New Light on Lyric XXXVI in Joyce’s Chamber Music: The Influences of Paul Gregan and James Clarence Mangan

This investigation derives from comments by Richard Ellmann about the composition of the final lyric in Joyce’s Chamber Music (1907). I explore his idea that not only the work of W. B. Yeats but also a poem, “Recreant,” by the now-obscure theosophist poet Paul Gregan may have played a shaping role. The Gregan poem is presented in full, analyzed, and compared to Joyce’s lyric XXXVI, “I hear an army.” Gregan’s clear debt to “A Lament for the Tyronian and Tyrconnellian Princes Buried at Rome” by James Clarence Mangan is discussed as another potential source for Joyce’s lyric. Mangan’s poem concerns Ireland’s political subordination, and Gregan’s reflects issues related to the freedom of the artist in the midst of national turmoil. Seeing elements of these poems in lyric XXXVI weakens the link to the largely apolitical Yeatsian source and extends the lyric’s concerns to later Joycean themes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and “Eveline.”