The Sleeping Lord

Extract

The Sleeping Lord brings together all that has been printed, sporadically, of David Jones’s work since The Anathemata was published in 1952, except The Narrows (in the Anglo-Welsh Review, Autumn 1973) and The Kensington Mass (Agenda, special issue, 1974). These nine pieces are described as ‘fragments’, but the word can hardly be used here in the sense in which it is applied, for example, to the fragments of Ennius (I choose Ennius because that dogged old hexametrist is specially dear to David—what would he not give to have half-a-dozen complete books of Ennius discovered?). There is nothing broken or incomplete in anything that is built into this work. The last piece, it is true, from The Book of Balaam’s Ass, starts with a ragged edge, but the context is restored and the continuity reestablished in a very few lines.

The collection falls into four parts: an introductory poem, A, a, a, Domine Deus, which comes close to, but leaves a loophole from, despair; then four sections, The Wall, The Dream of Private Clitus, The Fatigue, and The Tribune’s Visitation, which have in common (to put it crudely for the moment) an imperial Roman setting; then comes The Tutelar of the Place, which may be read as a prayer against the imposition of order at the cost of diversity and personality; and this acts as a natural bridge to the two ‘Welsh’ sections, The Hunt and The Sleeping Lord. Finally, Balaam’s Ass, which comes as an addendum : differing considerably in style, scale, and feeling from the preceding poems, and yet, in spite of its position in the book, serving as a link between David’s earliest and latest work.