Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach

In brief

James Joyce published two small books of poems twenty years apart. Chamber Music (Elkin Mathews, London, 1907) is his first book of any kind: thirty-six brief love lyrics in an Elizabethan manner, written to be sung. Pomes Penyeach (Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1927) gathers thirteen short poems written between 1904 and 1924 in Dublin, Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Both can be read in under an hour. Nobody would remember them without the novels, and that would be a small but real loss.

The argument

Joyce the poet is usually dismissed in a sentence, on the grounds that his real poetry went into his prose. That is true, and it is also the reason to read these books. They show what he could do when he stripped away everything he was best at: voice, comedy, Dublin, the weight of a mind thinking. What is left is an ear. A reader who has wondered how the last pages of “The Dead” or Molly Bloom’s rhythms were built will find part of the answer here, in small and exposed form.

The difference between the two books is the more interesting matter. Chamber Music is pretty, and Joyce knew it. Pomes Penyeach is written by a man with children, a failing body and real griefs, who has kept the same small forms and started to put something in them. My own view is that the second book is the better, even though Joyce’s first readers thought the reverse, and that its best poems could only have been written by someone who had first learned all the manners of the earlier one.

Chamber Music

The poems date mostly from Joyce’s Dublin years, up to 1904, and they read like songs from a lute book: courtly, musical and almost without local detail. Love wears a mantle, and the woods put on their finery. In 1909 Joyce told Nora that when he wrote it he was “a lonely boy, walking about by myself at night”.

The sequence was not his alone. His brother Stanislaus suggested the title and settled the final order of the poems while Joyce was in Trieste, though Joyce later claimed that the design was his. It does hold together as a suite, running from the opening “Strings in the earth and air” through courtship to parting and sleep. The original collection had thirty-four poems. The two added at the end, “All day I hear the noise of waters” and “I hear an army charging upon the land”, are in another voice altogether and they change how the book ends. The last line, “My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?”, is the first thing here that sounds as though it cost anything.

By the time the book was printed Joyce had gone off it. He told Arthur Symons, who had helped him to the publisher, that he disliked the title as “too complacent”, and to Stanislaus he called it “a young man’s book”, adding: “It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive.” The chamber-pot joke attached to the title, which is the one thing everyone knows about it, comes from an evening in 1904 with Oliver Gogarty and a young widow, as reported by Richard Ellmann. It was a later embroidery, and the poems are nothing like it. Leopold Bloom has the last word on it in Ulysses: “Could make a kind of pun on that.”

One poem repays a second look in the light of what came after. Number XVII has a speaker who loses a friend through a woman, in the plainest language in the book. It is a very small first sketch of Exiles.

Pomes Penyeach

The title is itself a poem’s worth of work: pommes at a penny each, in a book sold for a shilling or twelve francs. A shilling buys twelve pennies, and there are thirteen poems, so the first is called “Tilly”, the Irish tradesman’s extra measure. Joyce was in the middle of writing Finnegans Wake and being told by his friends that it had gone too far. Ezra Pound, shown these poems in 1926, said they belonged “in the Bible or in the family album with the portraits”. Archibald MacLeish was warmer, and Joyce went ahead. George Slocombe, by Joyce’s account, had the “melancholy distinction” of being the only reviewer.

The poems are dated and placed, which turns the book into a quiet autobiography of the exile years.

“Tilly”, Dublin, 1904. Cattle driven home at evening above Cabra, the district where the Joyces lived when his mother died. Its closing lines are harsh in a way that nothing in Chamber Music is.
“A Flower Given to My Daughter”, Trieste, 1913. A poem to Lucia, read now under the shadow of what later happened to her.
“She Weeps over Rahoon”, Trieste, 1913. Written in Nora’s voice for the dead boy of her Galway girlhood, the source of Michael Furey in “The Dead”. It begins “Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling”, and anyone who knows the end of the story will hear it.
“On the Beach at Fontana”, Trieste, 1914. A father wrapping a boy against the wind and cold sea, with a fear he cannot name. To my ear this is the best poem Joyce wrote.
“Bahnhofstrasse”, Zurich, 1918. The city’s main street and an ageing man’s eyes. Joyce’s sight was already failing by then.
“A Prayer”, Paris, 1924. A last, dark love poem of surrender, more frightened than tender.

The language is also moving towards the later prose. Compounds such as “moongrey” and “sindark” are small trial runs for the portmanteaux of the Wake, and “Tutto è sciolto” takes its title from Bellini’s La sonnambula, the aria that returns in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses as “All is lost now”. In 1932 a special edition appeared with lettering by Joyce and illuminations by Lucia, in only twenty-five copies, a late and sad collaboration between father and daughter.

The composers

Joyce hoped the first book would be set: “pretty enough to be put to music”, he told Stanislaus, by someone who knew old English song. Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer started at once, with Joyce’s encouragement, and set thirty-two of the thirty-six. Pound also thought the poems scarcely existed until imagined as song, and he said so in 1918. Samuel Barber’s Three Songs, Op. 10 (1936) use “Rain has fallen”, “Sleep now” and “I hear an army”, and they are probably the settings best known to singers. Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair” on The Madcap Laughs (1970) sets “Lean out of the window”.

The Joyce Book (Sylvan Press, 1933), edited by Herbert Hughes, gave one poem of Pomes Penyeach to each of thirteen composers in a limited edition of five hundred copies. They include Arnold Bax, E. J. Moeran, Albert Roussel, John Ireland, Roger Sessions, Herbert Howells and George Antheil, a remarkable roster for a book its reviewers had almost ignored. The settings go on: Fire Records released all thirty-six poems of Chamber Music by contemporary acts in 2008, and Brian Byrne’s Goldenhair followed in 2017.

Readers and critics

Yeats called “I hear an army” a technical and emotional masterpiece, and it was that poem that reached Pound, who printed it in his anthology Des Imagistes and so began his long campaign for Joyce. Pound also praised the “delicate temperament” of the earlier lyrics. Sales were small, with fewer than half of the first printing of five hundred gone in the first year. Critics since have mostly treated the poems as footnotes to the prose, though Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes put “Tilly”, “On the beach at Fontana” and “A flower given to my daughter” in The Rattle Bag (1982), which is about as fair a verdict as they are likely to receive.

How to read them

Both are free. Both books are out of copyright in the United States and the European Union. Project Gutenberg #2817 has Chamber Music, and Standard Ebooks has both books together with “Gas from a Burner”. Wikisource also has Pomes Penyeach. Since each poem takes a minute, read them there rather than here.
Read aloud or not at all. Chamber Music makes no sense silently and at speed.
Read the second book first. Then the earlier one will seem like a promise instead of a disappointment.
Find a recording. Barber’s songs are a good place to begin.
For notes, use an edition. J. C. C. Mays’s Poems and Exiles (Penguin, 1992) is annotated and has the later poems, including “Ecce Puer”.