There she blows! There she goes
The old tin tube rings clear:
Báck to kip for séc-tion six
the mónkey’s knackers for section seven
at the chill o’ the wind at the turn of
the wall.
Double up slow-boys
Double up seven
dóuble to see Auróra’s leg
kick báck the stárry blánkets.
You can break the hearts of god and men
but you won’t break Caesar’s
division of time
nor the august routine.
There she goes again — sets terms at
long last to the middle vigil, calls these
to the freshing wind at the third relief,
beckons these to stand-down, harbingers
for these the guardhouse fug, where the
companions nod, where the black billikin
brews the dawn-broth,
where the clear charcoal glows for y’r stiffened
palms and the stressed accents tell bucolic
songs and the companion-throats leave
quantity to cissy Greeks.1
There she goes — there she goes again
— from Conduit Keep — that’s
Blondie Taranus I’ll swear — he
always makes a bollocks of the first
bar — sounds more like the cock
o’Gaul trumpeting the Britannic
hen across the misty Fretum.
Cushy job, those trumpeters, sweet
fanny to do but swell their cheeks
a fine imperial hue at each
vigilia’s term.
An’ the strut on ’em in their special
clobber — and the lip of
’em with their extra pay — they
fancy they’re the Darlings of Athena Salpinx
— to bring all the world-walls down.
These west-wave Celts are all the same
— toe-heads or reds, short-arse or
lankies, bond or freed — they all
reckon on celestial connections.
The Julian line, the Claudian house,
the gens Cornelia — that’s all
jumped-up stuff to their way of
thinking — same with the muses
and the invented instruments —
there’s nothing good in the world but
what there’s better in the White Island.
To hear ’em talk you’ld suppose
the Divine Julius was blown from
Thule back to Bononia by nothing
but a barrage of British horns.
Blondie can blow his Roman horn and
pocket Roman pay — but what does
he see from his fronted eyes when he
sounds the vigilia call?
Most like his mind’s on the canteen
with the rest of us — but in
his mind within his mind are other
eyes that see not quadrilateral
shapes as ours do, but broken contours
and drifting things and confluences between
small hills where the Degeangli1 grope
between the sea damps and the
mountain-damps, with swords like
leaves and horses wear coats of
river-gold and men wear coats of
river-beast — so they do say.
How I figure it out is they open their
mother’s wombs on a misty bed —
some say the cold’s not over horrible
and some say there’s no true night
year in year out and others that it’s
dusk at high noon — but all say
of the far isles that walls of fog
drift all day and everyday and the
salt sea they say reaches their inmost
valleys and all is a maze of meeting
damps and ebb and flow of mist and
tide so that the waters are, in a way
of speaking, lord of all.
From infancy they feed on illusion
the very elements refract their thoughts
— their brain-pans are as full of
mist as are their hill-circles.
When they step in our ordered
light and know the clear sky where
Caesar reigns they yet walk like
men in a dream and in their
puzzled heads there yet rings
the tumbling of the waters and
estuary fret.
And they do say that in the country of the Dimetae
in another west-hill track of that March Hare’s
island there is a black mountain and on the black
mountain a black water and under the black water
a race of naiads, as it were, who sometimes
come to the surface and, so they do say, will leave
their water-kin and celebrate the rites with mortals
and conform all ways to the pattern of mortals
and share the griefs of mortals, both as
to the comfortable things, as flesh with kindle
flesh and as to what they call their cyfraith
what a civilized party’ld call lex
and all seems festal in the
green valley and economically on the
up-tack too, for these naiads of Dyfed
bring dower of milch-cows and plough-bullocks
what’s more, so they do say. Till one fine day
the inadvertent iron contacts the fairy skin
and back goes water-bride to water-lord and
back goes water-kine to water-byre — and
that surprises all; and nothing left, but
the twin-fruit of vanished water-wife, mewling
for breasts that are not and a bewildered
mortal man moaning for those same breasts
and for his cattle-dower, groping his native
mists alone to bark his dreamer’s head on
the hard edge of fact.
These things, comrade, are said for an
allegory: as soft-smelted Belgic iron is
to water-bride, so is Roman steel
to Britanni, so is continental fact to
island dreams, so is the world-sun to
Thule mist, so are our shock formations
to their loose deployments.
But by assimilation most of all, we
conquer them, and by equation too,
comrade.
Their Sulis we can juxtapose with
Great Minerva, and see how dim she’ll
shine down the history-paths, how
bright the other.
Vagrant Nodens of the woods and tide
shall learn that gods must be
citizens — we’ll roof him and give him
a tessellated floor —
he’ll hardly know himself in bronze.
But leastways we’ll lend him permanence
and incise his name and he’ll enter
history — else he’ll be ever a
phantom groping the shifting time
before time began — for history itself
we bring — where’s record without
an alphabet and what’s a god without
an inscribed stone.
Briginda of the February fires will
cut a more substantial figure as
Dea Brigantia under the pontiff’s
patronage — the darling of the
Lucky Victrix, in her Minerva hat.
We’ll mix their Bride-lights with
the lights of Syriac god-bearers
and gusty flames they coax within
the wattle hedge shall call to
carried flame lit from Demeter’s
torch, that ministers in glad dalmatics
hold at the Lesser Eleusinia,
till, in the woof of time
there’ll be but one queen of the
candles, and, by whatever name
they call her — she too ’ill
be in Roman rig.
And where Braint flows to Menai sea,
in the last fastness, they hear of soothing
waters moved by Hygiea and fertile Egeria
of the Roman fountains and baptise themselves
in Roman waters and bear in their British
wombs Roman sons — that’s how history
weaves — for what is history but the
boast of Rome.
I wouldn’t be hard on ’em — after the steel
comes the softer wares, indeed before, to
soft ’em up a bit to make the steel’s work
more certain — corrupt their economies before
we break their wills — the peaceful penetration’s doing
well, there are some who say.
Once your Briton sees his drooped
moustache in a Corinthian mirror, sold
him by a Greek Massiliot, off they’ll
come. Once his women finger the baled
linens from Scythopolis,1 a length of tawny
silk from Cos,2 what’s a mere man to do?
What’s freedom, what’s autarchy, compared
with smooth Sidonian glass? Next his sons
’ll pawn their golden collars to buy a white
length of toga-cloth — and shear their milk-white necks of
golden locks and into the salvage bin goes the
striped war-coat and the madder sagulum.
Who’ld be an island hobbadehoy
in home-cut trews when the world-mode
can rig you out as flash as a Syro-Phoenician
jockey.3 Once cats freighted at Nisbis or striped
Hyrcanian ones4 that the wind
begets on a cat-mother, and Mauretanian
lions shipped from Alex, throw up
the British mud under the stretched velarium
that’s meant for sun but sagged and
limp in the prevailing soaker, rows
of damp Britons make Roman holiday
to pile the takings of a syndicate
co-terminus with ocean5 — once
these things are, the mission of empire
is accomplished.
It’s by such things as these that men are
weaned from their gods. Who wants heroes
on hill-sites or naiad lovers, once there’s
a tessellated bath in all the world-tenements
— frescoed with a naiad a piece if need be and
if it’s blood sacrifice you must have — you can
have it at the spectacles and go home comfortable with
all the emotions satisfied.
The rational light that lights the world-routine
will light their twisted labyrinth — and that too
will straighten its meander — square its native
curvature, reform its devious pattern and
stiffen to the world-death under the death-light
that lights every jack-ass docketted within
the world-wall. They do say that some of them
remembering the immortal Julius and properly
taken in by these same mercatores and the
rest of the sharks that go before the eagles
to fatten the spoil, as it were, already
cry across the straits: Redditor lucis aeternae
seeing the cock of Gaul strut so fine
in his Roman suit on his Roman roads
and crowing no more from his free
dunghill, but braying a Roman tune,
crooning a megalopolitan syncope
in a marble odeon is too much to be
resisted — well they’ll have the returning light
alright — enough an’ all, to blind them
to their chains — poor bleeders — then
they’ll be quits with me and you, comrade,
and walk with us the traverse of the wall
and watch the god die.
What then, susceptible Britannia, when
any tout from Miletus1 can unpack
his pretty wares by soft Thames run.
That will end their song, when
sandy-floored Sabrina breaks on
Illyrian keels,2 and narrow Nedd
between the mud flats — and even
the far sinuses of Rhôs
feel a flow across the ebb
know a new tide that floods all
tides — and the submerging suck
from far-out wash of galleys
laden.
When the flotillas white the tide
that washes tidal Isca and
Severn flood floods to
hendre-height with tides of
Empire.
and the aged ousel of Cilgwri
pipes beware
to fauna more agèd still
and from the rotted flora of heaped ages
the ancient antlers lift
and the grey hunched sleeper that never
moved his stance for flint-head flight
or flying bronze hoots to the oldest
carnivore of all
who saw the world-woods three times
change from acorn-shoot to lignite
bed, from whose weary pinions, the
last grey moultings fall to the secret
pool
and the primordial fish that was
before them all — long long before,
long anterior and long before again, before
the early whirling sticks caught
the worm of fire — much, far before,
far again
who kept slow amoeboid vigils on
world-bed, who heard the dumb
anáphoras from creatures crawling
world-slime,
who bears the barbed name of Icthus,
the king-salmon of Glevum,
with his fish-eye that saw the ages
die
tells the water-darks,
Beware!
and as quick light he
glides the water-paths, down, down deeps,
deep down by deep ulterior water-track
below, yes — far it is below again,
where, past where, the secret prison is, where
the lamenting trembles the waters
deep under world-floor, deep
beneath world-flow, to where
the captive ages wait
and all cry, beware!
Ichthus comes, all cry Ichthus comes
who knows all things — so old he is
who is by water and by slime
who knows the mutations and the silent
metamorphoses, who is by water and by
blood — who shines like the nine
darting choirs.
Transfixed and burdened with the fifty
spears he is, yet so quick he is and agile
as light when he turns in the dark tracks.
Ichthus of the three liaisons, who mirrors
in his saucer-eye the feathered things
and the things of fur when he breaks the
rippled filament of the water-sphere
to drink the atmosphere.
His solitary eye that slipped the first
fisher’s double-barb, has seen what the
falling feathers tell that tell what the owl
of the cwm was told by the stag of the
thousand winters, what the water-ousel
saw above the estuary-bar
on world-floor
where anthropos walks so proud — so young
he is — o yes, so young and late in time
he is, he thinks he can measure all things
that are before he was
the fledgling of earth-time so young
he is, he knows nothing, yes, yes, so young
he is, he has not yet learned to sit still.
And all cry: beware,
the most young of the youngest,
these come, more active
than any yet that have come, they borrow
from all and because of their ingenuity they
surpass all and they understand less than
any.
The new Arya treads world shoal
with gilt-pinioned creatures of the air
and the winged beast of Parthia,1 his
silvered jaws drinking the world-wind to
enlarge himself, held at rigid leash on
numbered and medallioned poles, by men in lion-pelts2
and these several,
whose directional movements pivot the
massed direction of the many
whose ribs the iron laminations brace,
— and all move as though one iron thorax
caged the even pulse of one organism,
whose iron cheek-guards cave the many
eyes fixed single-eyed on one immediate
mark.
And these many walk not as many
but as one out of the sea
their iron-shod feet toil the draining
shingle not as many feet but as
one man’s feet moving on
one articulation
heavy they are, and these many weights
are as one weight bearing on one
objective
and these some
red-combed like the cock’s bank like
the grey-dog1
and these many, for that dog-cry
patterns strict formations as if the
ordered pleiad deployed
earth-floor — so shine their surly
order does
and their related unities grid a
hard beauty from torrid Pharphar
et fluvii Damasci to fierce Ebro
flood
from Cyrene-shore to
the cool washed views of Rhôs
because comrade:
at the disembarkation point, the green-gilled
details fall in, as best they may on the shivering
markers, with a bawling optio barking
’em into some sort of shape
and at the usual command the sea-doused signifier
spitting out the briny, doubles to
his column station and
ports the sections draco and
she droops like a wet Monday
wash on an old mare’s prop — but now
for a cup full o’ wind she flaps a bit, but
now the bright jaws drink
and now
she bellies fine
to the breeze of Guenedota
and they see for the first time their destined
totem.1
So mate, their very signa we fetch for
them — let history weave but long
enough,
their special boasts down the dim
history-paths where the race-memories
fork and criss-cross, are boasts of our
begetting.
When the tumbled caer above Seiont2
sees the squared castellum pile,
and from the river-massif the
river-matres whisper:3
The race which is the pontifex
need find no ford
for all our westing flows, for any of
our easting daughters
that scour the primal beds
and score the tilted floors
that sweep the talus down and
mock the failing grey wackes
(that once had mocked all waters, so hard
they came from the ancient fires.)
All the bounding naiad-ways break their
frolics on the centred piles, cease their
laughing liberties at the piers, dance
to a stricter tune for the dark conduits
where the vaulted sluicers sewer and regulate.
Because the men with the groma4 align the
Via Helena5
from Kai’s fort to Maridunum,
because the Men of the Strider must walk
the via they’ll call the Julia
south and beyond Merlin’s burg, with culverts
for Towy, a field pontoon for Cowyn,
with a sapper’s quick span for little Cynin and the same
for twisting Tâf
with lashed fascines or a duck board
each for all the winding courses that
ambulate the virid ways, where the
subsidiary viae fork to the forward stations.
For all the gay eroders that lush the
draining valley-troughs to
Narberth, where the palas is
and by the dark boundary-stream:
where the prince who hunted, met
the Jack of Hunters
in the woof of grey
and the pale dogs from deep under earth-floor
lit the dim chase.1
Even at the confines
where this is that, that, perhaps, was this,
even there, where is the moving wall of
mist where was the pillared hall
because of the inversions and the transmogrifications
where the illusions bind and loose, where the
inadvertent word binds the word-looser
where every barrier shifts:
does the confine-stream define the upper
from the lower commote or is the Afon Cŷch
the Cocytus?
Is Cothi of the quick-set hedge sad
Acheron?
Does meandering Gwaun flow to the Gwyddel
Sea, or does she empty into that under-flood
where the eternal bargain holds Proserpine
from fall to crocus-time?
Where, they do say,
the singing birds1 yet sing the song the
ported weapons heard gripped still, for
the eight sweet decades in the stilled
grip of listening warriors
the song the tough spear-stocks heard
that faltered, at the ready.
The song that checked the hafted iron
at long point, that stayed the close-handed
upward jab, that withheld at middle drive
the maiming butt-stroke.2
The winged-spell of the creatures of
Rhiannon the Mother, that deflects the
arissed shaft-heads,
that holds back the socketted axes
from the blue-enamelled shields, from
the dear bodies anxious
behind shields, from the priced limbs
of the sweet sons.3
The song lifted weapons heard:
the long dark-tempered blades and the holed
hammers of polished felsite
lifted at the stroke that never fell
because of the song-spell.
The song the tendoned limbs heard and the
articulations of bone and corded sinew that
implement the weapons.
The song the fisted knuckles heard
that are taut and pale for pressure of
the white-hilted iron; that the jointed
fingers heard, pressed to the round
hilt-grips.4
The song the obliquely positioned bodies
heard, bent heavily to the anxious technics of
defence.
The song the fast-beating hearts heard
that drum within the crouched bodies,
of those who wait the zero-hour.
The song the faster drumming hearts
heard that beat within alert bodies
hunched at the weapon-vent.
The song that changed the hard eyes of the sons
that looked into the eyes of the other sons
across the enormous floor
that is the narrow space of yards that separates
the crouched and waiting sons
from the hunched and ready
other sons.
The spell-song that was heard when the
enormous floor contracted;
when the traversing flint-heads and the aligned
shafts measure to a nicety the place of
separation;
when the narrow yards narrow to that
shrunk space where the hard breathing is
of the entranced sons, begetting anguish
upon each other
and the sound is of the reaping blades
toiling for the dragon-crop
(for the swords of sons must garner at
furrows the father tilled).
And the sound of the rough-ground iron
of the brothers, reaping down the white
harvest of the brothers,
ceased for the song-spell.
And for eight decades, because
of the song of the birds of the Mother of Penances
the war stood still.
Because of the melody and the melodic
spell, because of the shrill harmonies
of the melodious birds.
Because of the spell that binds by reason of the unities when
the diverse throat-strings bind and loose the
creature of air
because of the sound-spell, because of
the clear-voiced song
because of the spells and the enchantments
because
this is the zone
here are the marches
where such things may be.
Yet even here,
where the mixed-men most mix this
magic, where the exchanges are:
if it can be palace queen into field-rodent1
is the wolf-cry from the grey stone the
spell-changed voice of the palace prince
under bondage of the beast-spell?
Are these fragrant limbs meadow-blossom
and is she very flesh or would her bright boughs
break, bent at the sink-drift, or rocking
the Dioscuri?
Is he lord of the sparse commotes or
lord of illusion? Do the leaning
gorsedd-stones rest heavy on the hill
or does the potent and exact circle draw
the elusive contours to itself
of the lights upon the mountain, which is
uncreate?
Is she unborn, is he begotten, or is
this of the eternal processions?
Ah! Gwlad y Hûy, and where the
lledritch binds and looses,2 even there,
where west-land slowly drains to west-sea
and hills like insubstantial vapours float
— is this by some dissolving word or
by straight erosion?
Are they Goidel marks for Pretani monolith
or do the mamau with the adze of night
incise the standing stones?1
Does the riding queen recede from the
pursuer or does the unbridled pursuit
recede from the still queen?2
In this place of questioning where
you must ask the question and the answer
questions you
where race sleeps on dreaming race and
under myth and over-myth, like the
leaf-layered forest floor are the uncertain
crust, which there has firm hold, but
here the mildewed tod-roots trip you at
the fungus-tread.
Here in Kemais, igneous and adamant
and high — there in Penfro, the high trees
are low under Manannan’s tide
where the Diesi foray who converse with incubi.3
Does the tufted coverlet drape the shifting
scree or do we tread the paleozoic
certainties?
Where, hard strata lean on leaning strata
harder yet, and with each greater hardness
the slow gradient falls, slowly falls to where
the basalts dark gull’s isle, beyond the fretted
knuckles of Pebidiog
where the brittle rim of the lithosphere
hangs and jutties between water-cloud
and water
where the last grey tokens are.
And does the tilted capstone,
do the triliths, move in a space of mist
or does the veiling mist recede and come again, now
closely wreathe and now disclose
the fixed positioned dolorites
that stone-drags dragged
from augite brighted dyke
for love of his sacred body?1
Where the magnate of the sea-roads is
in his red-daubed cist where silence is,
in his sea-slope chamber,2
where the narrow-skulled prospector lies, under
the ritual cup marks,
in the green valley’s narrow cup
where the resounding is of the baffled wave sound
and the screaming wave-birds tack for the
backing gale
— and does the stone mastaba cairn the
negotiator?
Does the false entry guard the mercator?
Does the holed-slat within the darkened
passage keep the dark Promotor?3
Or does it kennel the bitch hounds?
Are these the name-bearing stones of the
named-hounds of the Arya of Britain,
are they the night-yards of the dogs of the
Island — the rest kennels of the hog-quest?
Do they mark his froth-track and the wounds
of his brood from the foam at Porth Cleis
to the confluence at the boundary where
Wye stream wars with the tidal Severn
when the dog-cry and the shout of the
Arya shouting the hunt-cry fractured
the hollow sky-vault because of the
impetuous unison when the dog-throats of the
Arya were lifted as one.
When he doubled his tracks and doubled
again and stood and withstood in the
high hollow, where the first slaughter
was.
Was he over Preselau top and down where
the nymph pours out the Nevern
where the Arya waited with the boar-spears
and the second slaughter was.
And was it in the Teiff dun where he
sorrowed the foreign queen,
and where was he thence that no one
could tell?1
Is the Sumer director2 within the hewn circle
or is this the dark pent for the mottled
hill pack with the wall-eyed leader?
What is it that glints from the holed-stone?
Is it the collar of honour with the jeweled
thong that leashes the glistening hound of
the hunter-lord
or is it the dark signet of the
lord of barter — was world-gain the quarry
or the world-hog?
What of the grouped stones by alluvial
Towy?
Did they shelter the nurtured dogs of
the trained vénators
when the innate men of the equal
kindreds and the men of equal privilege,
and the men who wed the kin and feud with the
stranger,1
and the torque-wearing high-men on the named steeds
and the small elusive men from the bond-trevs
who, before the Arya was
knew the beast-way and the elusive tracks
of the Island, without whom the Arya
could not follow the questing beast,
because they knew the secret ways of the
island and the ingrained habits of the fauna
and the paths of the water-courses and the
fissures and the rock-strike, and the properties
of the flora before the Arya came,
and the ministering sons who cover the
father’s fires, whose charge is the bright see
under the piled ash, which is the life of
the people,2
and the hundred and twenties of oath-taking
riders,
who closely hedge
with a wattle of weapons,
the first of the equals
from the wattled palaces,
the lords
of calamitous jealousy,
and the fetter-locked riders and the faithless riders, the riders who receive the shaft-shock
instead of their lords
and the riders who slip the column
whose lords alone
receive the shafts,1
when the men of proud spirit and the men of mean spirit, the named and the unnamed of the Island and the dogs of the Island and the silent lords and the lords who shout and the laughing leaders with the familiar faces from the dear known-sites and the adjuvant stranger-lords, with aid for the hog-hunt from over the Sleeve,
and the wand-bearing lords that are kin to Fferyllt2 who learnt from the Sibyl the Change Date and the Turn of Time, the lords who ride after deep consideration and the lords whose inveterate habit is to ride, the riders who ride from interior compulsion and the riders who fear the narrow glances of the kindred.
Those who would stay for the dung-bailiff’s daughter and those who would ride though the shining matres, three by three, sought to stay them,3
The riders who would mount though the green wound unstitched and those who would leave their mounts in stall if the bite of a gad-fly could excuse them, when the Arya by father by mother, without bond, without foreign, without mean descent,4
and the lords from among the co-equals and the bond men of limited privilege whose insult price is unequal but whose limb price is equal, for all the disproportion as to comeliness and power, because the dignity belonging to the white limbs and innate in the shining members, annuls inequality of status and disallows distinctions of appearance,5
when the free and the bond and the mountain mares and the fettered horses and the four penny curs and the hounds of status in the wide jeweled collars
when all the shining Arya rode
with the diademed leader
who directs the toil
whose face is furrowed
with the weight of the enterprise
the lord of the conspicious scars whose visage is fouled with the hog-spittle whose cheeks are fretted with the grime of the hunt toil:
if his forehead is radiant
like the smooth hill in the lateral light,
it is corrugated
like the defences of the hill,
because of his care for the land
and for the men of the land.
If his eyes are narrowed for the stress of the hunt and because of the hog, they are moist for the ruin and for love of the recumbent bodies that strew the ruin.
If his embroidered habit is clearly from a palace wardrobe it is mired and rent and his bruised limbs gleam between the rents, by reason of the excessive fury of his riding when he rode the close thicket as though it were an open launde;
(indeed, was it he riding the forest-ride
or was the tangled forest riding?)
for the thorns and flowers of the forest and the bright elm-shoots and the twisted tanglewood of and stamen and stem clung and meshed him and starred him with variety
and the green tendrils gartered him and briary-loops galloon him, with splinter-spike and broken blossom twining his royal needlework
and ruby petal-points counter the
countless points of his wounds
and from his lifted cranium, where the priced tresses1 dragged
with sweat stray his straight furrows under the twisted diadem
to the numbered bones
of his scarred feet,
and from the saturated forelock
of his maned mare
to her streaming flanks
and in broken festoons for her quivering fetlocks,
he was decked in the flora
of the woodlands of Britain;
and like a stricken numen of the woods
he rode
with the trophies of the woods
upon him
who rode
for the healing of the woods
and because of the hog.
Like the breast of the cock-thrush that is torn in the hedge-war when bright on the native mottling the deeper mottle is, and the briar points cling and brighting the diversity of textures and crystal-bright on the delicate fret the clear dew drops gleam: so was his dappling and his dreadful variety
the speckled lord of the Priten1
in the twice-embroidered coat
the bleeding man-in-the-green
and if through the trellis of green
and between the rents of the needlework
the whiteness of his body shone,
so did his dark wounds glisten.
And if his eyes, from looking toward the hog-track and from considering the hog, turned to consider the men of the host, and the eyes of the men of the host met his eyes, it would be difficult to speak of so extreme a metamorphosis.
When they paused at the check
when they drew breath.
And the sweat of the men of the host and of the horses salted the dew on the forest-floor and the hard-breathing of the many men and the many creatures woke the many-voiced fauna-cry of the Great Forest2 and shook the silent flora.
And the extremity of anger
alternating with sorrow
on the furrowed faces
of the Arya
transmogrified the calm face of
the morning
as when the change-wind stirs
and the colours change in the boding thunder-calm
because this was the Day
of the Passion of the Men of Britain
when they hunted the Hog life for life.
When they paused at the check
when they drew breath
when they lost the scent
was the thing already as far as the Taff or
was it wasting the trevs of Teifi or had it
broke north and away oblique to the chase
was it through the virgin scrub back
beyond the Cothi, was the stench-track
blighting the Iscoed oaks
does the red spot pale on the high-boned cheeks
in Ceredigion because the cleft feet stamp
out the seed of fire, in the fire-back stone
split with the riving tusks in the white
dwellings
while they pause at the check
while they draw breath
to take the ford of Amman flow, to
ride the high track of the Amman hill-scent
to the find on the grit beds of the Vans1
(where the leader rested from toil).
And is his bed wide
is his bed deep on the folded strata,
is his bed long
where is his bed
and where have they
laid him from Buelt to Gower?2
Is the tump by Honddu
his tilted pillow
does the gritstone outcrop
incommode him?
does the deep syncline
sag beneath him?
Does his strat’d mattress
and his rug of shaly grey
ease for his royal dorsals
the caving under floor?
If his strong spine
rests on the bald heights,
where, would you say, his foot-chafer1 leans?
Are his wounded ankles
lapped by the ferric waters
that all through the night
hear the song
from the long night sheds of Ystalyfera
where the narrow-skulled Kaethion2
of lowest price and the Kaethion of mixed-breed,
labour the changing shifts for the
cosmocrats of the dark aeon.
Is the Usk a drain for his gleaming tears
when he weeps for the land
who dreams his bitter dreams
for the folk of the land
does Tawe clog for his sorrows
do the parallel dark-seam drainers
mingle his anguish-stream
with the scored-valleys’ titled refuse.
Does his freight of woe
flood easterly
on Sirhywi and Ebwy,
is it southly bourn
on double-Rhondda’s fall to Taff?
Is his royal anger ferriaged where
black-rimed Rhymni
soils her Marcher-banks3
Do the bells of St. Mellons
toll his dolour
are his sighs canalled where
the mountain ash
droops her bright head
for the black pall of Merthyr?
Do Afan and Ned west it away
does grimed Ogwr toss on a fouled ripple
his broken-heart flow
out to widening Hafren4
and does she, the Confluence-Queen
queenly bear on her spumy frock a
maimed king’s sleep-bane?
Do the long white hands,
would you think, of Ierne queans
unloose galloons
to let the black stray
web the wet death-wind
Does the wake-dole mingle the cormorant scream,
does the man-sidhe to fay-queen bemoan
the passage of a king’s griefs
(who drank the torrent-way?)
westing far
out to unchoosing Oceanus
Does the blind and shapeless creature of sea know the marking and indelible balm from flotsomed sewage and the seaped valley-waste?
Does the tide-beasts’ maw
drain down the princely tears
with the mullock’d slag-wash
of Special Areas?
Can the tumbling and gregarious porpoises,
does the aloof and infrequent seal
that suns his puckered back
and barks from Pirus’ rock,1
tell a drowned taeog’s2 dole-tally from a
Gwledig’s golden collar, refracted in Giltar-shoal?
Or is the dying gull
on her sea-hearse
that drifts the oily-bourne
to tomb at turn of tide
her own stricken cantor?
Or is it for the royal tokens
that with her drift
that the jagged morben echoes
and the hollows of yr ogof echo
Dirige, Dirigie?3
Does in-shore Dylan hear?
Whose son is he
and does no wave break under him
or is he each breaking crest
and what can he hear but his own
sullen death-wash — himself on
himself broken
and in chorus with him and as
for a wave-mate of theirs
the keening wave of Iwerddon,
and the wave of Manaw,
the world wave of the Armidd Island
and the glaucous wave of glass
from Orc-night and ice-feld
that four’ll heed no lant-king’s griefs
who grieves for the dying
water-boy.
But where’s that tribious conjuror
who is both steady steer-bord hand
and heaver of the keel-track,
tosser of the gunnel wash and
handy at the thorl-pin,
mercator, sky-plotter, wave-lord and
Lord of the wheat-waves
where’s Mannanan deep of counsel
whose council-chamber is the deep.
Is he to west?
Do his three shanks wheel the Leinster
brume,1 or is he on circuit
nording the whale-track, leagued
with the Gynt2
or is he homing, sudding the
quartz on the northland pontiff’s
western cure,3 or is he sounding
the narrows at fifty fathoms
where Dalriada whites to Kintyre,4
with a sidling incline, dipping
his tufas, does he gravely
asperge the southing seals, off
Larne5
or is he sud of the mull
and thudding his Bradda, or,
lolled asleep
not winking a limpid ripple
from Bride to Maughold, to bluff
the porphyry sills on his nomen-isle6
or, with a long snook for Halcyon
quit by his south-port,7 showing his back
to his Mary-holm
his paddy up
his greycoat on
him phantom daffled
brume-white
under the hurrying scud
on solstice-night
straight for the Wirral!
Wave is rough and
cold is wind
but
bright is candela1
God! he’ll not douce with
Deva-water their Plugin lights!2
nor brakish her well for
’Frida Hygiea3
nor blight his Mary-berries4 for
Caisar o Pen-y-Bal, neat and measured
are his leeks to the passus, whose squared,
kept plot looks on the twin estuaries5 —
he’ll not havoc those strigae!6
that’s no jest for a Lars of the
grain stalks, for a consort to dawn-riding
queens — or is he the moon’s mate?
He’s a fine one for craftsmen to
pray to!
Is that what he learns from his black
Schleswig gentes when he takes his three
legs aboard, easting to Gokstad7—
he’d better by half stay at home in
the West
(no wonder the Matres keep sons from
the sea-spell
small wonder the sisters weep
when the youngest-born brother sits long
on the aged mariner’s knee, and drops his
bright toy and bawls for a wet sea-shell
— that tender skin’ll harden on the splintered
thwarts — he’ll waste land yet for all
their beads.)
Or, is he teaming his sea-tithes for Trillo —
a giving and beneficent lord!1
or over the drowned lands
smiling placid for the death of Helig;
or does he cry Dylan’s woe where
down-coming Conwy, channeled
to left bank wars with moon-drag;
or three leagues west by north is
he rocking the puffins off Glannog2
will he try the fjord3 [MS torn, word missing] clincher-built
or circumambulate the world of
Mother Mona4 to wheat her furrows for
Camber’s mess.
Is he whiting the Maldraeth for the
Aberfraw queens
for Tegau to lave
her breasts of gold; to get his brine
in the Gwynedd milk that Madoc
the Voyager may drink his
wanderer-potion.
Or has he southed the reaching sleeve of narrow
Llín
and does he contrive a cancellus of spray at Ogof Dibyn5
for the kneeling thegns of Mair;
is he deeping the Camlas, or
is he come to Big Traeth1
to gusset green the jagged seam
of Eifon’s côte, racing the troughs
of Donatus for progenitor Cunedda
to rinse the Goidel stains from
the Tyrian pexa of Padarn the Wall
for Triphum the son of Ane the
Mother to wet his decurian boot
on his Combroges leg, for
Urbigena to gird his toga close
when he drags his sea-weir in his
wild Gwynodig diocese.2
Or,
is he white-fretting a foam-fringe
with his cirrous wavelets extra frilled,
and gloriously broad for the trailing hem of lovely
Mariania.
Is he seas-high over
Sarn Badrig, his back streamers
lavering Gwaelod — five fathoms
high-over the drowned caerau
(where Lyr has multiplied his holdings)
and speaking of Lear, where’s Nuada
where’s the Roarer, or was he
the Strider, or what, by his
shape-shifting name, is he properly
called?
They’re all shape-shifters — all a
changeling bunch of amphibious heirarchs
refracted in a misted prism
— there’s none stays put in their
changeing phantom sphere.
Is he their lord-director of the
cisterns with aboriginal
command of west approaches?
But whoever he is, where is he?
He’s busied under, far and deep
under.
Who’ll fetch him from his under-heights?
Where’s their wandering Ogma
he’s the next thing they can swim for
a fleet Mercury — let him be liaison.
He’ll neither come nor heed, he’s busied
under, piling his Spolia Opima, draping
with slippery sea-flora his scoured trophies
gained in his bice-dark terrain — there too
his fluxing war is total.
Call him as may be: Lodens of Lydney
Nodens the horned, the hunter of Dean,
with his Hafren salmon, his classical
Tritons, his Phoebus-tensa, rayed and
afire; Nudd the Generous, Ludd of
Fleet Stream, Good King Lud of
Londinium wharf, loving with a
loving brother1
(for romancer boy back by-the-fire
over his birthday fairy-Brut)
but,
Nuada he is
of west waters
a Wotan of deeps
a wolf-meeter, a hand loser
his heaving war-field swept by the
Westerlies
the barque of his god-head jackass-rigged
— he’s a sinister build from whatever
his slipway,
denominate him once for all
hand him a fish-spear, treble-barbed
and call him Poseidon, but,
remember
he’s half a Mars, if not Father Thunderer
gone for a sailor.
Not he will heed a land-king’s
grief-flow.
But what’s this Bright?
Who’s quit the wine-darks and the pseudo-deeps?
Who’s broke middle-sea?
Who’s braved the Pillars to drench her navel
in West-brine, to witch with a cast-eye
the axile star?
She’s left her dolphins for the spotted seal
— lets her doves and peacocks pine for
great-pinioned grey gulls and the
sea-lammergeyer.
She’s put on the northern diaphane —
to that brumous shift how well
she’s suited.
The West casts her his pluvial — that
damp drape makes ceaseless metamorphosis
the only constant.
West-gowned she looks her best.
From west-wardrobe her changes are for
each vagrant light and each becomes her
— not by dawdling Kalender — no
moping dowdy till the season’s turn,
nor yet a fore-noon drab and frilled
for afterwards — each day the same;
but, with any hour’s chance of
wind or flow her frock is new.
Who’ld not choose her lit by the
sea-candles
West-light’s best for escaping
contours; in the West we find and
lose as can none under the star-gaze
meridian-sun.
We saline his eye for Phoebus in
the West so that he smiles only through
his tears.
These rough rises of our western air
hurt him — but learn him
and learn him beauty too and
teach him less abrupt approach
and
what does he know of beauty who
does not know Thule
and the laddered lights that change
on Thule sea.1
Here’s a sea for beauty’s best
Here then’s the sea for White Gwener.2
She’s a mirror for her streamers.
Who gave her the mirror if not the
King of Pictland
to comb her streamers.
Did she stretch for his comb from
the white rock or did he give her
that too, along with the Pictish
lunula she wears for tiara
purled with the spray of the Isles?3
She’ll know a Trojan’s tear
Gwener will find the King’s grief-flow
she’ll bear it on her sea-Veronica
out to the glass tower where they sing
their West In Paradisums and the
corposants toss for the dying flax flames
and west-world glory in transit is.
But yet he sleeps:
do the stripped boughs grapple above the
troubled streams when he dream-fights
the nine-night fight with the hog in the wilderness
when the eighteen twilights
and the nine midnights
and the equal light of the nine mornings
were equally lit with the light of
the saviour’s fury and the dark
fires of the hog’s eye.1
When he moved in his fretful sleep did
the covering stone dislodge and roll to
Reynoldstone.
Are the clammy ferns
his nestling vallance,
does the buried rowan
ward him from evil, or
does he ward the tanglewood
and the denizens of the wood
are the stunted oaks his gnarled guard
or are their knarred limbs
strong with his sap?
Do the small black horses
grass on the hunch of his shoulders?
are the hills his couch
or is he the couchant hills?
Are the slumbering valleys
him in slumber
are the still undulations
the still limbs of him sleeping?
Is the configuration of the land
the furrowed body of the lord,
are the scarred ridges
his dented greaves
do the trickling gulleys
drain his hog-wounds?
Does the land wait the sleeping lord
or is the wasted land
that very lord who sleeps?
What was he called — was his
womb-name Cronus or had he
another — was he always the stern
Maristuran?
How did they ask for the wheat yield?
— was the nomen’s ending he or she?
What did he answer to, lord or ma’am,
was he breaker or creatrix?
At the other reaping before they sowed
the dragon’s teeth, what love word
wakened him?
Is he of the Arya after all or
was he the gentle lord?
Is that why he smiles behind his eyes and from
the mobile lines between chin and nostril
and does he make hares of them all
in his iron and bronze and his enameled
gilt —in his Arya rig?
Is his descent agnatic — or is
that tale too a woof he’s wrought to
hide his peculiarity — the divine old hoaxer?1
Will they bless him a font-cup at the
Turn of Time, will they call him the
lord of the chalice-hunt, who sleeps?
Is this the land where the sleeper sleeps,
the sleeper who shall wake, is he in
his island cave
does Briareus guard him yet,
are the single standing stones
divinities about him?
In this charged land of under-myth and
over-myth where lord rests on greater lord
and by lesser names the greater named are
called; where the inversions are and the high
anticlines are hid by newer valley ways.2
And the under-strike of the ultimate
folds — how does it run? What ageless
Mabon recollects, which long-winded Nestor knows the
axile line of the first of the sleepers? And
from what exertion was he fain to lie
down? And what commotion faulted him
through and through?
But in this place of myth on wonder-myth
in this place of questions — where the
deepest thing outcrops on the highest
hill where the gods are beneath and the
men are above
even here, where the known and the
unknown traffic together at the
ultimate tilt of Thule where the gods
of Thule rest by the ninth wave,
in the last cantrevs, at the brink of
the lithosphere…
… even here
the factual gromatici,1 peeish in
the hills-god’s driving piss, wipe their
tablets and plain-table the hill-god’s
undulations from the hill-god’s knob
and back to valley-quarters,
past the valley-trevs, — and see
the valley Fuzzywuzzies togged
antique like Hallstatt duces2
— arse over tip for the heads
an’ tails when they toss ’em Caesar’s
demes to see what magic
Caesar’s image work.
(whose clear superscription cuts
square and across the faltering Oghams).
Even here
the casual sappers stand
and watch the borrowed infantry
labour the pontoons
and the Corps Survey strike the
levels true — from the 200 line up
and along the last long gradient
down to Promontory Post
where the forward details contact
Coast Command.3
Who watch the nearing speck
become the scouting actuaria
that brings the blank report, but
brings from Manapia shoal4 the
tallest tale of all.
So we grid the green shadow-floor
whether of failing land or gaining
sea, and change our picquets at
the Ivory Gate1 and trim the fast
liburnae for service on West Styx
and test with flesh the word
to beyond world-ends
over the world-edge.
When calibans of Logia Sinus1
swear by Bron that tree-tops walk
the spume because the green troughs
hide all but the top-trees of our
cruising biremes pooping the
after swell and sea-watchers on
Mona tell that
boding corpse-lights hover
Cantref Manawyddan2
when the truth is that on the
factual and charted sea, from the
stern-post of our leading
quadrireme sways the light of
admiralty3 and a Middle-Sea
trierarcha checks his log under
his dipping sea-lantern as cosy
as if his bearing was on the
Ostia light or he was snug at
anchor behind the fifteen piers of
Puteoli mole — the Sibyl’s
desolate shoal, so near now,
easily forgot for growing pilots
and the gay stolas of the bund.4
So, near, or very very far — by Aenaria
straits, plumbed or piloted, or by the
vatic shallows back side Britannia, the mantic
spells give over once the factual
and material light that lights the
work-a-day and waking world, our world,
is ascendant. So let the agnosis work
by us the appointed channels.
Some see ghosts comrade but seldom
when the cooked udders are milky on
the dressed dish5 and the lamps are filled
and the friends congenial, some, they do say,
— there are some in Taprobane, they say, who
see turbaned boys clamber to the sun’s
eye on ropes as bolt straight as this
stick rises from this butt — there’s no end
to it, comrade — no end to it —
why, they say, that the Troy Games,1
what our Augustus did but late years
cause to be kept, is figured out, and
always has been, on west hills, by the remembered
disciplinae of migrated savages — such as Blondie
might yet be, had he not got bagged by
the Greek mercator, and so by one mischance
fell in with many fortunes and made into
a more or less civilized party, and so finds
himself at last in a nice billet — all because
he’s got a pair of lungs on him
and can blow his trumpet like a Brigantian
bull — he’s well out of that Honey Isle2
of his — they’re going to get a nasty
packet soonish, soonish, that is, as
soonish goes, when it’s the great long
labour of making the world-people, that
all may be one in us.
[sheet torn] we’ll see it before they’re
[sheet torn] — there’s no end to it comrade,
[sheet torn] and no beginning to the mysteries,
[sheet torn] — no end at all to the shape
of war, no end to the world enrollments, to
extend the war shapes, to police
the extended walls, no end and no cessation
to the rigid war-calls that makes ’em
jump to it, that break a man’s cosy
dreams. All, all, the total sum of all
the very baritus of naked Teutons is
ours now, for barrack liturgy, to keep
our peckers up when on west parapets
we mingle the blood built from the milk of
latin mothers with that blood which Teuton
paps were bared to nourish.
There’s no end to it, comrade, no end
to the world’s end. All our swords ring
in the heads of mothers, and the
world-mother knows the iron phallus whose
thrust is not to give life, but to reap down
the fragile womb-fruit like early barley,
green and beardless in the barley mow
that the world-mother weeps for.
Must be getting along comrade — we’d better
not be found together twice in one vigilia
or they’ll suspect we tell together the
beads of Comrade Spartacus — whom the
shades bless — I wonder how the dialectic
works beyond the Styx — or if White Iope
toes the party line, and blithe Helen and
the Dog, if the withering away is more
remarked than hereabouts.
Ah mate, so Iuppiter me succour — you can
watch the bugger flourish — more ’an more
and more — out to the world-ends — till the
world ends.
So long mate, so long old china,
dear friend — it’ld be a whoreson indeed
but for war-friends on the traverse
of the wall
who redeem each other on
the traverse of the wall.
So long comrade: roll on the guardhouse
fug, roll on relief and the guardhouse
snooze and the songs of known-site that
we sing together in all the guardhouses
of the world-walls.
Cripes comrade! Kind comrade smile,
smile comrade, smile! —there’ll
be no end to it comrade, no
end at all
no end to the Song
in all the guardhouses on
the world-walls
in all the traverses world-without-end
they’ll sing the womb songs and the
songs the father’s told, the songs of
origin, the real songs.
Maybe, comrade, maybe — but maybe no,
as like as bloody not. We’re listed
by numbers to drill by numbers as part
of a sum of numbers and we who are our
bleedin selves numbered and who do
all things as to numbers, balls up by numbers the orbis
bloody terrarum —
I’ll layne sing to numbers the numbered songs the
C.3’s file in hypocausted offices, graded by
cuthberts-in-curia as suitable to the throats
of auxilia.
O man, this is but a beginning — we, who
reckon we suffer so late in
urbs-time, who come late in time, when times
have gone to the bad, are but at the
initiation days of megalopolitan time —
Caesar is but a pallid prototype of what
shall be, and what is shall pale for what shall
come. Take a common instance, mate:
a laureate — supposing him well lined and
well primed, dined and well boosted,
can yet, with a cheek full of tongue, sing
in Praise of the World; but laureates shall
need two tongues and double-bandaged eyes,
and hemlock for the prescient faculties and
counter magic against the vengeance of
disgusted Muses, who shall presume to
sing in Praise of the World yet to be.
Our time is the Strider’s Time — and what’s
the Strider’s time but world-time and what’s
world-time but Caesar’s time. When Caesar’s
clock is wound it runs not down but
rather accelerates — fast and faster the wheels
go round, and more and more and more keep
time to that clock — till the Crixuses and
Oenomauses, the yous and mes at the
world-end, in the last millenniums, shall
think of us as living in an Age of Gold,
as almost human, as relatively free,
as children playing at empire.
What if the senate is Caesar as once was,
or Caesar the senate as now is, or by
some other name than Caesar, Caesar is, as
in times yet to be? If the dictatorship
is Caesar’s, the dictated are the people,
no less are the dictated the people if
the People make themselves Caesar and the
Dictatorship is of themselves — for still
they can but dictate their own deaths as
does our life-giving Caesar — no man,
— there’s no end to it nor no way out,
neither:
I’ll be off, China — I’ve gone —
can you hear them at the turn
of the wall — that’s his lovely voice
and all.
Sure mate, that’s his delectable word
of command on the wind that tells
the middle vigil’s term — or I’m as
plug-eared as suffraged Jupiter.
Ah! sweet mate — this Lord — this
Thunderer, this God the Father of Heaven,
did he lend ears when Turnus by
the Fury doped and gaffer Aeneas
egged on their common folk to
bleed for the warring bosses and
the spites of heaven’s radiant whores
— the Olympian syndicate is as all
syndicates — remote from all our cries
and like the gentry of the Boarium,
deaf on ferial days to all but the
venereal whim and deaf on transaction
days to all but gold.
Relief Details halt!
Fall out first file for this post
remainder, order arms.
Nothing to report?
Nothing, Sergeant — all correct, sergeant
bar-a-movement-out-beyond-
round by the Water Gate, a bit back.
Water Gate? What’s that to you? that’s Virgin Post area. You save your eyes for trouble where they’re detailed,
d’you reckon you’re tutelar deity of the whole of Salem City, Upper and Lower and extra-mural picquet as well? Not Water Gate nor Fish Gate, but from left of Old Gate to right of the Arx, Birket Post West inclusive, with y’r centre on Skull Hill, that’s your bit — left an’ right of Skull Hill
Skull Hill’s your lode
the tump without the wall.
Project an imaginary line from that tump, cutting Cheese Gulley back to this same block of silex where you now stand and you’ve got y’r median point of vision — now hold it, man, hold it.1
That’s how we keep
the walls of the world
by sector and sub sector,
by exact allocation, unit by unit,
man by man,
each man as mans the wall
is like each squared, dressed stone
fronting the wall but one way,
according to the run of the wall.
Square to front you’ll skin those goolies
and report on what’s within y’r arc of
fire
it’s whoresons like you who can’t keep those swivel eyes to front one short vigilia through as cancel and properly bitch all the world-plan
and keep that weapon
at the proper slope
when you’re receiving orders
from a principalis
on his way to promotion.
And report for optios reserve, on relief of guard. He wants two extra details at the Water Gate and seeing you’re so attracted to the Water Gate, why then, y’r duties, for once in y’r twenty years, may fit y’r desires. And where’s that other beauty?
where’s Castor for our Pollux?
Where’s Crixus?
On his beat, sergeant, along by the hoist. Optio’s strict orders, sergeant,
man at hoist stands fast at hoist.
Crixus!
Coming sergeant.
Nothing to report?
Nothing sergeant bar
a movement left of Water Gate Post.
Ho! So! — that’s how it is.
O admirable collaboration!
The celestial pair
see with one eye to-night
the synchronization perfect.
The eagle-eyes of
Caesar’s horse-marines
see through stones and all
at movements that are no concern of theirs
you can make number two
for optio’s reserve.
New Guard, take over.
Party!
Fall in behind you two —
Remainder, slope arms
in file to Quarters, march.
Mind that step
the leading file
this is the Procurator of Judea’s night relief
stepping the smooth-laid silex of the Wall
not the radiant Cymbeline’s
trousered Catuvellauni
having a cut at
the passus Romanus
pick ’em up in front!
Keep that regulation step…
on the narrow beat of the wall
this relief of all
and two of you detailed
and the least of you
for escort without the gate,
where the optio waits
his full complement.
And others of you to be detailed
(not on other fatigues)
for the spectacle
at the sixth hour.
And some of you to be detailed
in Supplementary Orders
not yet drafted
to furnish the speculatores1
those who handle the instruments
who are the instruments
to hang the five bright blossoms
on the Dreaming Tree
and to see
between the red embroidery and the thongs
his wrists whiter than the lily
and his proud ankles
between the dark hooks and the twisted hemp.
Perhaps as digger-mates, perhaps to carry the heavier picks,
perhaps the heavier maul, the steadying wedges
the securing cables
the necessary tackle
of purchase, of lift, of haul
of stay
against a Fall.
It is weighty impedimenta
that belongs to Laverna’s crux-gear
it’s no light-fatigue
you’re in for.
Perhaps, if you hang back behind the lanky Gaul, or make yourself scarce at the hand-out, you’ll get away with the lighter essentials:
the Four Hooks
of Danubian iron2
together with a few spares
in a wattled basket
shipped from Thames1
so light as any child
might carry up a hill
with briary gifts
for the hill-god
who from the iron briers
plucks flowers for all
so clinking light they are
to staple such a burdened bough
on world-orchard wall.
Or, if you can play old soldier really well
there are things they’re apt to be forgetting:
the dried reed from up-stream reaches,
with that creature of sea-sponge from tidal Syrtis,2
and the small crock
of permitted dope
that compassioning Rachels fetch
from Mercy Seats.3
When you survey the unredemptive cross
on which in such bewilderment
the unknown felon dies,
when you’re through, and the tackle’s piled
and the quincunx has divided the perquisites
and you’ve cleared with y’r butt-end
the regulation space
and the bastards make their cat-calls
from a safer distance
when they’ve told off the picquet
and it’s your turn
to stand alone under the meridian eye
between the Man Hanged
and the Joker
under the burning sky
between the tribal totem
and the tribe
beneath the implacable ray
that beats
where your scorching back-plates join
that beats
where the swarming flies
pattern black
the thirsting Yggdrasil,
when you sag at the slope
between the Anathema and the Common Will
you could do with a
stiff one then.
When you stand at the ready
and hold their ugly dials
at a pilum’s length
for sometimes the stouter
or more slippy
would trespass
the marked-out adytum1
(where the stripped mensa
is set up
and the lance
stands upright
in the drained cup)
would press you back
against the Thing
lifted up
within the space measured
per pedes et passus
from the centred stake.
When, within the demarking termini2
inside the forbidden orbis
where the predella’d rock-face flattens
beyond the cancelli
in the place
which is called
The Tumulus
you complete the routine.
Between the lifted princeps
and the gobs that ave his
erect sedelia.
Between the lifted fists that loose
the deft-aimed excrement
and the pinioned substitute —absque
macula1 — The Male of the Year
in his twined garland
(round the budding-calends pole2
they jape the manusmission-dance and bid
him thirsting drink who frees the
waters).
Between the stricken quarry and
the savaging pack
(and you by way of trade
a venator)
under the lopped aquila
when the flanks cave in
(and you posted signum-guard)
— that’s when you could do with
an extra tot.
Between the many eyes
that shift like eyes in rodent-masks
when scrutting feet swarm up from
world-cloaca
and the spilled beauty on the
flowering transom.
Between the many voices
and the voice that speaks
urbi et orbi
and you, de Urbe
— of the Urbs which is the Orbis.
And you, from Regio 2
below The Caelian3
and him, de caelis
and you, ab Urbe condita
and him, ante omnia saecula
but
him a miles and
you
a bloody miles too
that’s when you face about
and let that butt ring smartly and toward
the thing set up
that’s when you could stiff y’r
lifted arm and front with y’r mired
but open palm
the Tree of prodeunt trees
and cry with the best of them;
Ave Dux
O Crux, Ave
Ave Vexillum
with the Beati
under the gealgan heanne1
where, from his Corona Civica2
mantling the pierced thorax,
the fresh mottling drains the spined
dark wreath.
Where the five phalare shine
that tell the hard war
and on his wrists the hard-gained
armillae3
where the spoil of spoils
hangs to Jupiter
and the trophies are the conquered
himself to himself
on the windy tree.4
Under the Croes Naid5
you could sit and mourn with
them awhile who not in vain
their Tammuz mourn;1
with the Turan
for the New Maristuran
with Es Sit for her dead baal2
the Lar who dies when
the Sun runs between Taurus and
the Ram
between March-drought and sharp April
on a Venus Day.3
From where, behind the Composite façade, off the second quadrangle past the third invisible cordon, covered by the screened vent in the new oblique wall, far side the temporary barrier, close the convenient niche where the sentinel has dumped his shiny dark, tight-rolled paenula and the emergency buckets dress by the right,
without entablature
flush with the drab cement
the inconspicious door
beyond the spiked gate
past the tenth check-point
gives inward on a stair
that’s narrow
but of polished Lunic and ornate,1
From where beyond the antechambers, across the greater atrium through the double hangings
(check-point Minotaur
the whispered counter-sign for the day
is ‘Capri’)
within the most interior room, on the wide-bevelled marbled table the advices pile and the out going documents must wait his initials.
From where in the adapted wing the ply partitions cubicle the marble spaces and the utile fittings plug the gilt volutes and the night rota is tacked to the fluted pilaster.
From where in the corridored annexe the newly assembled parts and the convenient furnitures already need replacement, they sit the regulated hours in the conditioned air and enclose with each directing chit a root of Saturn’s Loathing,2 special spined, for every Jack man in the Urbs, throughout orbis.
From where a high administration deals in world-routine, down through the departmental meander
winding the necessities and accidents
the ball rolls slowly
but it rolls
and on it your name and number.
By how an inner cabinet plot the mappa mundi when key officials and security agents forward their over lapping but discrepant graphs
by whether the session
is called for after
or before, noon
by whether a hypocaust has fouled its flues
by how long the amphora is off the ice
by whether the prevailing wind
blows moderate from Trans-Tiber
or with a nasty edge,
straight up the Tiburtina
to nip his special buds on Esquiline
and really find his kidneys,
by whether there’s an ‘r’ in the month
by how the shuffled pack divides
by how her intuition works
by the celestial conjunctions
and the journeying stars
by which side he gets out of bed,
by a routine decree gone out from a central curia, re. Imperial
Provinces, East Command
by how a Legate’s executive
complies in detail
by the disposition of groups
and units of groups
by regimental strength,
by the personnel available to
the Orderly Officer for the week ending
Friday
to-morrow.
By your place on a sergeant’s roster
by where you stand in your section
by when you fall in
by if they check you from left or right
by a chance numbering off
by a corporal’s whim:
you will furnish
that Fatigue.
Partee — party, halt.
Party — stand fast men detailed —
re-mainder — steady!
Middle Watch — to quarters — Dismiss.
Sergeant; sergeant! — where’s the
sergeant of the guard.
He’s about cock if you can find him
under his medals.
What’s your excitement you jumping
Mercury — d’you want me or
holy Jupiter — or is it a
double issue you’re after.
Officer of the Watch, sergeant,
doing his rounds sergeant —out
’o season and on his lonesome
— dekkoed his lordly crest by the
Medium Donkey —no sergeant,
No — the Mark IV, below — and
he’s stepping on it — and — sergeant
— he wears that lean and thoughtful
look
— that much I saw in a signal-flare
put up far side Garden Gulley.
Christ knows — how should I know—
there’s always some whores’ sons
these moons. – pooping off at insubstanitated
numina. They can’t tell solitary and
wandering gods treading the winepress
in their girt stoles from autonomy-wallahs
who carve up the world with a Zealot’s knife.
Bar-abbas, Car-abbas, they’re all
sons of the Father and all out for trouble.
It’s the moon for trouble, sergeant. But you
ought to know that much sergeant –
Sergeant — closer — a word
Sergeant — a word between us —
a quiet word: we’re both from the Urbs, sergeant
— a word while the muse is on me.
Sergeant: you’re going stale with
y’r third German war — hereabouts
is the limes now — if you
can take that much from a
suckling private.
.… you want t’knock
about with the locals, sergeant — you
want to rub up with y’r prescience and
let y’r medals bide — and, as the
wise poet’ll say – for we live long
before his time — keep y’r metaphysics
at the stir.1
That’s all right, sergeant — now
don’t take on…
Company Office? The Clink?
And the vine-stick, I suppose?
Stopped pay? We’ve had no
pay this third,2 but what we’ve
lifted.
Wherefore sergeant
take a tip from y’r townee, by the
Sibyl now possessed.
Keep yr’ earholes very wide
and maybe you’ll hear, if distantly
twelve ambushed legions3
shout the barritus as one.
But when they lift up the
castra-gates, that’s when you’ll hear
them — those in the candid tunicas — luting4
for the harvested lamb his spondalium.
Keep y’r eyes skinned for the Man in
the Mock
like Grass of Troy that queens
meander gilt, taut of the loom-limbers
for the deft swift-shuttled blows
you’ll see
taut on the world-loom
brighting the mortised tree,
the radiant abb for the dark warp
the crimson fili in and out
woof the five medallions for his pallium
on the leaning lignum see
the spolia bloom
arbor axed from arbour-side
that now stript is more arrayed
more than in the sylvan ride
when, to pierce the green and
tangled Tenebrae
comes’ Apollo’s ray
see what sheen the lopped boughs
now lift high.
… fronde, flore, germine
They fall-out two men, sergeant
they unclasp the balteus and
hand m’gladius
back to the store-wallah.
They tug at m’focale
and now they’ve stripped me of
m’two phalarae
I gained beyond the Limes Raetia
and rooky Buccos laugh
like buggery
who never knew the urbs,
sergeant, who’d never seen our
first wave melt on his wire.
They unbind the just rods
and bare the glorious axes.
But what’s this dark stream?
Does Jordan’s saving bourn flood
to Danube-flow?
But I see a muddied stream
sergeant and I see the wooden
stanchions in the tawny silt.
— I’ve always loved the Urbs
sergeant — I’ve always loved
our mob.
But sergeant
the muse is shifted
and I’m Private two o – one
one three 00 Dacius
I’ll substitute no god in transit
and you’re a principalis with
a mile o’ ribbons
and here comes the fact-man
and here comes Venus Day’s first
grey
and this is the dawn for trouble.
Sir!
No sir, yes sir — Middle Watch relief sir,
just come off sir.
Yes sir
Well no sir, half an hour back, sir.
No sir, some from last levy
some, redrafted.
No sir, from all parts, sir.
In particular?
I see, and you, sergeant?
The Urbs, sir, — Regio IV, sir.
Fifteen years sir, come next October Games.1
October Games!
and whose games pray, are these?
Some Judy-show
to make the flowers grow?
The April mocked-man
crowned and cloaked
I suppose
going rustic are they
under y’r very nose
and you good Cockney bred
born well in sound of the wolf-cry
and with the Corona up, I see,
and of the First Grade.
Where won? or was it an issue, sergeant?
On the German limes, Sir.
And y’r bar?
On the German limes, Sir, North Sector.
And the two torques?
On the same limes, sir. South Sub-sector, sir, in front of Fosse
60, sir, the other…
Enough! — I’m not asking for back-filed awards or Press Communiques — no doubt the Acta gave you half a column on how plebian blood’s no bar to bravery — I know it all and backwards. But we’ll speak presently, you and I
but come. All this is good yet not quite good enough.
Distinctions can tarnish, like other things
and Sergeant so can you and I. Remember that, sergeant, always
remember it.
For now where’s this mixed bunch
of yours?
I have a word to say.
Yes, sir, very good, sir. Guard! Guard —
for inspection…
Cease man, cease!
A liturgy too late
is best not sung.
Stand them at ease
stand them easy
let each of you stand, each as you are
let these sleep on and take their rest
if any man can sleep to
equinoctial runes
and full-moon incantations.
You corporal, stand yourself easy.
You, whose face I seem to know
a good Samnite face.
Private what? Pontius what?
a rare name too, for trouble.
And you with the Etruscan look
05? Tullius is it?1
With a taste for the boards, eh? — we must remember that at the regimental binge.2 That lorica back to front and y’r bare backside becomes you well — extremely funny — and very like your noble ancestors.
But all of you stand
I have a word to say.
First, a routine word
a gloss on the book
and no more, a sergeant’s word — sergeant.
Men, when you are dismissed to quarters, it is to quarter-duties, not to Saturnalia. The regulation rest’s allowed, now get on to those kits, on to those brasses. D’you think that steel’s brought from Tolentum at some expense for you to let rust — and those back-rivets and under those frogs
but must I do a corporal’s nagging, shall I be scold like a second cook to pallid sluts beneath her, must I read out a rooky’s list of do’s and don’ts and speak of overlaps and where to buy metal polish. Are there no lance-jacks to demonstrate standing orders?
Does the legate need to do
what he delegates?
Must those with curial charge
be ever prying on a swarm of vicars
or nothing goes forwards?
Must tribunes bring gun-fire to centurions or else there’s no
parade?
But enough; analogies are wearisome and I could analogize to the end of time, my Transpadane grandma’s friend taught me the tricks, I’ld beat the rhetoric of Canutic conjurors and out-poet ovates from druid bangors far side the Gaulish strait. But I’ll be ‘forthright Roman’ as the saying goes, but seldom goes beyond the saying. Let’s fit our usage to the tag —for once.
The loricas of Caesar’s men
should shine like Caesar
back and front
whose thorax shines all ways
and to all quarters
to the world-ends
whether he face unstable Britain
or the weighty Persians.
So that all of them say:
Rome’s back is never turned.
But a word more: this chitty’s fire is built for section’s rations not for warming backsides. Is Jerusalem on Caucasus? Are your Roman loins so starved that Caledonian trews were best indented for? Should all the aunts on Palatine knit you Canusian comforts,1 or shall we skin the bear of Lebanon and mount the guard in muffs?
Come! leave that chatter and that witch-wife song, that charcoal can well tend itself; now do you attend your several duties.
Guard! Guard! — at ease! Guard!
No sergeant, no! not so anxious
I have yet a word to say
I have a more necessary word.
I would bring you to attention
not liturgically
but in actuality.
The legate has spoken of a misplaced objectivity. I trust a serving officer may know both how to be objective and judge the time and place. For me, the time is now and here the place.
You sergeant, you junior N.C.O.s,
my order was stand easy
men less at ease I’ve seldom seen.
It belongs to the virtue of rank to command. If I, by virtue of my rank, deem it prudent to command composure, then compose yourselves.
I have a word to say, to say to you as men and as a man speaking to men, but, and a necessary but, as a special sort of man speaking to a special sort of men at a recurring moment in urbs time.
Is this a hut on the Apennine where valley-gossips munch the chestnuts and croak Saturnian spells? Is this how guard-details stand by for duties who guard the world-utilities?
Old rhyme, no doubt makes beautiful
the older fantasies,
but leave the stuff
to the men in skirts
who beat the bounds
of small localities
all that’s done with
for the likes of us,
in Urbs, throughout orbis.
It’s not the brotherhood of the fields or the Lares of a remembered hearth, or the consecrated wands bending in the fertile light to transubstantiate for child-man the material vents and flows of nature into the breasts and milk of the goddess.
Suchlike bumpkin sacraments
are for the young-time
for the dream watches
now we serve contemporary fact.
It’s the world-bounds
we’re detailed to beat
to discipline the world-floor
to a common level
till everything presuming difference
and all the sweet remembered demarcations
wither
to the touch of us
and know the fact of empire.
Song? antique song
from known-site
spells, remembered from the breast?
No!
But Latin song, you’ll say, good song the fathers sang, the aboriginal and variant alliterations known to each small pagus.1
The remembered things of origins and stream-head, the things of
the beginnings, of our beginnings, of our own small beginnings.
The loved parts of that whole
which, when whole
subdued to wholeness
all the world.
These several streams, these local growths, all that belongs to the fields of Latium, to the Italic fatherland, surely, these things, these dear pieties, should be remembered?
It stands to reason, you’ll say, these things, deep things, integral to ourselves, make for efficiency, steady the reg’mental will, make the better men, the better soldiers, so the better friends of Caesar.
No, not so!
That pretty notion, too, must go.
Only the neurotic
look to their beginnings.
We are all men of now, and must strip, as the facts of now would have it. Step from the caul of fantasy even if it be the fantasy of sweet Italy.
Spurn if need be our mother’s wombs,
if memory of them,
or our sister’s paps
call up some embodiment
of early loyalty,
raise some signum
which, by a subconscious trick
softens the edge of our world-intention.
Now listen: soldiers, comrades and brothers, men of the Cohors
Italica,2 men of my command, guard details, I address you.
I’ve never been one for the vine-stick, I’ve never been a Sergeant-Major ‘Hand-Us-Another’ to any man. We can do without a Lucilius in this mob, but let there be no private Vibulenus neither.1
I would address as one soldier to others. I would speak as Caesar’s friend to Caesar’s friends. I would say my heart, for I am in like condemnation.
I too could weep
for these Saturnian Spells
and for the remembered things.
If you are Latins
so am I.
If the glowing charcoal draws your hearts to braziers far from
this parched Judean wall, does it not so draw my heart?
If the sour issue tot,2
hardly enough to wet the whistle,
yet calls up for each of you
some remembered fuller cup
from Luna Vats,
do not I too remember cups so filled
among companions
womb companions and sisters dear
the brews of known-site
and the vintage hymn,
within a white enclosure
our Side, Our Sea?
No dying Gaul
figures in the rucked circus sand
his far green valley
more clear than I figure
from this guardhouse door
a little porch below Albanus.
No grave Teuton of the Agrippian ala3 rides to death on stiffling marl-banks where malarial Jordan falls to the Dead Meer, thinking of broad salubrious Rhine, more tenderly than do I think of mudded Tiber.
And we’ve lesser streams than Tiber,
and more loved,
more loved because more known,
more known
because our mother’s wombs
were opened on their margins
and our sister’s shifts
laved in the upper pools
and pommelled snowy
on the launder banks.
These tributary streams we love so well make confluence with Tiber and so lose all identity and Tiber flows to Ostia and is lost in the indifferent sea.
But, Our Sea, you’ll say, still our sea — you raise the impatient shout, still the Roman Sea that bears up all the virtues of the Middle World, is tideless and constant bringing the norm, with out variation, to the several shores.
Bah! are you party members
doped with your own propaganda?
Or poet’s who must need weave dreams and yet more dreams, saleable dreams, to keep the duns from doorstep, or have you hearts as doting as those elder ministers who think the race of gods wear togas?
But you are soldiers
with no need for illusion,
for, willy-nilly
you must play the appointed part.
Listen! be silent!
you shall be silent
you shall understand
the horror of this thing.
Dear brothers, sweet men, Italian loves,
it may not be!
We speak of ends and not of origins when Tiber flows by Ostia. The place is ill-named for mouths receive to nourish bodies; but here the maw of the world sucks down all the variant sweets of Mother Italy and drains to world-sea the blessed differences: No longer the Veneti, no more Campanian, not the Samnite summer pipes nor the Apulian winter song, not the Use of Lanuvium nor the Etrusca disciplina, not Vetulonia of the iron fascis, not the Arya of Praeneste in the gold fibulas, nor any of the things of known-site …
our world-Maristuran
marshalls all to his world-sea.1
Bucinator Taranus, swilling his week’s pay with his Combrogean ’listing mates, tough Lugobelinos and the radiant Maponus1 (an outlandish trio to wear the Roman lorica), maudlin in their barrack-cups, remember some high hill-cymanfa2 and the valley tippling-bouts and cry:
No more in dear Orddwy
We drink the dear metheglin
or some such dolorous anamnesis.
Now we, for whom the Ordovician hills are yet outside the world (but shortly to be leveled to the world-plain) must think no more of our dear sites or brews of this dear pagus, or that known enclosure loved of Pales, lest thinking of our own, our bowels turn when we are commanded to storm the palisades of others and the world-plan be undone by plebian pity.
As wine of the country
sweet if drawn from wood
near to the living wood
that bore the grape
sours if taken far,
so can all virtue curdle in transit
so vice may be but virtue uprooted,
so is the honey root of known-site
bitter fruit for world-floor.
The cultural obsequies must be already sung before empire can masquerade a kind of life.
What? does Caesar mime?
are the world-boards his stage?
Do we his actors but mimic for a podium full of jeering gods what once was real?
That seems about the shape of it, O Great Autocrator, whose commission I hold, but hold it I do, over and above the sacramentum that binds us all.
What then?
Are we the ministers of death?
of life-in-death?
Do we but supervise the world-death
being dead ourselves,
long since?
Do we but organize the extension of death whose organisms withered with the old economies behind the living fences of the small localities?
Men of my command, guard-details of the Antonia, soldiers of Our Greater Europa, saviours of our world-hegemony, tiros or veterans whichever you be, I have called you brothers, and so you are, I am your elder brother, and I would speak and command fraternally.
Already I have said enough to strip me of my office, but comrades I did so from full heart, from a bursting heart and knowing your hearts …
but set the doors to
let’s stand within
and altogether
let’s shut out
the prying dawn
the dawn-wind carries far
I have things to say
not for the world-wind to bear away
but for your ears alone to hear.
I have spoken from a burning heart
I speak now more cold
(if even less advised)
within these guardhouse walls,
which do, here and for us,
enclose our home
and we one family of one gens
and I, the paterfamilias,
these standards, the penates
however shorn to satisfy
the desert taboos
of jealous baals.1
This chitty fire’s our paternal hearth, these fatigue-men, our sisters, busy with the pots, so then, within this sacred college we can speak sub rosa and the rose which seals our confidence is that red scar which shines on the limbs of each of us who have had contact with the fire of Caesar’s enemies; and if on some of us that sear burns, then on all, on you tiros no less than these veterani
for all are members
of the Strider’s body.
And if not of one hope
then of one necessity.
For we are all attested to one calling
not any more several, but one.
And one to what purpose?
and by what necessity?
See! I break this barrack bread, I drink with you this issue cup, I salute with you, these mutilated signa,1 I with you, have cried with all of us the ratifying formula:2 Idem in me.
So if the same oath serve,
why, let the same illusions fall away.
Let the gnosis of necessity infuse our hearts, for we have purged out the leaven of illusion.
If then, we are dead to nature,
yet, we live
to Caesar
from Caesar’s womb we issue
by a second birth.
Ah! Lucina!
what irradiance
can you bring
to this parturition?
What light brights this deliverance?
From darkness
to a greater dark
the issue is.
Sergeant, that shall serve, for now.
1 See Mass (Roman Rite) prayer: Suscipe Sancta Trinitas, in which the words ‘and of these’ refer to those saints whose relics lie under the particular altar stone at which the Mass is being said.
2 Ibid., Veni Sanctificator.
3 Ibid., canon, prayer: Quam Oblationem.
4 Ibid., the Anamnesis prayer immediately following the consecration.
5 Cf. for this passage Milton’s Nativity Ode.
1 Cf. St. John 13:23.
2 Though the reference is to Genesis 43:39, the form is associated with the memory of a relative who used to say ‘It’s always little Benjamin’s mess’ whenever favouritism was shown to a certain child.
3 Cf. Song of Songs 2:6.
4 Cf. Malory Book XX, ch.1.
5 Cf. Zechariah 13:6.
1 The district bordering on Galilee where Hellenistic culture flourished in ‘the ten cities’, particularly after Pompey the Great had freed them from Jewish control.
2 Cf. the accumulative song: I’ll Sing you One O
‘I’ll sing you twelve O:
Twelve for the Twelve apostles
Eleven for the eleven that went to heaven
Ten for the Ten Commandments’ etc.
1 It will be remembered that the commentators equate the ‘King of Tyre’, ‘the Cherub that covereth’ (Ezekiel 28:12–15) and also ‘the king of Babylon’, ‘the Son of the Morning’ (Isaiah 14:12) with Satan himself.
2 ‘Zadoc the priest’, familiar to us from a recurring phrase in a famous Old Testament passage, was the founder of the intruded Sadocite line of high priests from whom, some say, the Sadducees derived both their name and tradition. Their criterion was the earlier deposits and it is by these that their rejection of bodily resurrection, angelology, etc must be judged.
They adhered to the common Semitic belief in an underworld of darkness and silence (Sheol) and rejected the newer eschatological doctrines which, since the Maccabean revival, had gained credence under the auspices of their opponents, the Pharisees. In addition to this, as influential and wealthy men of affairs, they were inclined toward the manners and ideas of the dominating gentile class.
So the party most representative of the primitive racial conceptions was, paradoxically, the party most susceptible to the sophisticated rationalism of the contemporary cosmopolitan world. Politically they were objective and opposed to the popular aspirations which were inconsistent with the actualities of Caesar’s world-order. Caiaphas was of this school. The Rabbis, Shammai and Hillel, represented two school of Pharisaic thought, the latter being more liberal.
3 Cf. Leviticus 25.
4 Cf. the psalm, In Exitu Israel (A.V. ps. 215) ‘chrism’d Daphnis’ = David. How many of the so-called ‘Psalms of David’ are, in fact, attributable to him is a matter for specialists to discuss.
5 The Prophecy of Baruch, 2:17.
1 There were nine towns and wharves on the Lake of Tiberius. The Sea of Galilee was wharfage along much of its shore. Not perhaps a ‘built-up’ area but certainly not a remote and rural lake.
2 Cf. John 14:26–30. In the opinion of some writers that passage of St. John is puzzling because no shops would have been open during the Passover.
3 Luke 22:38.
1 John 13:6–9.
2 Malory, Book XIII, 7.
3 Cf. Matthew 26:37.
1 The Paschal Meal had to be over before two o’clock, A.M.
2 Cf. Ordinary of the Mass, concluding versicle: Ite missa est.
1 Cf. Zechariah 11:12.
1 Cf. Chaucer Balade ‘Hyd, Absolon, thy gilte tresses clere.’
2 Cf. Canticle of Canticles 5:2, 10, 15 and 16.
3 See John 6:71 (‘Judas the son of Simon Iscariot’).
1 Cf. Exodus 38–40 (A.V).
2 Cf. ‘Daniel the wise judge’ of the Phoenician texts, equated with Daniel of the O.T.
1 Jeremiah came from Anathoth (Jer. 1:1), the ‘ancient high-place’ ten miles north of the high place of Zion; he was of that priestly family which had been superseded by that of Zadoc from whom Caiaphas and the priests of his period theoretically derived some sort of supposed continuity of tradition.
1 There was peace between Jabin King of Hazor and the House of Heber the Kenite when Heber’s wife welcomed the defeated Sisera with the tribal pledges of security: salutation, drink, roof, blanket. Her murder of Sisera was committed under cloak of those tokens and in violation of an inter-tribal peace-pledge.
1 Vervactum was land to be plowed in the early spring after being left fallow the previous year or years. The mould boards were not fixed until the seed-ploughing at the autumnal equinox. Traditionally, at the ritual ploughing of city sites, the team was a white bull and a white heifer, the share was bronze.
2 ‘larking plough hand .… fasces’: As we read in Jeremiah 52:12–14, the captain of the king of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem with fire on the 10th day of the 5th month. Of an event many centuries later, the Mishna says that on the 9th day of the same month of Ab (August) in the year that brought Hadrian’s suppression of Bar-Kochba’s Judean revolt to a close, the ruins of Jerusalem were run over with the plough. The Rabbis and the Church Fathers dwelt on this event. Subsequently the notion became accepted that as a special mark of finality and indignity, the old city was ‘given over to the plough’. What occasioned this tradition was, most likely, the usual Latin ceremonial ploughing of the limits of the site at any city’s founding. Hadrian, called restitutor in so many provinces, had planned (and perhaps commenced) a new town on the site (in ruins since the Great Jewish War under Titus) before the rebellion occurred, to be called Colonia Aelia Capitolina, after his own family name (Aelius) and the Roman Jove.
We see that, as usual, the tradition has its own symbolic validity, though built upon a dramatized interpretation of events which (again as usual) were in themselves of a casual and routine kind, presenting no difficulties of a factual nature. But had the tradition been content with a scrupulously actual foundation, then again (and again as usual) the symbolic content would have lost nothing. That the Latin inauguration rites whether deriving from the Etruscans or from prehistoric pile-dwellers in the Po valley, should have been employed on this Semite holy place is both more significant as symbol and more credible as event than any supposed literal ploughing-up of a ruined city out of spite to a particular people. We are in the position, however, of having to keep in mind the traditional interpretation and the more likely actuality — for we are the inheritors of both.
1 Cf. Adolf Hitler’s aphorism: ‘the sword must gain what the plough must till’. Aaron’s rod that budded almonds together with the tables of the covenant and the pot of manna (both ‘came down from heaven’) was once kept in the Holy place where Yahve’s sacred fire burned, just as the shields and the palladium (which ‘fell from heaven’) were kept in the shrine of the Vestal fire in Rome (Cf. Heb. 9:4).
In the case of ritual ploughing, the furrow was called fossa and the turned soil murus to indicate that the future city had a ditch and wall from the first moment of its ceremonial. A passage in one of the Talmuds and in Jerome attributes the ploughing-up of the Temple site to ‘Rufus the Tyrant’, i.e. Tineius Rufus, Procurator under Hadrian.
2 Cf. the ‘province coins’ of Hadrian: ‘restitutor orbis terrarium’.
3 The stella consisted of two cross-rods set horizontally and at right angles to the iron uprights of the groma, the instrument used by the Roman surveyors.
1 Jerome, following Eusebius, says of Colonia Aelia Capitolina: ‘Aelia founded by Aelius Hadrianus, and in front of the gate that leads toward Bethlehem, a pig sculptured in marble signifying that the Jews are subject to the Roman power’ (Cf. Schurer, Vol II, p. 316 note).
The reader will remember Jerome’s reputed ill-temper; his stone that he used as a pillow (of which Pio Nono is supposed to have said that without it he would never have achieved canonization); his companionship with the lion; his sojourn in the neighborhood of Bethlehem (Ephrata); his devotion to the classics; his imagining, during an attack of fever, that Our Lord said to him, ‘You are not a Xtian, but a Ciceronian; your heart is where your treasure is’; his being flogged on this account, in his dream, by angels and his resolution to turn from his favourite authors, Virgil and Cicero; his being depicted by Dürer and other masters in the habit of a Cardinal and by Antonello da Messina in a large well-appointed scriptorium. It is necessary and inevitable that our Jerome-conception should be conditioned by the late interpretations of Western and Xtian artworks along with ‘the documents’ and the hard-lived and tormented existence of the actual man in alien Syria — necessary because meaningful within the tradition and inevitable because that tradition is part of ourselves.
1 Cf. Malachi 1:2 ‘in every place … a pure offering’, a prophecy often taken as applicable to the Mass as perpetuating ‘in every place’ the offering of Calvary.
2 The thicket from which Abraham’s ram was taken (Genesis XXII) is here associated with the Cedron Valley and the ram with our Lord. Moriah mountain, the place of Abraham’s sacrifice, was the east hill of Jerusalem on which the Temple afterwards stood. Cf. further: ‘In the Passion the Humanity not the Divinity is believed to have been crucified; therefore not Isaac but the ram was immolated’ (Faustus of Rhegium as quoted by De la Taille).
3 What was done by the offerant at the supper on Thursday evening placed him irrevocably ‘in the state of a victim’ and bound him to Friday’s events, so to say the ‘first movement’ of the Passion was already played before Judas had left Caiaphas to go to the arrest.
1 On the 14th day of the 1st month of the old Roman calendar (March), a man was ceremonially beaten and driven from the city. He represented the Mars (as agriculture God) of the past year and was called ‘The Old Mars’.
2 Cf. Mark 14:48.
3 Cf. Mark 26:53.
1 The allusion is to Lucius Aelius Lamia, nominated legate of Syria but never posted. The Syrian command included Legio X, Fretensis, stationed at Cyrrhus (the famous ‘Tenth’ of Caesar’s Kentish expedition); Legio VI, Ferrata at Pella near the sea-side town of Laodicea; Legio XII, Fulminata; and Legio III, Gallica. This last regiment may naturally be supposed to have some association with a Celtic land — the place of ‘druid groves’.
2 In charge of a unit’s clerical staff, a kind of Orderly Room sergeant.
3 Cf. The psalm Judica me said antiphonally by priest and server at the steps of the altar at the commencement of the Mass in the Roman rite: ‘Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause’.
4 Cf. John 19:3.
5 Perhaps ‘the scarlet cloak’ of Matthew and the ‘purple garment’ of Mark and John was the square of cloth available to the ranks as a mantle and called the sagum. The paludamentum was a more expansive kind of sagum reserved for high officers who as legates of Caesar wore his purple.
6 Cf. The Roman liturgy for Palm Sunday, at the Procession, the fourth antiphone: ‘The multitudes … with flowers and palms’.
1 Sol’s morn, Jove’s night, Venus-Day: i.e. the morning of (‘Palm’) Sunday (Dies Sol); the night of (‘Holy’) Thursday (Dies Jovis); and the dawn of (‘Good’) Friday (Dies Veneris) respectively.
1 The Classicum was the term used of that call sounded on the bucina to invoke certain assemblies in Rome and for military purposes in camp. The same instruments were used at the changes of the watch. They were the great curved trumpets which are familiar to us all in Roman art-works. Whether in fact a detachment of auxiliary stationed at Jerusalem would have employed bucinators, like legionaries at regular camp, I do not know.
2 Ferrentium in Etruria, Aulius was a common Etruscan name.
3 Oenomaus. The choice of this name and that of Crixus, as the names of the privates of the middle watch was not gratuitous. Oenomaus and Crixus were the names of two lieutenants of Spartacus in the slaves revolt of B.C. 73 and although my two privates are far from belonging to ‘The Party’ they tend, as do most disgruntled privates of all periods, to take a somewhat jaundiced view of the hierarchy of things. ‘I have two bug bears, the Church and the State’ tends to colour their reactions in contradistinction to NCOs and warrant ranks generically considered, whether among ourselves or in any similar megalopolitan epoch. Tacitus is very clear (in Annals, Book I) on the natural discontent of the ‘men’ and the ‘correct’ attitude of the centurions. It ‘passes the wit of man’ (all ideological theories not withstanding) to avoid the situation whereby the ‘rank and file’ as such detest those immediately put over them and at the same time harbour some notion that a square deal could be got from those more exalted above again. The ‘world-centurion’ is necessarily at once the most respected and the most loathed figure and in world state societies the ‘centurion’ whether military or civil is the key-man of such societies, but for whom for many differing reasons, both the humblest and the most inefficient, and the highest placed and most noble, have an instinctive antipathy, though they in the one case submit to (willy-nilly) and in the other case employ (also willy-nilly) the object of their scorn. This in no way affects the magnificent qualities the ‘world-centurions’ display at their thankless tasks.
1 Onager, the ‘donkey,’ a military engine, so called because of its powerful recoil. This happily chosen name has a familiar objectivity about it and is obviously of the same category as ‘rum-jar’ and ‘woolly bear’. Roman soldiers, no less than cockney ones, evidently showed a poetic accuracy when christening the devices of their trade.
2 A group of psalms (pss. 115–118 A.V.) is chanted as part of the Passover ritual. This is called The Hallel, ‘The Praise’.
3 ‘Weep for their dead baals’. To the Roman soldiers those rites of Jehovah which fell in the spring must have been confused with the numerous ‘spring festival’ rites of the other local baals. Pte. Oenomaus would have no more clear distinction as to the various Palestinian cults than has Pte. Jones of the various cults of India. He would think it all has to do with ‘the health of the land’, of ritual death and rising again – as indeed it was.
4 Who had the reputation of being among the most military of the western tribes. Their precise racial makeup appears to be uncertain. They have been described as an ‘inartistic people’ and ‘of Teutonic origin’, though of Celtic speech. With regard to this Island, they had established, before the advent of the Romans, a military and organizing ascendancy. Cymbeline and Caractacus were Belgic, as was Cassivellaunus, the opponent of Julius Caesar, a century earlier.
1 Durostorum in lower Moesia (station on Danube). See Frazer, vol. VI p. 309 et sq. St. Dasius martyred in 303 for refusing to play the part of Saturn at the Saturnalia at Durostorum.
1 The titles of the of the goddess Fortuna were many. Among the earliest shrines was that called ‘The Lucky Chance’ on the right bank of the Tiber outside and below the city.
1 Cf. Malory Book XIII cp.7.
1 Cf Rev. ch. XIII
1 See Frazer, G.B. Vol VI. The ‘scapegoat’ section is where is mentioned the ‘one-eyed and beardless man’ of the Persian spring festival who rode on a white mule and was permitted to run riot among the vendors and the exchange booths – and is cited along with the mock-king Carabas Cat (Alexandrian) mentioned in Philo in connection with the appointment of Herod Agrippa & compared by Frazer with the gospel account of the ‘mocking’ of the Passion and the respective part played by Jesus and Barabas. As Frazer himself justly admits, for the Xtian this identification of our Lord’s Passion with the folk festivals and the cult practices adds enormously to the significance of that Passion, to the fulfillment of the age-long drama. Types and shadows have their ending, for the newer rite is here. Indeed, that must admit, he says – to sum up by the author of the Summa – the whole significance of the Xtian claims with regard to all the cults, rites, intuitions and religious queries of the whole world – ‘barbarous’ as well as ‘civilized’. ‘Whom you ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you’ has been somewhat narrowly understood.
2 See passages in the Book of Zechariah, in particular ch. XI and notably verses 10 and 11 of that chapter.
3 This passage is dependent upon the Scapegoat section in Frazer and of course upon various passages of the O & N testaments.
1 gwledig, ruler of a land.
2 teulu the term used of the mounted body guard of Welsh chieftains. The word also means ‘family’, tribe, gens, it has always the connotation of kindred, of a chosen group, an ecclesia so to say, the few, rather than Tom, Dick and Harry. It is a warm word – suggestive of all that is opposite to proletariat.
3 Each legionary carried a stake or stakes with which to make the palisades of the encampment. It will be remembered that criminals were made to carry the stakes on which they were to be executed and that this was done in the case of Our Lord.
1 Cf. Tacitus, Annals, II.
2 Cf. Tacitus, Annals, II, 17.
1 The Ara Pacis Augustae was dedicated in A.D. 9 by order of the Senate to mark the peace which Augustus had brought to the world. It was built, very appropriately, on the Campus Martius. Among the reliefs on the outer walls was one of the Mother Goddess with the symbols of fruitfulness and tranquility. This relief embodies in plastic form the idea and the ideal of the Augustan & Roman pax, the fruitfulness of land and sea, of man and beast, which Roman arms would protect and order.
1 Three tetrachates only, because the fourth had become the Procuratorship of Judea.
1 Some early Xtian writer, the reference to which I have mislaid referred in these or similar terms to the auxiliary troops of Herod and Pilate. Dean Farrar in his Life of Christ refers also to the ‘vile praetorians’ and to the ‘scum’ if my memory is not mistaken. Perhaps for the same writers, in other connections, they would have been described as ‘a fine body of men’. Soldiers on police duty have always been unpopular.
1 The village near Jerusalem from which the Iscariot, Judas, derived his name. He was, as the Jewish Encyclopaedia points out, the only Judaean among the twelve.
2 Autricum, the Roman Chartres, where there is the tradition of a pre-Xtian shrine of the Mother of God.
3 The Gammadion (swastika) was employed by the Celts as by other peoples of the Indo-European group.
1 In the Jewish literature which grew up in the Christian centuries concerning Our Lord there is the theme that he was a magician (Cf. Celsus who says that he learned magic in Egypt). That he cut magical signs in His skin, and later deposits declare that He put a curse on all trees so that no tree could hang him – that he was eventually hanged on a cabbage tree. This latter is from the medieval Toledot Yeshu — ‘The Life of Jesus’. As the pre-Xtian apocryphal stories tended to gild refined gold so the anti-Xtian apocryphal stories tended to paint the lily a darker hue. Cf. The Jewish Encyclopedia under ‘The Jewish legends’ in a article on ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.
1 ‘It is usually believed – but not universally – that the earliest Latin poetry was scanned by stress, not by quantity; & that the principle of scansion by quantity was adopted from Greek poetry. There is evidence that the use of stress was never altogether abandoned.’ W.F. Jackson Knight, Vergil’s Troy, p. 17.
1 The Degeangli were a tribe which in Roman times occupied Flintshire. Cantref Tegeignl was still the district name in the Middle Ages. At Mold (in Tegeingl) early in the last century was found the great and exceedingly beautiful horse-peytrel (pectoral) now found in the British Museum. The beaver was hunted in Wales until the Middle Ages.
1 Scythopolis (Bethshan) in Batanaea, 20 miles S.E. of Nazareth, one of the towns of the Decapolis, an important centre of the linen industry.
2 Cos, famed for silk manufacture (yellow, as opposed to white from China).
3 Many Syro-Phonecians were to be found supplying the professional sport and entertainment markets of the Empire.
4 Nisbis on the Mesopotamian trade route. The district provided many of the leopards used in the games. Tigers from Hyrcania (Armenia) were sometimes obtained. There was a belief that all tigers were tigresses and that the wind was the male parent, because of the agility of these animals. The traffic from India came to Charax on the Persian Gulf, thence through Palmyra on the West.
5 To ‘make empire co-terminous with ocean’ was said to be the aim of Julius Ceasar.
1 Miletus had a name for disreputable traffic: sexual goods (olisbos, baubon).
2 Roman biremes were called Liburnae after the name of the light fast vessels of the Illyrian pirates. Subsequently the word was applied to any Roman naval ship. The Illyrian name, I imagine, conjured up for the Romans good sailors and sea-faring, just as the word ‘Devon’ does for us — a British man-of-war might easily have become known as a ‘Devonian’, and the engine-room of any ship might well be called ‘Scotland’.
1 The Draco standard was borrowed from the Parthians, under Trajan. The jaws were made of a rigid material and the body was a coloured silk bag which inflated in the wind in the form of a dragon.
2 ‘In place of the helmet they (the signiferi) wore a headdress made of lion skins .… the words of command were directed to them, being given to the general to the trumpeters …’ H. Stuart Jones, Companion to Roman History, 213). The title, number and battle hours of the unit were signified by those saucer-shaped discs characteristic of Roman standards.
1 It is true that ordinary legionary soldiers wore, in some periods, a helmet-crest, but I here mean the distinctive plume of the officers and the NCOs.
1 Glendora = Gwynedd = N. Wales. The destined totem is the Red Dragon. It is most probable that this emblem derived from the late-Roman military ensign called the Draco. It is known from Bede (Eccl. Hist. Ch XVI) that Roman insignia was adopted or retained by barbarians, so that it is only to be expected that semi-barbarous, semi-Roman leaders such as Cadwaladr should be found to be associated with a Roman signum. It has been suggested that the name of the flag came to be applied to the official or chief who employed it: hence ‘Pendragon’ as a rank name.
2 Whatever the relationship between Segontium, the name of the Roman military station, and the river Seiont, the native Y Gaer Saint yn Arfon, or Caer yn Arfon, Carnarvon, the fort in Arfon, remains the name of the site or sites. It is of some interest that the native word caer shoud have been retained to describe both the old hill-forts and the new military stations, so that today ‘Caer’ not only for the Welsh but for all of us, evokes the feeling of defence, no less than ‘dun’ or ‘burg’ or ‘gorod.’
3 From the main n.- s. mass of the Cambrian mountains rise many streams, the Pumlumon group is called, on this account ‘the Mother of Rivers’.
4 groma, an instrument for taking angles and measurements.
5 Via Helena. The Welsh call sections of the Roman road from n. to s. Wales the Sarn Elen, Helen’s Way or road. The name commemorates Helen, wife of Maximus. She is important in Welsh tradition.
Kai’s fort: Caergai, the Roman fort near Bala Lake. Maridunum, Carmarthen, seems to have been a tribal centre before the Romans built their castellum. Caer Fyrddin, the native form, means Merlin’s Fort. The ‘Via Julia’ is a name applied to some sections of road reputed to be Roman, but this naming seems to be an invention of antiquarians. Each of the small streams mentioned must have been crossed by Roman field companies and other detachments (if not by lesser military ways no longer traceable) to the routine relief of such forward posts as that at Castle Flemish; but the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain (edt. 1931) marks no Roman road south of Carmarthen.
1 Narberth has mythological and historical associations as an important site and we have such expressions as ‘at Narberth his own chief palace’ where ‘originated all honour’. Readers of the Mabinogion will recall how Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, met Arawn, Lord of the Underworld, hunting at the boundary-stream called Cuch (the river Cych at the modern Carms. – Cards. Border) and how the mortal prince and the King of Hades exchanged dominions and identities for one year, and how such transpositions and metamorphoses are typical of those tales. The immortal hunter, was, like John Peel, in ‘a coat of grey’.
1 The ‘Song of the birds of Rhiannon’ is a recurring theme. Rhiannon is queen and wife and mother. Her son is ‘Anxiety’ (Pryderi). ‘All beauty was as nothing compared to her beauty’, her mysterious quality whereby no pursuer could gain upon her, though her gait appeared to be tranquil and not in haste, her bondage in the ass’s collar, her acceptance of the abominable penance at the horse block, the vengeance-spell cast upon her at the marble fountain, her trials, her wisdom and her patience are famous, but her singing birds and the sweetness and efficacy of their songs are more famous. Battles ceased because the warriors became immobilized by the sound spell, but as a later Triad observes, that song is seldom heard. As infrequent, says the Triad, as wisdom from a Saxon, or largesse from a miser, is the sound of those birds.
2 I use the terms of bayonet-drill because they are the only terms of which we have experiental acquaintance and so the only ones with emotional validity; and also because of the geneology: spear-pike-bayonet. The sequence of movements in that drill may possibly disclose a very remote technique. In this connection it has been remarked how similar, for example, was the Roman arms drill to our own.
3 Shields decorated with blue enamel are listed and priced in the codes.
4 The Codes speak, in the pricing of articles, of swords with ‘white hilts’ and swords with ‘round hilts’.
1 Cf. Among the many transformations effected by magic: the changing of the women of the court into field-mice to destroy Manawyddan’s harvest, the turning of the sons Don into wolves and the fashioning of a girl from meadow-sweet, broom and oak blossom to provide a suitor’s house-wife for the youth, Llew of the Skilled Hand.
2 Gwlad y Hûd, Land of Enchantment lldritch, illusion. The expression hûd a lldritch, ‘enchantment and illusion’, is an often recurring one in the traditional literature whenever the magic processes are referred to.
The South West part of Wales was denominated Gwlad y hûd by tradition, and by the poets, and was particularly associated with the earlier mythology, much of which is common to Ireland and Wales – the myth of a purely ‘Celtic’ pantheon. We say ‘Celtic’, but, just as the grammarians tell us there is a marked pre-Celtic and non-Aryan influence in Welsh syntax, so, we doubt, there are non-Aryan, pre-Celtic elements in Welsh myth. It is the land of Pryderi and Rhiannon and Pwyli, of magicians and demi-gods – a world removed from the later struggles of the Dark Ages. Neither Saxon nor Roman are as yet in evidence.
It was into this world of the archaic tabus and the primitive magics that the later ‘Arthur’ stories infiltrated, but it seems likely that the Arthur-motif, in some form or another, may have been present from very remote times. There is, for instance, the suggestion that the Gaulish inscriptions commemorating an agricultural-deity, Artaius, (later on a war-god) and the female deity Artio (associated with a bear symbol) may connect with a bear-totem of a still earlier society; that many centuries later the name of an historical leader, Artorius (and centuries later again, the romances that gathered around that name) became associated with the immemorial, primeval, cult-figure or figures – at least with regard to the protector and saviour motifs, to the dying-and-living-again-deity concept.
1 The grouped strokes which form the characters of the Ogham alphabet are found incised on many stones in Wales. They are indicative of the Irish infiltrations and occupations and are assigned to the post-Roman period.
2 Cf. Rhiannon, Note 1, p. 98.
3 Cemais was an ancient division of Pembrokeshire. It included the high ground of the Presely Hills. Penfro was the lower land south of Milford Haven as far as Amroth, where the remains of a primeval forest have been identified under the shallows of Carmarthen Bay. From the middle Bronze Age onwards to sub-Roman times Irish raiders made settlements on the coastal parts of Wales, the Diesi of Meath being particularly associated with these activities in Pembrokeshire both during and after the Roman period.
1 This district of Pebidiog is remarkable for the large number of its megalithic funerary monuments. The stones of some of the cromlectian were quarried from the dolerite sills in their immediate vicinity. Dolerite rock can contain certain augite crystals. In his chapter on the megalithic world in The Age of Gods, Mr. Dawson has written ‘it is only in dying civilizations that men forget their dead’. It was because of the sacredness of bodies that this labour was expended.
2 The chambered-tombs were sometimes painted red on the interior surfaces. Examples occur in Spain, and red colouring material has been found in one such tomb in Wales.
3 The expression ‘narrow-skulled promoter’ may seem a contradiction in terms to those who are familiar with the theory that a broad-skulled race, christened the ‘prospectors’, was responsible for the diffusion of the megaliths. But as far as Wales is concerned, the evidence seems to show that a narrow-skulled type was responsible. The word ‘prospectors’, however, seems to have a poetic appropriateness with regard to the disseminators of that culture, for some sort of commercialism seems to have been bound up with it, and like the ‘prospectors’ of more recent and more ramshackle ‘cultures’, this solerian burial-culture was semi-global in extent, and tended to be maritime. In Wales the monuments are more often on the lower slopes near the sea, rather than actually on the highest headlands.
1 At Aberteify (Cardigan) the boar killed the ‘King of France’.
2 The company Promoter from the Persian Gulf (See Note 3, p. 102).
1 There occur in the next half dozen pages some ideas and a few terms derived from the Welsh Laws of the early middle-ages; based, although they necessarily are, in the main of that period they do in some respects reflect a far earlier society, the society of a Celtic antiquity, pre-Christian and pre-Roman. What was envisaged at the late date of the codification was still ‘an aggregation of kins’. All rights derived from the blood-ties and a common ancestry. The bulk of the people are envisaged as free born men of equal status. These were the ‘co-proprietors’ of full privilege. (Prof. Lloyd has illuminated one use of the vexed word ‘Cymry’ in suggesting that it may well have meant ‘the co-proprietors’ before it was used to describe a race, or was employed in its now usually accepted sense of ‘comrades’.) These freemen were termed ‘the innate of gentlemen’. The Codes know of no ‘nobility’ in any way separated from these free tribesmen, but the ‘high-men’ and the ‘lords’ and ‘kings’, together with some officials, had dignities and ‘worths’ attaching to them in virtue of their various functions. The remainder of the nation were ‘unfree’ men who had a limited but real participation in this society of ‘co-propriators’. The conception of freedom was ‘freedom to move at will’ and this freedom was withheld from the numerically smaller class. They were, it is supposed, largely of that aboriginal stock which the Celtic Arya had conquered. ‘Bond-trev’ refers to the grouped dwellings of these men (tref = dwelling). Beneath these again were a certain number of persons who, either as captives or for some other reason had lost all rights and might be the property of either ‘free’ or ‘unfree’ tribesmen. They were termed caethin (slaves).
2 To the eldest son belonged the privilege of ‘uncovering’ the household fire when the head of the household was dead. He did so ritually and as minister to the hearth-spirits of his ancestors, in accordance with common Indo-Germanic practice with regard to kin and place and continuity.
1 The teulu (house-host), the war-band of the leaders and the petty kings traditionally consisted of 120 horsemen vowed to protect their lord and supported and maintained by him.
The Triad of ‘The Three Fettered War-Bands’ describes how one war-band tied the fetter locks of their horses to their own ankles making flight from battle impossible. The Triad of ‘The Three Faithless War-Bands’ describes how among the men of one war-band no one at all could be found who would stand substitute for their lord and receive in his place the accurate darts of his special enemy; and how the entire personnel of two other war-bands deserted their leaders on the road to battle.
2 Fferyllt = Vergil. The medieval conception of that poet as a magician was so dominant that in the Middle Ages fferyllt is the word for any alchemist and in Modern Welsh the word for chemist is still fferyllydd; so Hughes, Cash Chemist, is ‘a vergil’ even if his female assistant is far from being a Sibli. It will be recalled how Ceridren in the Taliesin story concocted her cauldron ‘according to the art of the books of Virgil (Fferyllt)’.
3 The maer biswail, ‘the dung bailiff’, was a contemptuous term to distinguish the unfree maer or bailiff who supervised the menial work from the Maer of the Cantref, an important executive figure.
4 ‘by father.… Descent’ is a translation given by T.P. Ellis in Welsh Tribal Law and Custom, from the Dimetian Code, describing the legal ideal of free tribesman.
5 The Codes say: ‘The limbs of all persons are of equal worth whether of king or villein’. As in the Jus Gentium of all Western Europe, status determined ‘insult-price’ and ‘blood debt’. but in apparent divergence from this general rule, the Welsh Codes allowed no variation of status to influence the ‘limb-price’. This conception of a common dignity due to the organs, limbs and ornaments of the human body is a unique character of these codes, whether or not it reflects a primitive conception, or is a modification peculiar to Wales in post-Christian times.
1 In the codes the locks over the brow were priced higher than any other. The several bones in the hands and feet were severally priced.
1 I chose this word on the following account: from the 4th century B.C. until the time of Caesar geographers called these Islands the Pretanic Isles, implying Pretani for the inhabitants. This word can be identified with an early native form, i.e. Priten, and it is supposed that the letter writers in using the word Picti of the northern inhabitants were only translating into late Latin this native word for ‘painted’ or ‘speckled’ by which originally the men of the whole island were known. The authorities say that Pretani cannot be equated with the familiar Britanni. The latter was the name of a people on the continental shore of the Straits, and this, or rather a kindred people, had invaded the insular shore and conquered part of the Island during the century before Caesar’s expeditions.
It is because of this westward drive of these Britanni – the last westward expansion of a Celtic-speaking Arya – that today Mr. Churchill is a Briton and not a Pict and Britannia rules Pretania’s waves. The Welsh, who owe their language (and so much besides) to the successive waves of conquering Galatae, have nevertheless retained in that language the older forms: they still call this island, Ynys Prydain – the Pictish Isle, i.e. the Pretanic Isle of Ptolemy and Diodorus of Sicily and all the world before Rome set the fashion of ‘Britannia’. Some scholars have observed that a similar Roman inaccuracy makes us still call Hellenes, ‘Greeks’.
2 Fforest Fawr (Great Forest) is the district name for a tract which includes the country between the upper Tawe and the upper Usk and which separates the two groups of Black mountains.
1 ‘The Carmarthenshire Vans’ – Fan Fawr, Fan Llia, etc, the height of the Carms – Brecon boundary district. This whole district is called Fforest Fawr, Great Forest.
2 Gwely Arthur, Arthur’s Bed, is associated with this same Brycheiniog district, but I have associated it with a whole cross-section of South Wales, with the Twrch Hunt and with the general theme of the long sleep of the Arthur-types and with Plutarch’s story of how Cronus sleeps in Britain and with later adaptations of the same or similar themes in historic times (cf. Owen of the Red Hand, Glyn Dwr, Richard II, Frederick Barbarossa, Achilles etc.) all the ‘heroes who shall come again’ from their secret places to restore the land and the people of the land. There is the further conception of the hidden saviour becoming as it were the genius loci of a district, and a further identification of the actual land with the presiding genius. In the Cantref of Buelt there rests another Arthur-type: somewhere near Builth Wells lies the body of the last representative of the Brythonic Arya to rule as a princeps; the exact site is, very characteristically, mountain; though local traditions and later writers have pretended to some exactitude and have embroidered the sparse certainties.
1 The office of the foot holder was to hold in his lap and keep warm the king’s feet when he sat at meal in the hall and to keep the king from mishap during the mead-drinking.
2 As noted above, Caeth equals slave (c = k). A native slave was priced lower than a foreign one because theoretically all men ‘of the Island of the mighty’ were free from bondage, except through their own fault.
3 The river Rhymni divided Cantref Breinol from Cantref Gwynllwg; it now, in part divides Glamorgan from Monmothshire.
4 The Bristol Channel.
1 Pirus Insula or Ynys Pyr, Caldy Island.
2 Taeog = villein, a man bound to a district, a semi-free labourer.
3 First Antiphon at Matins for the Dead, Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectus tuo viam meam.
1 In Ireland, the three-legged man of Man was said to cart-wheel in the mists of Leinster.
2 The Gynt (gentes) was the Welsh term for the northern peoples.
3 This is an association arising from the later Norwegian ecclesiastical jurisdiction over ‘Soder and Man’ which was, in a way, a fading symbol of the various pervasions and influences of the Nordic Sea peoples over all the western sea fringes.
4 Dalriada was the name for the parts of Ulster opposite the coast of Kintyre. The North Channel registers there a depth of 50 fathoms.
5 The arctic seals pass through this channel to their breeding grounds further south; for instance to Lambay off Dublin.
6 Bradda Head of the west coast. Maughold Head on the east coast of the Isle of Man.
7 Mary Port on the south coast of the Isle of Man.
1 This is a borrowing from an early Irish tale, where it occurs as thrice separated exclamations and nouns, I think, as follows: ‘Wave is rough’, ‘wind is cold’, ‘candle is bright’. I regret that I have no further, or more precise, recollection of the source.
2 ‘Plugin’ is one anglicized version of plygain (matins or cockcrow). The association here is with that matins service held from the small hours until daybreak on Dec. 25th. It was characterized by the many candles and the singing. The light and song of ‘the Plygains’ were still a memory in the Holywell district until the sixties of the last century. This practice may be traceable to the lingering memories of the Midnight Mass of Christmas. It also suggests a continuation of the deep and ancient Northern feeling with regard to the solstice.
3 Winefrida of the thaumaturgy and therapeutic well at Holywell.
4 In Wales the gooseberry is associated with Our Lady. It is called eirinen Fair, Mary’s berry.
5 Caisar O = Caesar of. Pen-y-Bal is a hill above Holywell. The association of the Imperial Roman name with that particular Welsh hill and with a certain neatly kept garden plot on that hill (from which the Wirral and the estuaries of the Mersey and the Dee can be seen) is not fortuitous nor fanciful, but strictly factual, though the occasion which fixed that association in the mind of the writer is personal and of too complex a nature to be dealt with satisfactorily in a brief note.
6 The striga was a Roman measure of land. Cf. the term: divisio per scamna et strigas, used in reference to one method of dividing land. The striga ran latitudinally, as did the diminutive plot on the Flintshire hill.
7 Here the reference is to those aspects of Manawyddan specifically associated with seafaring, which in turn inevitably involves the further association with the mercantile and nautical genius of the northern peoples. ‘Gokstad’, because of the ‘Gokstad boat’, the well-known archeological find of the Viking age.
1 The sea-weir in Rhôs contributed a fish-tithe to St. Trillo’s priests until recent years.
2 Conway Bay has, like so many other western waters, a tradition of submerged lands. Here the buried habitations are associated with the name of Helig. It used to be said in the Conway district that the noise of the meeting of river and tide was the cry of the dying water god, Dylan. Glannog is Ynys Seiriol, known to tourists and others as ‘Puffin Island’.
3 The ‘angle’ in Anglesey derives from the Norse, Öngull, a fjord. [Jones adds in the margin: ‘Ongul, a Viking proper name’]; it is the Island of the Strait or fjord, not, as William of Malmesbury supposed, the ‘Island of the English’. This makes historical sense and shows that Ynys Fon, as with Ynys Pyr (Caldey) and Ynys Weir (Lundy) received its latter name from the Vikings, as one would suppose. It has always been a mystery to me why Anglesey of all places should be associated with the English who, except for a very brief interlude, never controlled it, until the end of the 13th century.
4 Anglesey was known as Môn fam Cymru, ‘Mona the Mother of Wales’, on account, it is supposed, of the corn grown on the island. We have already noted the association of the sea god Manawyddan with the soil. The great fabulist, Geoffrey of Monmouth, in order to provide suitable founders for England, Scotland and Wales respectively, names as the sons of Brute: Locrine, Albanact, and Camber. Camber, no more than the other two, has any place in the earlier mythology. He is, I suppose, a literary invention of the Angevin age. Geoffrey was trying to provide an Aeneid for Henry of Anjou’s empire. We can, however, at this date afford to utilize his inventions, for he himself has become part of our deposits. (Incidentally what a tragedy it was for Britain as a whole that the Angevin hegemony ever disintegrated. For had it continued the unity between these islands and French civilization would have been assured.)
5 Ogof Dibyn (Deep Cave) on Ynys Enlli (Bardsey). This island was a place of intense religious life. From a remote period its caves (Ogof = cave) were the habitation of dedicated men in Christian and, it is presumed, in pre-Christian times. Called by the poets, ‘the beauteous isle of Mary’ (Mair).
1 Traeth Fawr. The triangular lowland that stretches to the sea between the Merioneth and Carnarvonshire mountains.
2 When Cunedda son of Eternus, during Stilicho’s military reorganization of the Province (c. 398) moved with his foederati from a district near the Antonine Wall in Lothian and expelled the ‘Irish’ from North Wales and founded a dynasty (which continued as the ruling Welsh line for nine centuries), his several sons took over the newly settled land, and Donatus was allotted this district called Dunoding, later in parts Eifionydd after Eifion his son. Marianus gave his name to Mariana (Merionethshire), and Romanus to Romaniaca (Rhufoniog). Thus do the Celtic forms mix with Latin ones. Cunedda’s grandfather Paternus (Padarn) is known to tradition as Padarn Beisnidd, ‘Padarn of the Red Pexa’, on account, it is reasonably supposed, of his official Roman position. Sometimes the title is transferred to Cunedda. ‘Triphun’ and ‘Urbigena’ are proper names derived from ‘tribune’ and ‘city born’. We find Urbigena hidden in the Celtic form Urbgen and Urien – the ‘King Uriens’ of Romance.
The Welsh genealogies, though tracing the Imperial descent, also give another clue – where they include on the female side Anna the cousin of Our Lady, in reality, perhaps, Ane the Celtic Mother Goddess.
1 The god Nodens whose Romano-British shrine at Lydney on the Severn is so well known, is equated with the Irish Nuada (of the Silver hand). Lludd (of the story of Lludd and Llevelys) and Nudd are variants of the same god. Rhys mentions also the form Lodens; we are all familiar with him as over-mythof Ludgate. He is of many aspects, sometimes appearing to be a Mars and sometimes a Neptune. He is compared to the Norse Tŷr and with Wotan and Zeus himself.
1 I use the word Thule here and elsewhere to denote the lands and isles of the Western sea, not in the accurate and precise sense of the Shetland Islands.
2 Venus.
3 It will be remembered that among the earliest incised stones in Scotland, about which there is some debate, the symbols found include the mirror, the comb and the crescent. (See introductory text to the Ordnance Survey’s Map of Britain in the Dark Ages, North Sheet.)
1 Arthur fought the beast in single combat for nine days and nine nights in the ‘Irish Wilderness’ – neither combatant gained the advantage.
1 The emphasis on the agnatic principle of descent is usually associated more with Aryan Celts than with the non-Aryan ‘aborigines’. Though the well-known instances of Queens among the Celts of Britain (Boudicca and Cartimandia) seem to suggest that they were not averse to feminine rule. Nothing of this sort occurs at all in late Welsh history. In no instance did a queen reign, and as we all know the tables of descent were always exclusively of the male’s line. But for that matter so were the tables of some non-Aryan peoples; cf. the genealogical table of Our Lord in Luke 3, regardless of the theological fact that a legal, and not a blood, connection made him Joseph’s son.
2 E.g. the valleys of the Towy and the Teify both in part contradict the under-structure, which is anticlinal.
1 Roman surveyors, i.e. the men who used the groma.
2 A Roman soldier serving in Wales at the time of the Conquest would find vestigial evidence of that technique and aesthetic for which the Iron Age Celts are now praised.
Exactly three centuries earlier, other Roman soldiers had seen the continental splendour of those techniques at the battle of Clastidium, and that ‘third trophy’, the Spolia Opima which the great Marcellus won, was the accoutrement, though not of a ‘Hallstatt dux’ at least of a La Tene one. The successive forms of the prehistoric cultures were late and incomplete in infiltrating the valleys of Wales, only to be superceded by or fused with the products of classical derivation which everywhere followed the flag.
3 I was thinking of the road called the Fford Fleming which runs from the river Cych and follows the line of the Presely Hills and drops down towards St. Davids. It used to have the reputation of being of Roman origin (but see note 5 to page 96). St David’s Head was called by the Romans the Octapitarum Promontorium.
4 According to early geographers, the Manapii occupied the Irish coast nearest to the extremity of South Wales, the parts around Wexford.
1 Cf. Vergil’s ivory gate ‘where the Manes send delusive dreams’. (Aeneid, Bk. VI).
1 Belfast Loch.
2 The ‘corpse candle’ is a phenomenon which foretells death. It is common to all parts of Wales. Belief in such lights survived into this century. Manannan being a sea god, the sea can be called his cantref, his hundred.
3 The admiral’s light on the flag-ship of a Roman squadron hung from the decorated aplustre which curved inwards far over the after deck.
4 The port and base of Puteoli a few miles from Naples had a harbour mole of fifteen piers to check the triennia storms. Just north of the bay, round the headland, lay the sibyl’s shore, past the Island of Aenaria, the Ischia of our present communiqués (1 Sept. 1943).
5 Cooked udders. Cf. Martial, Epigrams, Bk XIII, 44.
1 The Ludius Troiae, one of the public games of the earliest Roman period, having fallen into disuse was revived by Augustus.
2 One of the names for Britain, in Welsh tradition, is the ‘Honey Isle’.
1 A sentry looking across the shallow depression which divides Jerusalem, called the Vallis Tyropoeon, the Valley of the Cheesemakers, from his post on the S.W. angle on the Antonia fortress and having for his front an area stretching from the Arx (Herod’s Palace) to the Pontus Vetus, would have for his centre the slight rise outside the then west wall of the City – the traditional site of Golgotha. He could not, without leaving his post observe any movements in the area of the Porta Aquarum and the Mount of Olives – these would be round to his left beyond the roofs of the Temple buildings. By Birket Post West I suggest some military post near Birket Hamman el Batrak, a water supply, within such a sentry’s view, toward the west wall. The references are to the small map ‘Jerusalem tempore Jesu Christi’, in the Desclee edt. of the Vulgate Bible, it being the only map I have by me purporting to show the lines of the city at that date; for the rest I have my own confused memories of the place, as viewed from the top window of the Austrian Hospice which, it so happens, is not so very far north of where the Antonia stood.
1 One of the duties of speculatores was to carry out executions. I have here supposed them to be men detailed from the ordinary infantry. The Jews in the Time of Jesus Christ. See Schurer X Div I, Vol. II, pp. 61–4 (Eng. Trans.) and Rom. Hist. Sources and Institutions Univ. Michigan Studies art. on The Principalis of the Early Empire.
2 A large proportion of iron ore came from the Illyrian Provinces of the Danube. Cf. Stuart Jones, Companion to Roman History, 321.
1 Cf. Martial, Epigrams BK XIV, 99.
2 The bays called the Syrtes in North Africa produced sponges for the Roman Market. The Mediterranean runs something of tide on this coast as was noted by a Times correspondent during our recent operations in the Gulf of Gabes (Syrtis Major) (March 1943).
3 The compound of frankincense, myrrh and vinegar offered to condemned criminals was provided by a humanitarian organization of pious Jewesses.
1 In considering the site of the execution we must also consider the sites where that execution is re-eneacted ‘in an unbloody manner’, i.e. the sites of Xtian altars. The Ch. of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem particularly and for obvious reasons brings home this general truth, for there one roof covers both actual mound of execution and actual burial chamber, and although all the levels have been modified or destroyed by the accident of building, nevertheless there remains a marked feeling of ascents and descents, within a small orbit. The ‘naturalism’ in all of us may call for ‘a green hill … without a city wall’ but here a deeper realism is satisfied. The things done ‘once for all’ on that site continue to be done in another mode on the same site, as they do on all those many sites within the cancelli in the West and beyond the iconostases in the East.
2 The stones (cippi) set up to mark the orbit of a city-site were called also termini. I here employ the term to describe the barrier round the site of execution.
1 Exodus XII. 6. (A.V.): ‘Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year.’ Vulgate: ‘Erit autem absque macula, maculus anniculus.’
2 While the association is with the general rejuvenation ceremonies of May, I had in mind that pivotal day in the Celtic year, Calanmai (May Calends) on which the pastoral life changed its rhythms as it did back again on Calagaef (Winter Calends Nov.1st). The terms happen to have a continued use in a Celtic land, but of course they reflect the universal pattern of Antiquity.
3 Caelimontium, the second of the fourteen Augustan divisions of Rome, adjoining the central magnificence of the City and itself an important quarter, but we know from our own megalopolitan world that to be registered in W.1 is far from meaning a suite in the Dorchester, or access to the Athenaeum.
1 See the passage from The Dream of the Rood containing ‘strang ond stiðmod. Gestah he on gealgan heanne’ (strong and steadfast he mounted the high gallows).
2 The Corona Civica was awarded for saving the lives of other soldiers in the field. It was (leaving out of account certain decorations granted with regard to rank) the highest honour in the Roman Army.
3 The phalaera, a kind of medallion and the armilla, a bracelet were both employed as military decorations. If the Corona Civica was the V.C., these were the D. Car. the M.M.
4 See the Icelandic Havamal. The passage has reference to Odin’s passion at Uppsala (Frazer, G.B. abgd. edt. p.355).
5 Croes Naiad, Cross of Refuge. One of the Older Welsh Terms for the Cross. I rather gather that historically the term applied more to blessed crucifixes, relics of the True Cross etc., such as could be carried on the person, but that need not and shall not preclude its other use.
1 Cf. English hymn for Passiontide ‘O come and mourn with me awhile’ and Milton’s Nativity Ode, verse 22, ‘In Vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn’.
2 Turan, the Etruscan female deity, lit. ‘the Lady’. Es Sit, the general Palestinian term for ‘the Lady’ – e.g. Bab Sitti Miriam, the Lady Mary’s Gate and it is of Es Sit that the fellaheen still speak when they refer to the local Astarte.
3 Dies Veneris. Our own word Friday because of its Germanic form (from the Goddess Frig) obscures the Venus-association. In Welsh the translation is direct from the Latin and so the association is preserved and in the case of Good Friday preserved with a particular poignancy. That day is called Dydd Gwener y Groglith which means literally ‘Venus Day of the Service of the Cross’.
1 I refer to the so-called ‘fourth order’ of architecture, the hybrid style evolved by the Romans from the Corinthians and coarsened in the process.
2 Saturn’s Loathing is an English folk-name for of the Ranunculacea. The ranunculus arvensis, Corn Buttercup, is listed as a cornfield weed and is described in the botanical textbooks as characterised by its ‘spiny outgrowths’. It is therefore hated of Saturn who hates all things which hurt the grain. Burne-Jones in his series of allegorical designs based on glower names, chose, with poetical exactitude, to depict under this title an armed encounter in a harvest field. As we all know, wars tend to commence in the late summer.
1 Cf. King Lear, Act III, scene 2 (last line) and Whispers of Immortality, T.S. Eliot, Poems 1920. ‘But our lot crawls between dry ribs/ To keep our metaphysics warm’.
2 Under the early Empire a soldier was paid 76 dinarii a year or 10 asses (£8 per annum in our money). The bronze asses issued from the old mint on the Arx, had in the 4th century B.C., and for long afterwards, borne the head of the god Janus. Since those days, however, the coinage had undergone great and various changes, and whether or no the image and subscription was now that of the reigning Caesar, the as (the original unit of the currency) is associated in my mind with the two-faced god – with its original image.
Stoppages of pay were very considerable and included deductions for food, bedding, certain equipment, burial club, savings bank, annual regimental dinner subscriptions, etc. there was every excuse for loot. The two clauses in John the Baptist’s ‘be content with your wages, do violence to no man’ have a logical sequence: but to live by that logic was perhaps no easier than any of the great precepts are to fulfill.
3 Matthew XXVI, 53.
4 The sacrificial hymn called the Spondalium was accompanied by lutes.
1 The Ludi Augustales were held from Oct 3rd to the 12th. They were held in memory of Augustus Caesar.
1 The Ponti were a Samnite gens. The name of Tullius would indicate that a person was of Tuscan extraction.
2 As with ourselves Roman units had an annual regimental supper called the Saturnalicum. Contributions from each soldier’s pay were deposited in the regimental savings bank to defray the costs of this celebration.
1 Canosa was famous for the good quality of its wool (Martial, Epigrams, Bk LIV, 127) so much so that it gave its name to a Canusia, a garment made of wool from Canosa.
1 Stuart Jones in Companion to Roman History, p.15 says ‘We can only define the pagus by saying that it was a primitive division of land in Italy whose inhabitants were united by social and religious ties and possessed a corporate organization.’
2 Cohors Italica. It is pointed out in the preface that contrary to the historic facts, I have for my own reasons made the guard seem to be regular legionary soldiers of no particular period; in changing them here into a specific body of auxiliary troops, i.e. the ‘Italian Cohort’ (composed of free citizens raised in the Italian homeland) I again belie history and again have the interior requirements of this writing as the reason. There is evidence from inscribed monuments that a Cohors Italica did serve in Syria at some later date and there is the ‘Italian Band’ of Acts X, I, but the troops composing the Jerusalem garrison under Pilate were Palestinian gentile levies (probably of the Sebastian Cohort, i.e. auxiliaries drafted in Samaria) Jews being exempt from military service.
1 Cf. Tacitus, Annals I, 22–23. The Centurion Lucilius nicknamed ‘cedo alteram’. The mutinous legionary Vibulenus comes in this same section of the Annals.
2 When writing this I was thinking of some cheap ration wine such as I supposed might be issued, but I find that at one time vinegar mixed with water was a regulation issue drink in the Roman army – so ‘sour issue tot’ was more fortunate than I had supposed (See Parker, The Roman Legions, p. 236).
3 See George Adam Smith (Hist. Geog of the Holy Land, p. 236) on the tombs of the Hauran district: ‘Sometimes it is a native of Germany or Gaul drafted here for service on the Arabian border whose epitaph tells you how he died thinking of his fatherland: “.… born (?) and a lover of his country, having come from Germany and died in the Agrippian troop was taken back to his own”’. He points out that the Jordan Valley, where the river enters the Dead Sea, is particularly unhealthy. In historic fact, of course, the Agrippian ala belongs to a period some years subsequent to the times of Christ (see Note 1 above).
1 Vetulonia was traditionally connected with the origin of the fasces, and, as Christopher Dawson points out in the Age of the Gods, a singular corroboration of tradition occured when an iron fascis was discovered on the actual site of that place. Praeneste was a very early foundation of the latin nobles and the 6th century B.C. gold fibula discovered on the site is engraved with the oldest known inscription in the latin language Maristuran = ‘Mars the Lord’.
1 The names of these three Celtic recruits are also the names of Celtic divinites. Taranus, a Thunder God, Magons a Mars, Maponus an Apollo.
2 A Cymanfa is an assembly or festival.
1 It will be recalled that the standards of all troop detachments posted within Jerusalem were stripped of the silver effigies of Caesar as a concession to Levitical law. Although this was in keeping with the general Roman policy toward religious cults, yet, considering the specially sacred character of the signa it must have seemed a unique concession to the average Roman and an impious one to those who put a serious interpretation on the cult of flag and Emperor. Caesar was salvator mundi and these were the symbols of the only conceivable world-order.
1 See preceding note on the standards.
2 Seyffert says under sacramentum: ‘swore to the same oath with the words idem in me, i.e. “the same holds good for me” after the introduction of the twenty years’ service … the men … took the oath … altogether for the whole time of their service, in the name of the State, afterwards in that of the Emperor.’