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David Jones’s ''The Sleeping Lord and other fragments''. London: Faber, 1974.

This, David Jones’s third book of poetry, is a loose sequence of interior and spoken monologues unified by interwoven motifs. The poems in this book are far easier to read than Jones's earlier poems, which are epic in lengh—''In Parenthesis'' (1937) and ''The Anathemata'' (1952)—so The Sleeping Lord would be, for most, the best introduction to Jones’s poetry. It consists of a brief prefatory poem and nine mid-length poems. Of these, the first five are imperial-Roman in subject or persona, realistic in modality, and set in Jerusalem, most at the time of the Passion of Jesus, one decades later. Their subject is pragmatic, imperialistic totalitarianism. By analogy, they concern modern civilization. These five poems are followed by one poem set in an indeterminate time of dehumanizing civilization, a prayer for cultural vitality. Following this poem are two poems, Celtic in subject and set in Celtic Britain. These latter three poems are mythic in modality and celebratory of symbolic culture. Concluding the book is a poem set in 1917 and seeing mechanized modern war as challenging traditional cultural values. By allusion and affinity, this poem recalls its predecessors. Seamus Heaney writes that the poems in this book enrich “not only the language but people's consciousness of who they have been and who they consequently are.” Chronologically arranged, the poems are dialogical in a way that reflects Jones’s theory of culture, which informs ''The Anathemata'' and The Sleeping Lord and expounds in his essays “Art and Sacrament” and “Use and Sign.” In his theory, he distinguishes between culture and civilization, seeing culture as characterized by intrinsic, gratuitous value and civilization as characterized solely by the extrinsic value of utility. Gratuitous acts (goodnight kisses) or objects (birthday cakes) are, he writes, innately symbolic, while the utilitarian or pragmatic acts (fixing a faucet) or objects (a wrench) are not. For him, any immediate situation or historical period defines itself by balance, or imbalance, between gratuity and utility. Gratuitous acts and objects tend to become symbols or “signs” by which people express and experience humanity. Contemporary society tends, he thinks to be utilitarian and therefore dehumanizing. In The Sleeping Lord, the Roman poems concern a utilitarian civilization which is dehumanizing, imperialist, and immoral. The Celtic poems emphasize gratuitous sign-ificant culture in which love of particular place is important as an expression of the human spirit.

“A, a, a, Domine Deus”

The short prefatory poem is “A, a, a, Domine Deus” (9), a lament (echoing Jeramiah) of failure to find in modern technology, including the machine (“manifold”), architecture, and cinema, symbols of spiritual, and specifically Christian, meaning. In the poem, there is a great deal of punning and play on sex, ‘doubting Thomas,’ and the motif of deus ex machina, and, in the midst of apparent unrelieved despair, ambiguous hope because the final despairing crie, Eia, can also mean ‘Come.’

“The Wall”

The first of the mid-length Roman poems, “The Wall” (10-14), is the interior monologue set on Holy Thursday night (the time of Jesus’s betrayal and arrest), spoken by a Roman soldier on guard duty, distressed by having to enforce the Roman Empire which has become a prison. His mind meanders through the legendary Roman past, a meandering that precisely parallels in time in spatial route of a contemporary triumph in Rome, which he also imagines and which is, like his walking on guard duty, a perversion of the originally defensive purpose of city walls and of the ritually related ‘troia’ or maze dance. The Celtic chieftain he imagines being led to his death in the triumph is, unknown to the imaginer, an analogue to Jesus being led, even as he thinks this monologue, under arrest and eventually to his crucifixion.

“The Dream of Private Clitus”

In the second Roman poem, “The Dream of Private Clitus” (15-23), at an unspecified time, a twenty-year veteran named Clitus tells a younger soldier, Oenomaus, of a dream he had decades earlier, in Teutoberg Forest (in Germany), a dream in which he and a friend, Lugobelinos, take the place of the twins, Romulus and Remus, on the lap of the earth mother Roma high on a sculpted frieze on the Ara Pacis in Rome. With its “marble sheep next the marble ox” (21) that frieze corresponds to a Nativity scene. In the dream, the sculpted earth mother metamorphoses into a living goddess. The friend cries out (in Gallic, here Welsh) ‘Mother’ and ‘Gate of Heaven’, as he would later cry also cry at his death when “a stray got him” (16). In the dream, a lamb is taken away for sacrifice and Clitus bellows, a crying that metamorphosizes into that of a sergeant, a stickler for rules nicknamed Brasso, now a high-ranking officer, crying to wake him. Brasso is his foil. Clitus's remaining a private after all these years suggests that his tendency to dream and recount dreams and the friendships he values are anti-imperialist because non-utilitarian. All these cries comprise a motif in the poem which gives and takes meaning from the outcry of Jesus on the cross in The Anathemata (237-238). The poem is a celebration of friendship and maternal femininity as antithetical to empire (personified by Brasso) and foreshadows the genre of the medieval dream vision. The forest also evokes the medieval cathedrals that will be dedicated to Notre Dame, because Clitus is a person more suited to the more humane medieval culture.

“The Fatigue”

The third Roman poem, “The Fatigue” (24-41) continues the friendship motif. On Holy Thursday night, two legionaries who are friends standing middle night watch on the walls of the Fortress Antonia in Jerusalem have shirked duty in order to visit each. Caught out, they are assigned as punishment to execution duty the following day. A meditation on the crucifixion follows—it will be that of Jesus—and then a tracing of orders back through the labyrinth of command to the centre of power in Rome, which is the desk of Sejanus who administers the empire for Tiberius. This centre of power is devoid of positive moral or spiritual value—Tiberius will soon order the murder of Sejanus. The form of this poem is that of a triptych, which evokes the conventional pictorial crucifixion scene, with good thieves (the two soldier friends) on the right, Jesus crucified in the middle, and two bad thieves (Tiberius and Sejanus) on the left.

“The Tribune’s Visitation”

In the fourth Roman poem, “The Tribune’s Visitation” (42-58), is set also on Holy Thursday but decades after Jesus’s death. This monologue is mostly spoken by a military tribune, who is a contemporary of St Paul, to whom he corresponds as an expert rhetorician, and whom he frequently, unintentionally, quotes. He advises troops to reject culture, even when used in propaganda, in order to be realistic proto-positivist servants “of contemporary fact” (50). A combination of ''Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor'' in '''''The Brothers Karamazov''''', Orwell’s O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-four, and Conrad’s Kurtz—he speaks of “the horror of this thing” (54)—the Tribune is a living paradox. Although urging the renunciation of poetry and ritual, he speaks a Wordsworthian people’s poetry and inaugurates a ritual of deliberate self-dehumanization which, like the Mass, involves sharing bread and wine. This loss of humanity involves a rejection of all things feminine—”from Caesar’s womb," he says, "we issue by a second birth” (58). This dehumanization involves suffering for the speaker, which seems real, so that he corresponds the archetype of Christ in his agony on the same night, years earlier. This bringer of Bad News finishes with an ironic allusion to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, just the sort of propaganda the Tribune scorns, unaware that it will be interpreted as prophecy of the inauguration of a Christian age. Jones thought this poem the best “of all the separate pieces”, stating “the ‘whole works’ in brief space.” He reads it well on Argo Record PLP 1180 (1972), emphasizing the words “the horror” so that the allusion to '''''Heart of Darkness''''' is unmissable.

“The Tutelar of the Place”

In the hinge poem, “The Tutelar of the Place” (59-65), setting becomes unfixed and universal. The monologist divides attention between imperialist utility and gratuitous love, primarily love of native place, which dominates this poem and the Celtic poems that follow it. This poem is a sonorous lyrical celebration of free imagination, the female principle (embodied in fertility goddesses and Mary), and local, rural place as the matrix of cultural value. The monologuist corresponds to the poet because imaginatively flexible, able to imitate the voice of a grandmother teaching children to pray. In his or her own prayer, the local goddess is invoked to safeguard this place and its significant things from imperialistic utilitarianism by mazy dancing, such as the troia and the dance around the Maypole. For many readers, this musically lyrical poem is a favourite in this collection.

“The Hunt”

The first of the two Celtic poems, “The Hunt” (65-69), is lyrically musical and, because short and immediately rewarding, is probably the the first poem that a reader new to Jones's work ought to read. Its subject is a Celtic Armageddon, in which Arthur leads the hunt for a gigantic, destructive legendary Celtic boar that has already laid waste Ireland and much of Britain. The poem is dual in focus and modality. Its first half concerns historical Celtic society, realistically viewed as divisive. Allusions are historical, viewpoint that of editorial omniscience. The second half concerns the mythic figure of Arthur, who symbolically incorporates Celtic fertility gods and Jesus. Allusions are to myth and scripture. Viewpoint is temporally unfixed, iconic non-perspective with verbal tense alternating between past and present. The ''cynghanedd'' (rich alliterative patterning) of medieval Welsh poetry informs the language of this poem, which evokes it along with the interlace of Celtic medieval art: for the thorns and flowers of the forest and the bright elm-shoots and the twisted tanglewood of stamen and stem clung and meshed him and starred him with variety and the green tendrils gartered him and briary-loops galoon him with splinter-spike and broken blossom twining his royal needlework and ruby petal-points counter the countless points of his wounds (67). The poem concludes with a coda in which riding society and Arthur achieve the synthesis of co-redeemers. Helpful background reading for this poem is Jones's essay "The Myth of Arthur." "The Hunt" should be, but is not, widely anthologized. The poet reads it aloud beautifully on Argo Record PLP 1093 (1967).

“The Sleeping Lord”

The second Celtic poem and title poem of the collection, “The Sleeping Lord” (70-96) is a moving elegy of Celtic culture, symbolically embodied by the gigantic figure of Arthur sleeping beneath the terrain of South Wales. He sleeps during the decline of Celtic culture, which morfs into ecological despoliation of countryside. The meaning of this poem is illuminated by Jones’s essay “The Dying Gaul,” which concerns the centuries of decline of Celtic culture. The form of the poem corresponds spatially to the floor plan of Arthur’s early medieval hall, which is a rectangle divided by a screen (78, note 2). Corresponding to half of the hall is the first third of the poem (70-9), in which allusions accumulate to scripture, legend, and folklore, as contexts in which to understand the figure of Arthur. Corresponding to the second half of the hall is the final third of the poem (87-96), in which questions become elegiac, concentrating on devastation by the great boar and on despoliation of South Wales since the Renaissance and throughout the Industrial Revolution to the present. Corresponding to the thin screen dividing the hall—itself divided by the hearth fire—is the middle third of the poem (79-87), in which Arthur’s hall-priest silently prays for the dead for only a second. At the spatial centre of his prayer is Jesus, one of whose symbols in the poem is fire. Symbolically, then, this poem is Arthur’s hall, with Jesus at its centre. The relation between this image of Arthur sleeping and poetry is suggestively explored by the French poet Jacques Darras in his essay, "Sleep of the Tongue: Pound, Eliot, Jones and Europe."

“Balaam’s Ass”

The final poem, entitled “From the Book of Balaam’s Ass” (97-111), concerns a suicidal assault by Jones’s battalion on 31 July 1917 at the beginning of the Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele. It is a poem unlike any other, an anatomy involving satire, caricature, and humour alternating with pathos. Its texture is Celtic, consisting largely of nominal allusions and puns and having considerable affinity with the medieval Welsh prose tale “Kilchwch and Olwen” in The Mabinogion, with Jones’s favourite modern literary work, Finnegans Wake, and with the form of the litany, which is a list of names. The names are encyclopaedic in range and broadly evoke what T.S. Eliot calls ‘the mind of Europe.’ They summon traditional western culture to judgment for a calamity for which it may be partly responsible. The horrific circumstances of this battle force the question: is life absurd or does it have religious meaning—the question basic to all thoughtful atheism. As the terms of the poem become metaphysical, there is possibility of escape—but through, rather than from, death.

The Collection as a Whole

All of the poems in The Sleeping Lord are dialogical, and they are linked through dialogical motifs: the contrast between the female and the male, imperialism and local loyalty, the past and the present, ambition and friendship, the political and the personal. In nearly all these poems—though not in “Baalam’s Ass”—dialogue becomes dialectical and, in some degree, achieves synthesis and resolves or passes beyond binaries that limit vision. In “Balaam’s Ass” diology is antithesis between matter and spirit. Underlying the changing motifs and differing personalities of all the poems in this collection is unresolved antithetical tension between power and love. In form, many of these poems are challenging and innovative. What they communicate is important: they rigorously test traditional values in the face of political totalitarianism, technological pragmatism, and modern mechanized warfare. They place what Jones, like the other great modernists, sees as the crisis of modern civilization in the context of a coherent cultural analysis involving psychology, aesthetics, metaphysics, and political morality. These give his poetry an intellectual cogency that prompts the American critic and fiction writer Guy Davenport to write, “Every so often there comes along a poet or scientist who can realize for us the new configuration, which only our time can see, into which culture seems to be shaped, and the historical processes that shaped it. Jones is one of these.”