Chamber Music by James Joyce: book review

Chamber Music (1907, this edition 2014) is a collection of 36 short poems, written before the novels that James Joyce is most noted for, such as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939). None of the poems are titled; they are merely given a number.

In this poetry collection, James Joyce (1882-1941) writes of music, nature, and the love of both, while dreaming of a woman, with romantic rhymes: I have left my book,/I have left my room, For I heard you singing,/Through the gloom (poem 5-Goldenhair). And: Love came to us in time gone by/When one at twilight shyly played/And one in fear was standing nigh--/For Love at first is all afraid (poem 30-Grave Lovers). [The titles are mine.]

Throughout all 36 poems, Joyce uses the standard ballad stanza, where every second and fourth lines rhyme. Without fail.

Joyce is 25 years old, and in a letter to his brother Stanislaus, he wrote that the book of poetry is a ‘young man’s book’ and that the poems are not love poems, but ‘some of them are pretty enough to be put to music’ – which they were in 2008 and again last year in 2017.

I’d describe the collection as a set of whimsical poems, probably written while lazing in a meadow watching the birds and trees, and listening to the breeze. Nothing profound, nor gloomy, but light and hopeful.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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