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exploited by men, and yet to be hated and feared by many of the men
who exploit them: but it has been the face of men to have their whole
lives disLOrted by mothers who loved them LOO much (D.H. Lawrence)
or not enough (Baudelaire). Also, if men's love and need for women is
mixed with hate and fear, this is because of man's fear of impotence (or,
fantasized , of castration) and therefore of final humiliation by some
woman. Again, death in battle is a rough moral equivalent for labor
pangs... But my point is a quite different one: the poetry here is raw,
strong-ironically, but not to hurt Adrienne Rich, let us say
"masculine"! -and the poetry stands, at whatever angle the reader has
his gun poised (or hers) in the war between the men and the women.
Adrienne Rich's responses could easily become rehearsed , her eyes
blinkered, but she is a free creati ve creature, and the art transcends, as it
properly should, the support and imprisonment of the ideology.
David Jones comes in well here because his Roman Catholic faith
could be called an ideology and his central emotional experience,
expressed in his great book
In Parenthesis,
was of the all male
companionship of the First World War. He never married, hated the
open air and would draw £lowers with a loose water color wash
overlapping the delicate pencil lines, in vases on the inner side of the
window. He was a painter, illustraLOr (wood-cuts, mainly), and letterist
of genius. Because of his Welsh ancestry he immersed himself in the
"Maller of Britain," the Anhurian story. He was not unsenSllOllS ; thcll'
is a beautiful naked Guenevere, but of his myth world. He saw
Christianity as having the "unific" quality of a new world imperium
and he, loving ancient small gods, was in a sense thus depressed by his
own religion. But he felt the new "world imperium" of early Christian–
ity survived by containing the very gods it transcended. His quality is
suggested by this passage, neither versification or liturgy, but a
possible inscription on a first-century Roman boundary stone. I do not
understand the Welsh, though it may be water-gate or water-bridge.
Tenebrae are shadows and the Latin at the end can be rendered: "(In
the name of,
or
by) leaf, flower, seed, 0 Cross hail, Hail banner! " Jones
has a wonderful drawing in ink of marching trees, "Vexilla Regis," the
Banners of the King.
GWANYN YN Y LLWYN
ARBOR AXED FROM ARBOUR-SIDE
THAT NOW STRIPT
IS MORE ARRAYED
MORE THAN IN THE SILVAN RIDE
