You're a Poet, Stephen

       I don’t know whether to laugh at Stephen or be in awe at his artistic ability. In a way I think Joyce wants us to do both. He’s certainly a sad sight while he’s writing, but the final product is undeniably beautiful and he makes progress in his relation to women.
       The night before he writes the villanelle, Stephen falls asleep thinking of E.C. and her beauty. The next morning when Stephen awakes, his soul is “all dewy wet” and it lay “amid cool waters” (191). Is Joyce implying Stephen had a wet dream? If he did, it only makes the rest a more depressing situation. He stays in bed (potentially remaining in his filth), too lazy to get out of bed to get a piece of paper to write his poem down. Instead he reaches to the “foot of the bed” to get a pencil and the cigarette carton he writes on (192). Eventually he has written all the verses of his poem except the final quatrain wrapping up the entire poem. Before this is written and we are given the full poem, Stephen imagines E.C. naked and feels the “liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, [flow] forth” (196). Here it seems Joyce is implying Stephen masturbated, maybe after the completion of the poem, but considering we were given snippets as they were completed I find it more likely that it occurred before he writes the final quatrain, possibly the best part of the poem.
       No matter what we think of Stephen as he’s writing it, it’s tough not to find it aesthetically beautiful. A villanelle is a “[c]omplex French poetic form using only two rhymes and requiring specific repetitions of rhymes and lines” (ftn. 192). The villanelle, although not popular in English until the late 19th century, was a favorite of French poets in the 16th century. This seems to me an interesting point. Stephen is both modern and not, his subject, a love poem, certainly not. Furthermore, Philip Jason writes that because of their repetitive nature, villanelles are “often used, and properly used, to deal with one or another degree of obsession.”  Even more than that, though, the poem is exceptionally well written.  The rhymes go together well and he is able to express both his personal strife and write a poem others can identify with.

      This poem also marks an important time in Stephen's life.  For one, he has finally created something.  You can't be much of an artist if you don't create anything.  Finally Stephen has created something more substantial than his small pairs of rhyming sentences or short songs.  And it's beautiful too.  It's also the first time we've seen him actively express his love and desire.  With Eileen, she makes the first move (granted they're like five), with the prostitute, she had to kiss him first, and on and on.  Stephen has been passive, not active.  Here we seem him reaching out and acting on one of his desires, maybe not in a physical way, but an artistic way.  Good for him.