‘The Axile Tree’

Chapter 5 asks how Jones’s vision of an early medieval culture in which Welsh and English tradition are equally dominant resonates throughout the poem’s eight poetic sequences in the image of the cross. The chapter traces a history of Jones’s encounters with The Dream of the Rood, the Ruthwell monument, and the history of early medieval Northumbria during the 1930s, and explores how this experience of the landscape and history of Northumberland informed his reading of the Old English Dream of the Rood tradition. Jones’s visual and verbal engagement with the Ruthwell monument at the climax of The Anathemata in ‘Sherthursdaye and Venus Day’ allows for the creation of a new sign of the cross for the twentieth century, a sign which draws together the English and Welsh traditions that have informed the institution of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, as well as the poet’s own Catholicism.

Book III

This chapter envisions the Wake as part of the tradition of dream vision literature. Beginning with the first critical writing on the Wake that sought to contextualize the book as such, and reassessing more contemporary views that the Wake is not part of the genre, the chapter lays out the tradition from the origins of English poetry and demonstrates Joyce’s adaptation and conformity with it. Part of the chapter engages Giordano Bruno’s extensive writings on dreaming and sight. The chapter takes into consideration the end result of dreaming—awakening—and situates the Wake as an aubade as well as an example of dream vision. In so doing it connects Joyce’s work to possible sources of inspiration, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Bishop, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Dream of the Rood, and Richard Rolle, and looks into the criticism of Derek Attridge, Edmund Wilson, and John Bishop.