Sex and the Goddess in the Poetry of David Jones

THOMAS DILWORTH Sex and the Goddess in the Poetry of David Jones The poetry of David Jones comprehends most of Western history. But directly or by historical analogy, Jones focuses especially on the postindustrial world and on modern warfare, where he searches for metaphysical value. He is basically a religious poet. And among religious poets he is especially important because he gives new expression to a central metaphor of Western religion, which is that the soul is female to God. Because of its inherent awkwardness for males, the image of the female soul has troubled the religious consciousness ofthe West. How can a man love God as a woman loves a man? The difficulty, which is aggravated by the masculinity of Christ and the symbolic feminity of the Church, may partly explain why, among Christians, more women than men practise their faith. It certainly accounts for the uneasiness of males, even Christian males, with John of the Cross, whose poetry David Jones once told me he I could nevergetinto.' The sexual connotation ofJones's remark is doubtless unintended but may nevertheless be significant, for onlywith some difficulty can males sustain the imaginative sex-change required to identify with the female soul and the female Church in love with a masculine God. To obviate the difficulty, many modern writers deemphasize the sexual image, or avoid it altogether. But the image will not go away. It remains central to Western religious tradition. And since David Jones's subject is Western culture, especially in its religious dimensions, the sexual image is, as it must be, the central metaphor of his work. In his work, David Jones attempts to solve the hermeneutical problem that the sexual metaphor raises by altering the psychology of the metaphor in a way that makes it more accessible to the male imagination. He does this by withdrawing the focus ofattention from God to the female lover ofGod, with whom the female reader can still identify, and to whom the male reader can respond without imaginatively straining his sexual identity. In Jones's poetry, furthermore, the female lover becomes a goddess. The chief typological precedent for this divinization of woman is, for Jones, the centrality of the Earth Goddess in pre-Christian European religion. For Jones, the theological warrant for her divinization is God's desire, in Christian theology, to share his divine life with human beings. In the figure of the eschatological bride, then, the reader - and particularly UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1985 252 THOMAS DILWORTH the male reader - is drawn to a femininity already symbolically divine because of a spiritual destiny which, though never fully realized in time, is even now being fulfilled. Jones writes that a French Augustinian priest named Fr Bernardine, who impressed him more than any other priest he had met, used to preach the best sermons he ever heard, 'very frequently repeating, "God became man that you might become gods." 'I A further, symbolic, justification for the goddess in Jones's poetry is the female personification of divine Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs.2 After his conversion in 1921, furthermore, Jones was a practising Catholic, and Catholicism has always honoured the feminine principle in its symbolism and hagiography. Not that the diviilization of women in his poetry is synonymous with the cult of the Virgin; she is not, of course, a goddess. In Jones's poetry the female archetype absorbs Mary, moreover, much as the archetype absorbs other women, divine (in the pagan, mythological sense) and human. In any case, Jones does not so much divinize the feminine as hefeminizes divinity, so thata mancanloveits personification with psychological impunity. In his first long poem, In Parenthesis (1937), David Jones attempts to discover meaning in the apparent absurdity ofthe combat he experienced as an infantryman for three years on the Western Front. And since meaning corresponds to desire, it must be - for eighteen-year-old soldiers but also, in some sense, for everyone - sexual. Throughout the poem, infantrymendeprived ofthe company ofwomen exhibit the male imagination in its natural longing for the female. In the cold mud of Flanders, Cockney privates daydream of market girls, the curves of whose breasts are...