The Anathemata
Mabinog’s Liturgy (continued)
paler than under-stalks of barley, held in the sickle’s lunula.
So that the pale gilt where it was by nature palest, together with the pale river-gold where it most received the pallid candle-sheen, rimmed the crescent whitenessa where it was whitest.
Or, was there already silver to the gilt? b
For if the judgmatic smokes of autumn seemed remote, John’s Fires were lit and dead, and, as for gathering knots of may—why not talk of maidenheads?
Within this are, as near, as far off, as singular, as the whitest of the Seven Wanderers, of exorbitant smoothness, yet puckered a little, because of the extreme altitude of her station, for she was the spouse of the Director of Toil,1 and, because of the toil within,
her temples gleamed
among the carried lights hard-contoured as Luna’s rim, when in our latitudes in winter time, she at her third phase, casts her shadow so short that the out-patrol moves with confidence, so near the zenith she journeys.2
If as Selenê in highness
so in influence, then as Helenê too:3 by her lunations the neapings and floodings, because of her the stress and drag.
David Jones notes
1 Cf. ‘At Llongborth saw I of Arthur’s brave men hewing with steel (Men of the) emperor, director of toil’, from a fragment in Early Welsh translated by the late John Rhŷs.
2 Those who have had occasion to move about in Forward Areas recall that it is possible, if disconcerting, to do so in bright full moonlight, provided that the moon is high in the sky.
3 Selenê and Helenê are so accented because the proper English forms, Selene and Helen, do not preserve the phonetic similarity of the two names, a similarity said to disclose a far more important mythological correspondence between Helen and the moon-goddess. See Jackson Knight, Virgil’s Troy.
additional notes
DJ note 3: for this reason, the the middle vowels in each word should also rhyme (which they do not in ordinary English): sell-en-ey/hell-en-ey, accents on the middle syllable.
a the crescent whiteness: of her forehead.
b silver to the gilt: was her golden hair already showing signs of silvery grey?
see also
semantic structures
In the final clause, the parallelism shows that the first ‘her’ refers to Selenê and the second ‘her’ refers to Helenê.
comments
It is Christmas, so the fires of Midsummer (St John’s Eve) and autumn are past, as is the maytime of youth and virginity, this being taken both literally and also metaphorically as referring to Gwenhwyfar. Her forehead, despite its bright whiteness, is puckered because of her responsibilities as Arthur’s wife and because of the ‘stress and drag’ (as the note to the following page makes clear) of her adulterous relationship with Lancelot which ultimately led to the collapse of the Round Table and the death of Arthur.