The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
con flora cálida
mit warmer Fauna
The Respond is with the Beara:
Benedicite frigus . . .
Super-pellissed, stalled in crystallos, from the gospel-side,
choir all the boreal schola
mit kalter Flora
con fauna fria
Now, sewn fibre is superfluous where Thames falls into Rhineb. Now they would be trappers of every tined creature and make corners in ulotrichousc hide and establish their wool-cartels as south as Los Millares.d Where the stones shall speak of his cupola-makers:1 but here we speak of long, long before their time.
David Jones notes
1 The first cupolas or rounded vaults in Europe were made by men of the Megalithic culture in Southern Spain, in the first and second millennium BC. We are, in our text, referring to conditions in the twentieth millennium BC or earlier.
additional notes
DJ writes ‘the reason (for the Spanish and German) is accidental except that I like the sound of contrasted forms for cold and hot’ (Hague p. 54)
a The Great Bear, Ursa Major (known as the Plough in the UK) is one of the most recognisable constellations (in the northern hemisphere). Two of its stars point to Polaris, the North star, hence its association with the north.
b i.e. before the separation of Britain as an island (about 12,000 years ago). When man is wearing woolly skins, sewn (vegetable) fibre is superfluous.
d Los Millares is a Bronze Age occupation site 17 km north of Almería, in the municipality of Santa Fe de Mondújar, Andalusia, Spain. The complex was in use from the end of the fourth millennium to the end of the second millennium BCE.
see also
semantic structures
This paragraph is one of the best examples in the text of one of DJ’s favourite rhetorical devices: chiasmus, since it is shown not only in the text (warm/cold and flora/fauna) but also in the languages employed (German/Spanish). (In rhetoric, chiasmus (Latin term from Greek χίασμα, ‘crossing’, from the Greek χιάζω, chiázō, ‘to shape like the letter Χ’) is the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted parallelism. Chiasmus was particularly popular in the literature of the ancient world, including Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, where it was used to articulate the balance of order within the text.)
glossary
c ulotrichous: having woolly hair.
comments
When the warm winds (Notus and Favonius) are blowing, it is with the warm flowers and warm beasts. When the Bear answers ‘O ye cold, Bless ye the Lord’, the fur-wrapped (super-pelissed) choir in their stalls of ice (crystallos) on the gospel side (the north side, here associated with cold) sings with cold flora, cold beasts.