeeds in echoing a truly ironic Elizabethan, the witty and acerbic Ben Jonson.

The song's echo of Jonson I find quite explicitly in "plenilune." That word enjoys the fullness of its tenuous existence in English, insofar as I can determine the matter, in Jonson's The Fountaine of Selfe-Love or Cynthias Revels (as the title appears in the 1601 Quarto):

…. Arete, behold

Another Cynthia, and another Queene
Whose glorie (like a lasting plenilune)
Seems ignorant of what it is to wane!
(Act V, Scene 8)

That is precisely the doctrine of Joyce's "hooded moon," itself in its waned state contradicting its dogma, namely, that the full moon demonstrates that beauty and love and glory can last forever. Jonson's "lasting" on the surface implies that Queen Elizabeth, symbolized as usual in Cynthia the moon goddess, has been and will be plenilune forever. But she was, of course, ancient when Jonson wrote his lines, so Joyce's adjective also brings out an ironic undertone of Jonson's elegant surface. Joyce refers primarily to the old Elizabethan times, when "plenilunes" were fresh and at least verbally young. Now, he implies, the times and the word are both ancient and moribund, as Elizabeth was then and as the love this suite celebrates is now. All this speculation is contingent, I am aware, on Joyce's having actually derived the word from the author he was to read exhaustively in Paris, but my guess is that he did.

The waning and waxing of the moon in Joyce's song, the narcissism of this lady, the apocalyptic glory under her feet (not "tread out," as Tindall supposes, but rather supporting and setting off her glory), and her conviction, learned from the idealistic Capuchin, that there is a love that endures even to the edge of doom—these elements and others suggest Jonson's powerful influence. Further, Jonson himself, recently converted to Catholicism when he wrote those lines, would serve in excellent ways (with considerable irony also) as "the comedian Capuchin." The "elegant and antique phrase" of the following poem (27 ["XXVII"]) links with the antiquity of "ancient plenilune" to stress the courtly irony of old Ben, and to find deep roots feeding the "wisdom" of this young Dublin poet. In making his Capuchin a Jonsonian comedian, the wise young Joyce, who is reputed to have patronized Yeats, possibly echoes the attitude of Gabriel Harvey, set down about 1600: "… the younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, have it in them, to please the wiser sort."

The glory, at any rate, passes from the unreal dogma of stanza 1 into the real sparkle in living eyes in stanza 2, which, while trembling in its ephemeral "moving and changing every part of the time," can be doubly possessed—but not for long, as the chime of "Mine, O Mine" links inevitably with "No more."

The poet's own doctrine, product of his "human only" wisdom—Shem's life transaccidentates into ink expressing a literary "chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal"—is clearly set forth in 27 ["XXVII"]. In November, 1906, when he was twenty-four years old, Joyce revealed to his brother his theories on the love he had known: "Perhaps my view of life is too cynical but it seems to me that a lot of this talk about love is nonsense. A woman's love is always maternal and egoistic. A man, on the contrary, side by side with his extraordinary cerebral sexualism and bodily fervour (from which women are normally free) possesses a fund of genuine affection for the 'beloved' or 'once beloved' object." This is the wisdom that falls from these "all too wise" lips, assigning categories for love according to sex, and distinguishing in the man "genuine" affection, which leaves for the egoistic though maternally tender woman a mixed, or perhaps hypocritical, or maybe more exactly, devious affection. At any rate, we see in 27 ["XXVII"] the rapturous satisfaction of her maternal heart operating simultaneously with the poison of her malice. The malignant and even murderous elements that may be operating in some complex and basically incomprehensible women—like Cleopatra and Hester Prynne and Molly Bloom—have in this suite developed from the lady's indifference in 21 ["XXIV"] to this Housmanian statement. The bat image helped to suggest it, and in his notes for "Penelope," Joyce noted "(female spider devours male after)." The malice in her tenderness stems, Joyce suggests, from her own animal desires and needs, particularly the need to be inseminated and to protect and foster her offspring. This is expressed with more than Jonsonian tenderness, but with full Jonsonian irony. "I but render," I presume, echoes Shakespeare's Sonnet 125, where the rendering is mutual:

No, let me be obsequious in thy heart,
And take thou by oblation, poor but free,
Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art,
But mutual render, only me for thee.

This Chamber Music poet seems to be stressing, in his rendering, that the total giving of self is all on his side, and the significant item in his confession of his complete love is the supposition that mixed in with her tender love for him is malice.

The lying Capuchin of the previous poem, with his doctrine of perfect love, has waned, but these wise lips are waxing to bring in the modern truth. His own experience brings science to the religious and false "solemnizing" of love with pastoral and lyric pipes. Some touch of the poison dart he has found in all love (love in women, that is), and so he once more warns his beloved to believe him and to face the realities of human intercourse. But the warning seems to be spoken mostly for himself, and to be sugar-coated for her sentimental and less perceptive mind. Or perhaps he is striving to spare her feelings, while at the same time expressing the Darwinian under-tones of animal courtship and fulfillment. The song does not really have the definite limits I am suggesting, but, while it suggests those, leaves matters open to some unexpressed larger context. It does not finally exclude mystery, try as it will.

The poet in 28 ["XXVIII"] sings this same wisdom briefly, and, in more direct fashion, counsels accepting the passing nature of human love. He points to mortality and implies that death, as this wise young man tends to judge, ends all love. Mae West in her youth taught a similar doctrine when she replied to a suitor's pledge of eternal love, "Yeah, but how about your health?" Echoes in this poem of Marvell's broodings on the sleep of love in the grave prepare for the final poems of the suite. The weariness of declining love foreshadows the disillusioned "Are you not weary" of Portrait's villanelle.

More desperately, the poet in 29 ["XXV"] calls for laughter and song. The girl's divining heart, he knows, fears the inevitability of Time's (and Death's) victory—remotely like Margaret in Hopkins's "Spring and Fall," whose heart presaged mortality. But laugh anyway, he urges—as Joyce himself fills the cosmos with laughter in Finnegans Wake. Do not grieve over wasted suns like that of 21 ["XXIV"], but run while these winds (more familiar with the lover than they were with the virgin) loosen the tumult of your hair once more. Keep it light in all senses; the clouds that will bring darkness at evening yet attend (in the sense of await) the passing of the sun and of your love. Confess, not with stern self-revelation and acceptance of defeat, but with laughing and loving song assert a human defiance to darkness and the void.

Poem 30 ["XXIX"] is certainly written by "… a certain gay young nobleman whimpering to the name Low Swine …." He whimpers out accusations of her destruction of the "rich apparel" of 7 ["VIII"], of her Titania-like despoiling of summer, of her having brought to the enclosed garden the desolate winds of autumn, soon to bring the wild winds of winter. Love is dissolving, and it's all her fault. He had loved her, too dear, not wisely but too well, as another self-satisfied hero once whimpered. But she, whose clear eyes remain unperturbed, justifies his wise insight of 27 ["XXVII"]. She is selfish. And so, in this song, he falls upon the thorns of life and bleeds.

But in 31 ["XXXII"], before the lovers finally part, he once more, as a determined preacher, mounts his wise soapbox. Rain indicates nature's empathy with their tears—his anyway, since the lady may have perceived she will do better without him—and the wet leaves, once so loving and joyful, cover their memories (which he will uncover in the following song). "Way" here is a singular, I suppose, because they have not yet parted; they will need separate ways in the next poem. They stay for a moment, to contemplate the path this whole suite has taken, before they look at the memories and part. In this moment of pause, the wise counselor returns once again to his "heart speaks to heart" pose.

In 32 ["XXX"], he recalls the whole course of their love. The main memory is the opening action of the suite in 4 ["IV"], where she shyly played the piano and he fearfully stood near—like Bloom, less shy, turning the pages for young Molly. "Grave" has something of the atmosphere of "The Dead" about it, as do all these dripping trees and soggy leaves. The sweetness is gone, and the anapest "at the last" suggests the almost stumbling speed of the painful yet welcome parting. The plodding hesitancy of the final line, similar to the movement in the final line of Paradise Lost—"Through Eden took their solitary way"—suggests the return of loneliness.

Two lover's songs end the suite. The poet may be singing just to comfort himself, as he did in the opening poems. At any rate, he takes the advice which he gave to her in 29 ["XXV"], to laugh and sing though heavyhearted—or at least he tries. Having expressed his resentment and hurt in 30 ["XXIX"], and his sorrow and resignation and determination in 31 ["XXXII"], he now sings, and his music contrasts with the "sweet" music of Love at the beginning. Love now (in 33 ["XXXIII"]) is neither the lonely harpist nor the happy lover nor the possibly divine figure softly knocking at the heart in 12 ["VI"], but is a "fool in motley" like the one Jaques met in the forest (like Buck Mulligan in motley), now loudly knocking perseveringly at the tree—no doubt the garden's apple tree. Loneliness has returned to them, now loveless, but nature, not really malignant but only indifferent, carries on in its merry determination to have propagation by fair means or foul. Macbeth, indeed, is somehow involved in that knocking, as the next and last poem makes explicit. The fall, which takes the ungrieving leaves, goes into the gathering of winter, as night seals their sad parting. But the repetition of "year" in the final line may go with the ambivalence of gathering, which means both a collection of force for a deadly attack and a preparation for new things to come. It may more specifically imply, too, at the close of the suite, a harvest of the good things in their love. He urges her, or at least (if she has already gone) his memory of her, to imitate the leaves and go the way nature calls her. The ending has some faint hint of the immensely powerful tonality of the ending of "The Dead."

But all hopeful possibilities disappear or are at least muffled in the final song, almost a lullaby. It is more likely that the poet is alone here, as in the opening poems, speaking once again to himself. The unquiet of the girl in 25 ["XXVI"] now settles in him (if she herself, as I imagine to be the case, is not actually present), and the voice which urged her to sleep in union with him in 24 ["XXII"] now sounds only in his own unquiet heart. "The voice of the winter" has replaced the lovely voice of the turtle once heard in the land ("voax of the turfur is hurled on our lande"), and it is likely the wintry voice emerges from that rogue (Jack Frost?) knocking in the previous poem. Here the sinister voice echoes the cry which Macbeth heard, and it sounds in the heart which has murdered love—"Glamours hath moidered's lieb …"

In the final stanza, we run into what Tindall calls "pronominal confusion." "My kiss" operating on "your heart" would argue that the lady is still there. I settle it by supposing that she is there in his imagination, and that his unquiet heart can be viewed by him as his or hers or both. Shem (as Mercius) does something like this in regard to himself and Justius (and their mother) at the end of chapter 7 in Finnegans Wake, mixing pronouns as he and his brother mingle in his mind and merge into the fluid mother. But in any case, the suite ends in some confusion, in frustration, incomplete and uneasy, with a wish for peace stymied by that fateful knocking.

Joyce, having just received the proofs of Chamber Music, told his brother, about March 1, 1907, that he might finally determine to become a writer: "Yet I have certain ideas I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music." With this Wildean attitude in his mind, he goes on to say, "It is not a book of love verse at all, I perceive." Stanislaus's arrangement had treated the poems as just scattered love-verses. Joyce, as I understand him, perceived his poems, with his own suite in mind, as an attempt at a portrait of himself as artist, as a projection of the woman he desired to meet in the world outside himself (something like Stephen's "green rose"), and as a large philosophy dealing with human love.

Joyce's portrait of himself looms largest, of course, but if one listens to and stares long enough at the poems in Joyce's own imaginative scheme, not Stanislaus's, then behind that rather precious, self-centered, verbal musician emerges the outline of a woman, like the lovely Eve peering curiously out from under God's other arm in Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam." Joyce shows the woman of Chamber Music fulfilling Shakespeare's prophecy about his love:

'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth …
(Sonnet 35)

Joyce's woman, as I attempt to unify these fragmentary glimpses, emerges for me a clear Irish figure—lovely, graceful, shy, talented, passionate, affectionate, selfish, sensitive, possessive, intuitive, guilt-ridden, resentful, cold, determined—a woman of infinite variety. She has the Jewish beauty and passion of the Bride in the Song of Songs, of the Queen of Sheba, of Anastashie. She has the glory of Mary, the source of the human Word; the happy purity of Beatrice; the shy virginity of Stephen's Mercedes, Lady of Mercy. She has the sensual taint of Zoe (Jewish at least in Bloom's imagination), sterile source of life, like the Dead Sea. She has the witchery of the villanelle's Temptress, of the Shee, of Circe, of Titania. She has the malice of the Vampire, seeking the poet's mouth like the Pale Vampire of Ulysses, the complete inversion of the Song of Songs ' opening line: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth…." She is contradictory and tantalizing and mysterious, but full of life and energy. She deserves to be restored to the ordered if fragmentary world in which Joyce placed her. Then, in spite of the flaws with which adolescent certitudes and artistic uncertainties left her, she will still do all that a girl composed of ink can do to make defect perfection.