The Anathemata

Middle-sea and Lear-sea (continued)

Then was when the top-tree boy

from his thalassa over their mare . . .

cried to his townya

before the mast-tree

cries louder

(for across the weather)

to the man at the steer-tree:

Pretani-shore!1 Cassitérides!b

we’ve rounded their Golden Cornu.2

Mess-mates of mine

we shall be rich men

you shall have y’r warm-dugged Themis

and you, white Phoebe’s lune

. . . and laughless little Telphousa

what shipman’s boy could ask another?

said she’d smile

for tin!

What ship’s boy would lose her?

the skerry-mill rather!

rather the granite molars of the sea-Lamia.

 

David Jones notes

1 Pronounce pret-tan-ee, accent on middle syllable. The name by which the inhabitants of the British Isles were known to Antiquity before Caesar was the Priteni or the Pretani. Cf. Old Welsh, the Priten. It still survives in the Modern Welsh name for the island of Britain itself, Prydain.

2 The Horn allusion demanded my quite inaccurate ‘rounded’.

additional notes

DJ note 2: perhaps the ‘Golden Horn’ allusion indicates that the sailor boys were from Byzantium (as it would have been called then), the idea being that entering the English Channel from the Atlantic is like entering the Bosphorus from the Sea of Marmara at the Golden Horn. The Horn here is Cornwall (DJ notes to page 100.) Note that the Latin ‘cornu’ means not only a horn or trumpet, but also a rounded or pointed tip to anything (such as a bird’s beak or the horns of the moon).

b Cassitérides, the ‘tin-islands’ from the Greek word Κασσίτερος (Kassiteros) for tin, i.e. the Scillies and Cornwall.

For the significance of the names of the sailors’ girls, see DJ note 2 to page 104.

comments

We return to the main stream of events which was interrupted by the flashback beginning on page 98. After some wandering around as just described, they have sighted land.

see also

semantic structures

glossary

a towny: a shipmate from the same home town.