Antithesis and Unity in The Anathemata

The Anathemata (1952) is David Jones's great poetic summa, his symbolic anatomy of western culture. W. H. Auden wrote in 1970 that it was "probably the greatest long poem in English" written in the twentieth century. ¹ A major reason for endorsing Auden's judgment now, after the close of the century, is that, despite its length and open form, The Anathemata is formally whole. It is debatable whether the same can be said of any other modern non-narrative epic-length poem or sequence of poems. Minus its Preface, The Anathemata is 195 pages, and its explicit content ranges from primordial geomorphic changes to the present, with voices and figures from myth, scripture, prehistory, ancient Greece and Rome, Dark-Age Britain, Anglo-Saxon England, late-fifteenth-century London, and Victorian London. Jones unifies all this by means of spatial structure. He does this through a series of corresponding breaks and resumptions in the flow of text that delineate what may be visualized as a recession of circles within circles, the overall shape resembling a target. On its outermost circumference--the start (49) and finish (244) of the poem--is the consecration of the Eucharist during Mass; at the center of the poem (156-57) is a lyric recollection of the acts of Jesus that are made present in the Eucharist. The shape of circles within circles symbolizes the relation of virtually every aspect of life to the sacrament. Jones was able to achieve this symbolically charged, unifying structure because, in the late 1920s as a book illustrator, he had begun experimenting with precisely this sort of shape. About all this I have written elsewhere. ²

There is much more to the form of The Anathemata than spatial structure, which is so conceptual as to be, for many readers, a sort of large ghost, believed in but nowhere directly experienced in its entirety. By itself, such structure and the wholeness it undoubtedly gives cannot comprise a complete aesthetic. Jones liked Aquinas's notion of integritas and also his belief that art requires consonantia (harmony) and claritas (luminous brilliance). Probably no abstract language is adequate to convey the richly various beauty of Jones's poem, but the Thomistic term consonantia may serve to convey what provides the rest of its unifying force. It is a harmony consisting of a range of tones, styles, and allusions, and much else, which I have discussed under the rubrics of movement, physical and semiotic continuings, timescape, and typological correspondences. ³ There is another harmonizing element that also unifies the wide-ranging content or, as Jones preferred to call it, "form-content," of the poem: antithesis. In this essay, I will focus on antithesis as an aspect of the formal unity of the poem and discuss its origins in Jones's theory of culture, its manifestations in the imagery of the poem, and the relation of that imagery to Jones's life and psychological formation.

Jones began discovering the unifying power of antithesis in his early wood engravings, by dividing the picture frame vertically near the center by a pillar, tree, or wall. He does it in the last of his copper-engraved illustrations to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1929), in which the side of an arch divides corresponding human groupings indoors and outdoors. Such division is to visual form (which can be perceived all at once) what pervasive antithesis is to extended temporal form.

The usually symbolic, sometimes sexual, often spatial antithesis that pervades The Anathemata is the central element of an original and penetrating theory of culture. This theory and the resulting analysis informing all Jones's later poetry led Guy Davenport in 1982 to call him the poet who has realized "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." ⁴ Jones expounds his theory in several of his essays, but The Anathemata is...