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David Jones, He Frees the Waters in Helyon, Copyright Trustees of the David Jones Estate Bridgeman Images, SF issue 72

Contemplating Eternity

Although I want to tell you about a poem, let us begin with objects. I would like you to come with me first to Birmingham, to visit the Staffordshire Hoard. These rich and intricately worked treasures, most of which were once decorations for weapons, conjure images of kings and warriors in the Dark Ages: Anglo-Saxon noblemen, proud and brave, the gold and garnets on their war gear flashing in the light of the sixth-century sun. The few objects that are not overtly martial are reli­gious, and these show us how Christianity and paganism overlapped in England at this time: there are Christian crosses in the hoard, but they are decorated with the interlaced plants and animals characteristic of the pagan Germanic peoples. Perhaps most of all, though, the Staffordshire Hoard makes one think of passing, inheritance and decline. Some of the objects are decorated with re-used Roman glass, a reminder both of Roman technology and of Rome’s fall; more poignantly still, the majority of the items were systematically dismantled or broken up before they were buried, the precious metals and stones separated from the iron, wood, bone and cloth they once adorned. There must have been a reason for this, but that reason is lost, and those who understood it have been dust for centuries.

Let us now go west, across the Irish Sea to Dublin, to see the Book of Kells. The legend, attested since 1007, is that this lavish gospel book was written in the hand of St Columba himself (the Irish monk who founded the Christian community on Iona, and died in AD597), though it is now thought to date from sometime between the late seventh and mid-ninth centuries. Created either on Iona or in Ireland itself, the Book of Kells is Celtic and sacred whereas the Staffordshire Hoard is Anglo-Saxon and martial; instead of Dark Age action, weapons, kings and warriors, here we have contemplation, text, monks and, in the first full-page illustration, the Virgin and Child. But the manuscript shares to

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Although I want to tell you about a poem, let us begin with objects. I would like you to come with me first to Birmingham, to visit the Staffordshire Hoard. These rich and intricately worked treasures, most of which were once decorations for weapons, conjure images of kings and warriors in the Dark Ages: Anglo-Saxon noblemen, proud and brave, the gold and garnets on their war gear flashing in the light of the sixth-century sun. The few objects that are not overtly martial are reli­gious, and these show us how Christianity and paganism overlapped in England at this time: there are Christian crosses in the hoard, but they are decorated with the interlaced plants and animals characteristic of the pagan Germanic peoples. Perhaps most of all, though, the Staffordshire Hoard makes one think of passing, inheritance and decline. Some of the objects are decorated with re-used Roman glass, a reminder both of Roman technology and of Rome’s fall; more poignantly still, the majority of the items were systematically dismantled or broken up before they were buried, the precious metals and stones separated from the iron, wood, bone and cloth they once adorned. There must have been a reason for this, but that reason is lost, and those who understood it have been dust for centuries.

Let us now go west, across the Irish Sea to Dublin, to see the Book of Kells. The legend, attested since 1007, is that this lavish gospel book was written in the hand of St Columba himself (the Irish monk who founded the Christian community on Iona, and died in AD597), though it is now thought to date from sometime between the late seventh and mid-ninth centuries. Created either on Iona or in Ireland itself, the Book of Kells is Celtic and sacred whereas the Staffordshire Hoard is Anglo-Saxon and martial; instead of Dark Age action, weapons, kings and warriors, here we have contemplation, text, monks and, in the first full-page illustration, the Virgin and Child. But the manuscript shares to some degree the hybrid nature of the hoard: the gospel text is in Latin, the illustrations have affinities with Greek and Coptic iconography, and much of the other decoration is, again, in the interlaced, knotted style inherited from pagan culture. Admiring the Book of Kells, however, is a very differ­ent experience from admiring the Staffordshire Hoard, for, while the treasure is elegiac, the manuscript is an intrinsically joyous and hope­ful object. Its texts are those of the Good News, its essence faith in salvation, its purpose to redeem humankind from linear time and decline, and find us a home in eternity. For our last stops en route to the poem, we shall return to Great Britain and visit Cardiff and London (or Google) to look at two of David Jones’s paintings: Trystan ac Essyllt (1962, National Museum of Wales) and Aphrodite in Aulis (1941, Tate). These are beautiful, com­plex pictures that repay prolonged viewing, the former illustrating a scene from the Arthurian legend, which Jones loved deeply; the latter a female nude invoking many of the themes we have touched on already. They also share a characteristic style that makes visible the style of the poem: fluid, shifting, transparent, the layers overlapping and bleeding together to give an effect rather like looking through running water or mist. It is magical, stimulating and at times slightly unsettling. Why begin like this? Partly because David Jones was, besides being a poet, also a soldier, devout Catholic, artist, engraver, Londoner and Welshman; and partly because these objects have introduced ideas, themes and techniques that run through his great poem. The Anathemata, in that allusive, layered, overlapping style of the paint­ings, embraces the Christian and the pagan, the sacred and the profane, elegy and praise, the passing and the circularity of time, the nobility and the transience of human endeavour. It is, in essence, an extended love song to Britain and the West, and to the culture and civilization they have inherited from Greece and Rome. In 200-odd pages of verse, prose, image and inscription, the poem explores, and muses on, the development of humankind from its pre-human ancestors; the formation of Europe, both geological and cultural; the nature of human beings as creatures who make things; and, key to it all, faith and the Christian mysteries. Another central theme is what scholars call translatio – the notion that knowledge and power drift ever westward, from Babylon to Greece, to Rome, to France and Britain (and, we might add, on to America and perhaps beyond, back round to China and India). This idea of passage pro­vides much of the poem’s imagery – ships and sea travel abound, successive waves of migration and immigration are registered in Britain’s past, and the layers of history are laid down like rock strata, passing successively out of sight yet each underpinning the next, preserving the last, and all to some degree retrievable, none irredeem­ably lost. The Anathemata is Jones’s second long poem. The first, the war epic In Parenthesis, was published by Faber in 1937; The Anathemata followed in 1952. The word ‘anathemata’ (accent on the third syllable) means something like ‘things set apart’ – not in the sense of being made anathema, though the words are related, but, as Jones summarizes in the poem’s preface, ‘Things set up, lifted up, or in whatever manner made over to the gods.’ That is clearly how he saw his poem, and, indeed, all his work as an artist. Though not in the least ‘churchy’, The Anathemata is, nevertheless, a kind of offering. The poem is divided into eight parts, their titles indicating the ritualistic, mythical atmosphere of the whole. ‘Rite and Fore-Time’ meditates on the evolutionary origins of humankind and the geo-logical formation of the European continent, and in doing so attempts to mesh pre-history with Christian time. Jones considers all the unknown multitudes – the first proto-human to walk erect, those who went naked in tropical climes and the fur-clad ‘tundra wan-derers’ of the last Ice Age, he who killed the last mammoth, and the nameless artists who decorated the caves at Lascaux – and comes to the beautiful, moving conclusion that if Christ died to redeem humankind, that redemption must include all these too:
(He would lose, not any one from among them. Of all those given him he would lose none.) . . . Upon all fore-times. From before time his perpetual light shines upon them. Upon all at once upon each one whom he invites, bids, us to recall when we make the recalling of him daily, at the Stone.
In the next section, ‘Middle-Sea and Lear-Sea’, we creep gradually forward in time until, in dancing, lyrical mode, we reach classical Greece:
and the second Spring and a new wonder under heaven: man-limb stirs in the god-stones and the kouroi are gay and stepping it but stanced solemn.
Moving quickly now, in space as well as time, we join a weathered old Athenian shipmaster and his crew as they sail out from a choppy Mediterranean into yet rougher waters, headed north towards a myth-wrapped Britain. Storm-tossed, wind-driven, the ship-boys longing for their Greek girls back home, the section ends in mystery with the vessel shrouded in mist somewhere off Cornwall. ‘Angle-Land’ picks up where the previous section left off, as the ship of culture noses its way around Britain’s southern and eastern coasts, where Romanitas and more recent Germanic influences min­gle on a bed of pre-Roman Britishness. This section contains one of my favourite passages, which illustrates Jones’s playful use of lan­guage and skill with sound (he was adamant that The Anathemata should be read aloud), as our sailor travels:
On past the low lands of the Holland that Welland winds to the Deepings north of the Soke past where Woden’s gang is gens Julia for Wuffingas new to old Nene and up with the Lark past the south hams and the north tons . . .
You don’t need to understand all the references to appreciate just how lovely these words are; indeed, the sense of understanding only partially, of seeing the meaning ‘as if through a glass, darkly’, is part of the poem’s appeal (and if you prefer clarity, the Internet will soon provide it). The passage then slides off into thoughts on Nelson at Trafalgar, before the section ends in the Anglo-European waters of the North Sea. By Section IV, ‘Redriff’, our seaman has berthed his ship in a timeless London, but she needs repair. His enquiries give rise to a lively monologue from Eb Bradshaw, shipwright, Jones’s grandpa, in the great boasting tradition inherited from Beowulf. No, Mr Brad-shaw will not hurry the job, will not botch his work to suit this impatient foreigner,
But tell him tell him from me if he waits his turn an’ damps down his Sicily sulphur, we’ll spokeshave those deadeyes for him as smooth as a peach of a cheek . . . he’s got till the Day o’ Doom to sail the bitter seas o’ the world!
‘The Lady of the Pool’, Section V, is the heart of the poem and belongs to women. Though the title invokes Arthurian romance, we remain in London, our lady a Cockney lavender-seller and docklands harlot called Elen, who has learnt much from her seafaring backstreet loves and is, in fact, a powerful, atemporal, mother-lover figure, embodying not merely London, but also Roma, Amor (Aphrodite), Flora, Guinevere, Helen, Mary . . . ‘What rogue’s cant is this?’ she sharply asks the one man who senses some of her significance, ‘Whereas, inly,’ she confesses, ‘I for love languished.’ In the middle of Elen’s monologue is The Anathemata’s core: a lyrical account of the Passion that touches, typically, on the Liturgy, The Canterbury Tales, The Waste Land and the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’. Once Elen has lapsed back into her flower-seller’s cry, Section VI, ‘Keel, Ram, Stauros’, charts the fate of an archetypal tree in ship, battering ram and Cross. Next, ‘Mabinog’s Liturgy’ picks up themes from ‘Rite and Fore-Time’, but now located in Britain and closer to us in time, running right up to the Nativity itself and the joyous Christmas solemnities in Dark Age Wales and a timeless Rome, where we join the celebrants at dawn in the church of St Anastasia on the Palatine Hill:
Keeping this most stella’d night on Christmas Day in the Morning. Then back to Mary Major to hear them tell of how that from before all time Minerva is sprung from the head of Jove.
The final section is called ‘Sherthursdaye and Venus Day’, but here I must make a confession: though I first encountered The Anathemata over a decade ago, I have not yet read this last section. The poem’s style, as you will have noticed, is allusive, the language peppered with snatches of Latin, Welsh, German and Cockney rhyming slang. Though the references are not obscure, and Jones helps the reader with notes, The Anathemata is a demanding read. Jones writes in the preface of how every word is intended to mean ‘as much as it can be made to mean’, and expresses his wish that the poem be read ‘with deliberation . . . for what I have written will certainly lose half of what I intend, indeed, will fail altogether, unless the advice “with deliberation” be heeded’. Reading like this is stimulating, rewarding, but not for every day. Thus, the poem comes off my shelf at the beginning of Advent each year, and returns to it on Twelfth Night. (I reckon I’ll get to the end in 2023.) In between, I do read ‘with delib­eration’, following the references out into the OED, encyclopaedias and literature, going slowly, looping back, annotating and cross- referencing to the extent that my copy is beginning to resemble one of those medieval bibles in which the scholastic commentary threatens to swamp the Scripture. There is just so much meaning to discover. Though I say the references are not obscure, there are certain texts that loom particularly large in Jones’s mental landscape. Among them are the Mass and Liturgy, the medieval Welsh tales of The Mabinogion, Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and the Greek and Norse myths. Another book that profoundly influenced his thought is Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which argues that so-called Great Cultures rise and fall, and that contemporary Western culture is in its twilight having been at its most vital in the early Middle Ages. This sense of transience and fading gives The Anathemata an aching sadness, much like that one experiences when looking at the Staffordshire Hoard – a pervasive awareness that we are living late in time, in the ‘ramshackle last phases’. Yet this sadness is balanced by Christian hope – for the New Light of the Book of Kells shines on us just as it did on our prehistoric forebears – and by faith in the power of art, humankind’s defining trait, to preserve, offer up and pass on. ‘I have made a heap of all that I could find’, Jones writes at the start of his preface, quoting the ninth-century British chronicler Nennius, who wrote in the hope that the precious cultural detritus so gathered might be handed on and kept alive. Well, The Anathemata is a marvellous heap, built with the devotion and skill of a master- maker, and I can only urge you to seek it out as part of your own cultural inheritance, and to enjoy it for yourself. Even if it does take you a decade.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 72 © Marianne Fisher 2021


About the contributor

Marianne Fisher is native to the border between England and Wales, and discovered David Jones while at university in Cardiff. She usually acts as midwife to other people’s prose, but she likes to write her own occasionally too.

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