Tell No More Of Enchanted Days Essay

In the fifth chapter of James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus composes a villanelle about Emma Clery, a girl he has long admired. While this is not the first time readers have seen his creative process, it is the first time that process has resulted in a full, finished product. The poem itself is somewhat derivative and unimpressive. In the work, Stephen posits Emma as the “temptress” of his desires and the object of his infatuation and frustration. It reads:
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes

(242-243).

While the poem is a homage to Emma, it also laments her loss of innocence and blames her for the speaker’s vexations. The refrain of “tell no more of enchanted days” akins her emerging sensuality to the biblical fall and the repetition of “are you not weary of ardent ways?” underlines Stephen’s frustrations with the “impure” passions he feels for her. Stephen’s use of catholic imagery— as with the “chalice flowing to the brim” and the “eucharistic hymn”— highlight the ways his, and his country’s, catholic past shape his artistic production. The poem’s form—villanelle— is often regarded as one of the most difficult forms of poetry. It is a nineteen line poem “consisting normally of five three-lined stanzas and a final quatrain, with only two rhymes throughout” (OED). Its restrictive, “fixed,” form is highly stylized and, while beautiful, can be limiting to a poet’s creative process. As a result, the fixed form might produce uninspired imitations of similar poems. In his essay “The Villanelle Perplex: Reading Joyce” Robert Day Adams

The contrast between the Stephen’s lyrical verse and the imaginative, original prose by which it is framed exposes its juvenile nature, in both content and execution. Furthermore, when discussing his aesthetic philosophy with Lynch, Stephen calls the “lyrical from...the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion” (Portrait 232). Essentially, even in his ethestic theory, Stephen denounces lyric poetry as a simplistic, solipsistic artistry. This attitude towards the lyric from is further emphasized by the fact that Stephen’s villanelle was part of a series of unpublished lyrical poems that Joyce had written, and later discarded, at the age of eighteen. In his essay “Stephen Dedalus’ Villanelle” Charles Rossman argues that Stephen’s poem, even by his own standards, falls short of elevating him from esthete to artist. The villanelle simply showcases Stephen’s own insecurities rather than bringing him to a closer understanding of Emma. Rossman writes, “The villanelle is not a means to understanding, but an outraged cry of protest against the flesh, in which the poet laments the inherent shame of woman’s sexuality and manages to sublimate his own. The poem expresses and perpetuates Stephen’s alienation from [Emma Clery] as from all tangible reality, especially his own body (Rossman