Three Poems by James Joyce

“Lightly come or lightly go … Lightly, lightly — ever so”

On a recent trip to Austin, I tickled my soft spot for rare vintage literary treasures and indulged my guilty travel pleasure: A trip to the finest local rare-books seller, in this case the lovely South Congress Books, where I discovered a fortunate first edition of James Joyce’s Collected Poems (public library). It was originally published in 1937 by The Viking Press as a limited edition of 1,000 copies and features a signed portrait of Joyce by Welsh painter and etcher Augustus John.

Here are three sublime poems, one from each of the book’s three sections.

From the first section, titled “Chamber Music” and containing 36 untitled, numbered love poems:

XXV

Lightly come or lightly go:
Though thy heart presage thee woe,
Vales and many a wasted sun,
Oread let thy laughter run,
Till the irreverent mountain air
Ripple all thy flying hair.

Lightly, lightly — ever so:
Clouds that wrap the vales below
At the hour of evenstar
Lowliest attendants are;
Love and laughter song-confessed
When the heart is heaviest.

From the second section, titled “Pomes Penyeach” — a play on the French words for apples, offered at “a penny each” — and containing 13 short poems written over the course of 20 years between 1904 and 1924:

SIMPLES

O bella bionda,
Sei come l’onda!

Of cool sweet dew and radiance mild
The moon a web of silence weaves
In the still garden where a child
Gathers the simple salad leaves.

A moondew stars her hanging hair
And moonlight kisses her young brow
And, gathering, she sings an air:
Fair as the wave is, fair, art thou!

Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear
To shield me from her childish croon
And mine a shielded heart for her
Who gathers simples of the moon.

From the final section, containing a single poem written in 1936 and previously unpublished in America:

ECCE PUER

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

Collected Poems was eventually reissued as a much more affordable mass-market paperback. Complement it with Joyce’s little-known children’s book and this rare 1935 edition of Ulysses featuring exquisite etchings by Henri Matisse.

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How Our Government Helps Us, in Vibrant Vintage Illustrations from 1969

“As our country grows and changes, our government has more work to do and more laws to make.”

At a time of political tension that has exposed some of the ways in which our government doesn’t help us — at least not all of us — here comes a charming vintage reminder of all the ways it does, or at least is intended to. How Our Government Helps Us (public library), originally written in 1969 by Muriel Stanek as part of the same Social Studies Program series that gave us How People Earn and Use Money, How People Live in the Suburbs, and How We Use Maps and Globes, explores the various divisions and purposes of government — from healthcare to education to taxes — with a lens on how they affect our daily lives and what the ideals of good citizenship might be. The vibrant illustrations by Jack Faulkner bespeak in equal measures the era’s civic idealism and its typical gender stereotypes.

Some of the pages exude a bittersweet sense of a bygone era, like this memento from the golden age of the Space Race, a grim reminder of the critical condition of space exploration today:

Others embody “the problem that has no name,” depicting women’s sole purpose in civil society as mothers and girls’ destiny as seamstresses-to-be:

Others still come as a fine complement to these vintage infographics delineating the structure of government:

Complement How Our Government Helps Us with Maira Kalman’s illustrated chronicle of the Constitution.

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The Speech Chain: A Vintage Illustrated Guide to the Science of Language

A mid-century primer on how verbal messages progress from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the listener.

Given my documented soft spot for all kinds of vintage anatomy, I was intrigued to come across The Speech Chain: The Physics and Biology of Spoken Language (public library) — a short 1963 book that promises to cover “a significant subject in an interdisciplinary manner,” exploring the science of speech and featuring one of the most beautifully designed mid-century book covers I’ve ever come across. Today, in the age of constantly evolving textual and visual communication media, from Twitter to Instagram to Vine, the book reminds us why speech is the one — possibly the only — enduring and universal mode of relaying ideas:

Human society relies heavily on the free and easy interchange of ideas among is members and, for one reason or another, man has found speech to be his most convenient form of communication.

Through its constant use as a tool essential to daily living, speech has developed into a highly efficient system for the exchange of even our most complex ideas. It is a system particularly suitable for widespread use under the constantly changing and varied conditions of life.

It all sounds fine enough, until we realize the book — which makes such statements of questionable causal implication as “the widespread use of books and printed matter may very well be an indication of a highly developed civilization, but so is the greater use of telephone systems,” “areas of the world where civilization is most highly developed are also the areas with the greatest density of telephones,” and “countries bound by social and political ties are usually connected by a well developed telephone system” — was published by the educational division of Bell Telephone Laboratories. As we lament the the rise of “sponsored content” in contemporary media, a book from half a century ago reminds us that publishing and corporate propaganda have always coexisted, and have always elicited outrage.

That said, the book does offer a wealth of fascinating science, including a number of delightful diagrams:

'The Speech Chain: the different forms in which a spoken messages exist in its progress from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the listener.'

'The human vocal organs.'

'Outlines for the vocal tract during the articulation of various vowels.'

'The wavelengths and corresponding spectra of the vowels 'uh' (top) and 'ah' (bottom).

'Vocal tract configurations and corresponding mouth configurations for three different vowels. (The peaks of the spectra represent vocal tract resonances. Vertical lines for individual harmonics are not shown.)'

'Diagram of the auditory pathways linking the brain with the ear.'

'The cochlear portion of the inner ear.'

'Diagram of a section through the core of the cochlea.'

'Patterns showing the relationship between second format transition and place-of-articulation of consonants.'

In 1993, the book was reissued with cover art by Keith Haring:

Pair The Speech Chain with Lilli Lehmann’s 1902 illustrated guide to singing.

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