Protean Prosody

In the third chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the novel's main characters, young Stephen Dedalus, walks on the beach and wallows in angst and intellection. Stephen is preoccupied with, among other things, prosody. He is composing a poem along the way. As he walks and introspects, he tries on different metrical hats, much of it centered around tetrameter.

In drafts, Joyce had named chapters, but in galleys he removed the chapter names. In Joyce studies, the chapters of Ulysses are traditionally referred to by those original names. Hence, the third chapter, which is neither named nor numbered, is known as “Proteus”. Proteus is a sea-god Odysseus encounters on a beach in Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus seeks information from Proteus, but to get that information from the uncooperative divinity, Odysseus will have to seize and hold him until Proteus relents and tells Odysseus what Odysseus wishes to know. But things are never easy on an odyssey, and Proteus has the power to change form, instantly metamorphosing into different animals, each one difficult to hold on to or terrifying in aspect. The parallel in James Joyce's novel is that Steven walks along the beach while his mind explores many issues with his intimidatingly educated and incisive mind, including the terrifying: mortality, the nature of reality, salvation, and the eternal question of “will anyone see me if, here and now, I....”

I will quote the first five paragraphs of Proteus herebelow. The text is as printed in the 1992 Modern Library Edition of Ulysses by James Joyce (Modern 37).

INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusy boot. Snotgreet, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

          Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

                    Won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Madeline the mare?

          Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

          Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

          See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

So now I come to the point: the 1986 Gabler edition of Ulysses (Gabler 31) introduces an error into the above passage—an error based on a misreading that is itself based on an ignorance of prosody. That error has propagated through other editions and electronic versions of the text. If one has an even rudimentary understanding of English-language prosody—an understanding far below that of Stephen Dedalus, let alone that of Stephen's Author—it doesn't make sense.

I refer to the revision in the Gabler edition (devision is more appropriate) of the words “A catalectic” to the word “Acatalectic”.

“Catalexis” is a technique in poetry in which a foot at the end or the beginning of a line has a syllable lopped off. It can be used to emphasize a particular word, impose a startling brevity, to unsettle the reader's rhythmic expectations with a syncopation, or to break up a pattern to keep a poem's form from becoming monotonous or predictable.

For instance, if Tennyson had decided to “change up” the incessant ta-tum of iambic tetrameter in “The Lady of Shallot” and changed “On either side the river lie” to “Either side the river lie” or “And through the field the road runs by” to “Through the field the road runs by”, by dropping a syllable from the opening foot, that would be catalexis. William Blake's “The Tyger” is a famous example of end-line catalexis: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”. The meter Blake employed was catalectic trochaic tetrameter. If that line were acatalectic, it would read thus: “Tyger, tyger, burning brightly.”

To reiterate: An acatalectic line has no truncated metrical feet. An acatalectic line of iambic (or trochaic) tetrameter has eight syllables, not seven. An acatalectic line of iambic (or trochaic) trimeter has six syllables, not five.

So, for Gabler's change to be appropriate, the lines of verse preceding “acatalectic”--the verses in Stephen's stream of consciousness, so we know what he's thinking about--would have to be acatalectic, not catalectic.

A traditional verse form often used in Irish songs and poetry is the ballad stanza. Ballads are composed of quatrains alternating iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter/iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter.

Here are the two lines of Stephen's verse again:

                    Won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Madeline the mare?

These are two catalectic lines from a ballad stanza—seven syllables/five syllables. Here is what the lines look like with an insertion to make them acatalectic:

                    Oh, won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Oh, Madeline the mare?

Admittedly, the “oh” in both cases is ad hoc, but it clearly delineates (“delines”) what the rhythm would be if the lines were acatalectic. The change of “A catalectic” to “Acatalectic” in the Gabler edition is erroneous.

At the root of this error, and its propagation thereafter, is ignorance of basic English-language prosody on the part of a surprising number of scholars, some of whom are quite eminent.

To re-reiterate, the two lines Stephen recites to himself are both catalectic, a couplet, in ballad form. They are, as he says, iambs marching.

And Stephen himself, following the row of seawrack along Sandymount strand, “delines the mare”--mare being Latin for the sea but conflated with the English word for an adult female horse so that Stephen can refer to meter as “agallop”.

All through this passage, Stephen is engaging in metric play. Let's take a look at the intermediary passage between “Madeline the mare” and “a catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching”:

                    Rhythm begins, you see. I hear.

By calling the passage out isolated and indented similarly to Stephen's lines of verse, it becomes apparent that it is itself tetrametric. But it is not purely iambic: the word “rhythm” is a trochee. “Begins”, “you see”, and “I hear” are all iambs. (“'I am's” is a pun that runs beneath “Proteus” as a tacit organum. Many people are put off by Stephen's introspection throughout Proteus, but a Joycean joke is behind Stephen's angst. The Arranger has Stephen wrestling with prosodic composition; Stephen has no choice as to what he can think about: It is “I am”s all the way down.)

Joycean play is amok through this delightful passage. “Rhythm begins” brings us (by a commodious recirculation) back to Los, the Blakean Demiurge. The music of the spheres is a testament to the rhythm as well as the harmony initiated with Creation. (What Galileo saw, God “hears”.) The conversational “you see” separated by the period from “I hear” turns the period into the crux of a chiasmus. “I hear” is a homonym for “I here”, which is an iamb...so the first-person present of the verb to be inheres: iamb is present, making it “I am here” by yet another commodious circulation—while riffing on Stephen's earlier counterpoint of the modalities of sight and sound: “Stephen closed his eyes to hear”.

An intriguing exercise in tetrameter is in the sound of Stephen's unseen (sea <=> see) footsteps on the seawrack of Sandymount Strand:

                    Crush, crack, crick, crick.

Seewrack heard. But not in iambs--the world speaks to Stephen in monosyllabic feet. It is tetrametric, but in Stephen's slow blind pace. One syllable, one foot, one step. It is an interesting exercise in prosodic composition: To write a metric line in single-syllable, stressed feet. Stephen is trying out his Dedalean wings; a different rhythm to the same beat. And what could be more catalectic than an entire line of missing syllables? After all, the happy patter of little iambs proceed heel-toe; Stephen's cracking crush on drying wrack is flat: sole, sole, sole, sole.

- - - - -

Addendum I

This is the poem that Stephen composes in Proteus:

                    On swift sail flaming

                    From storm and south

                    He comes, pale vampire,

                    Mouth to my mouth.

We don't see what Stephen wrote on the strand until Chapter 7, “Aeolus”, when Stephen recalls what he had written on a scrap of paper torn from Mr. Deasy's letter to the editor on hoof and mouth disease (Everyman 132). When Stephen hands in Mr. Deasey's letter at the newspaper, one of the newspapermen, Lenehan notices that the bottom of the last page was torn off, and jests “Who tore it? Was he short taken.” “Short taken.” The Arranger has given Lenehan a winking reference to Stephen's catalexis. [Gabler here makes a change that holds water, changing the full stop after “short taken” to a question mark (Gabler 109), thereby reinstating the punctuation of the first edition of 1922 (Dover 127).]

Note the last line of Stephen's quatrain. The source for the meter employed in Stephen's poem, and in particular for the last line, is “My Grief on the Sea”, a poem by Douglas Hyde (Gifford 62):

                    My grief on the sea,
                    How the waves of it roll!
                    For they heave between me
                    And the love of my soul!

                    Abandon'd, forsaken,
                    To grief and to care,
                    Will the sea ever waken
                    Relief from despair?

                    My grief and my trouble!
                    Would he and I were,
                    In the province of Leinster,
                    Or County of Clare!

                    Were I and my darling--
                    O heart-bitter wound!--
                    On board of the ship
                    For America bound.

                    On a green bed of rushes
                    All last night I lay,
                    And I flung it abroad
                    With the heat of the day.

                    And my Love came behind me,
                    He came from the South;
                    His breast to my bosom,
                    His mouth to my mouth. (Hyde)

Stephen appropriates Hyde's last line for his own last line, but drops the first syllable, producing a catalectic variant on Hyde's original. Stephen's thinking is focused throughout on catalectic meter. To change “a catalectic” to “acatalectic” is simply wrong.

- - - - -

Addendum II

In the Oxford World Classics edition of Ulysses, an edited and endnoted edition of the original 1922 text, a note on the question of whether the text should read “a catalectic” or “acatalectic” quotes a letter from James Joyce to Harriet Weaver in which Joyce writes “divide better A catalectic” (Oxford 785). The editor concludes the note, “That ought to settle the matter.” Indeed.

- - - - -

Works Cited

Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Hyde, Douglas. “My Grief on the Sea”. Poemhunter.com. Poemhunter.com, 1 January 2004. Web. 20 March 2015. <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-grief-on-the-sea/>.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Facsim. 1922 ed. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2009. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: The Modern Library, 1992. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Gabler, Hans Walter, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Johnson, Jeri. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

'I Am of Ireland' by William Butler Years

What Yeats could do with trimeter is amazing:

‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity,
Come dance with me in Ireland.’

One man, one man alone
In that outlandish gear,
One solitary man
Of all that rambled there
Had turned his stately head.
‘That is a long way off,
And time runs on,’ he said,
‘And the night grows rough.’

‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.’

‘The fiddlers are all thumbs,
Or the fiddle-string accursed,
The drums and the kettledrums
And the trumpets all are burst,
And the trombone,’ cried he,
‘The trumpet and trombone,’
And cocked a malicious eye,
‘But time runs on, runs on.’

‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.’

Chapter XXII from Derek Walcott's Caribbean Epic, Omeros

Dove sta memoria?

I was reminded of the following section of his epic poem Omeros after being introduced to this video of a connection opening temporarily between an elderly woman incapacitated by Alzheimer's Disease and a caregiver trying to reach her and evoke the inner person, howbeit briefly.

The poet Derek Walcott encountered a similar situation, and presents it in chapter XXXII of his masterpiece:

Omeros

by Derek Walcott

Chapter XXXII

I

She floated so lightly! One hand, frail as a swift,

gripping the verandah. The cotton halo fanned

from her shrunken crown, and I felt that I could lift

that fledgling, my mother, in the cup of my hand

and settle her somewhere else: away from the aged

women rubbing rosaries in the Marian Home,

but I was resigned like them. I no longer raged

at the humiliations of time. Her turn had come

to be bent by its weight, its indifferent process

that drummed in wrist and shank. Time was that fearful friend

they talked to, who sat beside them in empty chairs,

as deaf as they were; who sometimes simply listened.

They were all withdrawn. They'd entered a dimension

where every single thought was weightless, every form clouded

by its ephemeral halo. Time's intention

rather than death was what baffled them; in the deed

of dying there was terror, but what did time mean,

after some friend stopped talking and around her bed

they opened the panels of an unfolding screen?

The frail hair grew lovelier on my mother's head,

but when my arm rested on her hollow shoulder

it staggered slightly from the solicitous weight.

I was both father and son. I was as old as her

exhausted prayer, as her wisps of memory floated

with a vague patience, telling her body: “Wait,”

when all that brightness had withered like memory's flower,

like the allamanda's bells and the pale lilac

bougainvillea vines that had covered our gabled house.

They, like her natural memory, would not come back.

Her eyes were dim as dusk. There were no more hours.

From her cupped sleep, she wavered with recognition.

I would bring my face closer to hers and catch the

scent of her age. “Who am I? Mama, I'm your son.”

“My son.” She nodded. “You have two, and a daughter.

And a lot of grandchildren,” I shouted. “A lot to

remember.” “A lot.” She nodded, as she fought her

memory. “Sometimes I ask myself who I am.”

We looked at the hills together, at roofs that I knew

in childhood. “Their names are Derek, Roddy, and Pam.”

“I have to go back to the States again.”

“Well, we can't be together all the time,” she said, “I know.”

“There is too much absence,” I said. Then a blessed

lucidity broke through a cloud. She smiled. “I know

who you are. You are my son.” “Warwick's son,” she said.“Nature's gentleman.” His vine-leaves haloed her now.

I Have a New Blog

It won't be daily, but I do intend to post here again, and make a more regular blog of the whole thing. But for now, I wanted to call attention to my new blog, intended to be about English and literature. Unlike my earlier focus, this is intended for my U.S. college students, rather than my ESL friends. It is called "What's All This Then?" I have a new post there today about resources to listen to poetry and literature.

Time to Return to Blogging

I shall be posting to this blog again, and--I hope--on a more regular basis.

Stay tuned!

"The Tree" by Ezra Pound (1882 - 1973)

The Tree

                    I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
                    Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
                    Of Daphne and the laurel bough
                    And that god-feasting couple old
                    That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
                    'Twas not until the gods had been
                    Kindly entreated, and been brought within
                    Unto the hearth of their heart's home
                    That they might do this wonder thing;
                    Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
                    And many a new thing understood
                    That was rank folly to my head before.


This is an early poem by the U.S. poet, Ezra Pound.

Pound was relying on two tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses above all: The myth of Daphne and Apollo and the lovely story of Baucis and Philemon.

The story of Daphne and Apollo is a cautionary tale warning against the danger of pride. Apollo, the god of the Sun, music, poetry, medicine, and more, was also a warrior and divinely skilled at archery. In Ovid's version of the myth, Apollo is inflated with his own power and skill and scoffs at young Eros (Cupid), the son of Aphrodite (Venus), the goddess of love. Eros uses his arrows to strike men and women in the heart, causing them to fall in love. Caveat! Eros has two types of arrow: those with a gold tip inspire love, and those with a lead tip inspire loathing. Eros has the form of a young boy, and Apollo mocks him, telling him not to play with a man's weapon. To teach Apollo a lesson, Eros shoots him with one of his arrows--a gold-tipped one--and Daphne with another--a lead-tipped arrow. Apollo is consumed by love and pursues Daphne, but in abhorrence she flees. He gains! She flees on desperately, but sees Apollo is gaining on her, and pleads to the gods to save her. Suddenly, she can not run; she is rooted to the spot (this is where the colloquial phrase comes from); her skin is turning to bark; Daphne is metamorphosing into a laurel tree. Apollo can do nothing to stop the transformation, and soon she is entirely a tree. But Apollo still loves her, and uses his healing power to keep her leaves youthful and green year-round. And ever after, the laurel tree is beloved of Apollo and he takes it as his symbol. So much so, that the winners in the Olympic Games in ancient times were rewarded with crowns woven of laurel leaves.

The story of Baucis and Philemon is a lovely tale. Zeus (Jupiter) and Hermes (Mercury) come to Earth and take the form of wandering travelers. They are rejected by all the people in a village they visit except for a poor old couple, Baucis and her husband Philemon (whose name means "loving" or "one who loves"). Although the old couple are very poor, they give all they have to their guests. Zeus and Hermes are touched by the generosity and kindness of the old couple, but determine to destroy the other people of the village with a flood. Which they do. The gods thus having revealed themselves, Baucis and Philemon dedicate themselves to their service as keepers of a temple. Zeus offers them reward for their goodness, but all they ask for is the gift that they might die together, so that neither should live on alone, which Zeus grants--but in his own way. Rather than dying, when their time comes, the two metamorphose into two trees, a linden and an oak, and those two trees grow entwining with each other, their love living on after them.

In Ezra Pound's poem, the poet's persona visits a quiet wood and sees the forest through eyes informed by Ovid's work. The forest is alive with love--both passionate and importunate and patient and abiding. As he sits and observes the forest, he feels the numinous and the real intermingle; he reflects on Nature and love and in his quiet, outward-looking introspection has an epiphany and comes to understand nature and love in ways that had seemed foolish to him before.

Ezra Pound had an ear for lyric beauty, and this poem is a masterpiece. The fluidity of the rhythm, and the cadence of the assonances are exquisite. It expresses a Romantic appreciation of love and pantheistic Nature, and yet at the same time, an American pragmatism and straightforwardness that twine and resolve in one, just as the elm and the oak (he changed the linden to an elm for his poem) twine and resolve into one.

It is a poem about a man unafraid to see what others disdain or fail to grasp, and a man who is willing, like Daphne, Baucis, and Philemon, to be transformed by love and Nature. As in their tales, contrary qualities harmonize within himself, and the poet's persona undergoes a sea-change that leaves him wiser and more at one in his many-mindedness.


Definitions:
"wold"--a high, wild, open area of rolling hills (in England, also called a "moor")
"entreated"--treated (the word usually means to ask, plead
"wonder thing"--wondrous thing
"nathless"--nonetheless
"rank folly"--total foolishness

New International Center Web Site and Facebook Page

The New International Center has a new Web page, and also a new Facebook page.

The original International Center will close for good on Friday. It is a milestone in many people's lives. Lucy Benedikt, for example, has been there from before the beginning--she volunteered before the Center even opened, more than 50 years ago. She is the senior of hundreds of us volunteers.

I taught my first class at the International Center in December of 1985, the year I came to New York City from Connecticut. My last class ever at the International Center in New York was last night, April 17, 2012. We stopped on a line from my favorite poet to teach, "The Dry Salvages" from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

I used to stop by the International Center to see my buddy Vladimir Malukoff, who used to be Program Director there. (My tenure at the Center is now more ancient than I was when I started.) Staff and volunteers used to ask me to teach, and I always declined, thinking that teaching wasn't for me. One particular day, a member of the staff asked me yet again if I would volunteer. I asked, "Can I teach a literature class?" She shrugged and said, "Whatever you would like." I said, "OK. She asked me when I could start, and I replied, "A week from Friday."

The first poem I taught was "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas. I had one or two people the first class. But I proceeded the way I have since, word by word, discussing definitions, meaning, context, history, culture, whatever comes to mind as we go. It was a success.

Since "Fern Hill", I have done many poems in my classes. And books: For ten years, we chugged through Ulysses by James Joyce. Three hours, every Saturday, word by word; digression; background; questions. It was slow going, and in those years we only got about 280 pages in. But some of my best moments as a teacher were during Ulysses. (I started the book a few weeks after my daughter was born. She was born on Bloomsday. When she was little, we used to refer to Ulysses as her "birthday book". She will be 18 on Bloomsday this year.) The Hobbit. Essays by Stephen Jay Gould. About 30 of the Cantos by Ezra Pound. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (three times each, over the years). On Saturday afternoons now, we are reading The Wind in the Willows, which has been a joyous find for several people. How can one not love Mole and Rat? Probably my greatest success is the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The current exigetical journey through Four Quartets is the third time I've traversed it at the International Center. We started with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and proceeded through "Gerontion", "Ash Wednesday", "Preludes", and "The Wasteland." What else? Short poems by William Carlos Williams. What else? I can't recall right now; so many.

My philosophy of teaching is to not dumb down to people because they are learning. Their English is still limited, but their minds are not. Language is a tool for the day-to-day, but there is no pleasure in that; why not teach by means of the most interesting ideas and the richest use of language? Poetry as text! I didn't want to teach the same things that others were doing when I started. "The...pen...is...on...the...table." Or the newspaper, or magazines. I felt I had a gift to bring words to life and to teach at the same time. So I used literature as the text. And people get to appreciate, feel, delight in, and learn from literature that they might not have the confidence to approach on their own. I remember one Japanese woman telling me she had been told sternly by her U.S.-born son that she could not read Ulysses because it is too difficult. Ha! She loved Poldy and the cat.

And my approach works. I was the first to teach English this way at the Center. Then others started doing it. Now there are others, and my students glow when they tell me the classics they have read in the other classes. Sometimes, they know the works from translation in their own country, sometimes it is new to them. But there is a feeling of pride and satisfaction that they have read and felt and understood such a book in their laboriously studied new language.

The moment when we reached the end of the fourth chapter of Ulysses (Calypso) and Adam Wroblewsky, who had come to the U.S. as a refuge with no English, read the last two words, "Poor Dignam", and suddenly understood them and gasped out loud in the class at the beauty and meaning of the words was perhaps the moment that validated these 25 years. So long as my brain is my own, I will remember and treasure that moment.

There have been many bad times, many strange, there have been days when it just seemed pointless. But through it all, poetry and sharing poetry has been my compass and my tether keeping me somewhat bound to my self. And the International Center has been my center as well.