war poetry, or the poetry of war? on these sources, for he saw that the continuity they represented was breaking down.
‘Inthe late nineteen-twenties and early’ rubthirties’, he wrote, ‘among my most
immediate friends there used to be discussed something that we christened ‘‘The
Break’’...[I]n the nineteenth century, Western Man moved across a rubicon.’^44
‘We saw, with varying degrees of clarity...the technological, scientific advances
which, one way or another and whether beneficent or otherwise, were destructive of
immemorial ways of life, of rooted cultures of all sorts.’^45 The technology that gave
a particular character to modern warfare was also bringing about the destruction
of the cultural inheritance on which he drew, giving both poignancy and relevance
to its use.
WithIn ParenthesisJones set out to explore some of the things that he had seen,
felt, and been a part of between December 1915 and early July 1916, as he shared in
the daily life of small groups of men who ‘bore in their bodies the genuine tradition
of the Island of Britain, from Bendigeid Vran to Jingle and Marie Lloyd’. He wanted
to make ‘a shape in words, using as data the complex of sights, sounds, fears, hopes,
apprehensions, smells, things exterior and interior, the landscape and paraphernalia
of that singular time and of those particular men’.^46 By drawing on the shared
inheritance, he was able to show that their experience went beyond the singular and
particular of their own lives into something wider and more universal. In broad
sweeps and small, vivid detail, with echoes ofY Gododdin,The Battle of Brunanburh
andChanson de Roland, of Chaucer, Malory, Shakespeare and Hopkins, of the Bible
and Catholic liturgy and much more, Jones built up his image of this particular war.
The allusions he offers are not glorious or romantic: they speak of ancient treachery
and madness, of fabled insult and of women seeking their husbands’ long-decayed
once-bodies. They speak of the extremes of daily hardships, of cold so deep that
it ‘hurts you in the bloody eyes, it grips chill and harmfully and rasps the sensed
membrane of the throat’^47 calling back frozen regions of the Celtic underworld, of
men sleeping in the rain and the mud as soldiers through centuries had done before
them. Through their experience they could share in the emotions of those other
generations, for they too could understand what it had meant to be a foot-soldier at
Crecy. John Ball echoes Edward Thomas’s Lob, who, ‘Although he was seen dying ́
at Waterloo,|Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgmoor, too,—|Lives yet.’^48
As John Ball prepares to go up the line for the first time, he realizes that the
ordinary is about to become the extraordinary: ‘there was in this night’s parading,
for all the fear of it, a kind of blessedness, here was borne away with yesterday’s
remoteness, an accumulated tedium, all they’d piled on since enlistment day: a
whole unlovely order this night would transubstantiate, lend some grace to’.^49 ‘I do
(^44) Jones, ‘Preface toThe Anathemata’, inEpoch and Artist, 113.
(^45) Jones, ‘Notes on the 1930s’, inThe Dying Gaul, 46. (^46) Jones, ‘Preface’,In Parenthesis,p.x.
(^47) Jones,In Parenthesis, 61.
(^48) EdwardThomas,‘Lob’,inCollected Poems, ed. R. George Thomas (London: Faber, 2004), 62.
(^49) Jones,In Parenthesis, 27.