The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
chimes I do not know,1 at the same ’buttment of the guardhouse wall, the day-guard dismissed, the sergeant and his crawlers do the small beer play at dice, within; the newposted first night-relief already a-nodding over his sloped stock—already a-bed with the Queen o’ Cockaynea—or, champion in the stourb he’d fled . . .
thank God
we’ve got the lightermenc, captain!
Between the heats and the cool, at day’s ebb and night-flow, the loded already over the fen of Islington, pressed we was to the same cranny of the wall to right of the same ’brassure of the same right gate-jamb—so Janus save me, but bodies will. The whitest of the Wandererse, what was Julius Caesar’s mother, white over toward Bride’s Well, and this her fish day—and again he says it, but this time it’s Bona Dea2 he cries . . . Hills o’ the Mother he says, an’ y’r lavender, the purple, he says, an’ then he says, but more slow:
Roma aurea Roma3
Roma . . . amor, amor . . . Roma. Roma, wot’s in the feminine4 gender, he says.
David Jones notes
1 Cf. ‘I do not know, says the great bell of Bow’. Bow Church, Maria de Arcubus.
2 Cf. the female guardian deity of Rome, essentially oracular and representing the whole female principle, the mother-sister-wife of Faunus, her male counterpart.
3 Cf. Roma caput orbis splendor spes aurea Roma. The inscription, now lost, that Leo IV (Pope 847-855) put over the gate of the wall which he built around the extension of the city on the right bank of the Tiber. See Nicolette Gray, The Paleography of Latin Inscriptions in the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Centuries in Italy.
4 Cf. the eighteenth-century rhyme ‘Amo, amas, I love a lass her form is tall and slender, etc.’ ending with ‘in the nominative case and in the feminine gender’. Feminine to rhyme with ‘fine’.
additional notes
DJ note 1: Arcubus, so-called because according to Stow, it was the first in the city to be built on arches (arcus) of stone.
See Oranges and Lemons.
DJ note 3: ‘Rome, capital of the world, splendour, hope, golden Rome.’
DJ note 4: see here for the complete poem.
a Queen o’ Cockayne: see this picture to get the general idea.
c lighterman: a port worker who operates a lighter, a type of flat-bottomed barge, which is used to transfer goods between a ship and the wharf.
d lode: the lodestar, i.e. the North Star. Islington is more or less due north of Newgate.
e whitest of the Wanderers: the planet Venus. According to Greek and Roman myth, it was Aeneas who was the son of the goddess Venus. Elen has got her heroes confused. To the Romans Friday (the Catholic fish day) was Venus-day.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
b stour: armed conflict.
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