Lahore is in the Punjab, in present-day Pakistan, but the
poem describes the Lodore Falls in England's Lake
District, across the sea from Belfast. Southey, England's Poet
Laureate from 1813 until his death in 1843, wrote some notable
works for children, including The Story of the Three Bears
about an ill-mannered "little old Woman," later known as
Goldilocks. In The Cataract of Lodore: Described in Rhymes
for the Nursery, Southey responds to a request of his
young son, seconded by his two daughters: "'How does the water
/ Come down at Lodore?' . . . And moreover he tasked me / To
tell him in rhyme."
"Lodore" begs comparison with other 19th century lyric
soundscapes. Instead of the relentless onomatopoeia of Edgar
Allen Poe's "The Bells," or the intricate alliteration and
assonance of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Inversnaid," Southey's
poem relies mostly on his son's request, "rhyme," to imitate
the clangorous effects of its subject. The poem ends with
several long verse paragraphs in which the end-rhymes give way
to internal rhymes—first in twos, then threes, and finally
fours:
Collecting, projecting,
Receding and speeding,
And shocking and rocking,
And darting and parting . . .
Dividing and gliding and sliding,
And falling and brawling and sprawling,
And driving and riving and striving,
And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling . . .
Retreating and beating and meeting and sheeting,
Delaying and straying and playing and spraying,
Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing,
Recoiling, turmoiling and toiling and boiling . . .
One can easily imagine the delight which Southey's children took
in hearing their father meet their request to imitate the
effects of the waterfall in rhyme. Less immediately apparent is
the delight which Joyce must have taken in having the heroine of
Ulysses associate the sounds of her chamber pot with the
musical effects of a lyric poem. In doing so, he alluded to
the pun embedded in the
title of his first book of poems,
Chamber Music—a pun
which has already occurred to Molly's husband in
Sirens.
This interplay between character and author supports the
inference that Gifford makes about another of Molly's remarks
just a few lines earlier. Sitting on her bloody chamber-pot,
she thinks, "O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh," to
which Gifford asks, "Dodging the curse O Jesus? or
calling on her maker?" Probably both readings are correct.
Molly felt no need to dodge the curse at the moment when she
first recognized the onset of her period—"O Jesus wait yes
that thing has come on me"—but she may well be falling back on
an accustomed substitute here.
For Joyce, however, her exclamation is like Alfred Hitchcock
strolling through a scene in one of his movies, or Renaissance
artists featuring their own faces in their paintings. The
artist who, according to Stephen in A Portrait, "like
the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or
above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence,"
shows his face here, in close proximity to a veiled reference
to the poems of Chamber Music. In a 21 August 1909
letter Jim told Nora that "When I wrote them, I was a strange
lonely boy, walking about myself at night and thinking that
some day a girl would love me" (Letters II, 236-37 and
Selected Letters 161). In 1922, near the end of his big
novel, he allowed his female protagonist to respond. She seems
to be saying, You were right to make your pun on water music,
but if you're the god of this fictive world why on earth did
you give us menstruation?
