The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered

9. Bleeding from the “Torn Bough”: Challenging Nature in James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach

9 Bleeding from the “Torn Bough” Challenging Nature in James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach Jefferson Holdridge Any essay on JamesJoyce’spoetry,evenoneinacollectionthatisdevotedto it, still must answer the question, why the poetry? Perhaps even more specifically , why the lyrics, which have always been viewed as slighter than the satires? I have argued elsewhere that it is the lyric moment, the epiphany, that proved as important, if not more important, to author and reader as the satirical voice. The simplicity of Joyce’s best lyric poems is central to his aesthetic project as a whole. One may rightly criticize Joyce for being too slight, but one must remember that this is a self-conscious end, a style, that, when matched to a theme, proved justified (see Holdridge 229–47). Such a stylistic choice moved the Nobel Prize winner and hermetic Italian poet Eugenio Montale to translate two poems from Pomes Penyeach, a collection of poetry that will be the main text of the subsequent discussion. An argumentfortheimportanceofJoyce ’slyricsispartofwhatfollowshere,butthis essayparticularlyaimstoexaminetheroleoflandscapeandnatureinJoyce’s poetry; hence the later parallels with Montale, one of the great modernist poets of landscape and nature in the twentieth century. The sky, mountains, and the sea constitute the beauty and terror that pervade myth and folklore. Both Joyce and Montale try to capture those forces and our aesthetic reactions to them, without necessarily resorting back to mythtoexplainthem,althoughbothdobringinCatholiciconography.Like Montale’s, Joyce’s poetry relies on landscape and nature to give meaning, whereas his prose resorts to characterization and other narrative and epic structures, leavinglandscapeasanimportantbackground.Voice,landscape, 188 · Jefferson Holdridge and nature (that foreign element, the uncanny other) may be said to be the primary players in the poems. If nature reminds Joyce of exile and suffering in the image of the “torn bough,” then landscape provides the common ground for love and escape in these poems. Often lost and seeking a lodestar , the speakers (and listeners) implied in the poem must first confront their sense of being lost and then must reinterpret the traditional nostalgia for home in order to discover what home really means. With that, they must also discover how to define their sense of family and nation. Responding to the pastoral meditations of the Irish Renaissance, Joyce describes an urban pastoral to show how the pastoral myth excludes the city dweller, and also to illustrate how the land has been a sign of exclusion for the Irish. In its prehistorical form, nature tells us as much about Irish experience as does the deeply historicized Irish landscape. One must enlarge the question to enclose the question of family, self, and home if one is to find forgiveness in nature. The amorous ambitions of the poems, full of betrayal and the sense of sin, combine with their national significance to place Joyce within the tradition of Irish landscape writing in which original sin, Irish society, and nature are inextricable. In response to the insistent surfacing of the political roots of landscape, to the traces of conquest showing through the palimpsest of history, which distinguishes the work of Catholic and Protestant writers (though from different perspectives), Estyn Evans rightly says, “Geographers are not alone in stressing the significance of habitat and heritage in the shaping of the human experience. True, we might well be spared the facile couplings of Irish mistandCelticmystery,ofblackbasaltsandblackPresbyterians,creameries and dreameries, or indeed, you may add, of poverty and poetry, drums and drumlins” (88). The critical (as opposed to the creative) presence in Irish nature might nevertheless be said to be largely Irish Protestant or English and American, despite all attempts to avoid the signaling of political and social affiliations. Michael Viney, the nature columnist for the Irish Times, is an Englishman, as is Tim Robinson, author of important recent work on the Aran Islands. Robert Lloyd Praeger, Northern Irish Protestant and author of The Way I Went, is considered the father of Irish nature writing, while Estyn Evans, author of numerous classic books on Irish folklore and geography , was born in Shrewsbury of Welsh parentage. Yet Evans insists, “the manners and habits of a people exist in nature, as a function of place” (88). Challenging Nature in James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach · 189 InIrish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature(Dublin, 2005),American-bornOonaFrawleyforthemostpartavoidstacklingthese sectarian questions directly (as they rightly raise hackles in Irish studies), even though they remain implicit in many of her observations (for example, in the distinctions between...