THE QUEEN OF THE WOODS
The sanctity, which is also the heroism, of ‘this July noblesse’ (186) has been obscured by ‘Life the leveller’ (185), a corrective reversal of James Shirley's ‘Death the Leveller’. At the end of the
poem, death brings hierarchical revelation in the ceremonial crowning of soldiers by the Queen of the Woods (185-6), a lyrical high point in modern literature. She is crucial to the ultimate
meaning of this poem, which is that human life has value even when it is lived and lost in the political-social-physical absurdity of war. She is the dryad of the forest, the Acorn Sprite (178) of its flora-fall. She delivers true judgments by which the ‘undiademed princes’ (184) ‘have diadems given them’ (185), in (realistically) the steel shorn branches and filigree of the woods.
Her ceremonial action is the poem’s final ritual, in which she unites most of the poem's secular and sacred motifs that have to do with desire, by becoming its archetypal fulfilment:
Fatty Weavel's sweet-briar, the love-token growing from the grave of Barbara Allen in her ballad, identifies him as the ballad’s ‘Jimmy Grove’ mentioned early in the poem (33). His ‘thousand years’ is the biblical millennium symbolizing eternity. The German Balder doubtless
receives mistletoe, the golden bough that kills and subsequently contains the life of his divine namesake in Norse mythology. Ulrich’s myrtle wand is the bough worn by initiates at Eleusis.
Cockney Billy Crower is now the equal of Mr Jenkins (Crow-er is a Cock-ney), for differences of class, rank, and wealth have ceased to matter. So has the common judgment of men, for,
although he seemed an unkind, priggish stickler for rules, ‘that swine Lillywhite’ receives daisies, which symbolize love. German Hansel and Welsh Gronwy, who died fighting each
other, lie together like Malory’s Balin and Balan ‘beneath their single monument’ (163), here a machine gun’s twisted tripod. Their dog-violets symbolize suffering and steadfastness. St John’s
Wort, for Siôn, is a plant gathered on Midsummer's Eve as protection from harm. Aneirin Lewis's rowan or mountain ash, a sign against evil, is indigenous to his native Gwynedd.
In the tender and multifaceted Queen of the Woods, the poem’s associations fully emerge from the ironies by which they indict war. She is the feminine principle nullifying the masculine malice of battle. She extends the poem’s motifs beyond mortality. The antithesis of ‘Life the
leveller’, she is ‘sweet sister Death’ as St Francis would have recognized her. She is the girlfriend that young soldiers longed for, and more: the beloved of the Song of Songs, Diana for these Jacks o’ the Green, the Kore of their initiation, Demeter to mother them. She is the Celtic triple goddess: the mother, the lover, the presider over the dead. Hers is the judgment they wanted, the accommodation they missed. No empty or ironic symbol, she is sustained by the
theological implications of the poem’s ritual associations. In her, nature and grace are one. To her the end of In Parenthesis belongs.
The visitation of the Queen of the Woods is an important literary event. Not only is it among the most moving passages in English, but it is an early appearance of the composite goddess Sir James Frazer had written about at the start of the century. In Ulysses Joyce compares
Molly Bloom to Gea Tellus but only in passing. He evokes the earth goddess more fully in Anna Livia Plurabelle, which is her first appearance in modern literature. Jones's Queen of the Woods
is the second, her first in a poem, and here she is more numinous, more authentically a goddess.
Beginning in 1924 and increasingly around 1930, Ezra Pound refers to Aphrodite and Demeter in the Cantos but does not make them imaginatively present. The goddess becomes prominent in criticism and poetry when Robert Graves writes about the White Goddess in 1948. But David Jones, who knew the Celtic sources better than Graves did, had discovered her there earlier for himself—though Frazer and Joyce doubtless pointed the way. Her visitation was Jones’s
favourite part of the poem.*
