The Soft, the Sweet, and Bloom

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 13, Summer 2002© 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 These include the enveloping tale of a love whose peak in a pristine setting steadily goes downhill, the menacing presence of a male other, insistent engagement with music, deft phonic exuberance, recondite allusive practice, and the parodic handling of inherited form. 2 I use the term lexeme in the elementary sense that Lyons gives in Linguistic Semantics: “The expressions of a language fall into two sets. One set, finite in number, is made up of lexically simple expressions: lexemes. . . . [T]hey are the vocabulary-units of a language, out of which the members of the second set, lexically composite expressions, are constructed by means of the grammatical (i.e., syntactic and morphological) rules of the language.” See John Lyons, Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 50 –51. The Soft, the Sweet, and Bloom JEFFEREY SIMONS Chamber Music prefigures Ulysses in multiple ways.1 I explore the sweeping breadth and narrow precision of lexical selection to see how the lexemes soft and sweet2 abound in Chamber Music and, having rearisen in moments of epiphanic awareness in “The Dead” and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reach a fleeting freshness in Ulysses . Joyce’s repertoire and habits of modification should thus stand in a new light. Soft sweet music in the air The second rhyme in the stanza setting Chamber Music in motion— Strings in the earth and air Make music sweet; Strings by the river where The willows meet (CP 9)— echoingly initiates the occurrence of sweet in the sequence; the closing stanza to the same lyric— 04-T2429 9/13/02 12:07 PM Page 86 jefferey simons 87 3 William Empson, tracing the textual fortunes and 612 instances of all in Paradise Lost, finds the word “repeated obtrusively.” See William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 101. 4 The full inventory of lyrics with soft and/or sweet includes I, III, IV, VI, VIII, X, XI, XII, XV, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXII, XXVI, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, and XXXIII. All softly playing, With head to the music bent, And fingers straying Upon an instrument (CP 9)— initiates the affix-altered incidence of soft. The two lexemes thereafter arise with suspicious, even obtrusive, insistence as the sequence unfolds.3 Once in motion, the suite includes the two terms, either together or alone, in 17 of the 35 lyrics to follow.4 Total occurrences number 41, comprising 24 of sweet and 17 of soft. Incidence is highest in VI, alone bearing six largely parallel instances, three in each of its two quintains: I would in that sweet bosom be (O sweet it is and fair it is!) Where no rude wind might visit me. Because of sad austerities I would in that sweet bosom be. I would be ever in that heart (O soft I knock and soft entreat her!) Where only peace would be my part. Austerities were all the sweeter So I were ever in that heart. (CP 14, emphases added here and in all subsequent quotations) Closely clustered elsewhere, the two lexemes likewise appear syntactically aligned or in line-contiguous proximity at the close to III —“. . . when soft lights come and go, / Soft sweet music in the air above / And in the earth below” (CP 11)—and in two quatrains of poem XX: How sweet to lie there, Sweet to kiss, Where the great pine forest Enaisled is! 04-T2429 9/13/02 12:07 PM Page 87 88 the soft, the sweet, and bloom 5 Northrop Frye coined the plausibility-principle when tracing “an associative rhetorical process, most of it below the threshold of consciousness, a chaos of paronomasia, sound-links, ambiguous sense-links, and memory-links very like that of the dream. Out of this the distinctively lyrical union of sound and sense emerges. Like the dream, verbal association is subject to a censor, which (or whom) we may call the ‘plausibility principle,’ the necessity of shaping itself into a form acceptable to the poet’s and his reader’s waking consciousness...