The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
Frogs in the Sleeve apart, bear away for the Forelands.1
An’ then, cap’n, for our English home-land beauties.
Without mention of the usuals
as: scurvies, cockroaches, melancholies, pent frenzies and open mutinies.
The sawbones
that should mend ’em, a-voyaging in his Muslim book, the priest, when not mum as a muffled oar, posing such as: Sirs, consider nautics, is it in itself a good?
The Redriff mate
drove by this to venial retorts of rumps an’ genitals, and thence to such mortal blasphemies as might’ve brought down the heavens and echoed in all the havens as there are from Gothland to the capes of Trastamara.a
The boatswain, from Milford,
for each circumstance finding antique comparison.
As though:
he were with them in the ships when they cast off at the rape of Helen.
Were dozing
under his pent-house lid in the Downs roadstead, when,
Bang! bang!! there were Julius2 stood-in for the South Foreland Light.
David Jones notes
1 See song, Spanish Ladies
v. 2 ‘ . . . until we strike soundings in the Channel of Old England; from Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues’ and v. 4 ‘and then bore away for the South Foreland Light’.
2 An English friend of mine living in Italy asked his Italian servant, who had been to the cinema, what picture he had seen. The reply was, a naval battle ‘in the old time’, and a further query as to whose battle, evoked ‘Bang, bang, bang! perhaps Julius Caesar’. The film in question dealt with Lady Hamilton and the hero of Trafalgar. I think it important to put this on record because it provides a concrete modern example of the attitude of the Old Masters who felt no anachronism in putting Herod or Darius or Joshua into medieval platemail. The same unconsciousness of period was still operative in this man of the Riviera di Levante in c. 1930.
additional notes
DJ note 1: For the text of the song, see here.
a Trastamara: a medieval county occupying what is now the north-western part of Galicia (nw. corner of Spain).
comments
We turn to a description of some of the crew of the Mary.