“ O S I S T E R S TW O W H AT M A Y W E D O ? ” : M U S IC A L A L L U S IO N A N D T H E F E M A L E IN D A V ID JO N E S ’ S IN P A R E N T H E S IS DIANA AUSTIN University of New Brunswick No one sings: Lully lully for the mate whose blood runs down.1 D a v id Jones is a poet whose works are noted for their allusiveness (not to say elusiveness). Much attention has been devoted to the allusions of In Parenthesis, his critically acclaimed long poem about World War I, with some critics praising the allusive richness of the poem and others condemning the technique as artistically and morally suspect.2 In all this discussion, however, one category of allusions has received little notice: those that draw on musical sources. Rarely recondite (unlike many of the references to history, literature, and art), Jones’s echoes of song carry simple but powerful emotional asso ciations, and, overall, they have the important effect in the poem of con tinually undermining the traditional glorification of war. One group of musical allusions particularly subversive in function will be the focus of this paper, those which bring into the male world of war so vividly portrayed in In Parenthesis the countervailing influence of the female world of nurturing.3 The lines quoted above echo the “Coventry Carol,” the song of the mothers whose children perished in Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents: O sisters two, How may we do For to preserve this day This poor youngling For whom we do sing By, by, lully lullay?4 The anguished question of the Coventry Carol mothers seems to have echoed in Jones’s ears, becoming one with the grief-stricken cries rending the air in his own war-torn epoch. Near the beginning of In Parenthesis, which he wrote in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Jones expressed through one of his poem’s narrative voices the recognition that World War I was another “proper massacre of the innocents in a manner of speaking” (6). A few years later, E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x v , i , March 1989 during World War II, he finished a small but detailed pencil and water-colour drawing showing two wounded females, apparently Britain and Germany, clasping each other amidst the debris of war. His caption reads: “ O Sisters two What may we do?” 5 One might be forgiven for thinking that traditionally there has been very little woman could do about that most destructive of masculine pastimes, war. Jones, however, is not prepared to accept the relegation of woman to this position of powerlessness. For him, she is the life-force, both literally and figuratively: “we cannot, for long suppose a creativity without the female principle.” 6 This belief in woman makes Jones sympathetic to the unusual interpretation of mythology offered in Jackson Knight’s Cumaean Gates: There is a difficulty in seeing what the personality of Juno means, and why a goddess, honoured at Rome, should be so hostile. The answer is that Juno is fiercely feminine. She was not among the principal early deities of Rome, and was never one of the greatest. Rome worshipped male gods first; Rome began, because Juno acknowledged defeat.7 It leads him to agree with Jackson Knight’s assertion that “The male prin ciple, which is seen in Fascism now, is always fighting the female principle, which has found its way into Communism, and lost much of itself as it went.”8 Jones’s view of woman as the life-force colours his interpretation of the politi cal upheaval shaping the world in the 1930s and 1940s. He identifies as a key problem in Spengler’s writing the fact that Spengler offers “ a male thoughtworld entirely,” 9and Jones worries that the political and social trends of the time present a very real “danger of Juno being put into a concentration camp, of her...
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Jun 1, 1994
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