‘Bedad He Revives! See How He Raises!’: An Introduction to David Jones's ‘The Sleeping Lord’

JOHN TERPSTRA 'Bedad He Revives! See How He Raises!': An Introduction to David Jones's 'The Sleeping Lord' Readers who have delayed looking into the poetry ofDavid Jones because of its fabled difficulties might do well to begin at the end. The last book of poetry published in his lifetime (there were three altogether) is also the shortest, and probably the most readily accessible. The Sleeping Lord, and Other Fragments is a collection of previously published pieces which appeared in 1974, also the year of Jones's death. Arranged for the most part in chronological order, the poems present a unified line of development . The title poem can be seen almost as a climax to the book, and also to Jones's poetic career. Following it, there is a passage from the unfinished, extended manuscript 'The Sook ofSalaam's Ass,' whichJones abandoned prior to the printing of his major work, The Anathemata (1952).' 'Salaam's Ass' provides a fitting close to The Sleeping Lord, and Other Fragments. Written during and concerning itselfwith a period immediately following the Great War, its placement here recalls Jones's poetic beginnings: his mst writing, In Parenthesis (1937), was about that war. Thereare otherindications that the title poem of the lastbookoccupiesa spedal place in the body of Jones's written work - external signs, so to speak, although they are perhaps of interest only to the previously converted. For instance, the composition dates of this poem read 'November 1966 to March 1967.' Within the context of the book, and never minding the other works, this is an unusual suggestion of swiftness. We are familiar with something along the lines of 'ca 1964 incorporating passages written ca 1950 or earlier.' Jones was a poet who, over a long stretch of time, would piece together poems he would then often call fragments, which served to perpetuate the impression that his work was still incomplete. Sut this poem, it would appear, literally burst outof him. Another such external sign alluding to this poem's uniqueness is the virtual outpouring of Welsh words. Most of Jones's writing, of course, contains Welsh, but nowhere is there quite so much ofit. Keeping in mind the place Wales occupied in the poet's heart and mind, one might suspect that here is the most thoroughgoing representation of that place and of his feeling towards it. A third sign has to do with the footnoting. Most of his poems, again, are copiously footnoted, to the end that he extended T.S. Eliot's public service following The Waste Land almost to a separate art. UNTVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 1, FALL 1982 0042-<124718211()()()-()()94-QIOS$cU·5010 Q UNIVERSITt OF TORONTO PRESS 'THE SLEEPING LORD' 95 Here the footnotes are, for the most part, restricted to translations of the Welsh words, with aids for their proper (he might say approximate) pronunciation. Either 'The Sleeping Lord' is so crystal clear it needs no page-bottom elucidation (it is neither more nor less clear than any of his other poems), or he may have considered that in this instance footnotes would be an unwanted distraction. None of these individual anomalies may be enough to prove the case, except that in so far as David Jones was a poet closely concerned with minutiae, even small changes carry considerable significance. The techniques employed in this poem are familiar: the spacing and arrangement of lines on the page as a form of notation, in order that each might have its proper weight; the blend of a 'high' language with everyday speech; the jumps in time, where centuries are crossed and crisscrossed with no apparent feeling of incongruity. And the content as well is often very familiar: there are the Cockney soldiers, the priest, Welsh words and settings, biblical and mythological references, and so forth. Themes, particular words and phrases usually occur and recur in his work. Jones repeats himself from year to year, so to speak, like the dates oftheCatholic church calendar. But each year, as someone who participates in that church year once told me, 'the meaning goes deeper.' In 'The Sleeping Lord' many of those same elements familiar to the other poems seem to have benefited from their tenure. A looseness, hardly to be mistaken for recklessness, allows the various parts to come and go of their own accord, without so much conscious arrangement. The arrangement decidedly exists, but within the almost stream-of-consciousness line the poem takes the elements appearmore, itseems, because they are meanttoappear than because they have been detailed to that action. This is saying quite a lot, I am afraid, that could easily be contradicted. But the poem is in the nature of a summary of David Jones's thought and feeling, as if it was composed over his entire lifetime, before it was finally written down, close to life's end. His great affection for Wales and his understanding of its historical importance for all of Britain are here at their fullest; as is his sadness at its present state, both national and natural; his convictions concerning the inescapable efficacy of certain signs and rituals to the life of humankind; his understanding of myth and mythological figures; his deep dismay at what he saw as the present-day decline in spirituality, love of nature, and awareness of historical continuity. One senses that this poem was a last token from him to the age and place he lived in. The dominant figure in the poem is the sleeping lord himself, a figure associated with and seen in the rise and fall of the hills of south Wales. A motif of the landscape as being representative of a human figure at rest or sleepingis new neither to the island of Britain nor to the writings ofJones. 96 JOHN TERPSTRA Already in his first published work, In Parenthesis, the image is recalled in the shapes of the soldiers in the trenches of the GreatWar. In a footnote to this passage the poet explains: In this passage I had in mind the persistent Celtic theme of armed sleepers under the mounds, whether they be the fer sidhe or the great Mac Og of Ireland, or Arthur sleeping in Craig-y-Ddinas or in Avalon or among the EiJdons in RoxburghshIre; or Owen of the Red Hand, or the Sleepers in Cumberland. Plutarch says of our islands: 'An Island in which Cronus is imprisoned with Briareus keeping guard over him as he sleeps; for as they put it, sleep is the bond of Cronus. They add that around him are many deities, his henchmen and attendants.' ... It will be seen that the tumbled undulations and recesses, the static sentries, and the leaning arms that were the Forward Zone, called up easily this abiding myth of our people! The motif has been called up in Canada as well. In northern Ontario the Ojibway people have ascribed to one of the larger rock formations the sleeping figure of Nanna Bijou, who once saved their people from destruction, and will do so again when their trouble is greatest. This is, of course, a native Canadian myth. Our own relationship to it, the relationship most would have to it today, either here or on the other side of the Atlantic, is probably best illustrated in the way in which it first came to my knowledge. This was on a picture postcard, in which an Indian, outfitted in buckskin and feather head-dress, was shown lying down, superimposed upon a photo of the rock formation. Jones would not have missed the absurd humour of this visual aid, but neither would he have missed its implications regarding our attitudes in general to myth: if the truth is not literal, or at best visible, it is all the more difficult to believe. The difference between fact and myth is often considered irreconcilable . The hard facts of many sciences dominate our time, and the tension they create was acutely felt by the poet. Although Jones greatly appreciated and pursued the fruits of various endeavours more scientific than his own, he was at the same time, and like many others, disturbed by the bam-storming, tree-riving technological forces which were advancing upon and conquering all that stood in their path. Technology, as he saw it, was rapidly making it impOSSible for people to see any worth in what had gone before, be it simple craftsmanship or a belief in the kind of truth the former myths of earlier people held for them. A Waste Land was being made of the green hills of land and heart. Jones remained particularly interested in those sciences which contributed the data somehow needed for his work, and these included geology and archaeology. One of his tasks was to reconcile their findings with his own, which were in a variety of fields and less single-mindedly devoted to their particular sphere. 'The Sleeping Lord' illustrates that effort. It begins by asking questions as to 'THE SLEEPING LORD' 97 the lord's whereabouts, a litany of questions which evoke the Magdalene 's search for the body of Christ one Sunday morning: And is his bed wide is his bed long is his bed deep on the folded strata where is his bed, and where has he lain him} Into these opening questions are put terms from a lexicon of geophysical studies: carboniferous vaultings (the location is south Wales), gritstone outcrop, syncline, lateral pressured anticline, faulted underbedding , and scoria. By looking for the lord in a landscape so technically defined, Jones asks after not only that lord's whereabouts but his currency as well. Can we, who know a gritstone outcrop from a drumlin, still see this lord in how the land is shaped? Does our terminology already preclude that possibility? Will the sleeping lord stand up to the exacting demands of scientific inquiry? By keeping the opening section of the poem within the form of rhetorical questioning, the case is kept open. The passage directly following upon this one introduces to the scene one of the attendants who historically would have been at the lord's side. The almost hypothetical nature of the poet's wondering is reinforced in this passage, as if the veracity of the myth cannotsimply be assumed, but will be played with as a possibility. If, he asks, this lord is sleeping here, then 'where, would you say, does his Foot-Holder kneel?' (p 72). This quietly inquisitive search offers no assurance of finding. In its own way, however, it recalls the wandering search of the Celtic monks in their round white boats, who, though they had no known destination, nevertheless converted a good portion of northern Europe. The questions asked of the Foot-Holder lead to similar questions being asked of another attendant to the lord, the Candle-bearer. These two, it would seem, by their very presence almost guarantee his. So far the poem has had a dreamlike atmosphere, a dream in which exist this lord, his attendants, and a natural environment from which they are inseparable. Nothing has really happened. The scientific terms stop when the Foot-Holder enters the picture, and into their place come the many Welsh words. The tension first created by them, however, will begin to manifest itself in other forms. We move gradually from these opening, outdoor queries into the hall of a Welsh chieftain, into the neuadd. There the priest blesses the food about to be eaten, and as he does so remembers and prays for the departed. Following his remembrance, the questions return, this time asking after the desecration of the landscape. How has it come about that all the dwellings are destroyed and the trees all fallen? From that point, still 98 JOHN TERPSTRA asking, we are led to the landscape of present-day Wales, where the coal-miningactivities have blackened the hills. Must the rivers carry to the sea the tears of a sleeping lord along with tailings from the mine? Following this passage, and in an abrupt switch typical of the poet, we are brought into a series of questions asked by two English night-sentinels of an invading force. They must decide if they will awaken their superior because of a mysterious noise they thought they heard. It was the sleeping lord, crying out in his sleep. The poem closes shortly after this with a brief, highly evocative, yet inquiring passage on the sleeping lord and the landscape: Does the land wait the sleeping lord or is the wasted land that very lord who sleeps? (96) The questions provide a major stylistic feature that is used selectively for lengthy passages that involve the larger part of the poem. They represent not so much a rhetorical poetic technique as a necessity imposed by the matter being dealt with, a necessity born of conditions in a Waste Land. In the writings of David Jones we first come upon the subject where he first became aware of those conditions, during the Great War. Dai Great-coat, a soldier of Irt Parenthesis, says: You ought to ask: Why what is this, what's the meaning of this. Because you don't ask, although the spear-shaft drips, there's neither steading - not a roof-tree,4 Jones had it from another story. In the Welsh tale Peredur SOrt of Efrawg Peredur is severely reprimanded for having failed to ask what was meant by the spear dripping with blood. Had he only done so, the king would have had health, the kingdom would be saved, and so would its people. A thorough presentation of the subject has been given by William Blissett in his essay 'The Liturgy of Parsifal': A momentous 'overwhelming question' is no unfamiliar motif. Searching questions are addressed to those who seek the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, matrimony, and ordination, thoughhere, asis normalinreligious and in everyday experience, the adept examines the neophyte. The risen Lord chides the two disciples at Emmaus as 'fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken' and then supplies the question they should have asked - 'Ought not Christ to have suffered these things?' - before making himselfknown to them in the breaking ofbread. Closest to the Grail question is the very ancient Jewish practice (based on Exodus 12:25-7- 'What mean ye by this service?') whereby the celebration of the Passover must begin with the youngest boy asking 'why is this night unlike all other nights?' In a sense the Grail question, where the necessity lies in the asking not the answering, is the reverse side of the old riddle of the Sphinx.' There is no one overwhelming question in this poem. The many questions lead, however, to one which does contain them all, to the last questioning line. The two questions cited above as being closest to the Crall also fmd their parallel in Jones's poem. If nothing had yet happened by the time the Candle-bearer was introduced, it is at that point that things change. His duty prescribes that he ward the lord's flame, regardless of circumstance. If they happen to be outdoors and the wind blows, his job becomes all the harder. A wind does begin to blow. The poem makes its frrst dramatic shift into the present, and the prevailing dream-like atmosphere gives way to an unexpected sense of urgency: And the wind-gusts do not slacken but buffet stronger and more chill as the dusk deepens ... Is the season sequence out of jOint that leafy boughs should tremor so for a night-fall gust at this age ofthe solar year ... ? (74-5) Why is this night unlike all others? A similarincident occurs later in the poem, when the two night-sentinels are disturbed by a sound carried on the wind during what is normally a quiet shift of duty. The nature of their duty as well as that of the Candle-bearer is asked by the other question, 'What mean ye by this service?' This is also the question which Peredur should have asked, and one which David Jones did ask. That the Candle-bearer will be performing his duty towards his lord, regardless of time or circumstance, is established in the poem as a fact. There is simply no doubt of it. In the brief passage immediately following his questions about the strange weather, the poet himselfis implicated by that duty and participates in the Candle-bearer's responsibility. He stands at the same place where he is already certain the attendant will be standing, which is 'here, on the open mynnydd-dir' [mountain-land] (76). His involvement at the present time and at this specific location suggest that holding a light for the lord has broad meaning. Asbecomes more apparentiater, this light signifies the undying presence of the lord. But it is also meant to be associated with the other lights: the light of the fire in a hearth which 100 JOHN TERPSTRA preserves life in the lord's hall; the flax-flame which is lit in the celebration on Holy Saturday, and from which the new light is created; and the light of the Word, the Word become Fire (72). What Jones 'means by this service,' so to speak, is the basis for the poem. He knows it to be his own duty to hold and ward a flame for the sleeping lord against what have become the inclement blasts of cold wind which the progress of our western civilization has set in motion. Who is the sleeping lord? His associations are many, although the King Arthur of legend and history is the strongest, single association. He is, it goes without saying, typic of the risen saviour, Christ. Following the passage which confirms the Candle-bearer's faithfulness to his office, the action moves indoors, into the hall of a lord. There, in the action of the priest, a fuller identification of the lord is made. The Priest of the Household blesses the food and drink, and as he recites the benediction, 'inly to himself, and but for a brief moment, he makes memento of those who no longer require such as himself to bless their meat & drink .. .' (79). His service is in obedience to the command given by Christ at the Last Supper, to 'do this in remembrance.' His remembrance embraces first that Eternal Victim, who initiated the celebration, and goes on to include all the other sleepers of the Island: the Athletes of God, and all those who offered the Eternal Victim in remote, desolate places; the lords and rulers and men of name in the land in times past; the saviours and leaders; Cunobelinos the Radiant, the Blessed Bran, and many, many, many more whose bones lie under the green mounds of the Island (84); the puellae, arglwyddesau, matronae, and breninesau; the Slendernecks and Fairnecks; and many, many more whose names are, for whatever reason, on the diptycha of the Island; and vastly many more still, men or womenkind, of neither fame nor recorded nomen, whether bond or freed or innately free, of far back or ofbut recent decease, whose burial mounds are known or unknown or for whom no mound was ever raised or any mark set up of even the meanest sort to show the site of their interment; or those whose white bodies were shovelled into earth in haste, without funerary rites of any sort whatever; or those- a veryI very great number, whose bodies, whether stripped naked or in full battle-gear were left to be the raven's gain and supperfor the hoveringkite and for the black-nebbed corbie that waits the aerfor-ebb: the deeper the stillness of the aerdawelwch, the higher heaped the banquet that she loves. (85-6) The list comprises almost one third of the poem, and its cumulative effect is great. The entire history of a people parades by in the mind of a man whose office it is to remember these things. The individual person and the people as a whole are as significant to the life and culture signified by the neuadd, the lord's hall, the Island, as Christ is to the life of all humankind. After the opening questions had been asked and the poem ITHE SLEEPING LORDI 101 moved into the quiet of the hall, the burden of those questions was lifted. The purposeful rambling of the aging priest which then began led, without obvious intent, to the body of the sleeping lord who is, then, the embodiment of that whole people. As with much in the work oOones, we are concerned here with origins. Ifthe priest is acting in obedience to Christ's command, then the situation in which Christ gave that command is also somehow replicated, and the dinner in the neuadd a type of Last Supper, a form of that culture's taking leave. Physically the priesthimselfseems to illustrate the age of the people as a whole, to suggest a natural aging towards death. He is getting on, as they say, and can no longer remember as clearly as once he could, nor make the swift connections which came more easily to him in the past. In reading the brief hints where this becomes apparent it is, I think, inescapable that one also think oOones himself, who would have been in his seventies at the time of writing. When the priest speaks, one senses in the manner and tone someone old enough to remember vividly those persons and incidents of a previous era. That same tone may be sensed in the passages preceding his, where jones made himself known as a participant. The entire poem to this point hasbeen a kind ofremembrance, done in such a way as to make the situation appear present. It recalls the older people we have all met who remember their past as clearly as if it were occurring in the present, or even more so. Memory is mixing with a desire that things still be so. Then, within it all, within for instance the line which closes the Candle-bearer passage, 'he's most like to be about somewhere, you can count on that' (77), there is an almost terrible poignancy. The sureness of the statement is belied by the fact that it is all but totally meaningless, now. In the opening paragraphs of his Preface to The Anathemata jones refers to the author of the Historia brittonum, who collated historically important material from diverse sources because he felt it would be lost otherwise in the relentless march forward. Although jones raises the subject there more or less to disclaim a connection between himself and Nennius, the Preface is largely concerned with the same situationand with whatmightbe termed the poet'sinheritance. Like the elder of the two sons in the Hebrew story, our modern culture seems willing to trade that inheritance for a mess offreeze-dried pottage. jones's purpose, in part, is to remember and record certain things which will inevitably be lost in the trade. He is one in a long line of Candle-bearers, who continue to hold lights for the lord regardless of circumstance, while the job, today, seems to be suffering from reclassification and may be downgraded into extinction. As was stated above, the Candle-bearer's light signifies more than a single, wavering flame crowning a wax cylinder. At the conclusion of his remembrance the priest makes the sign and says: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine (86). The Candle-bearer, unable to contain himself, sings out 102 JOHN TERPSTRA the response: ET LUX PERPETUA LUCEAT EIS (87). The flame which he wards signifies this light perpetual. In the passage following the questions begin again, asking this time after the destroyed dwellings and how it came about that the trees are all fallen. The answer given is that the great Boar Trwyth 'has ravaged the fair onnen [ash tree1and the hornbeam and the Queen of the Woods ... it is he who has stamped out the seed of fIre' (89-90). In the Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen King Arthur chases the Boar and eventually, with his own hand, destroys him. In this present telling of the story, however, the victory has not been accomplished. After nine days and nights of fIghting the king fInally lies down to sleep, becomes the sleeping lord. The lord who sleeps is the embodiment of a whole people and their culture, and this embodiment includes their physical landscape. The tale of that destroyed land continues into the passage following this, into the present-day situation. The poem reaches its climax in the following lines: Tawny-black sky-scurries low over Ysgyryd hill and over the level-topped heights of Mynnydd Pen-y-fa! cold is wind grey is rain, but BRIGHT IS CANDELA where this lord is in slumber. (90) Although the light is brightest here, its surroundings are the darkest yet portrayed. The picture which follows is as black as the clouds over Ysgyryd hill (in south Wales). The effects of coal-mining on the greenhills perhaps epitomize the historical realities of this one country. Jones's grief over the state of present-day Wales is here made explicit. Here, also, the magic of that landscape raises his language to its height. He evokes the destruction of those hills by those who know nothing of the land or its personal and historical associations. These 'cosmocrats of alien lips' (90) have sifted into the streams refuse from their mining of the hills. Do the rivers drain the sleeping lord's tears for the land with the tailings? Do the boughs above the rivers grapple with each other, just as the lord grappled with the Boar? The passage is as distinctive and fmely wrought as the priest's long remembrance, and presents us with much the same thing: an elegy. When the priest completed that elegy, he included not only the departed of Wales but also the departed 'of the entire universal orbis I from the unknown beginnings I unguessed millenniums backI until now' (86). That same extension occurs here, and the recorded death seems, as well, not entirely unnatural. Rivers flow to the sea, where the tide takes J THE SLEEPING LORD' 103 them away. These rivers carry the death of Wales, but the whole of western civilization is implicated in this movement towards a final end. If Jones seems something of a patriot, he is anything but closed-eyed about his undying dedication.Midway through this passage he asks of the birds which drink and eat from that water which has flowed out to sea: Or, is the dying guU on her sea-hearse that drifts the oily bourne to tomb at tum of tide her own stricken cantor? (93) In a move which is again typical of this poet the point where the world becomes darkest gives rise to a telling pun. The play on the fIrst wordsthe modem victim of outrage to the ecology being identifIed with the victim of Roman expansion - recalls an essay found in a book by the same title, The Dying Gaul. The statue of the Dying Gaul had originally been fashioned in response to a Roman victory over the Celts in the third century Be. It portrays a warrior in his lastmoments, almost unable to keep himself from lying down to a final sleep. His trumpet lies beside him: Two centuries later Caesar was to hear these [trumpets]bray across the surfon a Kentish foreshore, and twelve centuries after Caesar, an Angevin archdeacon, Sylvester Gerald de Bani, was to hear them in the wooded defiles of Wales. He says that when the Welsh attacked the sound of their deep-toned trumpets mingled with their harsh cries. You see the Dying Gaul was going west, slowly.' Present-day events in Wales, then, are part of a historical movement westwards. They are not to be isolated from events which took place, both in Wales and on the continent, years ago. For the race of Celts it has meant their prolonged, almost inevitable death. Although responsibility for the desecration of the Welsh hills and rivers might be laid at the feet of those who initiated the mining there, or later did not stop it, the final responsibility lies not with them but rather somewhere in the tangled branches of a world-thicket, through which is heard the great Boar, ravaging. And not only is the context of the destruction of Wales made more encompassing; the context in which the poet writes can be placed in a broader cultural framework. If David Jones stands in a historical line represented by the Candie-bearer, as a poet he also follows a tradition. In the same essay quoted above he writes: this sense of fighting a losing battle was to find expression in a kind of defeat-tradition which is part of the texture of the poetry of the peoples of the 'Celtic Survival' in the flrst millennium AD ... 104 JOHN TERPSTRA Now this tradition, with newer calamities piling up in plenty to give the old saws their modem instances and to intensify the feeling in differing localities of the Celtic West, developed, centuries later still and under the influence of a European-wide movement, a romantic conception of Celtdom, whereby, as we all know, if you wanta minstrel boy itis 'In the ranks of death you'll find him.'7 It may very well seem unlikely, given the particular 'defeat-tradition' within which the poem works, that the sleeping lord can be expected ever to rise. However, the flame the CandIe-bearer wards against the wind, and the light perpetual shining over the departed, and the candela seen bright over the level-topped heights have intensified in the poem even as the picture grew dark. The lord's rising is anticipated, though the light provides that event's solitary assurance. In the final passage the English night-sentinels begin to feel something of that assurance, though for them, of course, it takes the form of uncertainty in their own position as invaders. The passage begins by asking if, when the lord turns over in his sleep, he cries out in a great voice. His cry recalls the last cry of Christ before he gave up the spirit. But this was three days before he rose from the dead. Perhaps the sentinels anticipate the possibility oftheir own final defeat as they try to determine whether or not they really heard something of significance, or whether it was just the wind. This is almost a comedy sketch. The ramifications of their decision, or indecision rather, as to whether or not they should report the noise is taken all the way through the ranks to the top, to the Castellan, 'snug with his dowsabel' (95), who, they know, would not feel pleased at being roused for a wind-bluster. They would prefer that their sleeping lord not be made to rise on their account but conclude that they must report, because you never know what may be - not hereabouts. No wiseman's son born do know not in these whoreson March-lands of this Welshry. (96) As they acknowledge, the possibility exists, and in particular exists here, of events out of the ordinary. Within their scheme of things, as invaders, the foreign world in their command must be reduced to knowables. The power they represent is articulated throughout the poems contained in The Sleeping Lord, though perhaps no where better than in 'The Tutelar of the Place: which is one of the other two poems in the Celtic triptych that the book presents. Their power has always been that of the dark. Towards the end of his life the foreboding he felt must have tired his eyes, but David Jones's perception of history and where it 'THE SLEEPING LORD' 105 was leading was determined by the light. Of the great mythic figure in this poem he writes: It is impossible in recalling the Dying Gaul not to recall james joyce. And impossible in that recallingnot to recall the words from the Dublin street-ballad: 'Bedad he revives! See how he raises!'s NOTES 1 The full text of 'The Book of Balaam's Ass' has now been published in David jones, The Roman Quarry,and Other Sequences, ed Harman Grisewood and Rene Hague (London: Agenda Editions 1981). 2 David jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber '937), pp '98-9, n36. 3 David jones, The Sleeping Lord, and Other Fragments (London: Faber 1974), pp 70-1; subsequent page references appear in the text in parentheses. 4 In Parenthesis, p 84· The necessity of asking the question occurs in The Anathemata (London: Faber 1952), p 226: Unless he ask the question how shall the rivers run or the suitors persuade their loves or the erosion of the land cease? 5 William Blissett, 'The Liturgy of Parsifal: University of Toronto Quarterly, 49 (Winter '979/80), 123. I am indebted to Professor Blissett for advice and encouragement while I was writing a paper of which this is a shortened, refined version. 6 David jones, The Dying Gaul (London: Faber ' 978), p 5'. Sylvester Gerald de Bani is otherwise known by the name Giraldus Cambrensis. 7 Ibid, pp 53-4· 8 Ibid, P 58. ...