Chamber Music

Third Edition. Thin 12mo. [40] pp. Publisher's dark green cloth, lettered in gilt to cover and spine. 1/107 bound copies (of an edition of 500) before Jonathan Cape acquired the remaindered sets of sheets the following year. First published by Elkin Mathews in London in 1907, with a second edition following in 1918.

Sans dustwrapper. Spine lightly darkened, offsetting to endpapers, else Fine. Contents clean and bright. Scarce.

Author's first regularly published book, consisting of thirty-six lyrical love poems, and preceded only by two broadsides. Individual poems had previously graced the pages of the London Saturday Review, Speaker and the Dublin journal, Dana. Elkin Mathews agreed to publish at the urging of poet and editor Arthur Symons, after the collection was roundly rejected by both Grant Richards and Constable. Joyce never received royalties for Chamber Music, although he claimed in a letter to his publisher that his contract called for payments after the sale of 300 copies. In 1912, he undertook the sale of copies in Trieste with some success.

Although widely reported that the title refers to the sound of urine tinkling in a chamber pot – in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom reflects, "Chamber music. Could make a pun on that." – this is likely a later Joycean embellishment, lending an earthiness to a title first suggested by his brother Stanislaus and which Joyce had subsequently come to dislike. Not in the least bawdy and more a set of songs rather than a collection of poems, as Joyce revealed in a letter to English composer Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer (15 July 1909): "I hope you may set all of Chamber Music in time. This was indeed partly my idea in writing it. The book is in fact a suite of songs . . ." Besides Palmer, a number of other composers have set the poems to music, including Samuel Barber.

While less frequently anthologised than the latter Pomes Penyeach (1927), these early verses received some critical acclaim, with Ezra Pound admiring their "delicate temperament" and Yeats describing, "I hear an army charging upon the land" as "a technical and emotional masterpiece".

[Slocum & Cahoon A4]