The Anathemata
Redriff (continued)
if he can find him
down at the Galley Wall1
(though he’s many times before his time).
But tell him:
we scamp no repairs here; no botched Riga deal nor wood that’s all American, softs nor hards, hewn or sawn, heart n’r sap, cis- or trans- Gangem-landa teak, or fairgrained ulmusb from sylvan wester lands or goodish East Mark oakc via Fiume in British bottoms
let alone
heart of island-grown
seasoned in m’ neighbour’s yard
leaves this bench.
But
tell him
tell him from me
if he waits his turn an’ damps down his Sicily sulphur2 we’ll spokeshave those deadeyes for him as smooth as a peach of a cheek
we’ll fay that hounding trim and proper—and of the best spruce,3 to rhyme with her mainmast, we’ll square
[p. 121] true and round to a nicety the double piercin’s o’ that cap— and of keel-elm.
David Jones notes
1 The allusion is to the Galley Wall Road district in Rotherhithe. The name is associated locally with an event described in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 1016: ‘Then came the ships to Greenwich and within a little space they went to London and they dug a great ditch on the south side and dragged their ships to the west side of the bridge ... .’ (trans. Bohn edtn 1849). This association between Canute’s galleys and this street-name was, at all events, the popular tradition in my mother’s girlhood (in the late eighteen-seventies) and was the opinion of Canon Beck of Rotherhithe church. ‘Canute’s Ditch’, as it was called, was believed to run from near where Greenland Dock now is and to join the Thames again in Walworth: its actual siting is disputed.
2 Apart from timber from the Baltic and elsewhere, the Rotherhithe docks in the last century received large cargoes of sulphur from Palermo and other Mediterranean ports.
3 Cf. ‘a nyew mayne mast of spruce with a nyew staye hounsyd and skarvyd with the same wood whyche mast ys of length from the Hounse to the step 25 yards’ (1532) O.E.D., under ‘hound’.
additional notes
a i.e. west or east of the Ganges.
c i.e. Austrian oak (‘goodish’ but not as good as the best English). Fiume (now Rijeka) is a port on the Adriatic, now in Croatia but then in Hungary.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
b ulmus: elm (Latin).
d fay: to fit closely and exactly to.
comments