lost in grey. We saw that, dying and in hopeless case, For others' sake that day He'd smothered all rebellious groans: in death His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth. 15For those who live uprightly and die true Heaven has no bars or locks, And serves all taste . . . or what's for him to do Up there, but hunt the fox? Angelic choirs? No, Justice must provide For one who rode straight and in hunting died. 20So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came, Why, it must find one now: If any shirk and doubt they know the game, There's one to teach them how: And the whole host of Seraphim' completeMust jog in scarlet to his opening Meet. angels 191 6 Recalling War s10Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes. Their war was fought these twenty years ago And now assumes the nature-look of time, As when the morning traveller turns and views His wild night-stumbling carved into a hill. isWhat, then, was war? No mere discord of flags But an infection of the common sky That sagged ominously upon the earth Even when the season was the airiest May. Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard. Natural infirmities were out of mode, For Death was young again: patron alone Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.
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DAVI D JONE S / 198 9 20 Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight At life's discovered transitoriness, Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind. Never was such antiqueness of romance, Such tasty honey oozing from the heart. 25 And old importances came swimming back? Wine, meat, log-fires, a roof over the head, A weapon at the thigh, surgeons at call. Even there was a use again for God? A word of rage in lack of meat, wine, fire, 30 In ache of wounds beyond all surgeoning. War was return of earth to ugly earth, War was foundering' of sublimities, collapsing Extinction of each happy art and faith By which the world had still kept head in air, 35 Protesting logic or protesting love, Until the unendurable moment struck? The inward scream, the duty to run mad. And we recall the merry ways of guns? Nibbling the walls of factory and church 40 Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees Like a child, dandelions with a switch. Machine-guns rattle toy-like from a hill, Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall: A sight to be recalled in elder days 45 When learnedly the future we devote To yet more boastful visions of despair. 193 5 193 8
DAVID JONES 1895-1974
David Jones was born in Brockley, Kent, son of a Welsh father and an English mother, and studied at the Camberwell School of Art before joining the army in January 1915 to serve as a private soldier until the end of World War I?service that provided the material for his modern epic of war, In Parenthesis. He attended Westminster Art School after the war and subsequently made a name for himself as an illustrator, engraver, and watercolorist. In 1921 he joined the Roman Catholic Church and a few months later began working with the Catholic stone carver and engraver Eric Gill. Jones's Welsh and English origins, his visual sensitivity as an artist, and his interest in Catholic liturgy and ritual can be seen in his literary work, which includes the obscure but powerful long religious poem The Anathemata (1952) and The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (1973).
In Parenthesis, Jones's first literary work, was published in 1937 and won the Hawthornden Prize. Its seven parts, combining prose and poetry, evoke the activities of a
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1990 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1
British infantry unit from its training in England to its participation in the Somme Offensive of July 1916. The work proceeds chronologically, beginning with a battalion parade in England before embarkation for France, moving to the preparation for the offensive, and concluding when the protagonist Private John Ball's platoon is destroyed. Far from a straightforward narrative, since every contemporary detail is associated with the heroic past, the poem echoes in carefully patterned moments Shakespeare's history plays, Malory's accounts of Arthurian quests, Welsh epics of heroic and futile battles, the Bible, and Catholic liturgy. Even so, In Parenthesis avoids the traditional epic concentration on high-ranking heroes and builds its narrative around ordinary characters, both English and Welsh. Identified with historical or mythological figures, they?Mr. Jenkins, Sergeant Snell, Corporal Quilter, Lance- Corporal Lewis, and John Ball, who is wounded in the leg, as Jones was at the First Battle of the Somme?are presented in vivid silhouettes and sudden stabs of personal memory.
Begun a decade after the armistice, In Parenthesis could not have been written when Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon wrote their war poems. Jones profits from the ways in which James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's Waste Land drew on mythology and ritual and thus gained depth and scope. He has combined the pity for and irony of the soldier that we see in Owen with the distanced, more elaborately illustrated, less immediately personal style of Eliot's long poem. And like Eliot, he introduces notes to help the reader follow the mythological and literary references. Unique among the soldier poets, Jones combines the immediacy of war poetry with high modernism's strategies of formal discontinuity and rich allusiveness. The poem conveys the texture of war experience through comic or sardonic references to popular soldiers' songs, to follies and vices and vanities and every kind of trivial behavior. At the same time the poem is multilayered and densely textured, its complex allusions to history, ritual, and heroic myth infusing the characters and the war with mysterious meaning.
The extracts printed here are, first, from Jones's preface, in which he explains his intention and method, and, second, from part 7, describing events during and after the attack. At the beginning of the last section quoted, Ball is wounded and crawling toward the rear through the mingled bodies of British and German soldiers. In his fevered imagination he sees the Queen of the Woods distributing flowers to the dead. He wonders whether he can continue carrying his rifle, which he finally leaves under an oak tree. (At the end of the medieval French epic Chanson de Roland [Song of Roland], the dying Boland tries in vain to shatter his sword, Durendal, to prevent its being taken as a trophy by the Saracens; he finally puts it under his body.) In the end Ball lies still under the oak beside a dead German and a dead Englishman, hearing the reserves coming forward to continue the battle.
FROM IN PARENTHESIS
From Preface
This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt, & was part of. The period covered begins early in December 1915 and ends early in July 1916. The first date corresponds to my going to France. The latter roughly marks a change in the character of our lives in the Infantry on the West Front. From then onward things hardened into a more relentless, mechanical affair, took on a more sinister aspect. The wholesale slaughter of the later years, the conscripted
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JONES:IN PARENTHESIS / 1991
levies filling the gaps in every file of four, knocked the bottom out of the intimate, continuing, domestic life of small contingents of men, within whose structure Roland could find, and, for a reasonable while, enjoy, his Oliver.1 In the earlier months there was a certain attractive amateurishness, and elbowroom for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a less exacting past. The period of the individual rifle-man, of the 'old sweat' of the Boer campaign, the 'Bairns-father'2 war, seemed to terminate with the Somme battle. There were, of course, glimpses of it long after?all through in fact?but it seemed never quite the same. * * *
