ow and in ligland
,fl us Heaney 187.eePing Lord, David Jones, (Faber and r,E2.95) enot'LleePing Lord is David Jones's fourth full °L'i Work, or "writing". It carries, as an ti.liticlunl to the title, "and other fragments", A" the nieces included here are fragments, II.. . low:tave been dressed to a pattern that e %as to project the coherence and preskik the structure where they belong. The 11 j„ Ls Into that megalithic shape founded kaParenthesis and raised through The el',`tetrtata and Epoch and Artist. In fact, St Piece, from "The Book of Balaam's a 't,'is meant to wedge what the author sees hPed joint between the first two works. • Ce,.,Yeats hammered his thoughts into I he'l-iavid Jones is still engaged in "making ,10illithaP,of all that he can find", an activity 'le commended in the historian Neni No and which he probably undertook for Similar to those of Nennius, because 'flward wound" caused by the fear that i te irl things dear to him "should be like I lie. dissipated". i t Is literally an extraordinary writer, who I atiel'iled, single-handed, the task of creatter,;Ittish counter-culture: and if the whole i t.etise occasionally appears programma„ e o' certainly passionate. Picking up where e el Idord Movement left off, his effort has t t°,graft a healing tissue over that wound o forliglish consciousness inflicted by the r tri Illation and the Industrial Revolution. an
t aritain united and maintained within ii
0 ttnwall, of the Roman world by legionaries , list,c1 0Y their sacramentum or oath of 6 Raent, medieval catholic Britain bonded 1 ecue by the ministry of a sacramental %la' these worlds centred round a divine these, round an urbs at once of earth and i IA Poled on the axis of the cross, afford l'i riV,i for his alternative society. And un11 el , broorig both worlds, irrigating and if lareering the imperium from beyond the tii,4tliti'o,are the insular Celtic and British leld ,"s. All this he has wrought into a )0 kit) flourish in the face of the gorgon it his 'Polls. Otta,,Witihdrawal of assent from the techin?' does not, however, take the form of a 4 ,e,rItal primitivism. We have only to
/ e earth-nostalgia of some current
o loc,ell Poetry beside the historical and 111 reQral disciplines of Jones's imagination ill. „sgoise its adequacy and density. Where ttAmerican is often an aesthetic optIt'idst, exploiting a Red Ipdian myth for its ti likiltg effect, this Welsh Cockney retrieves ilientfi°11 with great labour, affirms it by its 0`,1c images and exposes its outline as a truth. He has, in Eliot's phrase, reit, to the origin and brought something it gesbcIllething to enrich not only the lane 61.4 People's consciousness of who they be People's and who they consequently are. Aca is, still, now and England. e()Ilvert, as a philologist, as a priest of \,-,t1, as a maker and breaker of metre 0 Itth-eabulary, he is the direct heir of rti"s. And as a poet of Christ's passion and of sacramental nature, his lineage laddenly past Hopkins to the Anglolybream of the Rood. His world is cerbicharged with the grandeur of God but ik ee,cis as a maimed god at the centre of . ic,)Irid, on the "tump” of Calvary, on a e too celebrates "all things counter, . sPare", "all trades, their gear, tackle
and trim" and laments the smear andand blear that man's toil has left. And just as for Hopkins Christ was a "chevalier", and a "prince" in the Anglo-Saxon poem, Jones's "sleeping lord" is an incarnate, numinous presence:
Is the configuration of the land
the fun-owed body of the lord are the scarred ridges
his dented greaves do the trickling gullies yet drain his hog-wounds? Does the land wait the sleeping lord or is the wasted land that very lord who sleeps?
This is the conclusion of the title 'piece which is the penultimate "fragment" in the collection, and the book can be read backward from here, or forward towards this point.
The next four pieces are set at the beginning of the Christian era and involve Roman troops serving in Palestine at that time, one of the pieces ('The Fatigue') being located in Jerusalem on the day of the crucifixion. The soldiers are drawn from different parts of the empire, with Celt, Roman and Greek rubbing shoulders, answering the same bugle calls, in order to emphasise "the unific aspect of an imperium", an aspect of the worldly empire that shadows forth the mystical body of the lord, the oneness of all in a heavenly kingdom. However, I would not want this suggestion of doctrinal underpinning to deter readers of a more secular frame of mind from the poetry, which often has the hardness and particularity of a soldier's mind about it. What David Jones said about James Joyce can be applied to him when he is writing at his best, when the references and allusions are not cluttering rapturously: "The concrete, the exact dimensions, the contactual, the visual, the bodily, what the senses register, the assembled data first—then is the 'imagination' freed to get on with the job." (I presume the quotation marks for 'imagination' are a rebuke to the too human presumption of the Romantics) He works from the known to the unknown, from the details of the soldiers who are instrumental to the purpose of the action in which they are involved.
Yet while the Roman armies were literally making straight the paths for the gospel message, they were also "hog-wounding" the inscape of the world, doing the business of the Ram "to square the world circle and number the tribes and write down the secret things and take away the diversities by which we are." Therefore, the answering movement to the Roman fragments are the three more or less Celtic fragments — `The Tutelar of the Place', 'The Hunt' and 'The Sleeping Lord'. These represent, as it were, the jungle's complaint to the napalm. While the worldbeaters suck at a mother who "was ventricled of bronze/had ubera of iron", the beaten tribes pray their litany to the tutelar of the place, her "that loves place, time, demarcation, heath, kin, enclosure, site, differentiated cult". This, for me, is the nurturing centre of the whole book, where the tutelar is both madonna and earth-mother, the female form in a pieta, cradling the sleeping lord:
In the bland megalopolitan light where no shadow is by day or night be our shadow.
Remember the mound-kin, the kith of the tarren gone from this mountain because of the exorbitance of the Ram. .
David Jones's readers are initiates of a kind and I hope The Sleeping Lord will initiate many more. His name has been 'insistently brought up in recent months because of his exclusion from The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, but it will increasingly figure not because of its exclusion but because of the inclusiveness of the vision it signifies. This new book is difficult, forbidding to those expecting bland felicities, but it has about it the gnarled riches of the oakwood and those who beat towards the centre will find poetry living in the dapple of the thickets.
Previous page
