Cara Wallia Derelicta

The inscription above by David Jones is in a mixture of Welsh and Latin. It reads
Cara Wallia derelicta....Literally 'Dear, abandoned Wales' (though David Jones himself once rendered it 'Poor buggered-up Wales'), 'on the feast day of Damaseus, Friday the Eleventh day of December, then was all Wales cast down' (the last bit of that is a line from the Elegy  to Llywelyn the Last native Prince of Wales who was killed on that day). The inscription goes on to suggest a lineage for Llywelyn such as that claimed by Geoffrey of Monmouth for Arthur, but using the Latin of Virgil mixed with the Welsh of Gruffudd ap yr Ynad Coch:

The ineluctable hour of Troy has come
A leader's head, a dragon's head was upon him
Fair Llywelyn's head, a shock to the world
That an iron stake has pierced it.

(Llywelyn's body was buried at Abbey Cwm Hir in Wales but his head was impaled on London Bridge.)

And then, still echoing the Elegy from Llywelyn's bard:

'There is no counsel, no closure, no opening' (this running up the side of the inscription).

So here, on the 'first day after ten' of December, this is in memory of that winter - ab hieme - 1282.

*

Light ebbs yet, and the turn of a tide is slow, but certain.

Vexilla Regis / Sir Bedivere's Horse

Vexilla Regis (pencil & watercolour)

by David Jones

While on the subject of Arthurian deposits ... One thing leads to another and so here is a delightfully eccentric way of 'interpreting' the painting above.The poet Jean Earle wrote this poem in her eighties with all the willed mischievousness of a young tyro.

Sir Bedivere's Horse

David Jones, dreaming ‘Vexilla Regis’.
Painted the souls of trees
On lumpish hills, such as spiral
My birthplace. Beyond the foremost,
Tallest and roughest Tree,
Run the wild horses.

Dreamer myself,
I know one is Sir Bedivere’s horse.
I was once Sir Bedivere’s squire.

How we sagged, after we lost Arthur!
Wandering purposeless –
The forest stiff in a winter
Like glass fur. So scarce the forage ….
Sir, at his blackest hour,
Poorly with fever,

Hardly spoke, grieving. The horse thin,
Carrying both of us. “At last”, I said,
“We are coming
To World’s Edge. My brother lives near,
In a fortified house.
You could lie down?”

So we had shelter. But Sir, brooding,
Rode his dear creature out,
Returned alone. “I have freed him,
To your hills”. “But where’s the bridle?”
Bed, not at all himself,
Had left it hanging.

“Sir, he’ll starve! Caught in some coppice,
Like the ram sacrifice
In holy writ”. Sir refolded
His great hurt as he did his long legs,
Closed off his mind from me,
Covered his face.

People there thought it a shame, to live
Stuck with a darkened knight
Who licked his wound while cursing
Lost battles. The pain Sir Bedivere
Nursed was as everywhere
As the King’s grave ….

Life will go on. I was young, afire –
Finding the horse, I’d go
Adventuring. Try my mettle
Some new road. Sir Bed would not miss
All my uncourtly ways.
Scarce a brilliant squire ….

Where the Honddu, in a rushy foaming
Hurries its little fishes,
I found the horse – fast in a tangle
Of witchwood, that might have killed him,
Strangled him with the reins,
Had I not come.

Ripe for love, sniffing his sweat and steam,
Gathered the wild mares,
Enticing him. It needed
My utmost muscle and finesse –
Muddied and almost thrown –
Till I unwound him.

Crazed for freedom; and the whinnying, hot
Mares – oh, the animal
Was as myself, was a brother
In prison. I slashed the brute loose.
Whatever might curb his life
Now – I would not.

With the soft act, Sir Bedivere’s
Quixotic chivalry
Came home to me. It was oddly
Endearing. Return to him, then –
Muddy; but maybe not
Quite a bad squire?

Such whiffs of mediaeval spice
David Jones loved: yet his fey brush
Deft with running shapes,
May not have known –
Through the layered myth –
Which was Sir Bedivere’s horse.

The title of the painting comes from a Latin hymn Vexilla Regis prodeunt ... (Forth come the standards of the King) written in Gaul in the 5th century. The symbolic imagery of the painting refers, among others things, to the Crucifixion (there's a robin with a 'bloodstained' breast). But what about those horses? Jean Earle was not so eccentric in the light of this from David Jones' letters:"the rushing ponies are, more or less, the horses of the Roman cavalry, turned to grass and gone wild off to the hills. This idea, probably, in turn comes from something in Malory's Morte D'Arthur when, right at the end, after the death of Guenevere, and the break up of the round table, Lancelot and the other knights let their armed horses free to roam where they will ... and gone off to be hermits and the like." (Dai Greatcoat p.149 ...)

Mabinog's Liturgy

Nativity with Beasts and Shepherds

(Dum Medium Silentium Tenerent Omnia)
drypoint, 1928, on wove paper

by David Jones

 *

In the middle silences of this night’s course the blackthorn blows white on Orcop Hill.

They do say that on this night

in the warm byres

shippons, hoggots and out-barns of Britain

in the closes and the pannage-runs and on the sweet lawns of Britain

the breathing animals-all

do kneel.

Some may say as on this night

                                                the narrow grey-rib wolves

from the dark virgin wolds and indigenous thickets of Britain,

though very hungry and already over the fosse, kneel content on the shelving berm.

If these are but grannies’ tales

maybe that on this night

the nine crones of Glevum in Britannia Prima, and the three heath-hags that do and do and do

north of the Bodotria

in a wild beyond the Agger Antonini

and all the many sisters of Afagddu

that practise transaccidentation from Sabrina Sea to Dindaethwy

in Mona Insula

tell their aves

unreversed.

(from the ‘Mabinog’s Liturgy’ section of The Anathémata by David Jones)

__________________________

David Jones (1895-1974), in his work as both an artist and a writer, made extensive use of allusive symbolism. Here are some glosses on the text above for those that need to know.

Orcop Hill
David Jones reports that he spoke to a farmer in Herefordshire in 1949 who claimed to have seen the thorn blossoming on Christmas Eve. The farmer also related the legend that animals knelt at this time, though it was outside his personal experience.

Shippons ... pannage-runs
Cow sheds  ... pig pastures.

Glevum
Gloucester (for the nine crones see 'Peredur' in The Mabinogion)

Bodotria
Firth of Forth

Agger Antonini     )
Antonine Wall
Afagddu                )    These three rhyme
Cerridwen's son
Sabrina Sea          )
Bristol Channel

Transaccidentation
Transformation brought about by sorcery (but with a suggestion of transubstantiation)

Dindaethwy
The seas around Wales

Mona Insula
The Isle of Anglesey

Aves unreversed
Even those practising the black arts are redeemed here.

David Jones' Arthur

And what of Arthur in the 20th century (it is too early to speak of the 21st)?

There were T.H. White's whimsical offerings The Sword in the Stone and The Book of Merlyn but, amusing as they might be, and delightful in their own way, they cannot constitute any sort of serious Arthuriad.

There were the writings of Charles Williams, which certainly deserve to be taken seriously. His Arthurian Torso attempted an analysis of the significance of the material and his long poem Taliessin Through Logres, if eccentric, does attempt a contribution to the tradition rather than a restatement of it. But both of these, in literary terms, have vanished without a trace.

Which leaves David Jones. His luminescent account of Gwenhwyfar praying in a chapel at Christmas occupies a significant point in the labyrinth of his spectacularly labyrinthine writing The Anathemeta. Then there are the two poems (though called 'fragments') published in The Sleeping Lord. 'The Hunt' is an evocation of Arthur in the medieval Welsh tale 'How Culhwch Won Olwen' while 'The Sleeping Lord' poem itself presents Arthur as a densely symbolic figure.

These works deserve to be better known. T.S. Eliot put Jones in the same league as Ezra Pound and himself. But, in spite of 'The Waste Land', with its echoes of Jessie Weston's study of the grail legends From Ritual to Romance, in spite of Pound's self-conscious echoes of The Odyssey, neither of these came as close to a deep engagement with the mythological deposits they used as did Jones. Perhaps Joyce - a particular favourite of Jones' - did in thoroughly modernising his mythological engagement with the soul of Ireland.

Jones' "what's under works up" is nowhere more concisely expressed than in his Arthurian poems. In 'The Hunt' , Arthur hunts the boar Trwyth and engages him with due respect "life for life". 'The Sleeping Lord' on the other hand, presents a more passive figure, the very essence of the island of Britain rather than it's defender. Just listen to Jones cadences here and savour the wealth of symbolic detail:

(from the conclusion of a poem covering 26 pages):

Yet he sleeps on

very deep in his slumber:

how long has he been the sleeping lord?

are the clammy ferns

his rustling vallance

does the buried rowan

ward him from evil, or

does he ward the tanglewood

and the denizens of the wood

are the stunted oaks his gnarled guard

or are their knarred limbs

strong with his sap?

Do the small black horses

grass on the hunch of his shoulders?

are the hills his couch

or is he the couchant hills?

Are the slumbering valleys

him in slumber

are the still undulations

the still limbs of him sleeping?

Is the configuration of the land

the furrowed body of the lord

are the scarred ridges

his dented greaves

do the trickling gullies

yet drain his hog-wounds?

Does the land wait the sleeping lord

or is the wasted land

that very lord who sleeps?

GŴYL DDEWI

DAVID JONES :

Chalice With Flowers

~

CALAN

MAWRTH