On the Parenthesis in T. S. Eliot’s The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

Abstract

THE CULTIVATION OF CHRISTMAS TREES, T. S. Eliot’s contribution to the second series of the Faber & Faber Christmas pamphlets, was published in October 1954 in New York and London. The American pamphlet was decorated with an early design by Enrico Arno; the British edition was illustrated by David Jones, the poet of In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952), and Eliot’s friend. Alluding to Christian iconography, Jones supplied a drawing of a wounded stag for the poem’s cover; the page on which the poem ends, in turn, he embellished with decorative lettering, a watercolour inscription comprising the Latin prayer for God’s mercy and for the union with St Lucy and all saints and beneath, in smaller font, a Greek phrase from an Orphic hymn, an invocation of ‘peace’ and ‘wholeness’. While the American and British editions were published ‘with no variants’, Jones’s painted inscription actually added eight lines to the British edition of the poem (Poems, i. 780). Jones’s presence in Eliot’s poem may also be more profound than that of the creator of the visual effects that accompany it. One thing that brought Eliot and Jones together intellectually as friends in the 1950s was their mutual interest in anthropology. As noted by Thomas Dilworth, Eliot shared Jones’s view that the same ritual and symbolic patterns underlay various