The quality and distinction of the poems in the first half of Mr. Joyce's "Chamber Music" (new edition, published by Elkin Mathews, 4A, Cork Street, W.1, at 1_s_. 3_d_.) is due in part to their author's strict musical training. We have here the lyric in some of its best traditions, and one pardons certain trifling inversions, much against the taste of the moment, for the sake of the cleancut ivory finish, and for the interest of the rhythms, the cross run of the beat and the word, as of a stiff wind cutting the ripple-tops of bright water.
The wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times suggesting Herrick, but in no case have I been able to find a poem which is not in some way Joyce's own, even though he would seem, and that most markedly, to shun apparent originality, as in:
Who goes amid the green wood With springtide all adorning her? Who goes amid the merry green wood To make it merrier?
Who passes in the sunlight By ways that know the light footfall? Who passes in the sweet sunlight With mien so virginal?
The ways of all the woodland Gleam with a soft and golden fire-- For whom does all the sunny woodland Carry so brave attire?
O, it is for my true love The woods their rich apparel wear-- O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.
Here, as in nearly every poem, the motif is so slight that the poem scarcely exists until one thinks of it as set to music; and the workmanship is so delicate that out of twenty readers scarce one will notice its fineness. If Henry Lawes were alive again he might make the suitable music, for the cadence is here worthy of his cunning:
O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.
The musician's work is very nearly done for him, and yet how few song-setters could be trusted to finish it and to fill in an accompaniment.
The tone of the book deepens with the poem beginning:
O sweetheart, hear you Your lover's tale; A man shall have sorrow When friends him fail.
For he shall know then Friends be untrue; And a little ashes Their words come to.
The collection comes to its end and climax in two profoundly emotional poems; quite different in tonality and in rhythm-quality, from the lyrics in the first part of the book:--
All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan, Sad as the sea-bird is, when going Forth alone, He hears the wind cry to the waters' Monotone.