Goldenhair:
This is the first poem of Joyce that caught my attention. I was browsing through the Childrens' section of a bookshop, many years ago (I was 19 or 20), with an eye out for a nice book to bring home to my young sisters, when I came across this poem, attributed to one James Joyce, in a book of Childrens' Poems. I liked the poem and bought the book. Later, I researched the matter and found that it was, indeed, written by the famous James Joyce, and included in his first book: a collection of poems Chamber Music, published in 1907. This little poem has strong rhythm, like a children's rhyme, and I soon found myself rattling off a tune for it on the tin whistle.
Another James Joyce creation that I found in a bookshop around that time was The Cat and the Devil, which my siblings and also the next generation of Killeens also greatly enjoyed.
I Hear an Army
This poem described a dream had by the young James Joyce. Perhaps it was an early premonition of the coming World War, like Carl Jung's dream-premonition of the Second World War. W. B. Yeats sent a copy of Chamber Music, (which did not earn Joyce any royalties, but cost him money), to Ezra Pound in America. Ezra was the founder of a new poetic movement, The Imagists. He proclaimed that poetry was not about rhythm and rhyme, but about presenting Images. This poem of Joyce is strong on images and was selected by Pound for inclusion in the Imagist Anthology (1914). This was the first solid step in Joyce's literary career. Becauses of this, he became known as one, or even the leader, of the modernist literary avant-garde, a reputation that made it easier to get Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist published, to get substantial financial backing, and that liberated him to take on the revolutionary styles that emerged in Ulysses and Finegan's Wake.
Bid Adieu to Girlish Days
James Joyce, himself, wrote an air to this poem. In fact, even though he considered the entire collection of poems in Chamber Music as suitable to be put to music, this is the only one for which he published an air himself. You can hear it here:
Bid Adieu by Joyce
His treatment is different to mine. He places it in the Classical Music tradition, whereas mine has a simple melody, reminiscent of a folk song or children's song.
Bid Adieu by Joyce
His treatment is different to mine. He places it in the Classical Music tradition, whereas mine has a simple melody, reminiscent of a folk song or children's song.