Deposits’ and ‘Rehearsals’: Repetition and Redemption in The Anathémata of David Jones A Comparison and Contrast with Blake

Abstract

Comparison is a dangerously seductive mode, and its seductions are perhaps most dangerous when they lead one to feel one is dealing with repetition. Yet, as with repetition, there has to be similitude as well as dissimilitude between the items compared for the word to mean anything in this fallen world. Blake has often, of course, been compared with Jones, who early became an admirer.¹ And there are sufficient similarities, at least when they are regarded in the light of my topic of repetition and redemption, for me to point to a useful contrast at the same time — one that I hope will make Jones’s beliefs stand out more clearly. Most obviously, there is the topic of the fall and resurrection of Albion in Blake and the way in which ‘All things Begin & End in Albions Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.’ (E, 171) In other words, the large features of Blake’s use of myth, and in particular his use of the Matter of Britain, yield a direct comparison with Jones: Jones’s work privileges the Matter of Britain even more obviously, especially in its intersection with ‘Romanitas’. For while it was providential that the witness of Christ could be spread through the medium of the Roman Empire, the Grail Legend (derived from the myth of the Cauldron of Plenty) fostered on its Celtic fringe is the nearest pagan approximation to the meaning of the Mass. Britain is thus the truest place of ‘rehearsal’, and in this belief lies a degree of similarity with Blake’s myth of Albion.