BRIGHT IS CANDELA

David Jones, T.S. Eliot, and the Breaking of Modernity's Chains

David Jones, The Resurrection of Christ (The Martin Tinney Gallery)

There are a host of writers and thinkers down the ages who have focused on one or both of the dual themes of this Substack project - the return of the King and the re-sacralisation of the West. In my first essay, for instance, I noted how St. Augustine’s City of God spoke directly to the meaning crisis of his time - the shocking, scarcely credible fall and dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. So there is nothing inherently novel in our gnawing intuition that we may be living at the end of an epoch.

Augustine saw the Christian faith as the launchpad for a renewed sense of civic purpose and vigour. David Jones (1895-1974) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), the two poets featured in this essay, would certainly concur. The poems we will look at in depth here, Eliot’s Little Gidding (1943) and Jones’s The Sleeping Lord (1974), both point in this direction. The difference between Augustine’s era and theirs, however, is the hugely negative impact of modernity (and now post-modernity) on people’s ability to tune into, perceive, and relate to the Divine. Augustine lived in an age which, for all its turbulence, was ordered essentially towards the sacred. The existence of God (or the gods) was taken for granted. The foibles of kings and emperors and mankind’s general propensity towards evil did not alter that basic orientation. It would not have been possible, for evil itself was held within the greater good of the wider whole. The universe and its different levels were all of a piece - cut from the same cloth - as we see at the other end of the Middle Ages in Dante’s depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and how the three post-mortem spheres as well as our lives right now on Earth relate and interact.

Modernity rips this web of meaning and connection apart. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’ as Karl Marx famously observed in the Communist Manifesto. George Mackay Brown’s novel Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) illustrates this profanation most poignantly. National security requirements ‘necessitate’ the building of a fighter aerodrome on the fictional Orkney island of Norday. As soon as the construction work begins, the time-hallowed, intricate, and apparently deeply grounded traditional way of life which Mackay Brown has deftly drawn us into dissolves as if made from the purest gossamer. The author holds out the possibility of a ‘return’ at the end of the book, but even so we need to understand that what we are looking at is a new start with new people in a new time on a changed island, not the re-emergence of the old, beloved pattern. That world has gone for ever. It has been cancelled, erased and rubbed out.¹ This is what modernity does. This is its modus operandi. It flattens. It disenchants. It banishes the numinous, making it well-nigh impossible to sense and feel anything except a pocket-sized, stripped-down universe of hard edges, narrow horizons, and linear, one-track thinking. We are robbed of our aboriginal patrimony and can only make sense of our lives and our world in material, quantifiable terms. Who cares is the age-old life of the island is destroyed? The government will compensate us for the requisitioning of our farms and we will become rich. That is the kind of thinking that is seen and lauded in today’s world as realistic and progressive. We are scarcely aware of just how sick these twisted thought-patterns are making us and the extent to which they are separating us from the Divine and from our true selves. We have fallen out of our ‘songline’ - the big mythic story which God has written for us - and stumbled into something mean and paltry, like a shabby, ill-fitting suit. It doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t sit right, it just isn’t ‘us.’

We know this deep down, but we don’t recognise it consciously yet (or not enough of us do), so we bite and stamp and kicked around, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction.’² We have banished ourselves from Eden and there is no easy way back, either to the Garden itself or to the Paradise that lies beyond. Like Dante, we have to do it the hard way, descending into the stink and pitch of Hell before our purification in the redemptive fires of Purgatory. As Eliot warns us in Little Gidding:

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit                              
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire                                   
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.

This theme of exile and return - the phoenix rising at length from the ashes - is a universal fact of nature. It applies across the board and can be seen as much on the civilisational level as in the particular communities (e.g. nations and religions) of which a civilisation is composed. The same is true, of course, of the lives of the individual men and women that create and build up all collective human endeavours. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm and vice-versa. As above, so below, etc. Eliot puts it well again in East Coker (1940): 

Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

This is the subject matter of The Sleeping Lord, a 27-page meditation on long-term, civilisational decline. How easy it is for a people to fall or be pushed out of their own big story, how hard it is to pick up the thread again, and yet, at the deepest level, how certain and assured is their eventual return to the summit. It is a matter, as we shall see, of Metanoia - of turning to face the right way - orientation, focus and attention.

Arthur, the sleeping lord, slumbers on throughout the poem’s long cycle of Welsh subsidence - 1500 years or thereabouts at the time it was written (1966). Like Blake’s Albion, however - another mythical embodiment of Britain - the possibility and hope that he may yet awake is always there. The nervous Anglo-Norman sentries, towards the end of the poem, are acutely aware of the revolutionary turnabout such an event would bring - a change in consciousness, a new way of seeing and being, the collapse of their power base. They take precautions therefore …

lest what’s on the West wind
                                            from over beyond the rising contours
may signify that in the broken
                                            tir y blaenau
those broken dregs of Troea
                                            yet again muster …

Arthur is identified closely with the land, so closely that Jones ends his poem with the question:

Does the land wait the sleeping lord
                                         or is the wated land
that very lord who sleeps?

The poet shifts his focus from the twentieth-century to the sixth and back again to modern times. Arthur is at one and the same time a historical, mythical, and legendary figure. The terrain Jones zeroes in on is that of South Wales, a region with its own unique culture and history but which also stands as proxy for Britain as a whole and for the wider world of Western civilisation. We are all blighted by the same affliction. We are all inhabitants of the same wasteland, cut off from the sacred source of Being both by modernity and by our own obtuseness. What any sane, right-orientated society would see as holy, God-created soil has been blasted, brutalised, exploited and despoiled. Arthur, even when asleep, is inseparable from the land he rules and represents. If it suffers, then he suffers:

Is the Usk a drain for his gleaming tears
who weeps for the land
                                           who dreams his bitter dream
for the folk of the land
does Tawe clog for his sorrows
do the parallel dark-seam drainers
                                           mingle his anguish-stream
with the scored valleys’ tilted refuse.
Does his freight of woe
                                           Flood South by East
On Sirhywi and Ebwy
                                           is it southly bourn
on double Rhondda’s fall to Taff?

We are looking here at what Tolkien called the ‘long defeat’, an ongoing process of diminution and decay, punctuated by bright and potent - if often brief - periods of revival and renewal. This Welsh tale of subjugation and retreat has been a long time in the making, from the westward thrusts of the Angles and the Saxons to the castle-building of the Normans to the expropriation of forest land and other natural resources from the Tudor era onwards. Then, with the Industrial Revolution, came the mass mechanisation of the South Wales coal field. There is an added poignancy to The Sleeping Lord, I feel, in that it was composed not long before the Aberfan disaster of October 1967, where 116 children and 28 adults were killed when a heap of coal on a hill above a school became displaced and fell down on top of them. The symbolism of this dark event says it all. ³

The dead are ever-present in this poem. In the middle section - the sixth-century part - Arthur’s priest remembers in his prayers all those Celtic warriors who served, fought for, and in many cases died for the land:

Then there was the Blessed Bran of whom the tale-tellers tell a most wondrous tale and then the names of men more prosaic but more credible to him: Paternus of the Red Pexa, Cunedda Wledig the Conditor and, far more recent and so more green in the memory, the Count Ambrosius Aurelianus that men call Emrys Wledig, associated, by some, with the eastern defences called the Maritime Tract and Aircol Hȋr and his line, protectores of Demetia in the west … and many, many, many more whose bones lie under the green mounds of the Island …

The priest recalls them in his prayers, but the irony is that all these names as well as the tradition they belonged to will soon become just that - a memory - cherished in the hearts and minds of a remnant few as the course of mainstream history starts to flow in a different direction, one that will eventually wash the independent Cymric kingdoms clean away. Yes, there will indeed be a tremendous rebirth of civilisation later in the Middle Ages, the seeds of which are being planted in Britain and Ireland at exactly the same as Arthur’s priest is reciting his prayer. Even so, it is not his culture - his people, language, place - which will be revitalised. What Kenneth Clark called ‘the great thaw’ of the eleventh and twelfth centuries will be akin to the priest’s culture and tradition but it will not be the same.⁴ The Celtic world will be peripheral from here on in. Songs aplenty will eulogise it and poems (like The Sleeping Lord) evoke it, but power and influence will rest in the hands of others. The marginalisation of Arthur’s Britain is real and seemingly permanent. Platitudes and sentimentality will not bring it back. Something meatier is required.

Despite this gloomy prognosis, it must be said that The Sleeping Lord does not leave the reader with a feeling of hopelessness or despair. Quite the reverse. There is hope in the heart and centre of the poem, hope in the person of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Logos, the Word made flesh. He descends into history, bringing the timeless into time, standing among us in the midst of defeat just as he stood in the midst of the Apostles in the Upper Room on the evening of the Resurrection. Darkness does not subsume the light. It provokes it to stand out all the brighter:

cold is wind
grey is rain, but
BRIGHT IS CANDELA

Christ is the Great Light, ‘the Word through whom you made all things.’⁵ He shines upon those who have gone before us, including Arthur, and in so doing guarantees their resurrection.⁶ This is a light which cannot be subdued; cannot be mastered. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness can neither comprehend nor overcome it:

And discreetly and with scarcely any discernible movement he makes once again the salvific sign, saying less than half-audibly: Requiem aeternam dona his, Domine.

But had he said these words never so low or had the slight movement of his right hand across the folds of his tunica been even less than it was, the Candlebearer would have heard and seen; and though standing a good few paces from him, did hear and see, and, though the office of Cannwyllyd gives him no right whatever to speak in the lord’s hall, yet he could not contain himself, and though, the Lord Christ knows, he is not, by any means, a clerk, he sings out in a high, clear and distinct voice, the respond: ET LUX PERPETUA LUCEAT EIS.

It is a question then, as we noted before, of orientation, focus and attention. If we are to connect with those archetypal forces of renewal, which even in the darkest times still surround us and still call out to us, then we need to make sure we are facing the right way, towards the sun and away from the illusory projections of Plato’s cave, a fitting parable, if ever there was one, for our media-saturated, ceaselessly online age.

This is what Little Gidding, the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets, is about - Metanoia - freedom from the colonising powers of distraction and abstraction, turning ourselves about to face the Logos - i.e. What and Who is truly Real - the deep pattern, the core of reality, the ‘still point of the turning world.’ ⁷

The poem is set against the backdrop of two conflicts which damaged Britain profoundly, the Second World War and the English Civil War. The poet’s focal point is the tiny church of St. John the Evangelist in the village of Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire. Eliot made a pilgrimage there in 1936 and it left a deep and lasting impression on him.

It has what today would be called a ‘storied’ past. An Anglo-Catholic contemplative community was founded on the site by Nicholas Ferrar in 1626, which attracted criticism and scorn from the Puritans. ‘A Protestant nunnery’, they called it. Charles I visited the community three times, the last occasion occurring in 1646 when he was on the run from Parliamentary forces. This is why the poet refers to him as ‘a broken king’, though Eliot’s interest in Little Gidding is not primarily that of the historian or antiquarian. The church, for him, is a living, breathing space where things come alive and ‘where prayer has been valid.’ It is a temple - a temenos - a place set apart. We are not here (to paraphrase the poem) to instruct ourselves, inform curiosity or carry report. We are here to kneel and pray. What other appropriate response could there be in a place like this where the timeless intersects with time? ‘History,’ Eliot continues, ‘is a pattern of timeless moments.’ So:

… while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

www.littlegidding.org.uk

This is a hard-earned wisdom though. It comes at the highest of prices, ‘costing’, as Eliot tells us at the end of the poem, ‘not less than everything.’ Enemy air-raids tear asunder the well-worn, comfortable routines of daily life. The soul is shaken and exposed, vulnerable and fragile, divested of familiar patterns and structures. One is opened up to revelation (or damnation) in a way that might not have been previously possible. Eliot served as a fire warden during the war, and it is in such an ambience, ‘in the uncertain hour before the morning’, that he encounters a stranger and catches ‘the sudden look of some dead master.’ This unnamed individual (some say Dante, some Yeats, others Mallarmé) proceeds to tell the poet some home truths about the human condition and warns him of the cost of dawning self-awareness:

the rending pain of re-enactment 
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness 
Of things ill done and done to others harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

This is the neon-lit reality of self-knowledge. These are the fires of Purgatory. The individual is flayed alive - spiritually, mentally, sometimes physically - as Marsyas was by Apollo.⁸ It would be nice if there was another path to take; another choice to make. But there is no other path; no other way:

The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Yet because the poet is able to see the big picture, because he can discern the pattern of the timeless within time, he is able to develop a broad, generous and inclusive vision of redemption and transcendence. Past, present and future are simultaneously revealed in one unfolding story. The unborn and the dead walk with us and constantly reach out to us. If only we could hear and see them! The first step for us is to recognise that we are not, never have been and never will be a random collection of isolated individual consumers. We are members of a grand continuity, links in a golden chain, participants in the Great Tradition:

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the 
       living.

Bathed in this salvific light, old and (at the time) vivid quarrels, such as the Civil War, retreat and fade into their true, relatively minor proportions:

We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.

It all comes down to place and locality - the ‘minute particulars’ as Blake called them - and the capacity to ‘see eternity in a grain of sand’ and to perceive how, why and when the timeless intersects and interacts with time.

This is why Little Gidding is such an authentically Royalist work of art. It points us in the right direction - towards Christ, first and foremost, the King of Kings - but also towards those emblematic figures that represent Him and stand in for Him here on Earth. Arthur is the most prominent example, but it is a lineage which goes back a long way, to David and Solomon, and forward to Alfred the Great and his grandson Athelstan, to Brian Boru in Ireland, and also, I would suggest, to Charles I himself. There are other royal names which could be added to this list and there will be more to come in the future.

Little Gidding is a poem of restoration - the return of the King in the outer world and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven in our souls. It is a consciousness-changer. It orientates us aright, and now, from this perspective, we can recognise and call out modernity for what it is - a partial, limited and highly restricted mode of understanding and experiencing the world. Its chains are broken; its spell dissolved. Our minds are re-opened and we approach again that Edenic, aboriginal mode of seeing and being which we cast aside so long ago. ‘In my end,’ as Eliot says elsewhere, ‘is my beginning.’⁹

The Garden, as Dante knew, is just a springboard. Higher levels await. ‘Fare forward, fellow voyagers.’¹⁰ There will be traps and deceptions to come (as we shall see in our next essay) but Arthur and Albion are awake at last, so all things are possible now and we have no fear. Sound out the trumpets. Let us go forth in joy to love and serve the Lord:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this 
    Calling

    We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 
Through the unknown, unremembered gate 
When the last of earth left to discover 
Is that which was the beginning; 
At the source of the longest river 
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for 
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-- 
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded 
Into the crowned knot of fire 
And the fire and the rose are one. 

1. George Mackay Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time, (John Murray Publishing, 1994).

2. T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (1936). All extracts from the poems of Four Quartets are taken from Four Quartets (Faber and Faber, 1952).

3. Episode 3, Season 3 of The Crown (Netflix) portrays very well the scale of the tragedy. All extracts from The Sleeping Lord are taken from The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (Faber and Faber, 1974).

4. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, (Penguin, 1982), p.36.

5. Eucharistic Prayer II, (Roman Catholic Mass), Preface.

6. Thomas Dilworth, The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones (University of Toronto Press, 1988), p.341.

7. Eliot, Burnt Norton.

8. For an outstanding fictional treatment of this theme see The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (1973).

9. East Coker.

10. Eliot, The Dry Salvages.