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David Annwn
Tutelar, Or Her Truth’s Teller? Myth, Women Poets and David Jones’s ‘The Tutelar of the Place’
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It is in an essay exploring links between evocations of the ‘Feminine ’ in the poetry of David Jones and Robert Duncan that John Matthias writes the following:
It is perhaps where they are invoking and evoking the Feminine powers that David Jones and Duncan are most complementary. They are, I think, along with Pound, Joyce, and Graves, the major twentieth-century poets of the Feminine in English. The mothers, daughters, goddesses, muses, sibyls, queens, and other embodiments or voices of the Feminine proliferate in a myriad of ways through the work of both poets. [1]Whilst, in one sense, I understand exactly what Matthias means in this context, this is nonetheless a statement in a fine essay which has echoed uneasily in my mind since I first read it some years ago. Why ? After all, this is just one man’s personally-stated opinion. The description is, in some ways, accurate, but it is the estimation that troubles me at a deep level. In one way, my query might be about that term ‘Feminine’ itself; on another, it might also question that exclusively male short-list of ‘major poets.’ Of course, some contemporary poets and critics might wish to do away with that canonical term ‘major’ altogether. Other women poets like Kathleen Raine would suggest their own very similar list perhaps replacing Pound with Yeats and Vernon Watkins. But any such list, especially with regard to poets of the ‘Feminine’, prompts me to ask, (as Diane Wakoski does later in this study), ‘How do you know ?’ For example, one important omission is easily stated: Duncan’s debts to H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Gertrude Stein are also mentioned in Matthias’ essay; yet H.D. herself, whose work powerfully informed Duncan’s sense of the Female Principle, remains off the list whilst Pound remains on. Perhaps this exclusion tempts one to remember Alicia Ostriker’s view that: Without a sense of the multiple and complex patterns of thought, feeling, verbal resonance, and even vocabulary shared by women writers, we cannot read any woman adequately. Time and again we will overlook some central shaping principle not only in an (Adrienne) Rich or a (Sylvia) Plath but in a Marianne Moore or an Elizabeth Bishop, in the same way as critics have misread Emily Dickinson. For writers necessarily articulate gendered experience… [2]Of course, the ‘gendered experience’ argument is not one which convinces all poets who happen to be women; it also goes without saying that Matthias certainly can read H.D. and the work of other women poets adequately. That is not the issue here. The fact is, though, that H.D.’s evocation of Feminine powers, an over-riding aspect of her art, does not, in Matthias’ eyes, warrant comparison with Graves or Pound. Or at least not here, in the list mentioned above. Where does ‘The Tutelar of the Place’ figure in this argument? Surely, Matthias is right: David Jones is one of the truly great poets of ‘Feminine powers’ in the languages of the West. ‘The Tutelar…’ is perhaps his greatest poetic rendition of the potency of Marian devotion and reverence for the Mothers of Europe. It is a great entreaty for wholeness and the parturition of ‘hidden things’; it celebrates all things ‘counter, parti, pied, several.’ Yet it does, of course, represent only one of many ways of looking at the Maternal deities; one of the ‘parti’ things implied might, indeed, involve a very different vision of the Great Mother. Is that why we might look in vain for very similar and unequivocal evocations in the poetry of women ? Further, where does this Fragment figure in relation to women poets, (H.D. and many others absent from Matthias’ list), and their visions of ‘the Feminine’ ? Such questions might seem bizarre to some readers; yet, for my part, I am determined not to read Jones’ ‘The Tutelar…’ as a museum-exhibit set behind glass: remote and untouchable. The poem is intimately involved with issues which engage us all on the deepest levels of our being. It opens upon, (not away from), our varied lives and histories. It is a linguistic presence within a continuing debate. Yet, admittedly, the issues concerned are very complex and this short study doesn’t offer answers but it does seek to re-frame the questions directly in relation to poetry by women and, latterly, it draws quite substantially from interviews with contemporary women poets. For context, I shall first go backwards in order to look forwards. Dance is at the centre of ‘The Tutelar of the Place.’ In summoning up a wide-ranging vision of the patterns and ceremonies of early communities, the speaker describes ‘ritual frolics’ on a ‘known-site’ : Gathering all things in, twining each bruised stem to the swaying trellis of the dance, the dance about the sawn lode-stake on the hill where the hidden stillness is at the core of struggle, the dance around the green lode-tree on far fair-height where the secret guerdons hang and the bright prizes nod, where sits the queen im Rosenhage eating the honey-cake, where the king sits, counting- out his man-geld, rhyming the audits of all the world-holdings.It was this and other related passages in the poem which have reminded critics of the influence of T.S. Eliot’s famous lines from ‘East Coker’ : In 1531, Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor was first published. In Book I of this famous work of English Humanism, Elyot wrote: It is diligently to be noted that the association of man and woman in dancing, they both observing one number and time in their movings, was not begun without a special consideration, as well for the special consideration, as well for the necessary conjunction of those two persons, as for the intimation of sundry vertues which be by them represented. And forasmuch as by the association of a man and a woman in dancing may be signified matrimony. [3]In his very next prose paragraph, Elyot continues: A man in his natural perfection is fierce, hardy, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable. The good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable, benign, of sure remembrance, and shamefast. [4]It needs also to be borne in mind that Elyot’s views and other writings on women and their position in society were, in some measure, fairly liberal for their day. Yet within a generation of these lines being written, Isabella Whitney, was to identify herself openly as a professional poet and satirise the unfaithfulness and grandiose pretensions of men in a fashion which was far from ‘timorous’ and ‘tractable.’ She was one of the earliest English women to write and publish secular literature. To re-coin another famous line of David Jones: ‘ We already and first of all discern her…’ The debate about the roles of the sexes in the great cosmic dance of life is as old as writing itself. In ‘The Tutelar of the Place’ the Great Mother of mankind presiding over the birth and rearing of successive generations, is the ultimate ‘arc of differences’, patroness of individuality and protectress of community against a brutal cosmopolitan uniformity. The essential appeal of the final section of ‘The Tutelar…’ is for ‘sweet Jill of the demarcations’ and ‘Sweet Mair’ to defend and save some vestige of humanity from the megalopolitan forces of the Ram. It is a piercing and moving prayer and one that reminds us all of our vulnerable childhood attachment to and reliance upon mothers. And it doesn’t, of course, stop there. Long into our adulthood, such a ‘cry’ stays at our centre; Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory reminds us that the most common cry of soldiers in affliction, pain and death is ‘Mother’ in many languages. Yet for many women poets who have helped develop and work with a Feminist vision of history, this might ring as an admittedly convincing and heart-felt petition, but also as a rather belated and misplaced prayer in the context of women’s experience in the 19th and 20th centuries. True, for many contemporary women writers, the archetypes of ‘Tellus of the myriad names’, ‘Great-Jill-of-the-tump-that-bare-me’, Mair and the other Mother-figures of the poem are sites of a newly-recovered reverence: over the last thirty years in particular, myriad eminent and substantial contributions have been made to the burgeoning genre known as ‘Goddess’ and Matriarchal Studies by anthropologists, archaeologists and social scientists; and poets have played their part in this. Yet this must be put in context: acceptance of and reverence for Mary and Madonna-figures has been far from unproblematic in women’s writing, for we must remember that, as well as providing women (and men) with a viable focus for spiritual yearning and contact, such visions of the ‘Mothers’ involve different psychological complexes for female and male artists. More, on a social basis the ‘Mothers’ have also often been used to characterise and limit the material progress of women. For, to the extent that the motherly Tutelar embodies vast energies and some ordinary, life-giving biological processes inherent in womanhood itself, she might also seem to embody a ‘rooted’, compassionate but essentially static and confined existence for those created in her image. To an overwhelming extent, of course, Jones is being no more than historically accurate here in depicting this situation as a result of long-held, limiting views of sexual essentialism. The truth of how some kinds of God and Goddess cults have been used to endorse strictly-segregated and circumscribed gender roles and vice versa is well-attested. For example, Frances Llewellyn, one of Wales’ most eminent historians and archaeologists, has told me in conversation that in considering recent discoveries, it seems that in Celtic religious belief, Mother-Goddesses were strongly associated with the land and male divinities, with forces which moved across and took possession of that land. Thus, apart perhaps from conditions in the very oldest matriarchies of Europe, the Ram does not just represent a vast, aggressive, urban empire threatening small heterogeneous rural settlements and communities from somewhere out there: as women have written in many forms and ways over the last five centuries, the Ram is already a presence inside the fold, at home in every earth-worked hill-fort and behind every mazy guard. Until very recently indeed, in order to write at all and in order to be read, women have had to re-negotiate and live through relations with that presence which seeks to restrict and circumvent their social roles. It is interesting in this light to consider women poets from 1850s and up to the turn of the century attempting to locate their ‘mothers’ and ‘grandmothers’ in literary expression and to create valid personae and voices for themselves inside their poetry. Most of them, though influenced by the work of male poets, were not content to adopt masculine strategies of Medievalism or the valorisation of heroic martial events. Though there is ample evidence of Victorian women poets writing in a strongly conventional religious vein, there is little trace in their writing of a nostalgia for golden, chivalric ages in which the freedoms of women were even more severely circumscribed. (In this they pre-figure their artistic grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters who have literally no time for a Spenglerian vision of culture.) For many of these poets of the last century, it was difficult enough to find their way into print - and, in this, to be acknowledged as artists in their own right - in the first place. Their truck was with the present and how to improve that present for millions of their own sex: predominantly excluded from meaningful cultural action, socially-limited, stereotyped and patronised into silence as the vast majority certainly were. This reality is considerably more than ‘Man-travail and woman-war’, that pattern of everyday stresses: the ‘bitter dance’ of the sexes which David Jones shows enacted by children in his poem. The wider reality embodies those forces in the human psyche and Western imperialistic Capitalism which create and sustain the Ram on many levels of existence. Many women writers made this identification apparent as soon as they could gain an audience. Women poets who were contemporary or near-contemporaries of David Jones, including H.D., Edith Sitwell, Laura Riding, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Kathleen Raine consistently worked at developing their own sense of mythos in their writing, often at one tangent or another to traditional religious beliefs. Mina Loy often commented with caustic irony on Madonna-figures, but perhaps it was H.D. who worked hardest at resurrecting mythical figures valid enough for her own hermetic literary discoveries. In The Walls do not Fall (1944), instead of making ‘a heap of all I could find’, this writer felt she had to clear the rubble away to find life-giving symbols: The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol… |
David Jones’ work often finds power and richness in agglomeration and echo: the overlapping and fusing of numinous pagan presences which prefigure and converge upon Christ’s sacrifice. For H.D. the opposite is true in that, in her poetry, it is only by stripping away the cultural detritus of warring cults and abandoned deities, that the writer’s way can be found. Beneath the types of Christos, she finds the punningly-named ‘Amen’ from the sacred pantheon of Ancient Egypt. H.D. is often drawn as if to her animus to male hierophants and angels: Hermes, Aries, Gabriel. Interestingly enough, Christine Pagnoulle has written of the association of Aries and the destructive Ram in ‘The Tutelar…’ [5]
For H.D., Amen Ra and Aries are closely associated as a male presence, and, in some ways, the prayer of the twelfth and thirteenth sections of The Walls… can be seen as a concomitant prayer to that of the Gallic soldier in ‘The Tutelar…’:
Yet, the Feminine principle is also considered in due measure and in a very different way in H.D.’s work; in the twenty-ninth section of Tribute to the Angels, we find a great evocation of the ever-present Lady:
This is a very different paean of praise to that found in ‘The Tutelar of the Place’: this figure is bowed ‘with the weight of a domed crown.’ She is described as a mere ‘wisp of a girl/ trapped in a golden halo.’ She is also Maria von dem Schnee, ‘Our Lady of the Snow.’ In contrast to Jones’ Mair:We have seen her the world over, Our Lady of the Goldfinch, Our Lady of the Candelabra, Our Lady of the Pomegranate, Our Lady of the Chair; we have seen her, an empress, magnificent in pomp and grace,
Jones’ tutelar inclines ‘from far fair-height outside/ all boundaries’ and yet is simultaneously ‘Sweet Jill of our hill…Queen of the differentiated sites.’ She is the ‘administratrix of the demarcations’, specifically linked with ‘child-crib within whatever enclosure.’ H.D.’s ‘Vestal/from the days of Numa’ refuses closure and enclosure: ‘she is not shut up in a cave…she is not imprisoned in leaden bars.’ Most significantly, she possesses an attribute entirely lacking from Jones’ poem:
Both these Modernist poets resident in London during the Second World War are engaged in the search to ‘re-invoke, re-create’, to evolve a synthesis which gives shape to their mythopoeic searching. If Jones’ ‘A, a, a DOMINE DEUS’ ,(a work too of the war years), dramatises a poet’s search for valid and salvific signa, a search which ends in a cry of dereliction over ‘stage-paste,’ H.D.’s imaginative quest is to ‘recover the Sceptre,/the rod of power’, ‘the stylus,/the palette, the pen, the quill’, a process the speaker of the poems undergoes as if she is an initiate in re-living the secrets of an ancient cult. Perhaps such a quest might acquire a double-edge and urgency, if we remember a certain sexual bias revealed in a quick random sample of negative views expressed by male writers:she carries a book but it is not the tome of the ancient wisdom, the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages of the unwritten volume of the new; Scottish women of any interest are curiously rare…our leading Scotswomen have been…almost entirely destitute of exceptional endowments of any sort. [6] Hugh MacDiarmidI don’t quote the writers listed above to indulge in a false sense of retrospective rectitude based on so-called political correctness; quite the opposite. In most respects, as I have written elsewhere, I admire the work of all three men very much. I only wish to add a sense of saliency and purpose to our sense of H.D.’s poetic quest for ‘the pen’ and the ‘unwritten volume’, her courage and determination. Though her work was valued early by Pound and Lawrence, she encountered her share of the type of prejudice these statements reveal. To propose the Lady carrying the ‘unwritten volume of the new’ is a crucial act in the context of Pound’s injunction to ‘Make it new’ and W.C. Williams’ :
Neither did H.D. define her work in terms offered by male poets: her sense of the ‘new’ was vitally different from theirs’.
Williams also recognised the iconoclastic impetus of another American poet and novelist resident in Europe from the 1920s onwards: she went about it ‘going systematically to work smashing every connotation that words ever had, in order to get them back clean’ [9 Though Gertrude Stein too had her mythologies and saints, her own sense of words, influenced by the theories of William James, could not have been further removed from Jones’ linguistic enterprise for, though his work exhibits throughout a wonderful exuberance and ear for the play inherent in words and their sounds and this is particularly evident in ‘The Tutelar…’ with its emphasis on lexical differentiation: there is the great anxiety also shown throughout his writing that words and images would totally lose their historic associations; in fact, there is a spiritual ache to ensure that words register past and present connotations.Now come on now little children, come on now it’s past the hour. Sun’s to roost, brood’s in pent, dusk-star tops mound, lupa sniffs the lode-damps for straggler’s late to byre. Many radical women poets and innovative writers in general over the last thirty years have followed Stein’s lead in scrutinising in many divergent ways the power-bases of the language they use and in honouring ‘pre-linguistic memory, the memory of the mother.’ [10] For some women poets, however, honouring ‘the memory of the mother’ and the mother’s needs and thereby elevating the Motherly Principle are hardly as unproblematic as it seems they are for Jones’ soldier. As Liz Yorke has written: …‘to be what the mother desires’ - may well be terrifying, threatening to any sense of separate integrity for many women. For to re-open the pathways to primal, pre-Oedipal overwhelming desire is always dangerous. [11]We remember Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’: One perception has been, as Adrienne Rich writes: Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language. In setting words together in new configurations, in the mere, immense shift from male to female pronouns…it lets us hear and see our words in a new context. [12]Jones’ reverence for words, (and that Logos which they embody), was always coupled with an intense care and attention for the vital differences inherent in things; as Hopkins would cite Duns Scotus: their haeccitas. This, surely, is a founding impetus in ‘The Tutelar…’ Yet, such Logocentrism can, of course, be construed in other ways; in describing French Feminist thought, Elaine Marks writes: Logocentrism is…a sign of nostalgia, of longing for a coherent centre. In order to satisfy this longing absence, difference and death are repressed; presence, identity, and life are given a privileged role. For Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous it signifies that women have always been on the side of the term that has been repressed [13]This has given rise to in attempts to write ‘woman’ back into language, to restore to life, voice, presence - in her own terms. As Liz Yorke writes: ‘ Ecriture féminine may be seen as the inscription of the specificity of the female body and female difference…’ [14] Very varied implications of this and kindred lines of thought can be found in the texts of Adrienne Rich, Erin Mouré, Nicole Brossard and Caroline Bergvall amongst others. Here, women writers, some involved in lesbian critiques, link biological difference to the need to explore non-traditional, anti-paternalistic modes of language outside the ‘Law of the Father’ and its associations of women with a characteristically-defining nature per se. Other contemporary women poets, amongst them Gillian Clarke and Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, engaged by notions of gender, have chosen to use and re-define traditional myths of women’s close-ness to nature.Yet there is today an immense spectrum, (or rather, immense spectra), of women writing poetry and, whilst seeing the necessary logic behind such procedures, some of these contemporary poets, see such modes as designating a new kind of inverse essentialism; writers like Diane Wakoski, Roo Borson and Lisa Raphals have amply discussed their dislike for the term ‘woman poet’ and this, of course, has far-reaching implications for their using of Feminine mythologies in their work. Borson describes the process of editing her partner’s work: When we’re doing this, I have no particular sense of a gender difference, just as I have no sense particular sense of gender when I’m writing alone. I’m always aware of being firmly situated in my body (‘in’ is inaccurate; I’m always aware of being a body), but it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m female… [15]Wakoski has also challenged the kind of radical assumptions made above: I do think that these kinds of issues, because they are political, don’t belong in the province of aesthetics, and really confuse the issue. The most blatant example of this that ever happened to me was in the days when there were so many women’s conferences…A girl stood up and said to me, “How can you write poetry when language was invented by men ?” My mouth kind of fell down to the floor. I didn’t really know how to answer her. Finally I rallied myself to say, “How do you know it was ?” [16]From the 1950s to the recent years of the present decade, many writers including, notably, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Diane Wakoski, Diane Di Prima have explored prototypes and archetypes of the mother-goddess and Tutelar of place. They have each fought, (thought and felt), their way through to personal mythologies which draw upon sources, some of which share the numinous resonances of Jones’ work. There is no space here to end with a comparison of ‘The Tutelar…’ with Diane Di Prima’s ‘The Loba Addresses the Goddess…’ or Jenny Joseph’s Persephone or Diane Wakoski’s Medea or Joanne Kyger’s The Tapestry and the Web or a good translation of Gabriela Mistral’s great poem to her mother. Perhaps it is Di Prima in her ‘Prayer to the Mothers’ who comes closest to the appeals in Jones’ poem: Maggie O’ Sullivan’s work bridges those innovative poetries which try to redeem and break free of connotation in language. She speaks of the constant ‘pull inside’ between recording vanished histories and ‘freeing myself of the need to contextualise.’ [17] Her ‘winter ceremony’ shares Jones’ care for motherly rituals:
In summoning up the life-patterns and experience of migratory exile of her own family forbears: generations of Irish hill-farmers, O’Sullivan also evokes Áine, an early Sun-Goddess of Munster:
This local deity is goddess ‘of Music & / Harp & Song.’ She also significantly presides over Poetry. Here we enter into a specific re-envisioned landscape: its grief, beauty and numinous power. This is an empowering act of dinnseanchas: an exploration of the interaction between myth, human existence and the etymology of place names. The suffering of the labouring men and women is evoked: the mother who, distraught with the death of babies is drawn to the edge of the deep quarry pool, ‘not once but many times - .’ But this isn’t a closed process of historic embodiment; personal histories in the past open upon possibilities for existence and expression now. Lines of generation mingle and twist as the poet plaits together: ‘my father cutting the corn and my mother behind him/piling and binding to the ways of spelling…’Once Upon Thorn Hill Thorn Hill, Curragh in the townland of Dareen Dangan off the Marsh Road out of Skibbereen in the much invaded & ancient province of Munster province of Áine - pre-Celtic Sun-Goddess… Of course, this poet’s senses of words and the spaces which they create are very different from those of David Jones, though there are formal links as in the incompletion of certain lines, swift switches in perspective, capitalised passages and passion for typographical acuity: (‘ARCHED O - FLOODED WITH O -’). Both poets celebrate and wish to re-invoke maternal and paternal struggles in specific Celtic scapes. Both see Feminine energies re-investing links between the human and animal worlds. Both share a deeply numinous sense of nature and what have been called ‘Feminine powers.’ Both are engaged by the need to remember and, simultaneously to stride forward, to find ‘the new.’ O’Sullivan echoes Paul Celan in that she feels that , as well as speaking for oneself, the poet should speak for ‘the altogether other.’ Moreover, Jones would understand and associate with the way O’Sullivan finishes this sequence. The verbal sense is different but it is exactly the message of his own Tutelar:
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NOTES
1.
‘Robert Duncan and David Jones: Some Affinities, Reading Old Friends, New York, 1992, p. 115.
2.
In Liz Yorke, Impertinent Voices, Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women Poetry, London and New York, 1991, p.11.
3.
Hollander and Kermode, The Literature of Renaissance England, Oxford, 1973, p.80.
4.
Ibid.
5.
Christine Pagnoulle, A Commentary On Some Poetic Fragments, Cardiff, 1987, p. 89.
6.
Ed. Wilson and Somerville-Arjat, Sleeping with Monsters, Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets, Edinburgh, 1990, p. v.
7.
Ibid.
8.
‘‘Correspondences’, An Interview with George Mackay Brown,’ Poetry Wales, Vol 27 No 2, September, 1991, p 20.
9.
Ed. Rothenberg and Jorris, Poems for the Millennium, Volume One, California, 1995, p.105.
10.
Erin Mouré, ‘Poetry, Memory and the Polis,’ Language in Her Eye, Toronto, 1990, p.201.
11.
Yorke, p. 65.
12.
Ibid p.16.
13.
Ibid, pp. 113-114.
14.
Ibid.
15.
Language in Her Eye, p.43.
16.
Wakoski, Towards a New Poetry, Ann Arbor, 1983, pp 272-3.
17.
In personal conversation with the author 25.10.98
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