Variations on a Theme by Joyce

The war is in words and the wood is the world

That turns beneath our rootless feet;

the vines that reach, alive and snarled,

Across the path where the sand is swirled,

Twist in the night. The light lies flat.

The war is in words and the wood is the world.

The rain is ruin and our ruin rides

The swiftest winds; the wood is whorled

And turned and smoothed by the turning tides.

--There is rain in the woods, slow rain that breeds

The war in the words. The wood is the world.

This rain is ruin and our ruin rides.

The war is in words and the wood is the world,

Sourceless and seized and forever filled

With green vine twisting on wood more gnarled

Than dead men's hands. The vines are curled

Around these branches, crushed and killed.

The war is in words and the wood is the world.

Our thanks to "Lute" from Allpoetry for this poem "Variations on a Theme by Joyce" which is from his first book, The Last Man, published in 1943. This poem is atypical of Kees in that its music is overt; it is full of sound — alliterations and echoes, assonances, internal rhymes, and its organization over-all is by grammatic parallelism.