W. H. Auden called David Jones's The Anathemata
"one
of the most important poems of our time" and "probably the finest long
poem in English in this century." A growing number of poets and critics
agree. Unquestionably, The Anathemata is a work of vital
and
all-inclusive imagination. Its subject is no less than western civilization
from its prehistoric beginnings. The work's frame of reference moves from
modern times to the Jerusalem of Christ, to geological prehistory, and on
to republican Rome, to classical Greece, and to a merchant ship in the
second millennium B.C. The time then shifts to Anglo-Saxon England, to
nineteenth-century London, to late-medieval Britain, to papal Rome, back
to Jerusalem and finally back to modern times. In all this there are no
associations of a personal and private nature such as mar the
Cantos of Pound. Nor are the myths that inform the poem
private, like those of Blake; they derive from historical
traditions—classical,
scriptural and medieval, Welsh, Norse and English. Because
these traditions involve what is for most readers "unshared backround",
David Jones provides his own annotations to the poem. These certainly
help. But
The Anathemata remains a difficult poem to read.
Its
density of allusion, its intricacy and breadth place it securely in what
George Steiner calls "the hermetic or intimist tradition" of literary
modernism.
The Anathemata will never be a popular poem.
But
it is an important poem and will always have readers, though these will be
grateful for whatever help they receive.
[1] In this regard, they will
necessarily be
indebted to David Jones himself, not only for his published prose, his notes
to the poem, and the letters that will someday be published, but also for the
interpretive glosses he inscribed over the years in his own copies of
The Anathemata. David Jones's handwritten marginal glosses
appear in two copies of the first edition of the poem (London: Faber and
Faber, 1952) that
he owned at the time of his death in 1974, and which have since been
deposited with the rest of his personal library in the National Library of
Wales.
[2]
In contrast to the poem's preface and notes, which mostly explain the
work's cultural and historical matrices, the marginalia comment directly on
specific aspects of the poem itself. Sometimes fragmentary and cryptic, the
glosses candidly record David Jones's personal clarifications and
interpretations of the text. For example, they assign major importance to the
motif of the voyage, the symbol of the ship, the figure of the captain and
that of the mother of Christ. Moreover, the glosses imply a thematic
interrelationship between this motif and these images. Certain of the
marginalia, further-more, suggest what appear to be some of the structural
principles and relationships informing the poem's composition. This is
especially likely if, as specific marginal references suggest, many of the
glosses were written within a year of the poem's publication.[3] In various ways, the marginal
glosses of
David Jones constitute an authoritative commentary on
The Anathemata.
One of the copies of the poem in which the marginalia appear was,
according to the poet's inscription on the front end-papers, "received from
Fabers, Oct 17th 1952". In this copy are a series of brief, hastily written
glosses entered by David Jones on the fifth of May, 1953, as he listened to
the two-hour radio dramatization of sections of The
Anathemata
on the B.B.C. Third Programme. These marginal comments, which record
a mixed reaction
to the programme, do not gloss the poem directly. But they do give some
indication of how David Jones thought his poem should (and should not) be
read aloud. Comments such as "Good", "OK", and "Very Good indeed"
register his emphatic approval of Dylan Thomas's rendition of the section
of the poem entitled "MABINOG'S LITURGY".
[4] Of Diana Maddox's reading of
"THE
LADY OF THE POOL", however, his remarks record a thoroughgoing,
sometimes anguished, disapproval. She reads "too fast", in contrast to the
slower pace of Dylan Thomas.
[5] And
she reads in the self-consciously dramatic way that David Jones particularly
disliked in the reading of poetry by many professional actors. About
Norman Shelley's reading of the "REDRIFF" section, David Jones writes
on page 121, "All part IV very badly done". His objection here is partly to
the section's being read in a Cockney accent. I remember David Jones once
saying that "the right accent
is home-county; Churchill had a bit of it, and George V. The 'g's were
dropped at the ends of words and it was 'gels' instead of 'girls'." Before
the date of broadcast, David Jones had unsuccessfully urged Douglas
Cleverdon, the programme's producer, to have the accent corrected or to
omit "REDRIFF" from the programme.
In the following list of marginalia, I omit the many and repetitive
comments on the radio broadcast, together with David Jones' occasional
protests at the radio-script's deletion of lines and passages from sections of
the poem. All other marginalia, that gloss the poem directly, are recorded
below, under the headings of the sections of the poem in which they
appear. The glosses are preceded by page and line numbers. In most
instances, these are followed by words of the poem in quotation marks and
then by the poet's marginal gloss in italics. An asterisk marks page and line
references to the copy of the poem in which Jones recorded his reactions
to the radio broadcast. I have, in most cases, interpreted the relationship of
gloss to text.
