The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
Who were his gens-men or had he no Hausnamea yet
no nomen for his fecit-markb
the Master of the Venus?c
whose man-hands god-handled the Willendorf stone
before they unbound the last glaciation
for the Uhland Father to be-ribbon die blaue Donaud
with his Vanabride blue.2
O long before they lateen’de her Ister
or Romanitasf manned her gender’dg stream.
David Jones notes
2 In Northern myth, Uhland is the abode of the gods of the atmosphere, the Luftraum. Vanabride is Freyja, a kind of Teutonic Venus. White cats draw her car across the blue sky and her myth seems in part confused with that of Frigg the wife of Odin. She is the most beautiful of the Vanir and half the departed (who die bravely) are hers.
additional notes
a Hausname: clan name (similar to the Latin gens).
b ‘Nomen’ and ‘fecit-mark’ refer to lettering stamped on Roman pottery such as ‘Satto fecit’, the potters name followed by fecit (made [this]).
c see note on page 60.
d the Blue Danube (also known as the Ister).
e ‘to express in Latin’ and ‘subjected to the lateen sail (the voile latine so characteristic of Mediterranean sailing ship). ‘It was a bit of luck that one could make the lateen sail evoke the Latin lingua & hands that manned the Roman craft. that and the change in gender in the grammatical sense. I remember labouring with this bit & how to cover these very differing matters within as compact as possible the form of the poiesis’ . (DJ, quoted in Hague p. 46).
g Grammatically, ‘Danube’ is feminine but ‘Ister’ is masculine.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
f Romanitas: Roman-ness (see Wikipedia).
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