Joyce was originally a poet. "Chamber Music" is his debut work. Critics seem to have made a final conclusion about it, such as the traditionality of the entire poem, its traditional rhythm and phonology, and its traditional image structure. The musicality of the collection of poems is also highly praised by critics. This is due to Joyce's musical ability and talent. According to the poet himself, every poem can be referred to music score. The style of the poem inherits the romantic style of the 19th century, but it is still sentimental. There is also the integrity of the content, that is, "the two clues of the evolution of love and the journey of the soul go hand in hand and complement each other, constituting the emotional tone of the entire collection of poems, and forming a certain artistic harmony and unity with the structure of the entire collection of poems." . And the style of this collection of poems is very different from Joyce's novels such as "Ulysses". The former is undoubtedly a fresh and clear work.
Some people point out that the thirty-six poems are written from the beginning. There is only one voice at the end, which is not entirely unreasonable, because the male protagonist is always confiding his heart to his sweetheart in the readers' ears, from adoration, proposal, and happy marriage, to changing his mind midway, encountering betrayal, and finally being alone and wandering. But we don’t hear the male protagonist’s voice at the beginning, which would be too abrupt, and readers would be confused whether the protagonist is expressing his emotions to the wrong person. In other words, a stage should be set up for the protagonist to perform. Introducing the protagonist from behind the scenes to the front stage, so the first poem is to introduce the male protagonist to the stage. We can infer from the line "Hundred flowers hang on his hood, and the night falls on his hair." The heroine appears in the second song, which is also supported by the poetic line "She leaned over the yellow keys." The role of the narrator is not limited to introducing the characters to the foreground. In the fourth poem, he also leads the hero to the heroine, as evidenced by the poem: "Listen, in the drowsy twilight / There is one who sings at your door. / His song is gentler than dew, and he comes to visit you.” The narrator even reminds the heroine, "When he comes at sunset, oh, don't bow your head in dreams, don't think: Who could this singer be?" The narrator's role here is dramatization. function. Of course, the level of drama here is lower. ·
The voices lingering in the ears in "Chamber Music" are mainly those of the male protagonist. If we do a little analysis, we will find that his voice can be divided into four levels, and we can feel his changing angle of narration and the changing distance from the heroine and his audience. The first level of sound is the recurring male protagonist's openness to the heroine. This is very obvious in the fourteenth, sixteenth, nineteenth, twenty-second, and twenty-third poems. The so-called direct expression of feelings is based on the hero's name for his sweetheart. This type of address is accompanied by demonstrative pronouns such as "we" and no words like "he" appear. The author keeps close to his sweetheart through the use of these epithets. Therefore, in these poems, what we hear mostly are their love words and love between men and women. In the ninth and thirteenth songs, we hear the second-level voice of the male protagonist, which directly expresses his unwavering feelings for the heroine to the wind. In the 24th, 27th, 30th and 36th poems, we hear the voice of the male protagonist at the third level. What he shows us is the fierce inner conflict of the male protagonist. The male protagonist's sharp words directly penetrate the hypocrisy of the vicious love beneath the tenderness of the heroine; he asks why his sweetheart treats him like this and why he abandons him? The fourth level of sound is that it looks at the beloved from a distance and tells his audience about her charm, her sweetness and tenderness. This level of sound is particularly prominent in the seventh, eighth and thirty-first tracks.
"Chamber Music" is about the love story and mental journey of the male protagonist, which is mainly narrated by his voice. In other words, the emotional experiences between Ou and the heroine are all shown to the readers through the consciousness of the male protagonist, that is, the emotional experiences between them are dramatized through the consciousness of the male protagonist. There are dramatic functions in "Chamber Music", including the voices of the narrator and the hero and heroine. But the dramatic functions of their voices are all low-level. That is, their voices fail to dramatize the deep conflicts within them. To demonstrate the prerequisite for conflict, the contradiction must first be revealed. Therefore, in the seventeenth poem, the author tries to convey the inner voice of the heroine through the mouth of the hero. The first line of the first stanza of the poem is "Because your voice is beside me", followed by the heroine's voice "I gave him pain". In the second stanza of the poem, the third and fourth lines are the voice of the heroine again: "Now he has become a stranger, he was once my friend." From the content, this is the first time that the reader hears the voice of the heroine. , although it is borrowed from the mouth of the male protagonist, this undoubtedly shows the readers their emotional conflict at a deeper level to a certain extent, that is, the so-called collision of soul and soul, and increases the reality and objectivity of the male protagonist's emotional expression.
Three voices of the hero and heroine. Joyce did not blindly use any one voice. Even in one poem, he tried to use two voices, or even more than two voices. Therefore, the fusion of sounds here refers to the simultaneous use of two or more sounds in a poem, or the fusion of a certain sound on two levels. In the eleventh poem, there is a fusion of the hero's voice and the narrator's voice.
In the last verse of the poem, the hero directly tells his sweetheart that the God of Love is coming, and the day to say goodbye to the girl is coming. In the next verse, the narrator reminds the heroine how to judge the arrival of the God of Love, "When you hear his name in the little angel's trumpet." The seventeenth poem is a fusion of the male protagonist's voice and the voice of the heroine's inner monologue. The eighteenth poem is the voice and fusion of the two levels of the male protagonist's voice and the concealed male protagonist. In the twenty-fourth poem, in the first and second stanzas, the male protagonist dramatically shows the heroine combing her hair from a distance, and in the third stanza, the male protagonist faces his sweetheart from the side and begs her not to comb her hair. . We have analyzed before that this is actually a fusion of the male protagonist's voices on two levels. The fusion of sounds is most fully reflected in the thirty-fourth poem. In the first stanza of the poem, "Sleep, oh, sleep, / oh, your restless heart!" After all, this is the male protagonist comforting himself, Because he has been betrayed? Or is the heroine’s voice comforting the hero? The next sentence says: "A voice shouted 'Sleep', echoing in my heart." This voice echoing in his heart should be the voice of his sweetheart, right? In the second stanza is the voice of winter, "Don't sleep anymore!" Isn't the cold winter outside the house not the "cold winter" inside the hero's heart? The voice of winter and the inner voice of the hero are so mixed together that how can we distinguish them clearly? In the third verse, "My kiss will now give you peace/peace in your heart" is the voice of the heroine, which is almost a sonata of several voices. The simultaneous appearance of several voices in this poem perfectly expresses the complex state of mind of the male protagonist after his failure in love.