'Bedad He Revives! See How He Raises!': An Introduction to David Jones's 'The Sleeping Lord'

Abstract

Readers who have delayed looking into the poetry of David Jones because of its fabled difficulties might do well to begin at the end. The last book of poetry published in his lifetime (there were three altogether) is also the shortest, and probably the most readily accessible. The Sleeping Lord, and Other Fragments is a collection of previously published pieces which appeared in 1974, also the year of Jones's death. Arranged for the most part in chronological order, the poems present a unified line of development. The title poem can be seen almost as a climax to the book, and also to Jones's poetic career. Following it, there is a passage from the unfinished, extended manuscript 'The Book of Balaam's Ass,' which Jones abandoned prior to the printing of his major work, The Anathemata (1952). 'Balaam's Ass' provides a fitting close to The Sleeping Lord, and Other Fragments. Written during and concerning itself with a period immediately following the Great War, its placement here recalls Jones's poetic beginnings: his first writing, In Parenthesis (1937), was about that war.