‘The Axile Tree’

Abstract 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.