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82J A M E S[ 1900-1902 ]I intone the high anthem,Partaking in their festival.Swing out, swing in, the night is dark,Magical hair, alive with glee,Winnowing spark after spark,Star after star, rapturously.Toss and toss, amazing arms;Witches, weave upon the floorYour subtle-woven web of charms . . .Some are comely and some are sour,Some are dark as wintry mould,Some are fair as a golden shower.To music liquid as a streamThey move with dazzling symmetry;Their flashinglimbs blend in a gleamOf luminous-swift harmony.They wear gold crescents on their heads,Horned and brilliant as the moon . . .Another poem, while equally silly,Wind thine arms round me, woman of sorcery,While the lascivious music murmurs afar:I will close mine eyes, and dream as I dance with thee,And pass away from the world where my sorrows are.Faster and faster! strike the harps in the hall!Woman, I fear that this dance is the dance of death!Faster!—ah, I am faint . . . and, ah, I fall.The distant music mournfully murmureth . . .shares the same frame of mind as the 'Villanelle of the Temptress,' usedin A Portrait at a later stage of Joyce's development, but dating, accordingto Stanislaus Joyce, 29from this period. The 'Villanelle' and 'A Prayer,'in Pomes Penyeach, ambiguously entertain the idea of a supplication addressedto a woman who is both temptation and doom. Joyce, in manyways so controlled, relished the notion of being overcome.As if to remind us that the other poems had not expressed his wholecharacter, Joyce left one example of a shine poem:Let us fling to the winds all moping and madness,Play us a jig in the spirit of gladnessOn the creaky old squeaky strings of the fiddle.The why of the world is an answerless riddlePuzzlesome, tiresome, hard to unriddle.To the seventeen devils with sapient sadness:Tra la, tra la.These examples seem more fitfulbecause they survived capriciously asfragments on the backs of sheets which James Joyce or his brother Stan-