Chamber Music

James Joyce

• Publisher: Ragged Hand - Read & Co.
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781447470281
• eBook ISBN: 9781473395824
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Chamber Music is James Joyce's debut collection of poetry, thirty-six lyrical, delicately wrought verses that reveal a softer, more musical side of one of modernism's most celebrated authors.

Though often overshadowed by his later novels, Chamber Music offers a unique window into Joyce's early artistic sensibility. Written in his early twenties, these poems reflect themes of love, longing, and youthful introspection, composed with the elegance and precision that would later shape his revolutionary prose. The collection's musicality, evident in its title and rhythm, draws on classical and Elizabethan influences, yet its emotional nuance and understated complexity point forward to the innovation of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.

First published in 1907, Chamber Music is a hidden gem in Joyce's oeuvre, and an elegant testament to the lyrical beginnings of a literary master.

CHAMBER MUSIC

I

Strings in the earth and air

Make music sweet;

Strings by the river where

The willows meet.

There’s music along the river

For Love wanders there,

Pale flowers on his mantle,

Dark leaves on his hair.

All softly playing,

With head to the music bent,

And fingers straying

Upon an instrument.

II

The twilight turns from amethyst

To deep and deeper blue,

The lamp fills with a pale green glow

The trees of the avenue.

The old piano plays an air,

Sedate and slow and gay;

She bends upon the yellow keys,

Her head inclines this way.

Shy thought and grave wide eyes and hands

That wander as they list—

The twilight turns to darker blue

With lights of amethyst.

III

At that hour when all things have repose,

O lonely watcher of the skies,

Do you hear the night wind and the sighs

Of harps playing unto Love to unclose

The pale gates of sunrise?

When all things repose, do you alone

Awake to hear the sweet harps play

To Love before him on his way,

And the night wind answering in antiphon

Till night is overgone?

Play on, invisible harps, unto Love,

Whose way in heaven is aglow

At that hour when soft lights come and go,

Soft sweet music in the air above

And in the earth below.

IV

When the shy star goes forth in heaven

All maidenly, disconsolate,

Hear you amid the drowsy even

One who is singing by your gate.

His song is softer than the dew

And he is come to visit you.

O bend no more in revery

When he at eventide is calling.

Nor muse: Who may this singer be

Whose song about...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• James Joyce
• Chamber Music