Bad lines in Good poems.

I’ve just put a page on pt 5 of ‘In Parenthesis’ on arduity. As ever, any feedback would be much appreciated.

Whilst extolling the brilliance of this masterpiece, I came across a couple of lines that could be described as Not Very Good which was a bit of a shock because Jones (in my head) is almost perfect and this got me to thinking about other bad lines in brilliant poems. So, what follows is a compilation of those examples that most readily spring to mind. The bebrowed definition of Not Very Good in this context relates, I think, to a line or two that is out of place and jars with the rest of the poem, lines that sound dissonant when read aloud. I think there’s a difference between these and Keston Sutherland’s depiction of the wrong line because that would seem to be more about apparent banality or the non-poetic in a line which nevertheless works.

This selection is personal and subjective, I’ve chosen to concentrate on poems that I feel are excellent but nevertheless are let down by this small blemish.

John Milton and ‘Lycidas’

This has been called the greatest elegy in English literature, its subject is Edward King who was at Cambridge with Milton and who drowned in 1637. I’m of the view that Milton never does lines of the above sort, in fact I’ve never been able to locate a bad line in the entire length of ‘Paradise Lost’ but the fourth and fifth lines here do seem to be out of place:

Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie,

Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,

Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard streams

Ay me, I fondly dream!

Had ye been there.....for what could that have done?

How could the muse herself that Orpheus bore,

The muse herself for her enchanting son

Whom universal nature did lament,

I know that this is intended as a sudden cry of hearfelt anguish and is meant to be dissonant but it does need to be strong and well put together and neither ‘Ay me’ nor ‘and ‘what could that have done?’ are up to the task. It isn’t anguished enough nor lyrical enough to justify its presence. It might be argued that this lack of verbal skill is the ‘point’ that this interjection deliberately refuses to work so as to express the depth of human feeling but the fact remains that there is little anguish in ‘what could that have done’ and that it feels both gratuitous and inept. Perhaps Milton was trying to imitate the sudden outbursts in the work of George Herbert which was published a few years before but Herbert’s interjections are both strong and believable whereas this isn’t.

Simon Jarvis and ‘The Unconditional’.

I have said this before but the above is one of the most important publications of the last thirty years. It runs to 236 pages, it is brilliantly and infuriatingly digressive and defiantly metrical. It is also deeply subversive and I don’t understand why this fact isn’t more widely recognised. It isn’t an easy read but it is important and more than repays the attention that is paid to it. It was published in 2005 and is still available from Barque Press for a mere fifteen quid.

One aspect of the Jarvis thesis is that prosody is helpful when expressing complex or philosophical ideas and ‘The Unconditional’ is, among many other things, an example of this. However, there are a few lines where things go a bit awry and one of these serves to undermine a particularly brilliant passage:

        In that domain a buried A-road may

sometime by old pavilions of its shops

        remind a hoarse commercial traveller

of the remediable loss of life

        in undefended type face of a font

still mutely pleading for a shoppers loves

        still wearily enduring falling sales

still waiting for authenticated close

        or still abiding till a ripeness when

the properly intolerable come

        and foreclose closure closing it by force.

=x. was ready to feel all that.

        There or anywhere else.

But he was nowhere near the area.

        The hue of the metallic colouring on

his complicit vehicle accompanying him

        could barely properly be named as blue-

fantastically overpropertied
        as though blue left blue for a blue elsewhere

or settled only in the skull of an

        acatastatical erotomane

whose dream then taking vehicle form

        inflicts whatever violence it can

on any object-field whose lightest flinch

        might intimate a rustable flaw beneath

with a pure undersong of "blue, blue, blue".

        Serene irony fell into the wrong tax bracket.

I’ve quoted this at length to emphasis the damage that a line can do. On an initial reading I thought it was the last word in ‘But he was nowhere near the area’ that was wrong, that ‘area’ seemed so out of place in the lyrical brilliance of what precedes and follows it but I’ve now decided that it is the line itself that is the problem. Both the portrayal of the commercial traveller and the improvisation on the colour of the ‘complicit vehicle’ are sustained passage of lyrical invention and technical flair but both of these are let down by the presence of this one decidedly dull line. The other issue is that I don’t entirely understand what it is supposed to be doing, it doesn’t add greatly to the sense of what’s being said and even by page 19 most of us will have recognised that =x. is disposed to this kind of self-lacerating melancholia. it is therefore difficult to see what these three lines might add.

Whilst I’ve got the opportunity, I would like to draw your attention to the brilliance of “as though blue left blue for a blue elsewhere” which is almost as good as “on any object field whose lightest flinch / might intimate a rustable flaw beneath” which is obviously wonderful.

As with Milton, this kind of ineptitude is completely out of character for Jarvis and for ‘The Unconditional’ in particular, it may of course be that this is deliberately ‘wrong’ but this kind of knowing wink is absent from the rest of the poem and doesn’t occur in what Jarvis has published since. I’ve now read the poem four times and this remains the bit that is most strikingly bad, there are other sections and lines that are overly self-indulgent, obscure or badly expressed but this is the only line that seems to be irredeemably bad.

David Jones and ‘In Parenthesis’

Anyone who doesn’t think that David Jones was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century either hasn’t read any of his work or is a complete fool. Tom Dilworth’s claim that ‘In Parenthesis’ is one of the five great war books that we have seems to me to be an altogether reasonable claim. Having spent the last ten days or so thinking and writing about it for arduity, I now have to report that it isn’t perfect and that there is at least a couple of lines that should have been cut.

The poem recounts Jones’ experience of his service in World Ward One leading up to and including the assault on Mametz Wood during the Somme offensive in July 1916. This is from Part Five and is a dialogue between two French civilians who run the bar that the troops frequent during rest periods away from the trenches:

        She bolted the door for the night

    and when it was morning

    Jacques said that the Englishman's guns had kept him awake.

       She said that it was a pleasant morning, and the first in June.

       He said it was time the English advanced, that there wera a

    stupid race, anyhow.

       She said they were not.

       He would like to remind her of the Pastoral,

    for which she laughed a long time.

    with: Vah, vah,

    and her head wagging

    with: La - la la, and her finger pointed, with:

    Tawny-tooth go watch the priest, and:

    Bent-wit.

       She said that the war was lucrative and chid him feed the 

    fowl, and smoothed her pinafore: sometimes the Siege Artil-

    lery came in during the morning, if there wasn't a shoot on.

Jones glosses ‘Tawny-tooth…bent wit’ as “Cf. Skelton. I cannot find the passage I had in mind”- and neither can I, even with the assistance of the Adobe ‘find’ gizmo. In some notes Jones also explains why he is using a particular quotation but chooses not to do so here. I have a couple of concerns:

• the two lines spoil the rest which is a reasonably straightforward account of a conversation that isn’t at all difficult to follow;,
• if you are going to quote something then you should try and make sure of it’s accuracy;
• if you know that the quote might be spurious and you are providing notes then you should explain (as you do elsewhere) what you were hoping to achieve.

It could be argued that this was an innovative and experimental work but there are elsewhere sustained pieces of experimental brilliance that do what they should whereas we will never know what this was meant to achieve, it serves simply to get in the way.

So, none of the above examples are essential to the poem and could be removed without too much difficulty and perhaps it’s this more than the poor quality that I find most difficult. None of these do serious damage to the rest of the poem and I would urge all readers to read the last two, you won’t be disappointed.

‘In Parenthesis’ is currently available from Amazon at just over twelve of your finest English pounds.

Poetry and goodness

I need to start by expressing my gratitude to Michael Peverett, John Stevens and Steffen Hope for their feedback of the ‘Mercian Hymns’ page on arduity which has been invaluable and much appreciated. I’ve just added a longish page on the first four parts of ‘In Parenthesis’, any feedback on this would be much appreciated- either in the comments here or via e-mail- the address is at the bottom of each arduity page.

In his response to my recent thing on David Jones, Tom Dilworth expressed the view that “In IN PARENTHESIS the supreme value is not human life but goodness” which has set me thinking in a number of different directions. The first of these is that poetry is much better at badness than it is on the more positive aspects of the human race. The second is that those great poets who have tried to deal with goodness or virtue have clearly dealt with badness and vice with greater relish. The third thought is that there are those poets who exude goodness in their work and who approach their material with both empathy and compassion for the human condition.

In chronological order, I’m going to have to start with Book I of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ which describes the quest of the Red Cross knight in achieving holiness. I think it is reasonable to observe that the most interesting/absorbing/entertaining characters are irrevocably Bad and that the way in which they do Badness is much more convincing than the good characters who help the knight on his way. Archimago and Duessa are eminently believable and Despair is a brilliant portrayal of what might be described as early nihilism but the virtuous Fidessa and Contemplation have all the realism of cardboard. The knight is so inept that we can’t take his side whilst Una, the object of his love and devotion, has only one scene where she is allowed to display her real emotions, for the rest of the 12 cantos she remains simply a bland paradigm of virtue.

Book III is ostensibly ‘about’ chastity as embodied by Britomart who does act with compassion and generosity, who does appear to be keen on doing the Right Thing and is much more complex and involving than any of the other ‘good’ subjects of the poem.

Spenser doesn’t write with compassion, he writes as a poet who is keen to demonstrate his value and skill. I am and always will be a Spenserian but that doesn’t mean that I’m blind to the rampant egotism that runs through the work which really does get in the way of any sense of understanding of the reality of human talents and frailties. This self-regard is most obviously on display in the ‘Amoretti’ sequence but it also runs through the Faerie Queene- Spenser describes a great many fight scenes not because they are essential to his theme but because he’s very good at them even though the reader is weary after the first five or six.

George Herbert’s Love III deals with God’s love for mankind and the way in which salvation might work. I don’t want to re-visit Prynne’s detailed analysis but I do want to suggest that the poets displays a degree of goodness (in the sense of compassion and tenderness) as well as insight in the following lines. The poem uses the analogy of a guest and a meal that is offered:

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

                   If I lack any thing.


A guest, I answered worthy to be here.

                          Love said, You shall be he.

This is probably an entirely personal response but this strikes me as more than a theological ‘point’ because it seems to encapsulate the struggle that most of us have with the notion of worthiness. I know than a few individuals who have dedicated their lives to some kind of public service as a way of reconciling or dealing with their own sense of unworthiness and the above exchange seems to explore this in a particularly accurate and humane way that is absent from most of the rest of great English verse.

This brings us to John Milton and his God problem. In Paradise Lost, Jesus has compassion for humanity and does all the right/good things from defeating the bad angels to undertaking to sacrifice himself in order to redeem mankind. God, on the other hand, is grumpy and complains a lot about man’s ingratitude and disobedience. Being omniscient, God knows about Adam’s disobedience before it occurs but also knows (because of Free Will) that there is nothing he can do to prevent it. This makes him far more compelling than either Satan or Christ because he confounds our expectation that God must be inherently good and kind and never, ever bad-tampered.

The other bits of goodness turn out to be rather tedious, I find myself becoming irritated by the unalloyed virtue of Adam and Eve in the idyllic garden prior to the Fall. Milton is our greatest poet but he’s also a streetfighter with a number of points to make and this doesn’t leave much space for an empathetic stance.

Charles Olson’s compassion for the people of Gloucester and the way in which he describes existence on the edge of the Atlantic is an example of warmth and his love for the place which is enunciated in detail throughout ‘Maximus’, drawing us in to a similar viewpoint.

As with David Jones, one of Olson’s concerns is the relationship of the past to the present and the following fourteen lines explore this with great personal warmth;

A year that year

was new to men

the place had bred

in the mind of another


John White had seen it

in his eye

but fourteen men

of whom we know eleven


twenty two eyes

and the snow flew

where gulls now paper 

the skies


where fishing continues

and my heart lies

I could go on for a very long time about how the archive and archival poetry brings the past into the immediate present a how Jones and Olson are two of our greatest poets (in part) because of this element in their practice. Instead, I just want to point to the love expressed and written in the above which to my mind is also an expression of Olson’s goodness.

Finally, Elizabeth Bishop is one of the very few poets who does goodness really well and I want to produce the closing lines of ‘Filling Station’ as an example of technical brilliance and a very human compassion:

Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

ESSO-SO-SO-SO

to high-strung automobiles.

Somebody loves us all.

There is a lot going on here but the ‘point’ is beautifully and expertly made and it is these expressions of compassion and human worth, even in the mundane, that makes Bishop so very, very good. There’s a reported conversation in ‘Moose’ which is technically perfect but is also soaked through with this sense of innate value in the human race.

So, I need to thank Tom Dilworth again for enabling me to think about yet another aspect that I’ve taken too much for granted and will now pay much more attention to.

David Jones as (profound) chronicler.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Nathaniel Drake Carlson for pointing me in the direction of the Spring 1982 edition of Poetry Wales which contains two particularly fascinating pieces on ‘In Parenthesis’.

I know I should be reading all that Thomas Dilworth has written on Jones but I haven’t yet because I’m still having this internal debate with the insightful Rene Hague on ‘The Anathemata’ and because the person in charge of the Bebrowed accounts has gently pointed out that I should read the books I’ve acquired before buying any more, which is entirely reasonable.

In this particular issue of Poetry Wales there are articles by Dilworth and Joseph Cohen on aspects of ‘In Parenthesis’, the first deals with the poem as chronicle whereas Cohen considers the profundity of the work. Regular readers will know that I have a long standing interest in the archival / documentary / commemorative aspects of poetry and that I wrote a week ago about profundity and poetry which generated more than a little debate so I’ve read both with great interest.

Before we proceed I need to point out (again) that David Jones is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and I remain dismayed that his work isn’t better known. ‘In Parenthesis’ is a sequence of poems that recount Jones’ experience as a soldier from training in England to being wounded during the disastrous Somme offensive of 1916. It is a work of immense humanity and technical skill, in his piece Dilworth makes a claim for it being “one of the world’s four or five great war books. It is far better than any other work or collection of works on the Great War”, I don’t know enough about war books to support this claim but it is certainly the best book on conflict that I have ever read.

So, Dilworth concentrates on the poem as an authentic / accurate account of Jones’ experiences which in itself (for us devotees) is valuable in itself but I’m a bit concerned that this focus might be missing other aspects of what the poem might be about- and whether ‘chronicle’ is the right noun.

Jones’ dedication at the beginning of the poem is long and complex but it includes “especially Pte. R.A. Lewis- gunner from Newport Monmouthshire killed in action in the Boesinghe sector N.W. of Ypres some time in the winter 1916-17″ and his preface starts with “This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt, & was part of” which might indicate that this is more of a personal memoir which also commemorates a fallen comrade. There’s also a ‘political’ edge – Jones goes on to condemn the increasing mechanisation of the war which led to even more ‘wholesale slaughter’.

Dilworth is the expert on all things David Jones but it does seem to me that there are a couple of quibbles. He writes:

Such changes in chronology indicate that Jones is not recording history, but he is being over careful when he writes in his preface that no ‘sequence of events’ in the poem is ‘historically accurate’.

The full quote is “None of the characters in this writing are real persons, nor is any sequence of events historically accurate” – this may be an indication of being overly careful but it is also an indication that it isn’t his intention that the poem should be read as a historical account, in fact the preceding passage seems to indicate more of a memorialisation of a time and a way of soldiering ( “a certain amateurishness, and elbow-room for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a less exacting past”) that was obliterated in the Somme offensive of 1916- the end-point of Jones’ narrative.

Dilworth rightly points to Jones’ technical brilliance and the ‘documentary’ feel of the sequence as a whole but also states that Jones doesn’t do anecdote. I’m struggling a bit with this observation because there is at least one (albeit loaded) innstance that seems to me to be anecdotal.

The OED’s primary definition of anecdote is “Secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history” and this seems to me that this (from part 2) might fit:

One day the Adjutant addressed them on the history of the regiment. Lectures by the Bombing Officer: he sat in the straw, a mild young man, who told them lightly of the efficacy of his trade; he predicted an important future for the new Mills Mk. IV grenade, just on the market; he discussed the improvised jam-tins of the veterans, of the bombs of after the Marne, grenades of Loos and Laventie – he compared these elementary, amateurish, inefficiencies with the compact and supremely satisfactory invention of this Mr Mills, to whom his country was so greatly indebted.

He took the names of all those men who professed efficiency on the cricket field – more particularly those who claimed to bowl effectively – and brushing away with his hand pieces of straw from his breeches, he sauntered off with his sections of grenades and fuses and explanatory diagrams of their mechanisms stuffed into the pockets of his raincoat, like a departing commercial traveller.

Ignoring the bitter sarcasm for the moment this strikes me as a previously unpublished detail of history. The Mills bomb was the first fragmentation grenade – a device which not only exploded but threw out shrapnel over the surrounding area and it would make sense for good bowlers to be recruited to throw these things far enough to prevent themselves being injured. This weapon was first introduced in 1915 and is one of the elements of mechanised brutality that Jones deplores so there is an additional ‘point’ being made in this particular passage which seems to me to be anecdotal.

I also accept that the sales rep device is particularly effective but it is entirely feasible that such an officer would do what he could to ‘sell’ this kind of innovation to the troops whilst providing explanation and context because that was part of his role.

Turning now to Joseph Cohen we find this:

In Parenthesis, if it is anything, is a profound work. It has unusual depth. It is a product of two complex cerebral functions: (1) reflection and the play of the imagination on the poet’s experience as an infantryman on the Western Front: an extreme condition, prolonged, marked by danger, suffering, privation and loss, unparalleled in history to that time; and (2) subsequent omnivorous reading and more reflection on the literature and history of individual and collective military experience reaching back to antiquity. Through this juxtaposition of the experience of the past with that of the present, Jones focuses out attention on the panoramic range of feelings human beings express in the throes of war. By comparing the past to the present, Jones emphasizes the supreme value of human life.

I don’t want to revisit the recent debate on the various elements of profundity but for me the above combination is not where this particular quality of ‘In Parenthesis’ lies- it is rather in the accuracy and honesty of what it was like to be in the midst of this senseless carnage and the sensitive portrayal of the human dynamics between officers, NCOs and the ‘ordinary’ rank and file. Once again, I accept that my definition of ‘profound’ is entirely subjective and (probably) subject to change but, as with Hill’s observation, there is this sense of insightful/useful humanity that makes ‘In Parenthesis’ so profound.

I also think Cohen misses the point about the past and the present which he sees as a juxtaposition- I’m of the view that all of Jones’ work is about the real existence of the past in the present, one of his many strengths is his ability to quietly insist on this in both ‘In Parenthesis’ and ‘The Anathemata’. I’m currently writing an extended page on the former for arduity and this seems clearer to me with each reading.

David Jones and the shape of the Anathemata

I’m re-reading the above poem in conjunction with Rene Hague’s commentary and this has (together with a re-reading of Jones’ preface) added a bit more perspective on the rationale of this remarkable poem. Many months ago I wrote something speculating about why some parts of poems are in prose and others are in verse, with specific reference to Jones, Olson and Sutherland, I don’t think I made too much progress then but what Jones has to say about ‘shape’ does begin to clarfy things a little.

Hague quotes Jones as saying “I have tried to make a shape in words” and it is both the verb and the noun that strike me as important. In his preface Jones talks about the appearance of the poem in these terms:

I intend what I have written to be said. While, marks of punctuation, breaks of line, lengths of line, grouping of words or sentences and variations of spacing are visual contrivances they have here an aural and oral intention. You can’t get the intention unless you hear the sound and you observe the score; and pause-marks on a score are of particular importance.

This seems reasonable but these visual patterns are also the components of the poem’s shape and in this regard Hague has drawn my attention to Gregory Dix’ ‘The Shape of the Liturgy’ which Jones admired and gives this definition of liturgical shape:

If the whole eucharist is essentially one action, the service must have a logical development of one whole, a thrust towards that particular action’s fulfilment, and not merely a general purpose of edification. It must express clearly by the order and connection of its parts what the action is which it is about and where the service as a whole is ‘going’. It is this logical sequence of parts coherently fulfilling one complete action which I call the ‘Shape’ of the Liturgy.

We now come to the question of emphasis and the difference between what Jones and Hague have to say about schemes and themes. Hague is of the view that Maurice de la Taille’s interpretation of the Last Supper and Calvary forms the ‘very scheme upon which ‘The Anathemata’ is built. Jones, on the other hand says “What I have written has no plan or at least is not planned. If it has a shape it is chiefly that it returns to its beginning. It has themes and a theme even if it wanders far.” These would appear to be contradictory because there’ isn’t that much difference between ‘scheme’ and ‘plan’. I may be missing huge chunks of Hague’s reasoning but his claim doesn’t seem to hold up in various parts of the poem. Let’s start with de la Taille. I’m going to paraphrase the quote that Hague uses because it runs for two pages even though I may be accused of ripping material from its context.

The first point to be made is that the Last Supper and Crucifixion can be thought of as a ‘twofold immolation’. Before we go any further in this, I do need to say that I know that ‘immolation’ is a loaded term with a number of different connotations but that I’m going to take it on this occasion to stand for ‘sacrifice’. The second point is that these two acts should be thought of as one ‘complete sacrifice’. There then follows quite a bit about the role of the priest as victim but then Hague explains that all of this was important for Jones because it ‘insisted on the significant act contained in the Last Supper where the sign (the breaking of the bread, the drinking of the wine) made inevitable, in a sense created, what took place on Calvary.’

My initial, readerly response is that this deeply felt belief, doctrinal view, isn’t the overriding concern of the work and I would point to the most accessible section, ‘The Lady of the Pool’ for my evidence. I also need to acknowledge that Hague has far greater insight and personal knowledge about this material than I ever will so what follows should be seen as a tentative suggestion rather than an outright refutation. ‘The Lady of the Pool’ is mostly the soliloquy of a London lavender seller in the 15th or 16th centuries. It makes extensive use of John Stow’s late (ish) Tudor account of the city and its wards. It also mentions a number of dates in terms of feast days but there’s much more emphasis on place and on love / romance / relationships than there is on liturgy.

I’ll concede that the section begins and ends with references to masses for the Passion but even here these do not seem to reflect the ‘two foldedness’ referred to above.

                               In all the white chapels

in Lud's town of megara

when we put up rejoicing candles bright

when we pay latria 

                           to the Saving Wood.

About the turn of the year, captain, when he sings out loud

from his proper in ligno quoque vinceretur

                           twisting his cock's egg tongue round 

the Vulgar lingua like any Trojan licentious of divinity.

Neither Jones’ notes nor Hague’s gloss make mention of the de la Taille interpretation as above, Jones is at pains to stress what the cross stands for and why paying ‘latria’ to it isn’t idolatrous whereas Hague glosses ‘he’, ‘cock’s egg tongue’ and the ‘Vlugar Lingua’.

When I first read ‘The Anathemata’, I grasped and held on to the notion that it was a representation (a making) of Jones’ personal cultural clutter or ‘res’. I therefore struggle a bit with Hague’s view of de la Taille forming the basis upon which the poem is structured because I think that there is much more going on than theology. I’m not suggesting that the liturgy isn’t important, I just think that it isn’t the only important / structuring element.

I’m not entirely sure that Jones’ musical score analogy is the only thing that is going on with the way that the poem looks, the above extract would also seem to draw the eye towards ‘the Saving Wood’ as being central in terms of Jones’ faith rather than the ‘sense’ of this part of the poem. What I do think is clear is that I need to pay more attention to the various shapes that Jones makes both on the page and the way in which the sections are structured and relate to each other. ‘The Lady of the Pool’, for example has a structuring device, a ‘frame’ and uses the layout of the London wards, at or about the time of John Stow, to tell a story. I’m also intrigued by the possibility that Dix’ notion of ‘shape’ as a sequence is reflected in how the whole poem ‘fits’ together.

Of course, Hague is probably correct but his is not the way that I read the poem – a range of emphases is better than no range at all. I also wonder if I’d read this poem differently if I had some kind of religious belief.

Rene Hague on ‘The Anathemata’

I have said this before but I will carry on saying until the current situation changes, David Jones is one of the five best modernist poets of the 20th century and ‘The Anathemata’ is his finest work. It is unfathomable to me that he should continue to be neglected when so many mediocre nonentities receive ardent critical attention. Anybody who affects to have an interest in what language can do must pay attention to this man’s work. I should go on but I’v just bought Rene Hague’s “A Commentary on the Anathemata” and it is a revelation.

I don’t normally read commentaries on modernist poems but Hague was Jones’ best friend and this particular commentary is clearly put together with enormous respect for the man and the work and I think I’m reading it more for context rather than for what things might ‘mean’.

For those who don’t know, Jones was an artist who served in the first world war and converted to Catholicism in his late twenties. His main poetic subjects are his faith and the Catholic liturgy, Welsh history and culture and the Roman Empire. ‘The Anathemata’ is a long poem (243 pages in the current Faber edition) and is accompanied by a preface and extensive footnotes provided by the poet. Auden described as the century’s best long poem and confessed that he had been reading it for ten years and still hadn’t got to grips with its meaning.

In his preface, Jones talks about the role of the poet in relation to power and of poems as a kind of gathering together of ‘signs’ or cultural artefacts and I have been reading ‘The Anathemata’ as a drawing-together of Jones’ personal and entirely subjective collection of Important Stuff. I can still make a case for this but Hague makes it clear that this Important Stuff is linked and underpinned in quite complex ways.

Before providing some examples of why the commentary is so effective, I think I need to address the Catholic and the Spengler Problems. Both Jones and Hague were ardent and traditional Catholics who deplored the introduction of the vernacular Mass after the Second Vatican Council. This is no longer as big an issue as it was in the sixties but I’m just about old enough to remember the storm it created at the time. The poem isn’t a Catholic Poem in that conservative (or any other kind) doctrine isn’t rammed down the readers’ throat but there is an emphasis on the ritual and liturgical aspects of the mass, as we shall see. Jones was a fan of Spengler’s analysis of how civilisations function, Spengler was ideologically Deeply Suspect (fascist) and all of his ideas have been discredited but, whilst the poem does deal with civilisations at different times and different places, it is not a blueprint nor an espousal of all things Spenglerian.

The other thing to note is that this is a commentary written out of friendship, out of the respect Hague clearly felt for the work and for the man, it doesn’t vaunt its erudition in the quest for academic prestige but tackles the areas that need clarification with warmth and respect.

‘The Anathemata’ starts with this piece of prose:

We already and first of all discern him making this thing

other. His groping syntax, if we attend, already shapes;

   ADSCRIPTAM, RATAM, RATIONABLEM....... and by pre-

application and for them, under modes and patterns altogether

theirs, the holy and venerable hands, lift up an efficacious 

sign.

Hague’s commentary on the first paragraph begins-

D. frequently, particularly when beginning a passage, uses ‘he’, ‘him’ or ‘his’ etc, to indicate that, while he has an individual in mind, that individual is to be regarded as typical. Only two of the eight sections of The Anathemata’ do not begin in this way, ‘Middle-Sea and Lear Sea’ and ‘Mabinog’s Liturgy’ – and the first of these is quick to introduce a named person as ‘him’.

The ‘him’ whom we discern in line 1 is (however far back we are looking into pre-history) a priest – or, if that is putting it too strongly, he is at least sacredotal in his intention; he is performing a ritual act and thereby making this thing ‘other’. The repetition of the verb ‘discern’ at the very end of the poem (p243, ‘discern the Child’, ‘discern a lord’s body) shows that here, too, it carries more than the meaning of ‘distinguish’, for it contains the Pauline sense of ‘recognise the true nature of’. We could paraphrase the poet’s words in this paragraph by saying that so soon as man makes that which is significant, which is a sign of something other and greater, we can already see that his act is of the same nature as the transubstantiation effected in the Mass by a representation of what was done at the Last Supper.

I’ve quoted this at length in order to show how Hague adds depth and context rather than simply elucidating meaning. It is entirely possible for the reader who has read Jones’ preface to work out what is meant in this paragraph but it is less likely that the ‘Pauline’ sense of ‘discern’ would have been grasped, nor is it clear that such a reader would have made all the connections involved in ‘making this thing other’- it certainly took Hague’s insight / knowledge for me to work out how all these elements (poem, sign, shape, Mass, Eucharist) function together.

There are also times when Hague disagrees with Jones’ notes. The first of these occurs with ‘Adscriptam’ which Jones glosses as ‘ascribe to’ and Hague comments- “The translation given is not very satisfactory, for God is not being asked to ‘ascribe to’ but to make it ‘ascribed’, i.e. enrolled as his own, made his own.” Hague then goes on to give the full Latin text of the prayer and indicates the points where the priest makes the sign of the cross in order to further explicate the further connotations involved in Jones’ use of ‘groping syntax’ before quoting an English translation which translates the word as ‘consecrated to thyself’ which seems (to this atheist) to be half-way between the two. There is then an extensive passage from a letter from Jones which gives more context, describes liturgy as ‘pure poesis’ as well as bemoaning “the awful havoc inflicted upon us by these blasted apostles of change”.

I hope I haven’t frightened too many people off by the above, I have tried to demonstrate how Hague enables a wider and more ‘complete’ reading even for those of us who are reasonably familiar with the poem and Jones’ rationale. Certainly it has prodded me into acquiring ‘The Shape of the Liturgy’ by Gregory Dix which Jones apparently admired. This isn’t because I’m on the verge of conversion (there still isn’t any kind of God) but it is because I’m intrigued by this link between verse and ritual and by how each inform the other.

‘The Anathemata’ isn’t just about faith, it has exceptional passages on the Roman Empire, London, seafaring and Wales as well as musings on the prehistoric. Next time I’ll discuss the Hague view of Jones’ London- his home town.

David Jones’ “The Fatigue”

The above poem was published in 1974 in the Faber collection “The Sleeping Lord and other fragments” and deals with the crucifixion, the working party of the title is the Roman soldiers detailed to accompany Christ to the cross. Before we go any further I need to make a plea from the Sadly Neglected Poets section of this blog.

I can just about understand the neglect suffered by Hoccleve, Skelton and Drayton, I can even appreciate that some may want to overlook/ignore the work of R S Thomas but I cannot understand why a poet of Jones’ talent and originality should be known more for his work as an artist than as one of the great modernist poets of the last century. The really odd thing is that he was recognised as such by both Eliot and Auden but now seems to be relegated to the third or fourth division. I accept that “The Anathemata” is very difficult but it’s also wonderfully difficult and “In Parenthesis” is by far the best poem from the trenches that we have.

Moving on to “The Working Party”, the good news is that it is nowhere near as tricky as “The Anathemata” and comes with an introduction and lots of footnotes. The even better news is that it’s very good indeed because it takes an unusual perspective and tells the ‘story’ in a way that is soaked through with compassion and humanity.

Jones converted to Catholicism in the early twenties and the Catholic faith and liturgical practice are major themes as are the Roman Empire, Welshness and the experience of ‘ordinary’ soldiers. All of these are present here. In his introduction Jones says:

I have (as in each other the other fragments) made the personnel of the Jerusalem garrison to be of mixed recruitment. Thus the NCO is from the urbs itself, while some of his men are Celts from Gaul or Britain.

and:

But if I may have falsified some of the historical accidents I have done so with deliberation in order toconvey a far more important historical truth: the heterogeneous composition of the forces of a world-imperium.

Jones’ attitude towards the Roman empire is ambiguous in that he saw it as both brutal and ruthless but he describes its inner workings with a kind of appalled and awed fascination. He was born inLondon but his father was Welsh and all of his work is littered with signs and tokens from the culture of that broken land (I have been reading R S Thomas…).

Jones identifies the three main sections of the poem as:

• ninety lines of a dialogue between a Roman NCO and two privates of Celtic origin;
• about a hundred lines of “soliloquy or reflection made in the context of Catholic Xtian tradition and theology” on the crucifixion;
• over seventy lines devoted to the administration of the empire from Rome before ending with a description of the “location and allocation of the men detailed”.

I want to deal with each of these in turn but need to point out that you don’t need to believe in God to appreciate what Jones does nor do need to be Welsh or have an enthusiastic interest in the Roman empire. I don’t fall into any of these categories and yet am almost overwhelmed by the strength and beauty of the work.

Jones is particularly adept in the demotic, his characters are believable and contain more than a little humanity. This is the NCO:

  D'you reckon you're tutelar deity of the whole of Salem city,

Upper and Lower and extra-mural perimeter as well? Not

Water Gate nor Fish Gate neither, but somewhat left of

Old Gate to the right of Arx, Birket Post West inclusive, with

y'r centre on Skull Hill, that's you bit of frontage

                         Skull Hill's your lode

the tump without the wall.

 Project an imagined line from that tump, cutting Cheese

Gully back to this same block of silex where you now stand

and you've got y'r median point of vision - now hold it.

                       That's how we keep

the walls of the world

                       sector by sub-sector

maniple by maniple

                       man by man,

                       each man as mans the wall

is as squared, dressed stone
                       fronting the wall but one way

according to the run of the wall.

It's whoresons like you as can't keep those swivel eyes to front

one short vigilia through as are diriment to our unific and expand-

ing order.

So, we have the Roman equivalent of a platoon watch complaining because one of his guards has reported something occuring outside the area he’s supposed to be watching- which happens to be the site of the crucifixion. This has the effect of placing the reader on those walls too and into the mindset of the lower echelons of the army. The middle section in verse is a refrain about the extent and strength of empire that recurs at the end of the poem and is one of the ‘points’ that Jones wants to make. ‘Cheese Gully’ is the only part of this that is glossed – “Cf. the Tyropoeon Valley which ran north-south through the Upper and Lower divisions of the city and means the valley of the cheese-makers.” I confess that I had to look up ‘silex’ and ‘diriment’ and am now of the view that we ought to make much more use of the latter.

The above records a banal, everyday event in the first century but Jones manages to situate it within the context of empire/imperialism and also, with the reference to Skull Hill as ‘your lode’, to anticipate what is to follow. None of this is overstated and the tone of the speech accurately echoes the voice and attitude of thousands of contemporary NCOs even though ‘whoresons’ does come as a bit of a shock.

I’ve said this before but if poetry is in part about bearing witness then there are very few who fulfil this function better than David Jones who manages in a very short space of time to involve (in its widest sense) the reader in what is being described.

This is from the second section:

   And others of you to be detailed

                        (not on other fatigues)

for the spectacle

                        at the sixth hour

in Supplementary Orders

                        not yet drafted

for the speculatores

                        those who handle the instruments

who are the instruments

                        to hang the gleaming Trophy

on the Dreaming tree

                        and to see

on the leaning lignum

                        the spolia-bloom

where shine the Five Phalerae

                        that till the hard war

and for his racked-out limbs

                        (extensis manibus...)

the dark-bright armillae

                        Quis est vir qui babet coronam?
 
for the spined-dark wreath

                        squalentam barbam
 
without the circuit-wall

                        of his own patria.

                        Where the Spoil of Spoils

hangs to Iuppiter

                        and the trophies

are the Conqueror

                        ...himself to himself

on the Windy Tree.

Most of the Latin is glossed and the rest can be looked up quite quickly. The ‘speculatores’ are glossed as “a special branch of the service directly responsible to the provincial governor for the carrying out of executions”. As well as the Latin, there are references to Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Norse traditions all of which are explained but the Point that I want to make is that this is incredibly beautiful in capturing the poignancy of the scene perhaps because of the wide range of references that are used. What also shines through is the humanity of Jones as witness. I’ll accept that there’s a degree of obscurity going on- “Quis est vir qui babet coronam?” is glossed as “a translation of a line in poem by the 14th century Welsh Poet Gruffud Grygg, reading: Pwy yw’r gwr piau’r goron, ‘who is that man that owns the crown?’”. The overall effect however is still stunning, in contrast to the routine tones of the first part and building up to the magnificent last two lines- which are glossed as being from the Nordic ‘Havamal’.

The last section is a complete contrast again for now we are observing the processes and structures of empire:

By how an inner cabinet plot the mappa mundi when key

officials and security agents forward their overlapping but dis-

crepant graphs

  by whether the session

                        is called for after

                        or before, noon

  by whether a hypocaust has fouled its flues

  by how long the amphora is off the ice

  be whether the wind 

                       blows moderate from trans-Tiber

or with a nasty edge

                       straight up the Tirbutina

As can hopefully be seen, none of this matches the level of difficulty found in ‘The Anathemata’ even though it addresses many of the same themes. As Jones notes in his introduction, ‘The Fatigue’ is interrelated with two other poems (‘The Wall’ and ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’) which are also set in Jerusalem at the time of the Passion and all of these give greater voice to Jones’ faith and his view of empire. The other two are both accomplished poems of a very high standard but ‘The Fatigue’ stands out for me because of the switch in focus and perspective that re-frames this pivotal act removing from it the conventional narrative and enabling us to see it with a fresh pair of eyes.

Drafts, notes and poems.

Yesterday the multi-talented Zachary Bos sent me two pdfs, one of a Geoffrey Hill pamphlet entitled ‘Preghiere’ which was published in 1964 and the other of ‘The Kensington Mass’ by David Jones which was published in 1975, a year after Jones’ death.

With regard to the second of these the publishers (Agenda Editions) explain that this is an unfinished draft of a poem that Jones had been working on until his death. The text of the book consists of a tentative draft of part of the poem together with fragments from Jones’ handwritten notes which have been collated by Rene Hague who also provides some explanation. Jones’ notes are reproduced at the end of the book.

I have mixed feelings about reading material that may not have been intended for publication. In general I think I’m against it because we don’t know if those poets would have wanted their drafts to be read by others and doing so can feel a little bit grubby and intrusive.

The above purist stance falls apart when we come to specific examples- ‘Edgar Allen Poe and the Jukebox’ is a collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s “uncollected poems, drafts and fragments” which contains 16 drafts of ‘One Art’ thus giving the reader the privilege of seeing a truly great talent at work. To those of us that might feel queasy about this kind of prying, the blurb quotes John Ashbery- “For those who love Elizabeth Bishop, there can never be enough of her writing. The arrival of this trove of manuscripts is therefore a stupendous event.” So, one justification would appear to be that it’s okay if the poet didn’t publish that much stuff during his or her lifetime. The counter argument goes that Bishop was meticulous about deciding what could be (by her very high standards) published and what couldn’t which is why a relatively small amount was made public.

Paul Celan presents a different kind of problem. James K Lyon’s “Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: an Unresolved Conversation 1951-70″ which (among other things) makes extensive use of Celan’s marginalia in books by Heidegger in order to examine the relationship between the two. As a fan of all things Celan, I should be delighted by this but it turns out to be far too speculative:

During his intense reading of Wrong Paths in 1953, a passage on the nature of poetic language in the essay “What Are Poets For?” prompted Celan to enter double lines and write the word language [Sprache] in the margin. The passage reads, “Being, as itself, marks off its domain, which is measured (temnein, tempus) by Being’s being present in the word. Language is the domain (templum), viz. the house of Being . . . [the] temple of Being” (Das Sein durchmisst es selbst als seinen Bezirk, der dadurch bezirkt wird [temnein, tempus], dass es im Wort west. Die Sprache ist der Bezirk [templum], d.h. das Haus des Seins . . . [der] Tempel des Seins, G 5:310). In connecting humankind’s dwelling in the temple of Being with the poet’s role as a seer in that temple, Heidegger made an allegorical move that must have appealed to Celan’s belief in writing poetry as a higher calling.

Only a few days after finishing Wrong Paths, Celan again encountered the image of language as the temple or house of Being in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, where it occurs in at least nine passages. His underlining of several of
those passages suggests that they caught the poet’s attention and probably left a trace in a poem he wrote soon after reading A Letter on Humanism.

This is from p32 but the whole book is peppered with ‘must haves’ and ‘probablys’ which doesn’t inspire confidence. The other reasonably obvious point to make is that underlining can signify a whole range of things as can making a double line in the margin. Most of us who make these kind of marks know that they have a wide range of meanings and connotations, as a mark to return to to reconsider/evaluate, as a mark of approval, as a mark of something that seems important or as something to denote disagreement or condemnation etc etc.

There’s also the voyeuristic/intrusive element in this. It is very, very unlikely that Celan made these marks in the knowledge that they would be scrutinised and made the subject of a book. What we know of his widow, Giselle, it is very unlikely that she would have given permission for an exercise of this kind. The other issue that I have with Lyons is that he makes a number of assumptions about the meeting between Celan and Heidegger at Todtnauberg when the fact is that we will never know what took place.

I also have Pierre Joris’ magnificent translation for Celan’s notes and drafts for The Meridian Address which continues to absorb me – I’ve written about it several times because I think it gives us a deeper insight into his poetics. The only moment of voyeuristic grubbiness has been felt when he equates Sophie Goll with Goebbels. The other redeeming aspects are that Giselle gave permission for poetry to be published after his death and that Celan retained these notes even though he no longer had need of them- he committed suicide over 9 years after the Address was made. The German editors have provided notes to explain some of the references but these don’t make the leap in speculation so there aren’t any must haves or probablys. For example, there is a lengthy citation for a French phrase used by Celan that identifies the source that Celan alludes and the version that was in his poession. There’s also a short entry on Kropotkin that identifies his anarchism and one oh his works- the editors do not then suggest that Celan was also an anarchist because that would be a probably.

Rene Hague was Jones’ greatest friend and would not have participated in the publication of ‘The Kensington Mass’ if he felt that this was in any way contrary to what his friend would have wished. His explanatory notes are a delight and I think this is an example of the right mix of respect and judgement that these situations require:

Our inclination will be to include as much as possible; but we have, unfortunately, to remember that David’s method was the exact opposite. We may comfort ourselves, however, by remembering, too, that little or nothing (I believe) was destroyed, and work which had been put on one side (e.g. Balaam’s Ass) would later be reinstated.

Hague goes into detail as to his reasons for ordering the drafts in this way but the drafts themselves are also included so we can follow the way these decisions have been made.

Given that Jones is one of the great modernists, as with Bishop, anything that adds to the sparse work that we have has got to be important, especially when compiled out of friendship and affection.

The Poet as Witness, Marvell’s ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’.

The above poem is a gloriously vicious account of the circumstances leading to the Second Dutch War which in 1667 saw the Dutch fleet sail up the Thames with impunity, steal our flag ship, set fire to a few towns and sail away without loss. This was going to be a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise with other primary sources (Pepys and the Calendar of State Papers) in an attempt to differentiate between the official, the personal and the poetic but then I got sidetracked into another line of enquiry which I should tackle first.

Re-reading the ‘Instructions’, I came across Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, who is one of the first political figures to fall under Marvell’s scrutiny. In the poem he is portrayed as a kind of seventeenth century sex machine and pointedly crude reference is made to his alleged affair with Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen. Being struck by the severity of Marvell’s gaze I (in the interests of balance) decided to look at Jermyn’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. The DNB article on Jermyn contains a reasonably objective account of Jermyn’s life in terms of posts held and the ‘close’ relationship with Henrietta Maria. Dealing with Jermyn’s role after 1660, we get this-

” Andrew Marvell’s great satire on the conduct of the war, ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’, attacked St Albans’s alleged lack of ability, his appearance, and his overindulgence in the pleasures of the court:
Paint then St Albans full of soup and gold,
The new court’s pattern, stallion of the old.
Him neither wit nor courage did exalt,
But Fortune chose him for her pleasure salt.
Paint him with drayman’s shoulders, butcher’s mien,
Member’d like mules, with elephantine chine.
Well he the title of St Alban’s bore,
For Bacon never studied nature more
But age, allaying now that youthful heat,
Fits him in France to play at cards and treat.”

So, poet as witness becomes poet as ‘official’ recorder. The Jermyn article is written by his only recent biographer and yet he chooses to include part of Marvell’s diatribe as part of the objective record which wasn’t part of Marvell’s intention. The poem portrays a high degree of political incompetence and corruption but Marvell was no innocent bystander, he had been MP for Hull since 1659 and was therefore part of the dismal political malaise that infected British public life during the 1660s and beyond. As an act of polemic, the poem needs to be considered as part of a series of ‘advice’ poems penned by Marvell and others and should perhaps be read both as testimony and as a demonstration of poetic skill.

There is a ‘point to this dismal tale and that is that the King, who is addressed directly in the poem’s closing lines, should pay more heed to the advice of the landed gentry rather than his courtiers and their parliamentary supporters. The primary reason given is that the gentry have substantial and enduring wealth and are not dependent on royal patronage and the corruption that this entails.

As well as being a scathing account of contemporary events and a polemic against the corrupt and sexually charged culture of the court, ‘Instructions’ contains a memorialisation in oddly erotic terms of Archibald Douglas who chose to stay aboard his burning ship whilst the rest of the crew fled. In a subsequent poem, ‘The Loyal Scot’, Marvell uses Douglas’ heroic example to suggest that national distinctions shouldn’t be given prominence in political debate.

So, poem that bears witness to a national disaster by recording both the circumstances and the disaster itself, a poem that acts as polemic against contemporary incompetence and corruption, that provides pithy descriptions of a range of powerful characters and, in the process, presents a vivid portrait of the culture and concerns of the ruling elite.

Incidentally, both Milton and Marvell eulogise characters who chose to stay on board sinking ships. Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ is an elegy for Edward King who drowned in 1637 after deciding to pray on deck rather than try to escape. It strikes me that we wouldn’t think of either of these deaths as in anyway heroic now (stupid, but not especially brave) yet this does seem to have been an act worthy of praise in the 17th century.

I’d like to conclude by means of comparison with a more recent piece of witnessing. David Jones’ ‘In Parenthesis’ memorialises the Somme offensive, that great British disaster of WWI but for other reasons. Jones does not seek to berate the dismal incompetence of the generals that sent so many men into this carnage, his stated aim is to mark the turning point in the British army with the arrival of new-fangled technologies that reduced much of the good natured camaraderie of the first two years of the war. Notwithstanding Jones’ aim the poem is a first hand account of soldiers moving up to the front and the initial suicidal assault on Mametz Wood. Jones resists polemic and even the scenes of death and dying are handled in a lyrical and moving way which is far removed from the anger so evident in many other war poets.

It can be argued that all poetry bears witness but Marvell’s ‘Last Instructions’ seems to cover most forms of testimony, apart from the eye-witness account, and also makes a significant contribution to the wider cultural landscape of his time. For those who are interested, it is especially rewarding to follow Pepys’ account of the same period (as well as having some responsibility for the naval fiasco, he read the poem in manuscript form) and the official records which show a government immobilised by panic.

Reading ‘Difficult’ Poetry with Success. Prynne, Hill and David Jones.

“The discourses of modernism in Western poetics make steeper descents into sub-intelligibility; and in my own case
I am rather frequently accused of having more or less altogether taken leave of discernible sense. In fact I believe this accusation to be more or less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because what for so long has seemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry (“what does it mean?”) seems less and less an unavoidably necessary precondition
for successful reading.”

But this is an important aspect of the question

Which I am not ready to discuss, not ready at all to

This leaving out business. On it hinges the very importance

   of what's novel.

Or autocratic, or dense, or silly. It is as well to call attention 

To it by exaggeration, perhaps. But calling attention

Isn't the same thing as explaining, and as I said I am not

   ready 
  
To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation, and shall

   not,

The first of these is from J H Prynne’s ‘Mental Ears’ and the second is from John Ashbery’s ‘The Skaters’ which was published in ‘Rivers and Mountains’ in 1966 and both appear to be saying the same thing. So, if two of the most important poets of the last fifty years have this lack of interest in the quest for meaning, what might a successful reading look like?

For me, ‘successful’ relates to feeling satisfied by the act of reading and this usually involves giving attention to a poem or part of a poem. It is the way I feel about reading attentively that is the marker for me. There are some contemporary innovative poets who produce work that doesn’t involve me, that doesn’t (for a variety of reasons) retain either my interest or attention. This is not to suggest that this work is inferior – it’s just that I’m not interested in it.

The problem of meaning (which used to concern me) is only one aspect of readerly attention/involvement and working out meaning tends to be a by-product of doing other things and being involved in other ways. I’m going to use the above poets to try and illustrate what I mean by this and how ‘success’ can occur in other ways.

Prynne is a good place to start and I’m currently paying attention to ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ because it seems to mark a significant ‘turn’ in his output and because I find it compelling. The first reward that I get is in responding to the challenge which, for me, is altering the way that I absorb information. Prynne’s work demands a less linear (for the want of a better word) kind of attention and requires this adjustment to be made before reading rather than after. I like this because I can do it and I find doing it utterly absorbing. I’ve also found that I can apply this kind of attention to other things unrelated to either poetry or reading.

This is one of the shorter paragraphs from ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’:

                                       Can this be or was it moreover
 
for this incision in dropsy yes not ventral not assented sold OUT

in mere song-like retrieval, give way with no-name in appearance

decking as a whirling swarm of gnats is soft summer sun at the

edge of the outward forest, infolded not time after time still less

perpetual by false appearance which is the true-fast semblance of

falsity, indued and ever-doubtful. Our morning hymn this is, and

song at evening echo confuted by shared antagonism, implicit not

by next coming-to-be as the world is transformed in feature full

of folk saying what is it not, time-locked against spokes in the cycle

of saying so. Indicative ridiculous also, won't you come home

Bill Bailey before a toast and tea, scumbags! reptiles! the old folks

just better stay at home or lose their reason too, mine and yours

loaned against non-interest, souls implanted by necessity smooth

turning upon an axle you'd not know was not granted its near life

to be there, on-site in foam, I saw no less than these things

right up on the peremptory shore line.

I’ve quoted this at length because I can now show different kinds of involvement. The first of these is about identifying the individual phrases and working out what they might be doing. The first phrase asks a question which then appears to be answered with some qualification. This process is less arduous here than it is for most of the more recent Prynne, this seems to be making an effort towards greater coherence but there are still challenges – deciding what the Bill Bailey and old folks at home references are doing is something that would need a different kind of involvement (checking song lyrics) than the rest. For me, the most satisfying part is engaging with the way that some phrases point in a number of different directions at once and then trying to apply these to the whole. This passage contains these that are crying out for this kind of involvement;

• incision in dropsy;
• mere song-like retrieval;
• appearance decking;
• the outward forest;
• true-fast semblance;
• song at evening echo confuted;
• spokes in the cycle of saying so;
• souls implanted by necessity;
• on-site in foam;
• peremptory shore line.

Some of this involves looking at secondary word meanings and derivations, checking how each of these might relate to what’s going on around them and (in this work) bearing in mind the ‘reference cues’ printed at the end. All of this is absorbing and rewarding because it is possible to gain a sense of progress and some insight into other ways of thinking generally and doing poetry in particular. I must also mention the feeling of success that I get when I begin to grasp the structure and direction of the whole.

It is also important to stress that meaning comes way down on the list, I’m very comfortable in not knowing what ‘this’ and ‘it’ refer to in the first paragraph and accept that this will only be made clearer by the kind of attention that I’ve just described.

A successful reading of Geoffrey Hill doesn’t have the same qualities but it still requires attention and involvement. My first encounter with Hill was reading the first few pages of Comus on the bus on the way to work and realising that this was a poet who was confident in his abilities and quite precise in what he had to say. This gives the reader a feeling of security – as if she or he is in safe hands. Success with Hill works on two levels, responding to what he says and considering the way that he says it. I occasionally try to write poetry and therefore have an interest in the practice and technique of those that I admire. One element of success with Hill is evaluating his technique and assessing whether the poem is both technically efficient and beautiful- his criteria, not mine. Success comes when I feel that I’ve made a reasonable assessment. Some of this doesn’t take long, ‘Oraclau’ is obviously less than technically efficient and this gets in the way of what Hill might be trying to say. Other judgements are more nuanced, I wouldn’t have addressed my critics from within ‘The Triumph of Love’ but that doesn’t stop it from being a brilliant piece of work. I admire ‘Clavics’ more than I did when it was published but I’m still not sure about the use of patterns. So, successful reading as a practitioner in the case of Hill is wanting and being able to continue to think about technique and tactics.

I’ve said before that I don’t have any kind of faith and that Hill and I occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum. I don’t feel challenged by his high Anglicanism nor by his odd brand of ‘hierarchical’ Toryism because both are wrong in the sense of being factually incorrect so success here is not about being challenged about my beliefs and prejudices but is more about what poetry can and should do. In general terms I agree with Hill about poetry and about literature and I like the way that he reads. Success here is about being able to place myself in the hands of a fellow traveller who knows far more than I about the things that interest me.

The sense of success that I get from reading Hill comes from this complex sense of identification and/or comparison which usually leads to other things. To give a recent example, reading ‘Clavics’ and Hill’s identification with Yeats has led me to look again at his work.

I’ve written before about the challenges presented by ‘The Anathemata’ and success here is more about throwing yourself into what’s been said and trying to get hold of the extent of Jones’ ambition. As with the work of Prynne, engagement is more about the way in which language is used and the variations in those techniques issues of meaning take a secondary place. In his introduction Jones indicates his intention to set out his personal cultural background and interests in poetic form so we have the Roman Catholic faith, Welshness, London, the Roman empire, prehistory and seafaring as well as material from various chronicles and romances.

Success with Jones works on two levels, the ability to immerse yourself in what is being said and the extent of your willingness to explore further some of the issues and subjects covered. I like to think that I succeed by the first criterion in that I can now, with the help of the notes, follow the flow of the poetry and visualise most of what is described. I have however ‘failed’ on the second standard in that after the first couple of readings I resolved to know more about Catholic liturgy as well as Welshness. I have the books sitting on my hard drive but have yet to look at any of them.

I think what I’m trying to say about all three of these ‘difficult’ practitioners is that successful reading starts with a degree of acceptance of them on their own terms and being interested in how those terms are involved in the poetry making rather than being primarily concerned with either meaning or intention.

Technical Prowess in ‘The Anathemata’

This is in response to Michael Peverell’s recent comment on the ‘Dead End’ post. Initially I was going to make some pithy observation in the thread but then I got to thinking that my idea of technical worth might require a bit of explanation.

I don’t think what Geoffrey Hill describes as technical efficiency should be confined to rhyme and meter but should also include a range of techniques, foibles and slights of hand. These can vary from word choice, phrasing, cadence, enjambment through to subject matter and ‘message’.

In the technical department extra marks are given for disguising the means by which effects are achieved and additional points are awarded when these effects carry important or profound material. Elizabeth Bishop is a good example of a great poet who put enormous effort in to achieving technical perfection so that the reader wouldn’t notice the devices used along the way. John Matthias’ ‘Kedging in Time’ has the same effect on me in that I know what effect the poem has but I don’t know how this effect is achieved.

David Jones is not as technically accomplished as Bishop but ‘The Anathemata’ is full of little flurries of technique that assist the reader in getting to grips with this incredibly ambitious work. Auden called it the best long poem of the 20th century and confessed that he had been reading it for ten years and still didn’t grasp all its levels of meaning so readers of this might understand when I say that after 18 months of paying attention I’m still on the nursery slopes in terms of understanding but I think I can recognise skilled verse even when I don’t fully understand it.

I find ‘The Lady of the Pool’ to be the most amenable section of the poem because I’m reasonably familiar with one of its themes (the history of London) and because it uses a number of established techniques to good effect. I make no apology whatsoever for the length of what follows because it really does illustrate why more people should pay this poem some attention;

              From the two sticks an' a' Apple to Bride o'

the Shandies' Well over the Fleet; from Hallows-on-Wall to

the keel-haws; from the ditch without the Vicinal Gate to

Lud's hill; within and extra the fending circuit both banks

the wide and demarking middle-brook that waters, from the 

midst of the street of it, our twin-hilled Urbs. At Martin

miles in the Pomarary (where the Roman pippins grow) at

winged Marmor miles, gilt-lorica'd on his wheat hill stick-

ing the Laidly Worm as threats to coil us all.

              At the Lady-at-Hill

above Romeland's wharf-lanes

at the Great Mother's newer chapelle

at New Heva's Old Crepel.

            (Chthonic matres under the croft:

springan a Maye's Aves to clerestories.

                      Delphi in sub-crypt:

luce flowers to steeple.)

                      At Paul's

and faith under Paul

where

     so Iuppiter me succour!

they do garland them with Roman roses and do have stitched

on their zoomorphic apparels and vest 'em gay for Artemis.

               When is brought in her stag to be pierced,

when is bowed his meek head between the porch and the

altar, when is blowed his sweet death at the great door, on the

day before the calends o' Quintilis.

               At the tunicled martyr's

from where prills the seeding under-stream.
               At Mary of the Birth

by her long bourn of sweet water.

               In where she mothers 

her painters an' limners.

               In Pellipar's

where she's virgo inter virgines
for the skinner's boys an budge-dressers.

               In all the memorials

of her buxom will

               (what brought us ransom, captain!)

as do renown our city.

Michael will be pleased to know that I have proof-read this with some care from the Faber 2010 edition (I don’t have access to the original) and that I have preserved the line breaks in the prose sections as they occur in that edition.

The other good news is that this is one of the most densely annotated passages in the poem but I’ve chosen it for the way that it throws the reader into a specific place (London) whilst moving across a number of different time-frames. I’d like to point out the use of repetition in a complex act of invocation, the rhetorical tropes involved in situating both the work and the person reading / participating in it. There’s also the supreme skill involved in making a list both poetic and the point of what is being listed. Those of us who love long poems know that even the best of these will occasionally resort to the list, Milton’s description of the fallen angels in hell is gloriously digressive but it is still a list, as is his initial description of Eden, Spenser’s chronology and rivers are both examples of lists getting in the way of the poem but here the poem is in part about what you do with this cultural clutter, this conglomeration of signs and symbols. I would argue for a very long time that the above is the one of the most accomplished examples of modernist technique which is deeply rooted in the classical tradition.

In his introduction Jones refers to the difficulties he encountered in gaining some control over his material but his success is demonstrated by the fact that on the page the struggle is transformed into something both elegant and effortlessly profound.

I’m of the view that Ezra Pound was technically brilliant well before 1920 and that ‘The Cantos’ are a fascinating and gloriously erratic use of that brilliance to extremely ambitious ends (‘the whole shooting match’) but he couldn’t thrust the reader into a place or a time as effectively as Jones although it is possible to read the development of a variety of techniques from Pound to Jones – the use of the demotic to say complex things being the most obvious.

So, Jones’ prowess lies not so much in meter or rhyme but in the ability to use repetition and a range of rhetorical devices to thrust the reader into the cultural detritus that we all carry with us. We can argue with the components of Jones’ clutter (Catholicism, Wales, London, the Roman Empire etc) but we do have to acknowledge the skill with which he brings these to our attention.