The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
Did ever he walk the twenty-six wards of the city, within and extra,a did he cast his nautic eye on her
clere and lusty under kell2
in the troia’db lanes of the city?
And was it but a month and less from the septimal month, and did he hear, seemly intuned in East-Seaxna-nasal3
(whose nestle-cock polisc but theirs knows the sweet gag and in what urbs would he hear it if not in Belin’sd oppidum, the greatest burh in nordlands ?)4
David Jones notes
2 Cf. Dunbar In Honour of the City of London, v. 6:
‘Fair be thy wives, right lovesom white and small
Clere be thy virgins, lusty under kellis’
3 East-Seaxna, ‘of the East Saxons’, pronounce a-ahst sa-ahx-nah. Cf. the theory that the cockney intonation derives from that of the English people of Essex; London being their capital just as it was associated with the Trinobantian Britons before them, whose tribal commune Caesar referred to as civitas Trinobantum. In this factual community-name we have the origin of the legendary city of Trinovantum, or Troy Novant, which the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth made an integral part of our national mythological deposit, whereby, through the Trojan, Brute, of the line of Aeneas, Venus and Jove, our tradition is linked with all that that succession can be made to signify; and seeing what we owe to all that, the myth proposes for our acceptance a truth more real than the historic facts alone discover.
4 Cf. the Ragnar Lodbrok Saga
‘Lundunaborg which is the greatest and the most famous of all the burhs in the northern lands.’
additional notes
DJ note 2: William Dunbar’s poem of 1500-1 is the first poem in English dedicated to extolling a city. A kell or caul is a lady’s hair net.
DJ note 3: Troy-Novant (London).
This name gave rise to the tradition that Brute, a Trojan refugee, founded London and called it New Troy; but the word is British, and compounded of Tri-nou-hant (inhabitants of the new town). Civitas Trinobantum, the city of the Trinobantes, which we might render ‘Newtownsmen.’
‘For noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold,
And Troy-novant was built of old Troyes ashes cold.’
Spenser: Faërie Queene, iii. 9.
a Each ward of the city, of which some were within the walls and some outside (‘extra’) had its own Alderman on the city council.
DJ note 4: the Ragnar Lodbrok Saga is a 13th century Icelandic saga about the Viking ruler of that name.
b troia’d: an adjective formed from Troy, i.e. ‘like Troy’. This may refer to the poet’s description of Troy as being archetypal of all walled Western cities (page 57) or as being layrinthine and containing within itself multiple historical layers, or is a reference to Troy Novant (see above note 3) or (more probably) all of these.
d Belin: Cunobeline, known in Latin as Cunobelinus, was a Celtic king Britain in the period immediately before the Roman conquest. He controlled a substantial part of south-eastern Britain and ruled from the late first century BCE until around 42 CE and is the most famous British leader prior to the Roman occupation. He is the main character in Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline.
But also see p. 167 note 2 for Belin.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
c nestle-cock: the last-hatched bird of a brood; the weakling of a brood. In extended use: a mother’s pet; a spoilt or delicate child or youth. Hence a soft-bred townsman.
comments
The skipper now encounters the Lady of the Pool, whose monologue addressed to him occupies the remainder of the Section.