Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (part 4)

I wanted to set down my thoughts on part 4 of Portrait before I forget them...

Stephen gives up the idea of the priesthood, realizing that it was never a realistic option for him. As soon as he does, we get a beautiful (but somewhat purple) passage:

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds.

I think Joyce is showing us how overwhelmed Stephen suddenly is with the world, and how self-consciously he's poeticizing the world -- he can't even see all these things very well. The purpleness of the prose shows us that Stephen is still an adolescent, over-reacting to everything. From here, Joyce goes us on to throw a bunch of alliterations, compound words, and even 2 chiasmi at us, again showing us Stephen's sudden awakening, but also his immature over-reaction -- he wants to make a metaphor out of everything he sees, turning the girl wading in the sea into a bird, a tidepool into a silver ring, and so on.