James Joyce’s poem “Tutto è Sciolto” appeared in the May, 1917 issue of Poetry.
Beautiful. That line I excerpted calls to mind the final four paragraphs of The Dead.
Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
The word “falling” appears 7 times there. On the face of it, it seems like that would be WAY too much. It breaks all the rules. But that’s why it is so brilliant.
And there it is again in the poem. Falling. Falleth.
Joyce was overrated.
We have a little family tradition of saying so-and-so is overrated. The idea is it has to be someone who is inarguably anything but overrated. Such as–Meryl Streep is overrated, Jack Nicklaus is overrated, Da Vinci is overrated, and so on. Thus, Joyce.
Michelangelo was such a hack.
Don’t know if he was a hack, but unquestionably overrated.
Hi Sheila,
Reading Joyce’s early poems can be both tantalizing and frustrating, because they seem so slight, sugary sentimentality in contrast to the later revolutionary prose, the work of a young man who had not yet discovered that he would only be a very minor Pre-Raphaelite but could instead be a major modernist. And yet they always leave me wondering if I really have seen all there is to see. Joyce himself never quite abandoned them, and there are modifications subsequent to Ulysses that seem to have been made with Ulysses in mind.
I think you are right to point to the parallel to The Dead. Another parallel can be made to the Sirens episode. “Tutto e Sciolto” means “All is lost,” and it is a quotation from Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker). Bloom recollects this opera as he and Goulding dine together, and he imagines a parallel between Molly’s infidelity and the deception of Elvino’s wife in Bellini’s opera. Notice the repetition of “All is lost” in the following passage.
“Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee murmured: all…. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there…. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled. Fall, surrender, lost…. Yes, I remember. Lovely air. In sleep she went to him. Innocence in the moon. Still hold her back. Brave, don’t know their danger. Call name. Touch water. Jingle jaunty. Too late. She longed to go. That’s why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost.
– A beautiful air, said Bloom lost Leopold. I know it well.”
This passage does not require knowledge of the poem to explicate it, but Joyce’s later revision of the poem, in which he made a change quoting from the opera Martha, another musical reference in Sirens, appears to be a deliberate effort to link the poem to Sirens, to make us think of Sirens when we read it.
So what is Joyce driving at with this poem? What did it mean to him? Why did he make a revision that suggests that he regarded it as part of his mature work, an opinion that none of his critics have shared?
That is what is so tantalizing and frustrating to me about these poems. I don’t know how to answer those questions.
Bryan – really nice to hear from you again!! Thank you for your awesome comment. I did not at all make the connection with the Sirens episode – that is awesome. I agree with you about Joyce’s poetry – it’s strangely flimsy, you can’t believe it’s the same guy who wrote Finnegans Wake and the others. Perhaps it’s sentimental? That’s the word? It’s lovely – but somehow – like cotton candy – it doesn’t really stick with you.
And yes: the poems appear to look BACK to earlier forms, earlier 19th century voices – nothing there that is in any way modern. That was all saved for the prose.
Again, thanks for the comment.
Hi Sheila,
“Bryan – really nice to hear from you again!!” Thank you very much for saying that! It has been a long time since I have commented (maybe even a few years now!), but I have been following your blog the whole time.
I actually have recently been meaning to write to you, because a long time ago I wrote a comment on your blog smacking down John Ashbery in comparison to Wallace Stevens, and my thoughts on Ashbery have changed. I’ll probably never love his work as much as I love Stevens’, but I now realize that he is a lot better than I used to think he is, and I have been thinking that I should not let my former criticism of him stand without retraction.
Your statement, “the poems appear to look BACK to earlier forms, earlier 19th century voices,” got me thinking about the tradition that Joyce was emerging out of. The term “Pre-Raphaelite” as applied to poetry is usually associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, and perhaps Meredith to a lesser extent, but there was a similar movement in Irish verse that strongly affected both Joyce and Yeats. (Yeats indeed said that he began “in all things Pre-Raphaelite.”) Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson are the most remembered of those Irish poets, although they are remembered mostly by Joyce and Yeats fanatics tracking down sources.
I personally have not yet learned to appreciate Dowson, but Johnson is better than is often acknowledged, and Joyce would have agreed passionately with that judgment. In fact, I seem to recall that Joyce got in a public disagreement with Yeats over who had “discovered” Johnson first. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to document that and would probably have to spend part of an afternoon in the local university library to find the source.
That is all to say that there existed this context of Irish Pre-Raphaelitism, and both Joyce and Yeats started in it, and then they broke with it, and the conventional wisdom is that Yeats broke with it regretfully, deciding to walk naked and to restrict himself to the pleasures of irony, whereas Joyce’s break was more thorough and complete, a turn toward modernism with no looking back.
Yeats described that turn as part of the overall culture, “In 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church.”
I have long considered a certain passage from Proteus to be Joyce’s announcement of his turn. The passage centers around the poem by Stephen Daedalus that we get to read in Aeolus.
On swift sail flaming
From storm and south
He comes, pale vampire,
Mouth to my mouth.
Here we have Stephen as a minor Irish Pre-Raphaelite, in this case almost blatantly imitating Lionel Johnson’s weird and lurid Baudelairean Satanic Catholicism.
In Proteus, Joyce gives us this as the genesis of the poem.
“A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.
Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss. No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth’s kiss.
His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayaway.”
Here Joyce almost seems to triumph in his superiority over the literary achievements of the Irish “lost generation,” placing the birth of Stephen’s lyric in the context of such eloquent language and expanded vision as to make Stephen’s finished verse seem weak an insignificant in comparison.
It is almost as if Joyce is saying, this is the difference between me and Stephen, between me and the lost generation, between me and the Pre-Raphaelites. Perhaps even between me and Yeats.
That is what I tend to think of as the conventional wisdom about Joyce’s relationship to his immediate Irish precursors, and I have found that view persuasive for a long time.
And yet, and yet… those early poems continue to bug me, with their seeming slightness but also with their ambiguities, their sexual revelations, and their occasional hints that there is more meant than meets the ear. They sometimes make me think that Joyce never quite let go of the Pre-Raphaelitism in which he started.
Just a few late night Joyce thoughts… It’s been fun to think about these things again.
// They sometimes make me think that Joyce never quite let go of the Pre-Raphaelitism in which he started.//
This is absolutely fascinating to me. Thank you for your perspective. I was not aware of the battle-royale between Yeats and Joyce over these two poets – although I am sure Ellmann covers it in both biographies he wrote about the two men, yes? I’ll have to dig a little deeper – this is really interesting to me.
Hi Sheila,
To tell you the truth, I don’t remember where I read about Joyce’s claim to have discovered Johnson. Ellmann might mention it, but I think I also read about it elsewhere. It would take a trip to the university library, which may not happen for several days, but I’ll send you an email if I dig up anything.
Bryan – speaking of pre-Raphaelites, what was Joyce’s feeling about Oscar Wilde? I can’t recall him saying anything about Wilde and Wilde’s sort of continental decadent outlook, the aesthetic outlook. All of Yeats’s qualifications for the 1900 poet could describe Wilde, not to mention his deathbed conversion to Catholicism, which had haunted him for years. To his parents, becoming a Catholic would probably be worse than being a homosexual!!
Fascinated by this whole Anglo-Irish culture, in general.
Hi Sheila,
Interesting question… I actually don’t know what Joyce thought of Wilde. In fact, I can only recall two references to Wilde, from Telemachus.
“Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen’s peering eyes.
— The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you.
Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:
— It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.”
The allusion is to Wilde’s remark, “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.”
The second passage from Telemachus is the following.
“– You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?
— Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”
I suspect there must be more references to Wilde that I am not remembering, but those are the only ones I can recall at the moment. It is interesting that both are spoken by Buck Mulligan, who appears to aspire to Wilde’s wit whenever we see him.
Hmmmm. Good stuff.
I’m very curious.