Complete Works of James Joyce (324 page)

In the soft nightfa
l
l

In the soft nightfall

Hear thy lover call,

Hearken the guitar!

Lady, lady fair

Snatch a cloak in haste,

Let thy lover taste

The sweetness of thy hair.

Discarded, broken in t
w
o

Discarded, broken in two.

Sing to mine ear, O rain,

Thine ultimate melody;

That the dearest loss is gain

In a holier treasury;

That a passionate cry in the night

For a woman, hidden and pale,

The Holy Offi
c
e

Myself unto myself will give

This name Katharsis-Purgative.

I, who dishevelled ways forsook

To hold the poets’ grammar-book,

Bringing to tavern and to brothel

The mind of witty Aristotle,

Lest bards in the attempt should err

Must here be my interpreter:

Wherefore receive now from my lip

Peripatetic scholarship.

To enter heaven, travel hell,

Be piteous or terrible

One positively needs the ease,

Of plenary indulgences.

For every true-born mysticist

A Dante is, unprejudiced,

Who safe at ingle-nook, by proxy,

Hazards extremes of heterodoxy

Like him who finds a joy at table,

Pondering the uncomfortable.

Ruling one’s life by common sense

How can one fail to be intense?

But I must not accounted be

One of that mumming company —

With him who hies him to appease

His giddy dames’ frivolities

While they console him when he whinges

With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes —

Or him who sober all the day

Mixes a naggin in his play —

Or him whose conduct ‘seems to own’,

His preference for a man of ‘tone’ —

Or him who plays the rugged patch

To millionaires in Hazelhatch

But weeping after holy fast

Confesses all his pagan past —

Or him who will his hat unfix

Neither to malt nor crucifix

But show to all that poor-dressed be

His high Castilian courtesy —

Or him who loves his Master dear —

Or him who drinks his pint in fear -

Or him who once when snug abed

Saw Jesus Christ without his head

And tried so hard to win for us

The long-lost works of Eschylus.

But all these men of whom I speak

Make me the sewer of their clique.

That they may dream their dreamy dreams

I carry off their filthy streams

For I can do those things for them

Through which I lost my diadem,

Those things for which Grandmother Church

Left me severely in the lurch.

Thus I relieve their timid arses,

Perform my office of Katharsis.

My scarlet leaves them white as wool

Through me they purge a bellyful.

To sister mummers one and all

I act as vicar-general

And for each maiden, shy and nervous,

I do a similar kind service.

For I detect without surprise

That shadowy beauty in her eyes,

The ‘dare not’ of sweet maidenhood

That answers my corruptive ‘would’.

Whenever publicly we meet

She never seems to think of it;

At night when close in bed she lies

And feels my hand between her thighs

My little love in light attire

Knows the soft flame that is desire.

But Mammon places under ban

The uses of Leviathan

And that high spirit ever wars

On Mammon’s countless servitors

Nor can they ever be exempt

From his taxation of contempt.

So distantly I turn to view

The shamblings of that motley crew,

Those souls that hate the strength that mine has

Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.

Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed

I stand the self-doomed, unafraid,

Unfellowed, friendless and alone,

Indifferent as the herring-bone,

Firm as the mountain-ridges where

I flash my antlers on the air.

Let them continue as is meet

To adequate the balance-sheet.

Though they may labour to the grave

My spirit shall they never have

Nor make my soul with theirs at one

Till the Mahamanvantara be done:

And though they spurn me from their door

My soul shall spurn them evermore.

(1904)

Gas from a Burn
e
r

Ladies and gents, you are here assembled

To hear why earth and heaven trembled

Because of the black and sinister arts

Of an Irish writer in foreign parts.

He sent me a book ten years ago.

I read it a hundred times or so,

Backwards and forwards, down and up,

Through both the ends of a telescope.

I printed it all to the very last word

But by the mercy of the Lord

The darkness of my mind was rent

And I saw the writer’s foul intent.

But I owe a duty to Ireland:

I hold her honour in my hand,

This lovely land that always sent

Her writers and artists to banishment

And in a spirit of Irish fun

Betrayed her own leaders, one by one.

’Twas Irish humour, wet and dry,

Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye;

’Tis Irish brains that save from doom

The leaky barge of the Bishop of Rome

For everyone knows the Pope can’t belch

Without the consent of Billy Walsh.

O Ireland my first and only love

Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove!

   
O lovely land where the shamrock grows!

(Allow me, ladies, to blow my nose)

To show you for strictures I don’t care a button

   
I printed the poems of Mountainy Mutton

And a play he wrote (you’ve read it, I’m sure)

Where they talk of ‘
bastard’, bugger
’ and
‘whore’

And a play on the Word and Holy Paul

And some woman’s legs that I can’t recall

Written by Moore, a genuine gent

That lives on his property’s ten per cent:

I printed mystical books in dozens:

I printed the table book of Cousins

Though (asking your pardon) as for the verse

’Twould give you a heartburn on your arse:

I printed folklore from North and South

By Gregory of the Golden Mouth:

I printed poets, sad, silly and solemn:

I printed Patrick What-do-you-Colm:

I printed the great John Milicent Synge

Who soars above on an angel’s wing

In the playboy shift that he pinched as swag

From Maunsel’s manager’s travelling-bag.

But I draw the line at that bloody fellow,

That was over here dressed in Austrian yellow,

Spouting Italian by the hour

To O’Leary Curtis and John Wyse Power

And writing of Dublin, dirty and dear,

In a manner no blackamoor printer could bear.

Shite and onions! Do you think I’ll print

The name of the Wellington Monument,

Sydney Parade and the Sandymount tram,

Downes’s cakeshop and Williams’s jam?

I’m damned if I do - I’m damned to blazes!

Talk about
Irish Names of Places!

It’s a wonder to me, upon my soul,

He forgot to mention Curly’s Hole.

No, ladies, my press shall have no share in

So gross a libel on Stepmother Erin.

I pity the poor - that’s why I took

A red-headed Scotchman to keep my book.

Poor sister Scotland! Her doom is fell;

She cannot find any more Stuarts to sell.

My conscience is fine as Chinese silk:

My heart is as soft as buttermilk.

Colm can tell you I made a rebate

Of one hundred pounds on the estimate

I gave him for his Irish Review.

I love my country - by herrings I do!

I wish you could see what tears I weep

When I think of the emigrant train and ship.

That’s why I publish far and wide

My quite illegible railway guide.

In the porch of my printing institute

The poor and deserving prostitute

Plays every night at catch-as-catch-can

With her tight-breeched British artilleryman

And the foreigner learns the gift of the gab

From the drunken draggletail Dublin drab.

Who was it said: Resist not evil?

I’ll burn that book, so help me devil.

I’ll sing a psalm as I watch it burn

And the ashes I’ll keep in a one-handled urn.

I’ll penance do with farts and groans

Kneeling upon my marrowbones.

This very next lent I will unbare

My penitent buttocks to the air

And sobbing beside my printing press

My awful sin I will confess.

My Irish foreman from Bannockburn

Shall dip his right hand in the urn

And sign crisscross with reverent thumb

Memento homo
upon my bum.