Catherine Eisner: Alliteration

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificial hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous grace, divine of limb.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

‘With languorous look and lavish limb!’ (?)

Yes, you’re right, of course, the antepenultimate line that James Joyce wrote (aged 18 years?), in his Villanelle of the Temptress, was, indeed, ‘With languorous look and lavish limb!’; an infelicity that jars, especially with calorie-counting readers expecting his aesthetic to match a more archetypal Hellenic ideal of beauty.

In other words, the Muse that young Joyce intended to invoke was, we must believe, surely not a divinity in the image of a prehistoric earth-mother-goddess with bloated hips whose over-burdened flesh of loose corpulence resembles layers of molten candle wax. Or did he mean by ‘lavish limb’ to advert to a certain ‘largeness of gesture’, which for some is held to be a defining characteristic of Irishness?

Brazen tweaks.
Whatever the case, the liberties I have taken with the verse to mitigate my own obsessive-compulsive neuroses are not excessively brazen when you consider the immaturity of the celebrated versifier and, perhaps, Joyce’s conscious intention to mock his own nascent counter-cultural revaluation since his villanelle appears in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published more than a decade later (1915), following the passage where Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce’s literary alter ego) propounds his modernist aesthetic philosophy.

His mature revisionism we must assume would have shunned such classic prosodic forms as the villanelle, as indeed such swooning fin de siècle Swinburnian accentual tics as Alliteration and the Parallel Syntax to be found in the echoes of contiguous phrases (ardent ways/enchanted days), which I have attempted to replicate in longing gaze/languorous grace.

Repeat offender.

One further transgression recorded in this Discipline Report from my Bowdler Correctional Facility should be mentioned: the reduplication of the adjectival participle -ing (sacrificing hands upraise/The chalice flowing) within the span of one sentence. For the perpetration of this ill-advised inelegance the perp has received counselling under new measures for improvement (i.e. the change from sacrificing to sacrificial is deservedly an advance towards reformation).

It is true that Joyce’s fellow countryman, Yeats (whom he venerated), regarded the younger poet’s lyrics as somewhat clichéd and a ‘little thin’ though undoubtedly worthy in their command of poetic form.

As I have commented elsewhere, Aldous Huxley remarks in an iconoclastic vein: ‘There are slightly reckless good poets, and there are good poets who, at times, are extremely reckless . . .’ He then cites the conclusion of Yeats’s Byzantium to illustrate the ‘recklessness’ of his proposition: ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

It follows, then, that the callow verses of Yeats’s disciple should be similarly held to account as, even, a species of kitsch. ‘And still you hold our longing gaze/With languorous look and lavish limb!’

Is this, we wonder, the moment when the gong-tormented tin-eared versifier is called out for an audacious musical effect that does not quite ‘come off’, as our idiom bluntly has it. I welcome your views . . . Oh! Is that the bell?

Well, never mind. Class dismissed.

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