PROTEUS

The Homeric title of the Episode is quite applicable – Proteus, the shape shifter, is reminiscent of the shifting of Stephen’s thoughts. Proteus is also called “the old man of the sea” and Stephen’s thoughts are generated and spurned by things he sees as he walks along the shore.

Proteus, so far, is my favorite episode. The way in which Joyce interweaves Stephen’s daydreaming with reality is seamless and compelling. What makes this steam of consciousness/unconsciousness sound cohesive is Joyce’s use of descriptive images. Several of them jumped out at me because they are so unconventional and yet translate an exact impression to the reader: the “two crucified shirts” on the clothesline, the “lemon houses” turned golden in the sun and the “molten pewter surf” of the sea. These instances seem poetic in intent because Joyce is presenting us with banal images that are enlivened and given new meanings through his descriptions.

Elsinore is also referenced again in this episode: “My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon’s midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood.” Elsinore, in this case, represents a sort of unavoidable reality or calling. At this point Stephen snaps out of his thoughts and is brought back to his surroundings only to notice a “bloated carcass of a dog lolled on the bladderwrack.” When Elsinore was referenced earlier by Haines: “I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as the followed, this tower and these cliffs remind me somehow of Elsinore” it causes Stephen to see “his own image in cheap and dusty mourning between their gay attires.” This parallels what Stephen says about “form of forms” and the idea that he is shifting shapes and constantly unsure of his form.

NESTOR

The Nestor Episode offers up another character that is fundamentally different than Stephen: Mr. Deasy. Unlike Buck who is young and strapping, Deasy is old and I think, in some ways jealous of Stephen (despite all of his apparent short-comings.) Deasy takes pleasure in lecturing Stephen and makes a little show when it is time to pay him with his leather purse and placing his payment on ceremoniously on the table. “He brought out of his coat a poketbook bound by a leather thong. It slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and laid them carefully on the table.” This is another way in which these to men differ: money. Deasy is meticulous and obsessed with it while Stephen could really care less. Deasy preaches to Stephen about getting a little machine like his in order to keep his money safe and Stephen replies with, “Mine would often be empty.” In the Telemachus Episode we learn that Stephen is the one who pays for the rent, milk and trips to the Ship and doesn’t really even think much about it. In fact, after he is paid he refers to the “lump in his pocket” as “symbols soiled by greed and misery.”

The scene in which Deasy asks Stephen to take his letter about diseased cattle to get it printed is telling of Deasy’s character. He wishes to still be influential in someway and the best way he can think of is through this letter. For some reason I associate this act with aging – still wanting to be heard while you influence is waning. Perhaps this is because I feel like writing a letter like this is something my grandmother would do – a form of assertion and proof that he is still capable.

telemachus

What I found striking about the first book in Ulysses is that it begins with Buck Mulligan. Joyce opens with a figure that is hulking and of heroic stature, and yet he is not our hero – he is the foil for Stephen Daedalus the meek and insecure anti-hero. This false start is clearly modern in what it achieves. On one hand it harkens back to the classic, to the Odyssey, because it begins in the middle of things. However, when we realize that this is not the intended protagonist within the story the rug gets pulled out from underneath us. By structuring the beginning of his epic in this way Joyce further underscores Stephen’s apparent ineptness as a hero.

As to why this section is given the title of Telemachus may also be modernist in its intent. In the Odyssey Telemachus is Odysseus’s son who is born just before Odysseus is called to war. This idea of father and son and of lineage arises in Ulysses when Buck Mulligan jokes by saying “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” Later on in the conversation Haines goes on to say, “The Father and the Son idea. The son striving to be atoned with the father.” That is to say that perhaps Stephen is a “descendant” of the ultimate hero and therefore diluted and removed from greatness. Or maybe it is even Joyce commenting on his attempt to modernize the classic epic and atone, somehow, with Homer,

QUESTIONS:

-Money permeates the first book – what role does it play in defining the relationships between characters? And will it continue to be a prevalent image throughout the rest of the books?
- Is Joyce attempting to create a new form of poetics or is he pursuing a modernist narrative?

sing whatever is well made

In reading this last collection of Yeats’s poems I have begun to focus on how he connects music with the poet and how that relationship is often times burdened. Burdened either by an audience or the sense of a certain responsibility. This responsibility is evidenced in ‘Under Ben Bulben’ when Yeats writes, “Irish poets learn your trade Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.” In this particular section the voice of the poem is telling poets to write of past greatness and “cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.”

In ‘Lapis Lazuli’ Yeats opens with, “I have heard that hysterical women say they are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, of poets that are always gay.” There seems to be something ineffectual about the poet especially in times of turbulent Irish history; poets are no longer lauded for their art (like Homer) but seen as superfluous. Throughout the course of this poem, as Yeats reflects on the carving, there is a longing in its tone to be one of those three Chinese men who, in the end, are immortalized in the stone with their easy made “glittering” and “gay” by “mournful melodies.”

Images of music and singing are prevalent in ‘Sailing to Byzantium.” In this poem music (poetry) enlivens the past but the ancient monuments themselves served as the genesis for the poem. Yeats evokes the sages like the muse and says, “O sages standing in God’s holy fire as in the gold mosaic of the wall, come from the holy fire, perne in gyre, and be the singing masters of my soul.” He begs them to take him from the earth so that he may reborn not in the “form of any natural thing” but to be “set upon a golden bough to sing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, passing, or to come.”

endurance

What I find most intriguing about Yeats’s poems from The Tower are his references to mythology and empire. These nods to the past, though at times appear disjointed in certain poems are also appropriate in light his transformation as a poet. Ellmann asserts Yeats’s later years as a poet is a result of his complex and mystical belief in the different phases of the human soul and his desire to reconcile the four main antinomies that form the world. Yeats believed that time in which he was living was nearing its peak of objectivity, which would then cycle into subjectivity. These ideas also play into Yeats’s obsession with aging and the afterlife.

Meditation on enduring images from the past reveals a certain preoccupation with the immortal – things that have not deteriorated over time. Yeats mentions both preservation and deterioration (“loosening masonry”, “cracked masonry”.) But unlike his earlier poems, which view aging with a certain fear, this fear seems to be quelled by the hope of his words enduring after his death, like those of Chaucer and Homer. However at the same time his own doubt surfaces through imagery of the inadequacy of stone and more explicitly when he says, “my works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”

QUESTIONS:

SWANS

On the surface Yeats’s poems in The Wild Swans at Coole suggest that his relationship with nature has began to fissure in some way. It seems the optimism and wonder he once held for nature as evidenced in Seven Woods has transformed into feelings of desertion. In this collections namesake Yeats writes, “I have looked upon those brilliant creatures and now my heart is sore. All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, the first time on this shore.” From this I gather that nature has shown Yeats how he has changed and he is subsequently saddened by it. How is it that “their hearts have not grown old,” but his has? Yeats envies the swans and their ability to remain true to their partner (swans choose a mate and stick with them for their entire life) and “attend upon them still” with a heart unchanged by outside circumstances.

‘Lines Written in Dejection’ follows a similar theme. Its title says it all: dejection. Yeats is again the solitary observer (“when have I last looked on…”) who has been left out and left behind and age seems to have something to do with it. “And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.” The moon has left him with only the sun and taken with he a sense of wonder and magic (the witches and centaurs.) This poem suggests to me that with age, Yeats has discovered that he does not have the same optimistic views of nature as he did when he was younger – but desperately wants to return tot hat state of mind.

QUESTIONS
- Is it Yeats’s age that was cause for his changing perspective on nature or was there a significant event in his personal life that lead to these changes?
- There is a lot of imagery of things “vanishing” in this collection – how does this create a mood that differs from Seven Woods?