The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
I said, I’m unversed, I said, nor a clerk of nigromantics, though for a short while put to school in a sisterhood,1 I and know the ample shape of our Redemption, and could answer up, and before the Ordinary, when he put on us the Second Indelible Marka.
But am a simple person, sponsored in Papeys-in-Wall,2 but reared up by Redriff mast-pond; swaddled, crawled and found my walking legs in a keel-haw, did know a sheaved block from a dead-eye before I were gunwhale high, knowed the lily i’ the shipman’s cardb before any water-boy made for to know me.
Learned much of the dear God’s created orbis from such as navigate and circumnavigate
from tarpaulins and salts, clerks of nautics that thither from the known to the knowable
hither again to haven
whose first premiss, main-stay and Last Gospel is: That the Lode be constant3
yet dealing much
in the peregrinations of Venus.
Much have I learned of them.
David Jones notes
1 Clerk, pronounce to rhyme with ‘lurk’; and cf. ‘And the thyrd syster, Morgan Ie Fey, was put to scole in a nonnery, and ther she lerned so moche that she was a grete clerke of nygromancye.’ Malory, Bk. I, Ch. 2.
2 above ‘native within Aldgate’. Papey Church was in that Ward.
3 The importance to the medieval seaman of the Pole Star, which they called Stella Maris, is appreciated by recalling that until the sixteenth century their manuals of seamanship were entitled The Regiment of the North Star.
additional notes
DJ note 3: the North Star is only approximately aligned with the earth’s axis of rotation, and therefore itself appears to be circumpolar in motion (a peregrination). This had to be allowed for when the navigator was determining his latitude by its altitude. These corrections were described in the book mentioned, together with the use of a measuring apparatus. (There were also other manuals of navigation at the time in addition to a Regiment.)
a i.e. when she was confirmed by the bishop of her diocese (the Ordinary, for he ordains priests), for it is Catholic doctrine that the three sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders imprint an indelible character or mark upon the soul.
b keel-haw: a ‘haw’ can mean a yard or enclosure, so: that part of a shipyard containing a frame where the keel is built or repaired.
sheave: the rotating wheel inside a block or pulley.
dead-eye: a flat hardwood disk with a grooved perimeter, pierced by three holes through which the lanyards are passed, used to fasten the shrouds.
gunwhale: the upper edge of a ship’s side.
lily i’ the shipman’s card: the conventional fleur-de-lys marking the north on the compass rose.
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