the great war and modernist poetry problematic in this work. Jones’s imaginative ambition to insert his experience in
thegreat tradition of romantic martial literature, extending from the Old English
heroic poems through ancient Welsh legend to the Arthurian chronicles of Malory
and beyond, is a project fraught with the difficulty of fit, of fittingness, in so far
as the conditions and motivations of warfare in the early–late medieval period
obviously differ considerably from those of the new technological century. It is
nonetheless the substantial dare this poem takes on.
Consider the piece that stands at the ostensible centre of the heroic imagination
of Jones’s poem—in fact, at the exact midpoint ofIn Parenthesis,inthecentreof
Part 4. This is Jones’s recasting of the ancient heroic boast. His new hero is a soldier
garbed in (and named after) the standard-issue trench wear, ‘Dai Great-Coat’, at
once the main type of the commons-in-arms in this current mass war and a sort of
universal soldier. He tells of his part in the major campaigns of Western history and
myth and legend, but configures this soldierly condition in terms of a most timely
paradox, in a series of enigmatic images, like these:
I was the spear in Balin’s hand
that made waste King Pellam’s land...
I the fox-run fire
consuming in the wheat-lands...
And I the south air, tossed from high projections by his Olifant...
(IP, 79–80)This Dai is not Balin wielding the spear, he is the weapon itself; he did not set the
consuming blaze, he is the fire set; he did not sound the trumpet that called men
to action and glory or death, he is the air blown by the soldier sounding the heroic
horn. While he is passive in each instance, he isalso performing an action, at least in
an instrumental way. This riddling role of the passive agent can be seen to depict the
condition of soldiering in the modern arena of mass technological warfare, where
any single man’s strength is subordinate to the power of the new weaponry, and
where individual martial prowess, which offersthe source of the distinctive heroic
action, is subordinate to the co-ordinate force of massed infantry. On the one hand,
of course, this imaginative figure takes the ancient conceits of hero-making into
the deflating circumstance of modern technological atrocity; but, on the other, it
projects the contemporary pathos back into the ennobling pose of the heroic stance,
whose values seem to be claimed here, at least as incipient possibility.
Again and again, in his appropriation of the older ethos, Jones elaborates this
tension between ethical criticism and imaginative heightening in his representation
of the modern martial experience. ‘For the old authors’, he remarks in the preface,
‘the embrace of battle seemed at one with the embrace of lovers. For us it is different.
There is no need to labour the point, nor enquire into the causes here’ (IP,p.xv).
Where those ‘old authors’ might claim the same physical strength as the basis of
distinction in love and war, when individual power was expressed equally in each of