Breaking sense in A Portrait's villanelle

At the heart of Stephen Dedalus' aesthetics of perception in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is pleasure. When Stephen analyzes the pleasurability of words however, he is repeatedly puzzled by what could be termed a conundrum of sense: for when he savours the beauty of words, just what is it that pleases? The sensory dimension, the sounds, rhythm, and colour of words themselves, or the inner sensations they stimulate in him? The "reflection of the glowing sensible world" or alternatively "the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions" (P 167)? For the nascent artist, his early tendency to privilege the word over the interior world of sensation and affect, poses a stumbling block to the development of his imagination; the episode in which Stephen composes a villanelle can be read as an attempt to circumvent the primacy of the word in an experimental dialogue of sensation and sense-making.