In Time and Out of Time: David Jones’s The Anathemata
Jones’s epic poem brings both time and eternity to bear on his homeland of Wales, and on our transitory lives.
By J.C. Scharl
One scrap of lore that has accrued around 20th-century poet and artist David Jones is that until the age of eight he could not read. This poet who W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot toasted as their better described himself as “backward at lessons.” He attended school dutifully but barely passed his classes.
This legend, in which the burgeoning magister verba stares not at his books but at the dancing shadows around them, enchants us because it gives us an insight into Jones’ particular genius: a genius not of mastery, but of magic. In Jones’s poetry, the modern obsession with sense slips away. Rationality takes its proper place as the footstool of wisdom; and language rests again as daughter, not dictator, of truth.
I began reading Jones the week before my son was born. He’s my first child. He came just a few weeks after I finished graduate school. His first “room” was a closet, which I fitted with a mini-crib and a rocker for the nursing I assumed we’d do. My son never nursed, but I sat in that rocker anyway and, in a few moments a day when no one was crying, I read David Jones.
I read In Parenthesis, Jones’ prose-poem about the First World War. Then I read his essays. Then I read criticism about his work. Finally I read his poem The Anathemata. Years later, I am still reading it.
The Anathemata is a book-length prose-poem. Jones himself said that it takes place in seven seconds of free-associative thought in the mind of a worshipper at the Latin Mass. If you flip through it in the bookstore, you will be bewildered by the pages: enjambed lines mingling with prose paragraphs; occasional prints of engravings, Romanesque letters carved deeply into stone; all framed by extensive footnoting written by the author and, in some places, as stylish as the language of the poem itself. The Anathemata is an epic poem in every sense: it is long and loosely narrative; its scope is vast; it even explores the Homeric theme of the nostos, the return home.
I have been to many lands and not one of them is mine.
I have not yet said anything about Jones’s lifelong love of his lost homeland, Wales, nor have I said anything about the fact that my mother is dying. I do not think I can avoid either topic any longer. For Jones’s work is the work of mourning a mother who is dying, who is not yet dead but is, in many of the ways that matter: gone.
Jones’s father was Welsh, but he, like many of his contemporaries, was pressured to leave Wales for England to pursue his career. Young David was born in London, and only visited Wales periodically. But through his father’s stories, David developed a deep love of Welsh history, culture, and language. He studied Welsh for the rest of his life, though he never felt he had mastered it. His work—both written and drawn—fixates on Welsh themes (most notably the Arthurian legends). David Jones lived his life in service to a homeland he never had.
As a modern, a Millennial, I have no homeland. I’ve heard several dates given for the death of homelands: the Russio-Circassian War, the end of World War I, the end of World War II, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Regardless, I was born in 1990. Homelands as I read about them in old books were long gone.
I have been to many lands and not one of them is mine. I wish I could say we—my generation—were a generation of pilgrims, but we are not. Pilgrims have a home, both behind and before. We do not; we have a place we have left, surely, but no place we are going. We are a generation of tourists. We are, in a vital way, motherless.
When Jones writes about Wales, he gives us a glimpse of what it means to have a motherland: a land, soil and dirt and grass and sky, from which we are born. In Norse mythology, earth is the decaying body of Ymir, a Giant overthrown by the gods. In Greek, earth is the body of a goddess, impregnated by the sky. Probably both myths are true. Fertility is one step from decay; birth is the beginning of death. Earth is body; earth is blood; and from this body and blood we are born.
The Anathemata roams the hills and valleys of Wales, striding easily across the centuries to reveal the country as a whole that exists forever within time. The poem speaks of Wales as though every moment of its history is now—as though no instant of that history has been lost, or ever will be, though it is even now sliding out of sight into a past almost totally invisible to us. Just as the Welsh language (like hundreds of languages around the world) is fading, so Wales—her soil, her culture, her mountains and streams, her history—is fading, obscured beneath the industrialization and globalization that eradicates cultural differences.
From “Rite and Fore-time,” Part I of The Anathemata:
When is Tellus
to give her dear fosterling
her adaptable, rational, elect,
and plucked-out otherling
a reasonable chance?
Not yet—but soon, very soon
as lithic phases go.
So before then?
Did the fathers of those
who forefathered them
(if by genital or ideate begetting)
set apart, make other, oblate?
What by rote, if at all
Had they the suffrage:
Ascribe to, ratify, approve
in the humid paradises
of the Third Age?
But who or what, before these?
Had they so far to reach the ground?
and what of the pelvic inclination of their co-laterals,
whose far cognates went—on how many feet?—in
the old time before them?
For all WHOSE WORKS FOLLOW THEM
among any of these or them
dona eis requiem.
(He would not lose, not any one
from among them.
Of all those given him,
he would lose none.)
I also converted because in the Church I felt I had found, for the first time, a motherland.
I’ve run my eyes over the words of The Anathemata time and time again, but I cannot really say I’ve read the whole thing—not if reading implies any kind of mastery or comprehension. I suspect I’ll never be able to say that. The Anathemata is nothing if not an exercise in patience, in waiting for the work to come to you.
From the beginning, Jones maintained a posture of patience about his work. No flash or fire of the literary wunderkind here; in an era that saw W. B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot publishing prolifically throughout their twenties, Jones did not begin to cultivate himself as a writer until his early thirties. Throughout his career, he kept his attention turned inwards—not, I must be clear, towards his own self, but towards that inner world Hopkins calls “the inscape”: the world in which nature, history, love, beauty, legend, tragedy, religion coalesce into that unique mythic whole that is the individual soul’s relation to reality.
Both of David’s parents were low-church Protestants. We may assume that his conversion to Roman Catholicism was difficult for them, as it was for the parents of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mabel Tolkien (mother of John Ronald), and Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman. But in the Tridentine Rite of the Mass, David found a living instance of the ancientness he loved about Wales. Following Vatican II, Jones did not fall away from the Church, but he mourned the burial—respectful, surely, but still a burial—of this great relic connecting us to the past.
I converted to Catholicism in my early twenties. I converted for all the usual reasons: the Church’s sense of history, the liturgy, the embodiment of the sacramentals. But I also converted because in the Church I felt I had found, for the first time, a motherland. A few years later, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She has been ill for decades. The diagnosis was just that: a dia, or distinguishing, gnosis, coming to know, a discerning of what the sickness unto death means for her.
Jones’s work has a speakability—not the vernacular so beloved of other 20th-century poets, but an exquisite mouthfeel, if you will, of a wine whose value is far beyond my taste.
Nothing Jones wrote was meant to live solely on the page. It was meant to be read aloud. Sometimes when I read his work, I wonder if he would have been content to have it spoken once, given full form of sound, breath, and fury, and then pass away, like all the things he wrote of. But instead he wrote it down.
Jones’s work has a speakability—not the vernacular so beloved of other 20th-century poets, but an exquisite mouthfeel, if you will, of a wine whose value is far beyond my taste. I love it, though I can only begin to say why. It seems as though Jones has shown to us a possible way to speak, and to think one that I should dearly love to know but seems as far beyond me as the Pater Noster is to the child chirping along in the Tridentine Mass Jones held so dear, where the = words are entirely lost but the sense is near, nearer indeed than when we have hung those ancient, sodden sounds up on the hook of meaning and left them to dry.
From “Middle-Sea and Lear-Sea,” Part II of The Anathemata,
One thousand two hundred years
since the Dorian jarls
rolled up the map of Arcady and the transmontane storm-
groups fractured the archaic pattern.
Within the hoop
of the iron years
the age is obscure—
and is the age dark?
The makers of anathemata can, at a pinch, beat out
utile spares for the mobile columns or amulets for raiding
captains and the captains themselves bring certain specifications
and new god-fears.
The adaptations, the fusions,
the transmogrifications,
but always,
the inward continuities
of the site
of place.
The place of which Jones speaks is gone. He is merely a maker of anathemata, beating out with the hammer and tongs a few bangles, a few relics of words that will remain a little longer.
You enter a Jones poem the way a child enters every day: no matter how baffling it may seem, there is an obvious wholeness to the thing that assures us that it is worthy and worth inhabiting.
My son is three this year, and the chasm between thing and meaning has just begun to show. He still beats happily at his breast while singing, “Murrzyonus!” while I intoned, “Have mercy on us.” For which of us does the ritual remain intact: me, for whom language has crossed forever the barrier of sense and now belongs to the rational mind, or him, for whom language is a somewhat senseless communal act, one that centers on the thing itself, the sounded thing that brings us together at the end of this day as it does the end of every day, in this joint ritual of sound and motion, speaking to Jesus who is there and not there, striking our breasts in unison and speaking those words that (at last, Derrida is correct) have no meaning beyond themselves: Have Mercy On Us, a plea which to make at all is to have answered?
What Jones does, of course, is bring the two together. He is me, speaking the words rationally, and my son, warbling them out of the joy of routine that is childhood (and Paradise, for that matter). This is his gift: a lyric pre-language-ness, in which it no longer matters how much of the poem makes sense. You enter a Jones poem the way a child enters every day: no matter how baffling it may seem, there is an obvious wholeness to the thing that assures us that it is worthy and worth inhabiting.
The obvious contrast is with T.S. Eliot, that other fiercely intelligent, difficult long-form English-language poet of the early 20th century—that nomad in his own right, the child of America who became as English as he could. Eliot’s verse is remarkable for many reasons, but none more than its relentless sense. It is possible to become confused within an Eliot poem, to lose one’s way, but that is always the result of some failing on the part of the reader. Eliot remains forever a Protestant; the thread of sense is there—allusively, syntactically, Eliot has supplied everything you need to make it on your own.
Even The Waste Land becomes quite workable once you have a few key pieces of information. With repeated study, the poem’s mysteries drop away, for they are not mysteries in toto. Thanks to the tremendous labors of countless scholars and critics, Eliot’s work has been meticulously mapped and routed. Reading them is like visiting the Matterhorn: a tremendous experience that stirs in us all the deep human urges to mastery. Perhaps, at the base of that peak, we read accounts of famous ascents; perhaps we ramble and point out the trail from below that snakes along the northeast ridge and vanishes in the black couloirs; perhaps the most daring of us hire a guide and attempt the climb ourselves. Whatever our response, we are drawn to the spectacle because it appeals to our abilities, to what we know and what we could come to know.
Jones’s work is nothing like this. There is no question of rational mastery here. If Eliot’s poetry gives language its maximum effect upon the mind, Jones’s bypasses the mind and goes straight for the imagination. Perhaps it was his upbringing by a printer; for Jones, the artifactual nature of words—their madeness—is primary. They are things, like sticks or jewels, that can be played with, collected, shaped, cherished, separately from the meaning they express. In Jones’s work, words are themselves like pictures. They are their own marginalia. The story they tell—if any—is secondary.
A literary way to summarize what I am trying to say is this: For Jones, connotation completely subsumes denotation. This does not mean that Jones’s work is meaningless. Not at all. It is crammed with meaning. But that meaning is an accident of something else: of the very essence of the words, which are beyond the meaning.
In history, in memory, we teeter always on the knife-edge of holiness and hell.
As we walked, looking for duck eggs around the edges of the pond, my son asked me, “Do you remember when we saved that ladybug from death?” (He really does talk like that.) I did not remember it. But he described it to me, so vividly that now I think I do remember it, and more than that I remember him remembering it, so that now the record of the past has become a layering of memory upon memory, and each memory is simultaneously a thing that has been lost (we can only remember what is gone) and a thing—a separate thing—that has been gained, and can be added to and rounded out the farther we get from the point where the original thing dropped away from us through the past.
Anathemata means “things devoted to the gods”; its more famous sister is anathema, a thing cursed because it has been offered to a false god. In history, in memory, we teeter always on the knife-edge of holiness and hell. This—this phenomenon of memory, its multifaceted relationship with history, and the mystery of redemption—is the prism through which Jones’s poems look.
To speak of mastering these poems is ludicrous, as ludicrous as attempting to master our own memories. They do not exist within time or place; the setting is no more or less than time and space itself, distilled in one man’s imagination and simultaneously compressed and expanded to become perfectly precise and perfectly sweeping: a walk on a winter’s day; a forgotten song; the Straits of Gibraltar; the color of a stranger’s hair; a trip taken to the coast decades ago; the scent of lilacs at Grandmother’s house; the Battle of Mt. Badon, which you fought over and over in the silence of your room before sleep. The color of Betelgause, hanging crimson in the sky after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. A blue shirt, too small, flung over the chair in your son’s room. A camping trip long ago, and your mother, young, roasting marshmallows beneath the stars, long before she is bound to die.
Our prayers are either risen or they are not; either way, they are gone away, out of sight.
I just returned from a walk with my son. Last night it rained, and the sidewalks this morning were rich with treasure: dozens of walnuts, crabapples, even a great fuzzy chestnut. He exclaimed over each of them, carried each of them carefully to me, and forgot each of them instantly as he placed them in the pail. The bells rang for the Angelus, but I could not recall the order of the prayers, so we said the Hail Mary and at the “And the Word Became Flesh,” we knelt. We kicked over the pail and had to gather everything up again. On our way home, my son cut his foot, and (separately) asked me why Gammie (my mother) does not smile anymore.
What of this day remains? The pail is empty in the garage. The bells are silent. Our prayers are either risen or they are not; either way, they are gone away, out of sight. He’ll go to sleep, and come tomorrow morning, he won’t recall any of this, at least not in any way I can understand. He will remember the cut.
Late in his life, Jones wrote an autobiographical manuscript entitled “In Illo Tempore” (published posthumously in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings). The essay takes its name from the opening words of the Gospel reading in the Tridentine Rite of the Mass. All rise, and the priest chants the words, “In il-lo tem-por-e,” slowly and in exact pitch, before launching into the chant of the Gospel reading as a whole. When I first heard of Jones’s essay, I did what any enterprising literary critic would do: I researched. I learned a good deal about the simple phrase, including its earliest uses and various Enlightenment derivatives. It was not until several months later, however, that I grasped, quite suddenly and in the middle of the Mass, what the words really meant. In that time, they mean, and that is how Holy Mother Church has chosen to open every single reading from the Gospels. These words do not merely serve to orient us (in that time, and not another time), but to reassure us: all these things did indeed happen, within time, within space, and however far-off they seem from us now, they are yet at our elbow, crowding in close around us within this narrow, cluttered corner of existence that we call time.
In that time. What is life but that which is in that time, day after day, moment after moment, hallowed or not hallowed? What is kept, and what is lost? What perishes, and what remains? Who can say? But this we know: whatever we say remains, even if only for a moment longer.
That is why Jones spoke of Wales, of Mother Church, of rite and fore-time, of earth and ice and Arthur and the vast skies of prehistory. That is why I speak of my mother: that by speaking of her, she might remain a little longer. With my words, I devote her and her time to that which is beyond time. That is all any of us can do.
What is said remains. In what is said, the things we spoke of have a little remaining of their own, and in that remaining, they bring to mind everything that is lost, so that perhaps, as we were promised, nothing—not one thing given—will be lost entirely.
J. C. Scharl is a poet, editor, and critic. Her poetry has been featured in New Ohio Review, Classical Outlook, Measure Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Dappled Things, Plough Quarterly, Fare Forward, and Euphony Journal (among many others). Her criticism has appeared in Plough Quarterly, Dappled Things, and others.