The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
And shall be, so these Welshmen say, 2 till the thick rotundities give, and the bent flanks of space itself give way
and the whitest of the Wanderersa
falters in her transit
at the Sibyl’s in favilla-day.3
David Jones notes
2 When a Welsh poet of the eighteenth-century wished to express the final catastrophe he wrote ‘Snowdon’s peak is one with the plain’, just as Isaias or John, had they been gentiles, would have written ‘Olympus is brought low’, or ‘Ida is cast into the sea’.
An analogous sentiment is to be detected in the twelfth-century Welshman who told King Henry I that whatever policy he pursued, Welshness would endure until the dissolution of all things.
3 See the hymn by Thomas of Celano, Dies Irae.
‘day on which the world dissolves into ashes (infavilIa) as David and the Sibyl testify.’
additional notes
a Venus, the whitest, or at least the brightest, of the ‘wandering stars’, as the planets were called by the ancient astronomers.
see also
The Dies Irae theme recurs quite a bit in the poem. I have tried to pick up every occurrence of an implicit or explicit reference in my keywords, but may have missed some.
comments
the ‘bent flanks of space’ may refer to Einstein’s general relativity theory of space and time, according to which 3-dimensional space together with time can be seen as being a single four-dimensional curved ‘space-time’.