The Anathemata
Middle-sea and Lear-sea (continued)
And us marines, remember us
as belong to y’r panzer’da lover.
Sea-wives of Laconia
bid your Cytheréa
be mindful of her nativity.1
Ladies of Tyre and the Phoenician littoral pray The Lady to have a native pity on this ship’s company—consider: how many inboard, along of us, belong to her!
In all the sun-lands of our cradle-sea
you many that are tutelarb
regard our anathemata.
Pay our vows Iberian ladies
to the Lady of Iberia
for making by her coasts toward this placec
we did call her by her name:
remind her.
In the parts of Liguria about Massilia and at Corbilo-on-Liger, our last port of call, implore the Three Mothersd to recall what we have donated to all Gallia: almost all, letters most of all; nor least the love of our Ionian Artemis.
Phocaean Huntress, pray for us,
your sea-dogs hunted of the hungry sea.2
David Jones notes
1 Both Paphos on Cyprus and the Island of Cythera off the Laconian coast were claimed as the place where Aphrodite was delivered from the womb of her mother, the sea. The nearness of Cyprus to the Syrian coast may indicate a route by which Es Sitt, The Lady (as they still call her among the Arabs of Palestine), came to Hellas and so to us.
2 Corbilo at the mouth of the Loire was one of the distribution ports of the tin-traders in pre- and early-historic times. It was from the Phocaean settlement at Marseilles that Ionian influences infiltrated Gaul, and Phocaean sea-men are known to have spread the cult of Artemis along the sea-board from Monaco to Barcelona. The name Marseilles derives from a Phoenician word for ‘colony’ and, although in actual historic sequence the Phocaeans displaced the Phoenicians as masters of the sea, in my text I put them in the same boat because they both were precursors of the Mediterranean thing in the lands of the Western seaboard.
additional notes
a One of Aphrodite’s many love affairs was with Ares, the Greek god of war (later identified with the Roman Mars). The sailors were fighters, too.
c ‘making ... place’: read as if this clause was separated off by commas, the main sense being ‘for ... we did call her’.
d Three Mothers: Themis, Phoebe, Telphousa of the preceding page and DJ note 2.
Phocaea was an ancient Ionian Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia. Greek colonists from Phocaea founded the colony of Massalia (modern day Marseille, in France) in 600 BCE. In their mythology Artemis was a huntress, the Greek equivalent of the Roman Diana.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
b tutelar: one who watches over and protects a person, place or thing.
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