David Jones's The Grail Mass and Other Works

David Jones, Thomas Goldpaugh, Jamie Callison, Thomas Goldpaugh, Jamie Callison

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350277267
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350052079
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Drawing on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones's The Grail Mass, the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece The Anathemata – a work described by W.H. Auden as 'one of the most important poems of our times' – and The Sleeping Lord and other fragments, his final collection. With detailed commentary on the development and reconstruction of the text, this edition provides a full picture of Jones's literary endeavours over the second half of his life and further establishes his status as a major figure in the first wave of British modernist writers alongside T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.

In addition to the text of The Grail Mass, this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.

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The Grail Mass

	(The Mass)	26
	Section I	30
	Section II	35
	Section III (The Agent)	38
	Section IV	50
On The Traverse of the Wall, I
	(The Wall)	53
	Section VIII	86
The Celtic Insertions
	The First Celtic Insertion, I93
	The Second Celtic Insertion, I	103
	The Third Celtic Insertion	111
	The Second Celtic Insertion, II	119
	The First Celtic Insertion, II	122
On The Traverse of the Wall, II
	Section VIII	124
	Section IX	129
	Section X	137
	Section XI	139
	Section XII	143

On ‘The Traverse of the Wall, I’ contains versions of ‘The Wall’, ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’ and ‘The Tutelar of the Place’.

The Celtic insertions present versions of ‘The Hunt’ and ‘The Sleeping Lord’.

‘On the Traverse of the Wall, II’ contains versions of ‘The Narrows’, ‘The Fatigue’ and ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’.

Section XIII was used in the construction of The Anathemata and also for insertions into ‘The Fatigue’. Section XIV is in rough form and published as ‘The Roman Dinner Conversation’. The absence of Sections VI and VII simply denotes that no sheets specifically marked Section VI and Section VII were located with the manuscripts, although narrative continuity is not broken as a result of their absence.

THE MASS

Inclined in the midst of the instruments

and invoking the life-giving Persons

and in honour of the former witnesses,

et istorum,¹ dusty in the cist,

he kisses the place of sepulture.

He turns to ask of the living.

Those round about answer him.

He turns again and immediately

toward the tokens.

He continues and in silence

inclined over the waiting creatures

of tillage and of shower.

Ceres with Liber and

the dancing Naiad

have heard his: Come, who makes holy²

and now so still

between the horns of the mensa

they wait awhile

his: ratify, accept, approve.³

You are his special signs

and you’ll be doubly signa

before he’s at the Unde et memores⁴

O no! — not flee away

but wait his word

not to the infernal jail

(as blind makers tell

by Cam stream)⁵

not troop off — not you, nor

Peor’s baalim

but wait on him

not brutish you,

but you his dear forerunners

each of you — and his figura too.

Need peculiar powers forgo their stalls?

He’s no doucer of dim tapers

and why should Anubis hasten

except to glast the freeing of the waters.

So stay

but when they sing

QUI VENIT

here all of you

kneel

every Lar of you

numen or tutelary

from terra, pontus and the air

or from the strait bathysphere.

Now constellate

are all your brights

of this lifted Lode.

What light else

brighted you ever?

He stands upright now in the weeds

of the young-time, of the sap years.

Under his fair-worked apparels

the tubular blacks of the mean years

of the dead time.

In file of two

the patrician tunicas

move up in support.

(They’ve stitched the laticlave

so, since the year that measures all

the years.)

He hunches free of wrist

the gothic folds

(O, give us a Roman planeta any day!)

Loudly he clears his throat

brother ass must neigh for all his

May Day rosette

the belly murmurs though it serve Melchisedec.

Full and clear he sounds his vowels

when he says Per omnia

but his full chin crumples to the

pectoral folds at Gratias agamus.

And now he sings out

and alone

the gleemen and the Powers take the cue

he has the Nine Bright Shiners at his beck

when he stands substitute

to the Man in the Mock.

(you, dark-membraned

awned in dim sanctus-pent

softly flit, cum angelis exult

and with clerestory concelebrants

mix your shadowy webs

they sometimes make you

signa of the evil thing

but laugh at them

and stretch again your fragile pinions

high up and over the meal spread

tumbling our Faustian spaces

where the stone creatures grin.

You are the proper image

and very figure

of us all

purblind, yet, somewhat winged.)

He thumbs a page or so

smooths the violet marker out

swift on, professionally

minding his Roman step

seems to search for what mislaid

tilts this ever so little

with a sensitive deliberation

backhands Miss Weston’s leaning lily

clear of the instruments.

You can hear her penny stop

or a beads drop or rope slack

chafe staple...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series-Text
• Title Page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• EDITORIAL PREFACE TO MODERNIST ARCHIVES
• LIST OF FIGURES
• BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
• Introduction
• The Grail Mass
• A True Fragment, An Extraction, and A Variant:
• Origins and Endings:
• Notes
• A Guide to The Grail Mass
• Appendix A: Editing The Grail Mass Manuscripts
• Appendix B: The Chronology of The Grail Mass Manuscripts
• WORKS CITED
• Copyright