The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
No, captain, your mirage is but a mirage, this were nonesuch, ergo, this were no mirage but some other, even though fancy-bred and but apparently substantiate, still no mirage as commonly understood, or should my re-teller have told me untrue, then a ship-man’s naughty lie: we may blast his sweet eyes but have still no mirage, neither on bow, beam nor quarter.
You see, Master, I were not honoured of a’ aurioled clerk to no purpose, nor but fleshly . . . and ’twere he that did name me when and as he would favour me, after the name2 of her dower; and in the secret garth and inmost bailey of him, where such unlike conjoinings are, he did meddle me with his Bountiful Mothera and with that other, that nourished him bodily: these too were England—if with differences.3
So that native-wise
and following the precepts of the spindle sideb and taught by horse-sense, yet primed of the nice embraces of sweet logic, I do affirm: All that is comprised under mermaid is no mirage.
David Jones notes
2 The name Angela is the name referred to because by a pious sentiment Anglia was named the ‘Dower of Mary’—‘Non Angli sed angeli’.
3 Cf. the arms of Oriel College, ‘England, engrailed for a difference’.
additional notes
DJ note 2: Non Angli sed angeli: the famous pun of Pope St. Gregory the Great, which he made upon meeting children from England in the slave market at Rome, as recorded by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of England (Book II, Chapter I): ‘not Angles, but Angels’. This encounter, according to Bede, prompted the Pope to initiate an Apostolic Mission to Britain, in order to convert the Anglo-Saxons.
a Bountiful Mother: the term Alma Mater used to signify a person’s college or university literally means ‘Bountiful Mother’.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
b spindle side: (in geneaology) the female line of descent.
comments
Elen recalls that during a lovemaking session with her first lover, the clerk would call her ‘Angela’. The poet can now use his word-play to elevate the lavender-seller into the figure of Britannia (page 145).