‘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.

A Poetic Historiography of the Early English Settlements

Zooming in to consider how the ambitions of Jones’s project are realized in the individual poetic sequences that make up The Anathemata, Chapter 3 engages in a close reading of the third sequence of The Anathemata, ‘Angle-Land’. ‘Angle-Land’ focuses on the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes to Britain and the extent of the subsequent cultural change in the fifth century and beyond. This chapter argues that in ‘Angle-Land’ Jones uses aspects of the physical and cultural geography of Britain, in particular evidence from toponymy, to write a poetic historiography of the early English settlements that challenges the idea that the migration of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes rapidly transformed the landscape and culture of Britain. By exploring the language of landscape, Jones writes a poetic historiography that is in tune with contemporary, emerging historiographical narratives.