The Anathemata
Middle-sea and Lear-sea (continued)
What belles she can foam
’twixt Uxantis and the Horn!1
And did Morgana’s fay-lighta
abbb the warp of mist
that diaphanes the creeping ebb, or worse
the rapid flow
off Scylla’s cisted West-site
screening her felspar’d war
with the skerry-mill?2
Her menhirsc
DIS MANIBUSd of
many a Schiller’s people
many men
of many a Clowdisley’s ship’s company:
for she takes nine
in ten!
But what Caliban’se Lamia
rung him for his Hand of Glory?3
(And where the wolf in the quartz’d height
—O long long long
before the sea-mark light!—4
David Jones notes
1 Uxantis is Ushant and the Hom is Cornwall. In Celtic as in Latin cornu meant horn, in modern Welsh corn. Hence the Old English compound Cornwealas, ‘the Welsh of the horn’.
2 Cf. the stone cist discovered in a large barrow on one of the smaller islands of the Scillies, which whole group is remarkably rich in megalithic burial-sites. Scilly, as with the Classical Scylla and the common noun ‘skerry’, means a rock in the sea.
3 Cf. as typic of the innumerable losses off the Scillies the two most popularly remembered: In 1875 the Schiller whose 300 dead are buried on St Mary’s; in 1707 the flagship and other vessels of the squadron of Sir Clowdisley Shovell together with 800 men in his ship and himself. Cf. the Scillonian saying that nine are dead by water for one dead in the course of nature.
Cf. the report that Sir Clowdisley was washed alive to shore but was murdered by a Cornish woman for the jewels on his fingers. Lamia, a land vampire.
4 Cf. the Wolf Rock Light, between Mount’s Bay and the Scillies.
additional notes
DJ note 3: the Hand of Glory was the dried and pickled hand of a man who had been hanged, which was reputed to have various magical properties. The term itself derives from the French ‘Main de Gloire’, a corruption of mandragore, the genus of plants commonly called mandrake, used as a narcotic and in magic.
a Queen Morgan la Fay is a powerful fay or enchantress in the Arthurian legend.
d DIS MANIBUS : ‘to the divine shades [of]’ a conventional Roman inscription on a tombstone (hence the capitals), equivalent to the English ‘sacred to the memory [of]’, followed by the name of the deceased.
e In The Tempest, Prospero describes Sycorax as an ancient and foul witch native to Algiers, and banished to the island for practicing sorcery ‘so strong / That [she] could control the Moon’. Prospero further relates that many years earlier, sailors had brought her to the island, while she was pregnant with her bestial son Caliban, and abandoned her there. She proceeded to enslave the spirits of the island. ‘lamia’ is the Latin for ‘witch’, here and later on a sea-witch personified as Lamia.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
b abb: the weft of a woven cloth, here used as a verb (i.e. to weave).
c menhir: a large upright standing stone.
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