The Anathemata
Mabinog’s Liturgy (continued)
for sharp spines
that’s all the balm he’ll get
of Gilead brakea
this late-lambing year:1
(Already they have put wood into his bread)2
But eighteen days to the Maying.3
They say it’s Tuesday’s child
is chose
this year’s Mab o’ the Greenc
mundi Domina
or was she Monday’s
total beauty
Stabat by the Blossom’d Stem4
David Jones notes
1 See note 1 to page 52 above.
2 Cf. Maundy Thursday, at Tenebrae, 3rd Noctum, responsary following Lesson VII Venite mittamus lignum, etc.
‘Come let us put wood into his bread and root him out of the land of the living.’
3 The 14th of April: eighteen days before the Kalends of May.
4 Cf. the Nursery Rhyme:
‘Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesday’s child is full of grace’
and the Tract in the Seven Sorrows Mass:
Stabat sancta Maria caeli regina et mundi domina juxta crucem . . . ‘Stood holy Mary, queen of heaven and mistress of the world, next the cross’, and the Gradual in the Mass of the Immaculate Conception: Toto pulchra es Maria . . .
additional notes
DJ note 2: the Latin reads ‘Mittamus lignum in panem eius’, which literally does mean ‘Let us put wood in his bread’. RSV translates the phrase as ‘Let us destroy the tree with the fruit’; but an equally good translation of the Hebrew seems to be ‘Let us break wood on his body’; or, as the Jerusalem Bible has it, ‘Let us destroy the tree in its strength’ — though I do not know the rationale for these corrections. But it is generally taken to be a prophecy of Christ, though the context of the original is Jeremiah lamenting that he is persecuted in his own town.
DJ note 3: inclusive counting, as the Romans did, included both the day from which and the day to which we are counting.
a Jeremiah (8:22) laments, in a time of a famine sent by God to punish His unfaithful people, ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’, a fertile wooded (‘brake’) belt of the Tranjordan hills.
b I found the following in a Victorian book of children’s poems (Echoes of our Childhood, anon., 1865):
Fairies are singing,
Lily-bells ringing,
Dewdrops are flinging
Their diamond spray;
Crickets are starting,
Fireflies darting,
Radiance imparting,
This merry May-day.
Queen Mab has her seat where her subjects may greet
The sovereign they all love so well;
In her garment of green sits the fairy-land queen,
On a fern in the midst of the dell.
This suggests that DJ may have known of an old May-day tradition of electing a child to be Queen Mab for the day. In this case, the chosen Queen is Mary (full of grace –Ave Maria, gratia plena– and fair of face).
comments
The poet is referring to the day of the crucifixion.