Molly came into her relationship with Bloom liking poetry and
imagining that this new man in her life might bear some
resemblance to the poet who notoriously embodied sexual ardor:
"I always liked poetry when I was a girl first I thought he
was a poet like lord Byron and not an ounce of it in his
composition I thought he was quite different." Bloom appears
to have played along with Molly's fantasy, and his looks helped: "he
was very handsome at that time trying to look like Lord
Byron I said I liked though he was too beautiful for a man
and he was a little before we got engaged." Ithaca
observes that Bloom, caught up perhaps in this mutual focus on
his Byronic potential, sent a romantic lyric to Molly on
Valentine's Day, 1888 that emphasized her affectionate name
for him. It does not proclaim the second coming of Lord Byron:
Poets oft have sung in rhyme
Of music sweet their praise divine.
Let them hymn it nine times nine.
Dearer far than song or wine,
You are mine. The world is mine.
Molly also remembers, in Penelope, that Bloom gave
her a book of Byron's poems when they were arguing: "after
that I pretended I had a coolness on with her over him because
he used to be a bit on the jealous side whenever he asked who
are you going to and I said over to Floey and he made me
the present of Byrons poems and the three pairs of
gloves so that finished that I could quite easily get him to
make it up any time."
Ulysses does not record the name of the book, but
Byron's first published collection, Hours of Idleness
(1807), contains a poem called "The First Kiss of Love" that
seems powerfully relevant to Molly and Bloom. (It also
features a poem titled “To Marion.”) In seven quatrains,
"First Kiss" praises the experience of new sexual passion as
an authentic inspiration for poetry that far surpasses the
influence of stale artistic conventions:
Away with your fictions of flimsy romance;
Those tissues of falsehood which folly has wove!
Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance,
Or the rapture which dwells on the first kiss of love.
Ye rhymers, whose bosoms with phantasy glow,
Whose pastoral passions are made for the grove;
From what blest inpiration your sonnets would flow,
Could you ever have tasted the first kiss of love!
If Apollo should e'er his assistance refuse,
Or the Nine be disposed from your service to rove,
Invoke them no more, bid adieu to the muse,
And try the effect of the first kiss of love.
I hate you, ye cold compositions of art!
Though prudes may condemn me, and bigots reprove,
I court the effusions that spring from the heart,
Which throbs with delight to the first kiss of love.
Your shepherds, your flocks, those fantastical themes,
Perhaps may amuse, yet they never can move:
Arcadia displays but a region of dreams:
What are visions like these to the first kiss of love?
Oh! cease to affirm that man, since his birth,
From Adam till now, has with wretchedness strove,
Some portion of paradise still is on earth,
And Eden revives in the first kiss of love.
When age chills the blood, when our pleasures are past—
For years fleet away with the wings of the dove—
The dearest remembrance will still be the last,
Our sweetest memorial the first kiss of love.
Byron's description of the physical energy of the
kisses—"effusions that spring from the heart, / Which throbs
with delight"—makes clear that these are embraces of a
passionately carnal sort, like those represented later in the
19th century by Rodin, Munch, and Toulouse-Lautrec. But he
also uses religious language to characterize their spiritual
power. New love is "soul-breathing," a "rapture," a "blest
inspiration" which shows that "Some portion of paradise is
still on earth." The allusion in stanza 6 to mankind's fall
from Eden, with its recognition that only "Some" of the
original perfection can "still" be glimpsed, introduces the
thought of the final stanza, that within individual lives too
there is a falling away. Rapturous sexual "pleasures" belong
to hot-blooded youth, because (in an echo of Psalm 55:6)
"years fleet away with the wings of the dove." First kisses do
not remain in one's experience, but they do endure in memory:
the "dearest remembrance" of older years, "Our sweetest
memorial," will be the flaring passion we experienced in
youth.
The poem is clearly relevant to Molly's memories. Although
she seems almost as addicted as Gerty MacDowell to "fictions
of flimsy romance," when left alone with her thoughts what
stirs her is the passion of a "first kiss." The lyrical
rapture that closes Ulysses blends her memory of
kissing Mulvey in Gibraltar with the memory of kissing Bloom
on Howth Head: "my God after that long kiss I near lost my
breath." Such kisses, she thinks, possess an intensity
that dissipates in long-term relationships: "its only the
first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think
no more about it why cant you kiss a man without going and
marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you
feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I
wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there
and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long
and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you."
Bloom too looks back on the picnic on Howth Head as a kind
of lost paradise. His recollections in Lestrygonians
are sadder than Molly's, but no less rapturous: "Coolsoft with
ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me
did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full
open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my
mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had
mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young
life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky
gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. .
. . Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her
stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of
nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She
kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair.
Kissed, she kissed me."
The eyes gazing on Bloom, the hand caressing him, the sense
of rapture, undoubtedly derive from Joyce's memory of his
first date with Nora, when she took the sexual initiative and
caressed him to orgasm. In a letter he wrote to her years
later, Joyce recalled that evening in Ringsend when she "first led
the way" by reaching into his pants, "all the time bending
over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes." In
another letter he called Nora the girl who "took me so easily
into her arms and made me a man." He was overwhelmed by the
realization of what sex could be with a woman who somehow
evaded, or combined, the Catholic dualities of fallen woman and saint.
In Proteus Stephen wishes for the same experience.
Walking on the strand not
far from where Jim found delight with Nora, he longs for
someone to "Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand."
Knowing nothing but sexless Catholic icons and prostitutes,
however, he cannot imagine a kiss like the one that dwells in
the memories of Molly and Bloom. A few paragraphs earlier,
seeking inspiration for a poem, he concocted a fantasy of a
kiss that was itself inspired by a
poem, meriting Byron's condemnation of art that is
sterile because it knows only art. Moreover, it involves a
prostitute meeting a man who "comes, pale vampire, through
storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to
her mouth's kiss." The association between love and
nutrition seen in Bloom's recollection of the seedcake here is
inverted into a vampirish draining of life.
§ Joyce
famously set his masterpiece on the day when he walked out to
Ringsend with Nora, and his sense of the importance of that
date points to still more Byronic influence. In a note titled
"Byron's Don Juan and Joyce's Ulysses," James
Joyce Quarterly 29.4 (1992): 829-33, which argues that
Byron's ottava rima comic epic exerted great
influence on Ulysses, Walter E. Anderson quotes from
the first canto, where Byron narrates the beginning of the
amour between Don Juan and Donna Julia:
'Twas on a summer's day—the sixth of June—
I like to be particular in dates,
Not only of the age, and year, but moon;
They are a sort of post-house, where the Fates
Change horses, making history change its tune. (1.103)
James Joyce too liked to be particular in dates, and Ulysses
shows his fascination with crucial moments when lives can
track a new course. Anderson infers that he must have been
struck by the coincidence of June 6 and June 16, and he quotes
more lines from Don Juan which may have further
inspired Joyce to make his date with Nora a date that changed
the tune of history: "June the sixth (that fatal day / Without
whose epoch my poetic skill / For want of facts would all be
thrown away)" (1.121). Byron here reiterates his sense of the
date's cosmic importance and returns to the lyric poem's theme
of basing literary art on actual human experience, "facts."
Several lines later, he recalls another motif from "The First
Kiss of Love," its fancy that new erotic passion is a taste of
Edenic perfection which outshines all the later events of a
life:
But sweeter still than this, than these, than all,
Is first and passionate love—it stands alone,
Like Adam's recollection of his fall;
The tree of knowledge has been pluck'd—all's known—
And life yields nothing further to recall. (1.127)
Anderson leads off his brief article with these passages
about newfound love, but he seems chiefly interested in the
ways that Byron may have inspired Joyce to write an
irreverent, densely contemporaneous version of ancient epic
poetry: "Seminal as is the suggestion of a fateful day of
seduction in June, it seems at least equalled in importance by
other basic propositions" (830). This may be true, but the
importance to Joyce of the life-altering effect of sexual
delight should never be underestimated. Not only do all three
principal characters of Ulysses show the unmistakable
imprint of "The First Kiss of Love," but the novel itself is
founded upon the author's experience of a kiss that set his
life upon a new course.
In Part 2 of A Portrait of the Artist (85-86),
Stephen endures a pummeling by bullies rather than recant his
high esteem for Byron's poetry. His classmates object to Byron
primarily on moral grounds: "Byron was a heretic and immoral
too"; "Byron was a bad man"; "Byron was no good." Stephen
maintains his aesthetic judgment that Byron is the greatest
English poet (one that Joyce shared even in later life,
according to Ellmann) despite his notorious philandering.
There is a kind of ironic triumph in knowing that in Ulysses
Joyce values Byron in large part because of his
enthusiastic celebration of erotic passion.
