David Jones: Painter and Poet

An epic poem in its own right, In Parenthesis is rooted in David Jones' experience as a soldier in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the First World War. Over two decades after Jones enlisted in 1914, In Parenthesis is an attempt to faithfully deliver his experience of life in the trenches. Starting as a series of war drawings with captions, the captions grew into "a writing", and from there he had a new objective: 'to make a shape in words'[1], or put more eloquently, 'to see how this business of 'form' and 'content' in a writing, compared with the same problems in [...] the visual arts'[2]. It is the evolution from painting to poem, that provides us with a beautiful 'landscape of language' that allows what a painting lacks: motion and sound.

 Painting by David Jones,Frontispiece for In Parenthesis, 1937,©Estate of David Jones

For example, at the close of Part Two, there is an explosion while John Ball is being reprimanded for his failure to address an officer properly (which says a great deal about the importance of hierarchy), and the scene's impact on the reader is, like the explosion itself, atomic:

[. . . ] in a stillness charged through with some approaching violence -registered not by the ear nor any single faculty -- an on-rushing pervasion, saturating all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed, millesimal – of calculated velocity, some mean chemist's contrivance, a stinking physicist's destroying toy. Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came -bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo's up-piling snapt. The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through -  all taking-out of vents - all barrier-breaking, all unmaking. Pernitric begetting  -  the dissolving and splitting of solid things. (p. 24)

In vivid slow motion, we are confronted with both stillness and velocity, a howling crescendo and a 'pernitric begetting'. This extract, like the rest of the text, is so visually striking that both the words, and the images they create, leave a lasting imprint on the reader.

Alongside his use of memory and vivid imagery, Jones also breaks out into poetry in times of great emotion. In Part Three, it seems that prose cannot bear the weight of John Ball's fear and a more expressive medium of poetry is needed:

You can hear the silence of it:
you can hear the rat of no-man’s land
rut-out intricacies,
weasel-out his patient workings,
scrut, scrut, sscrut

                                (p. 54)

Drawing our attention to the oppressive silence, this section demonstrates poetry's ability to compensate for what prose may lack; that is, that the aesthetics of poetry seem to help isolate the emotions and actions displayed. Prose, in turn, may provide a more emphatic way of conveying memories and experience than painting.

For this reason, it is easy to understand the indecisiveness of its genre: Is it a novel, a poem, or a "word painting"? Is it surely not all of these?




Sammy Evans.

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[1] David Jones In Parenthesis London: Faber and Faber (1937) pX. 

[2] Jonathan Miles Eric Gill & David Jones at Capel-y-ffin Bridgend, Wales: Seren (1992) p155.