FINNEGANS WAKE
99
lle8S
of the functional
interrelation~hip
that always exists between
10und and meaning in poetry. In music the individual unit of
expression, the sound, is an abstraction; form and content are
ildistinguishable; the
meaning
of a piece of music resides in the
total organization of its separate units. But in poetry, where the
ildividual unit of expression is the word, sound is the
medium
or
Yehicle of meaning. Poetry, as has often been stated, is the more
dillicult because the more impure of the two arts. Yet this has been
its
principal glory: the maintenance of a proper harmony between
the sound and the meaning of words, both taken separately and in
their interpenetration, has constituted the art of poetry. And we
may suggest that if the "pure music" fallacy crops up here again it
is
because of the now almost universal incapacity to make an ade–
quate
response to poetry. What is being offered . to us more and
more in the name of poetry is something hardly different from the
matter-of-fact type of statement about a situation that used to be
limited to prose. We have forgotten that the special function of
poetry
is not so much to describe or explain a situation as to express
m ordered emotional attitude toward the situation. Music is in–
YOlved in such expression because of the still unanalyzed and prob–
ably unanalyzable effect of music on our psychology-its power
of
rousing, sustaining, and ordering our emotional states. It is
aeither an accompaniment nor a decoration; it is an imponderable
part
of the poem, "the thing made". And this is to say that it is
inextricable from the
meaning
of the poem as a whole. These are
elementary considerations; hut they perhaps cannot he repeated
too
often in an age given over so exclusively to the situation.
In the extraordinary richness and variety of musical effect in
m
writing, therefore, Joyce is simply pushing to a high degree of
development qualities that we find in all authentic poetry. And the
111ne can he said of his manipulation of the content-meanings of
words. Here the principal point to be made is that the poet does
DOt use words for their past history alone. This would he indis–
tinguishable from the manner in which the mathematical scientist
188igns
one fixed and immutable meaning to his symbols. From the
atandpoint of poetry such symbols are inert, dead, and hence in–
operative. Poetic symbols consist not only in all their past histories
but
in whatever special modification of their meanings are involved
through their use in a present context. A word, in the terminology
