I Hear An Army by James Joyce

‘I Hear An Army’ was published in 1907. It was featured in Chamber Music, a poetry collection
by James Joyce that didn’t sell well at the time of its publication. Later, Joyce said: “When I
wrote [Chamber Music], I was a lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that
one day a girl would love me”. Chamber Music is a compilation of lyrical love poems, which
were intended to be accompanied with music. The poems in Chamber Music brighten
the style of the Celtic revival with Joyce’s own technique and playful irony.

Chamber Music has 36 poems of various lengths and forms, connected by the same thematic
content found in most of the lyrical texts. ‘I Hear An Army’ is the last poem of the collection.
According to many critics and readers, this poem is the best in the collection. Moreover, Ezra
Pound included it in an Imagist anthology in 1914. As the rest of the poems included in the
collection, ‘I Hear An Army’ expresses the lamentation of lost love. Furthermore, the poems
in Chamber Music were written as songs, related to the musical interest the author had.
Throughout the collection, James Joyce alters tradition and offers an innovative form of poetry.
Musicians like Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer and Ross Lee Finney, among many others,
appreciated the collection’s suitability for musical interpretation.

‘I Hear An Army’ is a rewriting of a poem by W. B. Yeats (He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace’
from The Wind Among the Reeds). There are similarities in language, rhythm,
and tone between James Joyce’s poem and Yeats’s poem. ‘I Hear An Army’ is a lyrical poem
that contains some vocabulary of disdain. The tone of the poem shifts with the passing of
the stanzas, like the lyrical voice experiments with a martial vision. The rhyme scheme of the
poem is ABAB. ‘I Hear An Army’ captures the feeling of lost love through intense imagery and
the use of musical patterns. In the poem, there is a description of a group of charioteers, riding
out of the sea and approaching the lyrical voice that culminates with the thought of
yearned affection.

I Hear An Army Analysis

Stanza One

I hear an army charging upon the land,

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
This first stanza of ‘I Hear An Army’ opens with a vivid description. The lyrical voice starts the
poem by describing an army that is moving across the land. The stanza has a soft and
questioning tone, which is accompanied by the regular pace of the rhyme scheme. In the first
line, the lyrical voice will state clearly what he/she is describing and the following lines will
expand this image. Moreover, the first two lines give a general image (“I Hear an army charging
upon the land,/And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees”) whereas the
following two lines create vivid images through a different and more dynamic sentence structure
(“Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,/ Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the
charioteers”). Notice how the lyrical voice enumerates a series of attributes (“Arrogant, in black
armour…”, etc) and he/she mentions the thing that is being described (“the charioteers”) at the
very end of the phrase. With this particular syntax and with the adjectives used to depict these
men, the lyrical voice questions these figures that he/she is describing.

Stanza Two

They cry unto the night their battle-name:

(…)
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
In this second stanza, the lyrical voice shifts the attention to him/herself. The lyrical voice refers
to the charioteers’ cry during the night (“They cry unto the night their battle-name”) and how this
affects him/her. The tone of the poem becomes angrier but still questioning. The stanza is
constructed with abrupt and short phrases, which emphasize the meaning and description of the
words. Thus, the lyrical voice expresses his sufferings when he/she hears the charioteers at
night (“I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter/They cleave the gloom of dreams,
a blinding flame,/Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil”). There is
an onomatopoeia and a repetition in the last line that accentuate the description and make the
stanza culminate in a more dramatic tone.

Stanza Three

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:

(…)
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
This final stanza continues the description that started in the previous stanza. The lyrical voice
depicts the physical characteristics of these charioteers in more detail (“They come shaking in
triumph their long, green hair:”) and how they approach the land (“They come out of the sea and
run shouting by the shore”). Notice how the lyrical voice mentions, once again, the cry and the
shouting of the charioteers. The tone of the stanza is soft, as in the first lines. There is a
repetition in sentence structure and syntax that enables the construction of a new rhythm at the
end of ‘I Hear An Army’. The first and second lines and the third and fourth lines have parallel
sentence structures. Finally, the last two lines express the lyrical voice’s thoughts and feelings
towards these charioteers. The final words show the lamentation of lost love through a repetition
(“My love, my love, my love…”) and a melancholic tone.

About James Joyce

James Joyce was born in 1882 and died in 1941. He had little success as a poetry writer and is
better known as a novelist. By 1932 James Joyce had stopped writing poetry altogether.
Nevertheless, James Joyce is considered one of the most prominent literary figures of the
twentieth century. He was an Irish novelist and a short story writer but his works also include
three books of poetry, a play, some journal articles, and published letters. James Joyce’s most
famous book is Ulysses, which is based on Homer’s Odyssey and parallels its structure but with
a Dublin setting. Moreover, he is also well-known for introducing the stream of
consciousness form and for contributing to the modernist movement of the beginning of the
twentieth century alongside T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, among others.

I Hear An Army…
James Joyce suffers from terrible nightmares.
“This bizarre and wonderful creature who turned literature and language on end”
Richard Ellman, Joyce’s Biographer

If you’ve ever woken sweating and panting from a nightmare that seemed real, you’ll be able to
empathise with the speaker in today’s poem. The ravaging, green-haired hordes from I Hear An
Army… are as terrifying as any Lovecraftian monster. Charging mercilessly out of the sea,
equipped with chariots, whips and flaming swords, they resemble a terrifying Roman legion on
the attack; a vision twisted by Joyce into a supernatural fever-dream. Despite the visceral
intensity of the poem, halfway through it becomes clear that the army are not real – they invade
the speaker’s dreams, bringing fire to the gloom of sleep and causing him to shift restlessly in
the waking world (I moan in sleep when I hear them from afar). The secret is revealed in the last
line of the poem: the speaker has been abandoned by someone he loves and the
army symbolise the crushing forces of loneliness that ‘attack’ him now that he’s all alone.
Powerless to defend against their assault he becomes, metaphorically, a conquered land. The
poem ends hopelessly, with the thought that the speaker’s love has gone for good:

I hear an army charging upon the land,

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees;

Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,

Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:

I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.

They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,

Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:

They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore

My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?

My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

If you know anything about James Joyce’s famously sunny disposition, you may have been
surprised at how viscerally intense and even shocking this poem was to read. Joyce was a
popular child, favoured by his father, and loved to dance and sing (more on his musicality later).
In any case, it’s never advised to assume the speaker of a poem and the writer are the same
person. Just because Joyce wasn’t prone to depression or despair (the word dreams is
tantalisingly pluralised – is this meant to be a hint?) doesn’t mean he can’t empathise with the
despair of somebody who was callously or suddenly abandoned by a loved one. Or it may come
from the darkest reaches of his subconscious; this is the same James Joyce who’s most famous
novel, Ulysses, was banned in several countries after publication. The invasion in the dream
may not be real, but it nevertheless doesn’t pull any punches for taking place in a purely
imaginative realm. This isn’t a sneak attack – diction like charging, plunging, cleave, blinding,
whirling, shaking and run are all-action. From the speaker’s perspective, we can hear the army’s
ominous approach before we see it and, once they crash onto the beach, the noise is
overwhelming: thunder, clanging, clanging and shouting summon the metal-on-metal clash of
swords and shields, the deep rumble of horses’ hooves as they charge and the chaos of the
battlefield – even if the site of the battle is in reality only the speaker’s heart.

For a more detailed analysis of poetic techniques such as rhythm, rhyme and repetition, visit the
shop and find the study bundle for this poem. It contains a meticulously detailed powerpoint with
explainers for poetic and technical effects, as well as a series of worksheets, quizzes and study
materials to help you delve deeper into the poem’s mysteries. The bundle also contains help
with essay writing, including sample analysis, essay questions and advice, and one completed
essay plan for you to work from.

Joyce was not particularly famous as a poet, and only published two slim volumes in his
lifetime. By 1932 he had given up writing poetry altogether. But this poem demonstrates the full
weight of a poet’s craft as he bends different devices to a single purpose: evoking the tumult
and chaos of this supernatural army’s merciless and devastating assault. Onomatopoeia is
employed frequently (clanging, thunder and fluttering all contain the sounds of the words being
described) and the driving rhythms of the poem (all iambs and anapaests) evoke the
unstoppable impetus of charging horses and chariots. Words such as whips,
moan, blinding and flame suggest that, even though it is purely imaginary, the invasion causes
real pain nevertheless. The effect of psychic harm is suggested by caesura, especially in the
first two stanzas; for example, Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand. Meaning a
deliberate break in the middle of a line of poetry, Joyce uses all kinds of caesuras – commas,
semi-colons and colons – to ‘fracture’ his lines and stanzas in a way that evokes the ‘breaking’
of a heart or the terrible, stuttering fear suffered during such a vivid nightmare.

I Hear an Army unfolds rapidly in a kaleidoscope of garish images that slam into the back of
your eye with the force of a firecracker. Like blinding flame, lots of these images are visual, as if
Joyce is intent on bringing your worst nightmare visions to life. Beginning with
the foam swirling about the knees of their fearsome horses to their intimidating black armour, to
the blinding flame, to the long, green hair the army shakes in triumph as it charges up and down
the beaches in the third stanza, the procession of images comes thick and fast like a house of
horrors dream-sequence from an old movie. Long, green hair is arguably the strangest and
most lucid visual image, creating the impression that army is alien, anathema to human
happiness. There’s a real ‘them-and-us’ opposition in the poem, created by the repetition of the
word ‘they’ at the start of so many of the lines, as if the world of simple human desires can’t
stand against the coming of these supernatural beings.

In the second stanza, the usual associations of dark and light are reversed. The army split apart
the darkness of his dreams, ‘blinding’ the speaker with light and fire. He preferred the gloom of
sleep, perhaps as a respite from pain in the waking world.

Actually, this strong visual aspect is a quality of James Joyce’s body of work. While not formally
an Imagist poet, Joyce is associated with Imagism through Ezra Pound and a slim body of work
(Joyce only published two volumes of poetry) that shares much with Imagist craft and
philosophy. The Imagist movement began in 1908 when a group of poets, including Pound,
formed a ‘school of images.’ Pound became the guiding force behind this ‘school’, writing a
manifesto and using the French term Imagiste. He published an anthology called Des Imagistes,
which contained the work of a wide range of writers and included Joyce in later anthologies of
Imagist poems. Pound even singled out I Hear an Army… as a poem whose images transcend
words.

There are several tenets of Imagist poetry, one or two of which are particularly relevant to us
here. Firstly, the reliance upon concrete language and an aversion to abstract language. Amy
Lowell, an important Imagist, wrote, ‘we are not a school of painters, but we believe poetry
should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and
sonorous.’ Imagist poets can be placed in opposition to what Lowell called ‘cosmic’ poets, as
the aim of Imagism is to produce ‘poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite.’
Therefore, despite the bulk of I Hear an Army being set explicitly in a dream world, the quality of
the images in the dream are stark, clearly drawn and defined with concrete – not abstract –
language. Let’s look couple of examples:

Arrogant… behind them stand,

Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers

Diction in these lines is carefully and precisely chosen to allow the reader to picture the army of
loneliness exactly in their minds: they wear ‘black’ armour and brandish ‘fluttering’ whips.
Consider how a poet may have described the army – wearing ‘fearsome’ armour, with
‘frightening’ whips. Black and fluttering are concrete words, positioned as close to direct
sensory experience as possible – you can see the colour black, hear the flutter of barbed whips
as they swish through the air. Even the word disdaining contains the visual hint of a
condescending sneer with cruel, downturned lips.

One or two of the words just listed bear closer examination. Fluttering is strangely
delicate diction (another poet might have chosen ‘scourging’ to describe whips, for example).
Yes, onomatopoeia helps recreate the sound of ropey strands in the air as the charioteers
brandish their ragged whips overhead, but so would the S sound of scourge. It contrasts with
other words in the poem which are hard like metal (armour and anvil). What it does do is
collocate (collocation is the pairing of complimentary verbs and nouns, as if they are good
friends) nicely with the mention of the speaker’s heart in stanzas two and three, as if his heart
flutters out of fear, or even in faint recognition, in concord with the vision before him. Cleave is
another interesting choice of diction. It’s a polysemic word as it has more than one assigned
meaning which happen to be diametrically opposite: cleave can mean both to split apart or to
force together, to separate or join. Associated with the swinging action of a huge sword, in this
line it means to cut, or split apart, the darkness of the speaker’s dream. In fact, this whole line
aptly illustrates the confusing tumult of the poem:

They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame

You might like to consider the usual connotations of light and dark – light is often used
positively, whereas dark represents negative forces. In the second stanza these associations
are reversed. The speaker was mired in gloom, perhaps using sleep as an escape from reality,
a respite from pain in the waking world. The ‘armies of loneliness’, though, will not let him rest.
Their flaming swords are described as blinding – imagine being cocooned in darkness and
suddenly opening your eyes to powerful light, and you’ll get an idea of how disorienting (don’t
ignore whirling from the previous line) the effect is intended to be.

You can choose any image in the poem and find the same precise use of concrete language:
the army don’t cry ‘threateningly’ or ‘fearsomely’, and the sounds of their terrible
swords clanging, clanging… as upon an anvil employs onomatopoeia to render the clash of
metal on metal semi-audible (again, another poet might have written, ‘like a terrible bell,’ or
some such). Arrogant jumps out as a rare adjective, a describing word. It also happens to be a
curiously human one, combining with disdaining to give the army ‘character’ or ‘personality.’ Are
the speaker’s dreams subconsciously giving us little clues about the one who left him so alone?
The quixotic visual detail of long, green hair could reflect the way dreams take real world
figments (such as a woman who left me alone) then twist and distort them into something ugly
and frightening.

In the third stanza, the invaders come out of the sea and occupy the shore. In reality the
battlefield is the speaker’s heart, left vulnerable and wounded by the sudden leaving of one he
loved.

More important than the visual, though, is the auditory power of I Hear an Army… Joyce was
trained as a musician and one of his books of poetry (he published only two) was
called Chamber Music. Many of his poems have such strong musical properties that they have
actually been set to music. The terminology ‘imagery’ perhaps biases us to think of images as
a visual component of poetry – but in fact any use of language that sits close to sensory
perception (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory or kinaesthetic) can be an image. Don’t forget the
title of the poem – I Hear An Army… – letting us know in no uncertain terms Joyce’s dream
army is going to make an auditory impact. We’ve already discussed some instances
of onomatopoeia, and the thunder of horses, whirling laughter, moan in
sleep, clanging and shouting on the shore are all fairly obvious auditory images, helping to
evoke the clamour of invasion and chaos of battle.

But all this pales in comparison to the patterns of alliteration and consonance (these differ in
that consonance repeats sounds within a word while alliteration repeats only the sound of the
first letters) Joyce employs to evoke the terrible cacophony of the charging army. At various
points in the lines Joyce accentuates the force and movement of the army
with alliteration (shouting by the shore is a good example) and internal rhyme. We are used to
poems placing rhyming words at the end of lines (such as land / stand in the first stanza) so
sometimes other types of rhyme are overlooked: check out army / charging, thunder / plunging,
disdaining / reins in the first stanza alone.

If euphony is the arrangement of flowing, pleasant sounds (vowels and soft

consonants) cacophony is the opposite: a group of harsh sounds that clash and clang like the
spiky metal armour and weapons borne by the dreadful invaders. In this one line alone, you can
count seven different consonant sounds, most of them hard and none of them harmonising:

They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame

Try this exercise for yourself with a couple of other lines (they come shaking in triumph their
long, green hair works well) and you’ll begin to appreciate the sonic whirlwind – technically
called cacophony – that Joyce whips up. As a supremely clever piece of juxtaposition, lines
which focus on the thoughts of the sleeping speaker (such as I moan in sleep when I hear afar
their whirling laughter or My heart, have you no wisdom, thus to despair) contain almost no hard
consonant sounds: hear / afar / laughter and heart / have rely on softer F, aspirant H
and assonance (repeated vowels) as sound effects. What better way to suggest the absolutely
alien quality of the invading army, and how much psychic damage it deals to the unfortunate
victim, than through utilising the opposing qualities of sound in different lines. You might also
notice the first line contains mainly softer consonants and vowel sounds, as the speaker hears
the rumble of the distant army drawing nearer before they crash onto the shore.

The final stanza suddenly changes focus, as if the dreamer has started awake, eyes snapping
open in terror at the power of his horrific dream.

Suddenly, halfway through the final stanza, the all-action violence of the poem is replaced by
something more contemplative. As if a switch has been flicked, the sights and sounds of the
army disappear; the abruptness of the change creating the impression that the speaker has
suddenly awoken from his terrible dream, eyes snapping open, breathing raggedly. The poem
still has one or two lines left to contemplate the images lingering in his mind’s eye. The first, My
heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? is a little tricky in terms of grammar and perhaps
the word thus might throw you a little. It might help to break the question down a bit: My heart,
have you no wisdom? Let’s assume the answer is ‘no’, raising the interesting possibility that this
isn’t the first time the speaker has been left bereft by the leaving of a loved one. Could
the repetition of my love, my love, my love be more than a plaintive cry – is it a list of past
disasters? I’m not sure, but you might like to consider this as a possibility. Have you
no wisdom? has the angry tone of an accusation levelled at himself – that he has not learned
from his experiences in the past. Thus (‘therefore’) when he is abandoned once again, his heart
is open and vulnerable to despair.

Ending the poem with two rhetorical questions creates uncertainty, as if the speaker is flailing
in the face of such destruction. The final question, in particular, suggests futility. If love is a
fortress that protects against despair, the green-haired armies of loneliness (symbolism which
is finally confirmed by the last word of the poem) have devastated his defences and left him
bereft, alone in the dark.
Poem Analysis of James Joyce - Claire Dennis
I HEAR AN ARMY by James Joyce

I hear an army charging upon the land,

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armor, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:

I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame.
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:

They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

In red is the author’s use of end rhyme.

In orange is the author’s use of repetition.
In purple is the author’s use of personification.
In blue is the author’s use of similies.
Underlined is the author’s point of view. In this poem, he uses first-person.
In green is the author’s use of the sense of sound.

ANALYSIS

In the poem "I Hear An Army" by James Joyce, the poet describes a nightmare about
charioteers clad in black armor and with long green hair, riding out of the sea and charging
towards him. He uses intense, graphic imagery to portray the powerful image of an army of
horses galloping in battle.

Joyce opens the poem with sound, writing “I hear an army charging upon the land”. He employs
music in his poem, using his words as lyrics that accompany the underlying beat of his stanzas.
In the second stanza, he uses abrupt, short phrases that emphasize his descriptions of the
horses and charioteers. Along with his violent imagery, this stocatta-like phrasing establishes a
rhythm for the poem. Maybe it matches the rhythm of the horses’ hooves as they gallop across
the shore. Maybe it’s the loud, fast beating of his own anxious heart.

Joyce uses repetition in the fourth stanza to emphasize the “clanging, clanging upon the heart”,
which is the action of the charioteers as they “cleave the gloom of dreams”. Again the beat of
the poem is detected and builds momentum in the reader’s mind.

The threatening force is portrayed in this poem through the charioteers. Joyce continually refers
to the soldiers as “they”, using parallel sentence structure in the third stanza to describe what
they do and why they are so fearful. He says the charioteers “come shaking in triumph”, making
the charioteers seem powerful and frightening.

His fierce imagery and intricate rhythm in “I Hear an Army” allows Joyce to convince the reader
of any emotion he wishes to portray. Although a relatively short poem, “I Hear an Army”
certainly does not lack ambition.