The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
How the dish
that holds no coward’s food?1
How the calixa
without which
how the re-calling?
And there
where, among the exactly faceted microliths2
lie the bones
of the guardian and friend.
How else Argos
the friend of Odysseus?
Or who should tend
the sores of lazars?b
(For anthropos is not always kind.)
How Ranter or True, Ringwood
or the pseudo-Gelert?3
How Spot, how Cerberus?
(For men can but proceed from what they know, nor is it for the mind of this flesh to practise poiesisc, ex nihilo.)
How the hound-bitches
of the stone kennels of Arthur
that quested the hog and the brood of the hog
David Jones notes
1 In Welsh mythology, when Arthur goes to raid the Celtic hades one of the spoils he has to recover is a vessel from which no coward can eat or drink.
2 To the same Mesolithic epoch of the first beginnings of pottery belongs also the first domestication of the dog. This was during a low ebb of prehlstorlc culture, yet the pygmy weapon-heads are famous: ‘their microliths, although often measuring no more than half an inch long, are yet meticulously trimmed’ write J. and C. Hawkes in Prehistoric Britain.
3 I use the mutated form, Gelert, because this is familiar and customary; the radical form is Celert and is the name of a man, presumably a sixth-century saint. The hound-association at Beddgelert is said to be not older than the Romantic Revival of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. There are, however, tales of devoted Welsh hounds of early date (Cf. Giraldus) from which the Gelert motif may stem.
additional notes
a The use of the Latin calix and the emphatic the make it clear that the reference is to the Last Supper and its re-enactment in the Mass.
Argos is Odysseus’ dog that greeted him on his return from his long journeyings and then died at his feet. John Peel’s dogs were Ranter and Ringwood, Bellman and True. Cerberus is in Greek mythology the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, the underworld. Spot I take to be any family dog. Toby (next page) is the dog that occasionally appears in a Punch and Judy show.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
a calix: cup, chalice (Latin).
b lazar: a poor diseased person afflicted with sores (usually leprous).
c poiesis: the making of things (Greek); hence poetry is something that is made.
comments