In Parenthesis is an epic poem of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 (or First World War) by David Jones

David Jones (poet)

David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...

 first published in England in 1937. Although Jones had been known solely as an engraver and painter prior to its publication, the poem won the Hawthornden Prize

Hawthornden Prize

The Hawthornden Prize is a British literary award that was established in 1919 by Alice Warrender. Authors are awarded on the quality of their "imaginative literature" which can be written in either poetry or prose...

 and the admiration of writers such as W.B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

. Based on Jones's own experience as an infantryman, In Parenthesis narrates the experiences of English Private John Ball in a mixed English-Welsh regiment starting with embarcation from England and ending seven months later with the assault on Mametz Wood

Mametz wood

Mametz Wood was the objective of the 38th Division during the First Battle of the Somme. The attack occurred in a Northerly direction over a ridge, focussed on the German positions in the wood between 7 July and 12 July 1916. The attack of the 7 July failed to reach the wood before the men were...

 during the Battle of the Somme. The work employs a mixture of lyrical verse and prose, is highly allusive, and ranges in tone from formal to Cockney colloquial and military slang.

Summary

In Part 1, Ball and his battalion assemble, march to Southampton, and sail at night across the channel. In Part 2 they receive instruction and training and travel towards the front, where Ball has the shattring experience of a long-range heavy shell exploding nearby (p. 24). In Part 3 they march at night along a road and then through flooded communication trenches to a position in the front line. As Ball stands sentry, narrative realism gives way to Irish and Welsh mythic associations. Part 4 concerns a typical day in the front line, from morning stand-to evening stand-down, alternating between fatigue duty, horrendous violence, and boredom. This day is circular in shape, with echoing allusions centring on the great, long boast of Dai Greatcoat (pp. 79–84). He is the archetypal soldier who has fought in previous historical, lengendary, and scriptural conflicts and who never dies. Part 5 is a montage of events in estaminets and work parties in reserve (behind the lines) where rumours abound, culminating in their long march south towards the Somme. In Part 6 they are moved into various positions, and Ball meets and talks with friends. In Part 7 they begin their assault and fight through the day and into the night. Soldiers die whom the reader has come to know. Ball is wounded. In one of the most moving passages in literature, the mythic Queen of the Wood visits the dead, bestowing on them garlands according to their worth (pp 185–6). Part 7 is the most fragmented, most allusive, most lyrical part of the poem. The work is preceded by the poet's 7-page Preface and followed by his 33 pages of notes. It is accompanied (in some editions) by his frontispiece-drawing of a soldier standing in the waste land and his endpiece-drawing of a spear-pierced scapegoat.

Allusions

The allusions throughout are literary, historical, and scriptural. The literary allusions include Shakespeare, primarily Henry V

Henry V (play)

Henry V is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to be written in approximately 1599. Its full titles are The Cronicle History of Henry the Fifth and The Life of Henry the Fifth...

, Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...

's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Cristabel, Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

's Alice books, and The Song of Roland

The Song of Roland

The Song of Roland is the oldest surviving major work of French literature. It exists in various manuscript versions which testify to its enormous and enduring popularity in the 12th to 14th centuries...

but they also include Malory, The Gododdin, The Mabinogion, and the sixth-century Welsh poem Preiddeu Annwn (The Harrowing of Hell). The principal cumulative effect of these allusions is symbolically to align the Battle of the Somme with the catastrophic (for the Welsh) defeats at Catraeth and Camlan. Far from 'romanticizing' war, allusions to romance give to battle frightening archetypal force and express the combatants' preverbal intensity of emotion. Allusions to scripture (especially the Book of Revelation

Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalupsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation"...

) contribute to this effect.

Theme

At the centre of the book, Dai Greatcoat says that "you", the reader, "ought to ask" questions (like the Grail-questor): "Why ... what's the meaning of this." It is a question about war but also about life in general—in his Preface, Jones writes that he did not intend this to be a 'War Book'. Life has always involved war (and suffering and dying), so if war has no meaning neither does life. The answer to the question may lie in Malory's Beaumains (alluded to on p. 118), whose true character is disguised by employment as a kitchen boy. However painful the circumstances in life, meaning resides in the virtue (courage, patience, kindness) of human beings, in this case infantrymen.

Criticism

T.S. Eliot called it "a work of genius." W.H. Auden considered it "a masterpiece," "the greatest book about the First World War" that he had read, a work in which Jones did "for the British and the Germans what Homer did for the Greeks and the Trojans" in "a masterpiece" comparable in quality to The Divine Comedy. The novelist and poet Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe is a British poet, novelist and playwright whose works also include short stories and radio dramas.-Career:Adam Thorpe was born in Paris and grew up in India, Cameroon and England...

 says it "towers above any other prose or verse memorial of that war (indeed, of any war)". The Jones scholar Thomas Dilworth

Thomas Dilworth

The Reverend Mr. Thomas Dilworth was an English cleric and author of a widely-used schoolbook, both in Great Britain and America, A New Guide to the English Tongue. Noah Webster as a boy studied Dilworth's book, and was inspired partly by it to create his own spelling book on completely different...

 writes that it is "probably the greatest work of British Modernism written between the wars" and "the greatest work of literature in English on war."

The best discussion of In Parenthesis published in Jones's lifetime is by John H. Johnston. Paul Fussell contends that "The effect of the poem, for all its horrors, is to rationalize and even to validate the war by implying that it somehow recovers many of the motifs and values of medieval chivalric romance" (p. 147). In the most thorough and sophisticated interpretation of In Parenthesis, Thomas Dilworth convincingly refutes Fussell by showing that the important battles that Jones alludes to, most of them Celtic defeats, are symbolically contained in the archetypal calamities of Camlann and the fall of Troy (94-9). He shows how allusions to romance express the horror of modern war and the poignancy of the deaths of infantrymen (98-9), and contends that Jones reinterprets the tradition of war by, for example, revealing Shakespeare's Henry V

Henry V (play)

Henry V is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to be written in approximately 1599. Its full titles are The Cronicle History of Henry the Fifth and The Life of Henry the Fifth...

as an incipient anti-war play (99-100).

Some critics, such as Evelyn Cobley and Umberto Rossi (who carried out a detailed analysis of Part 7), consider In Parenthesis a destructured novel, not a poem.