University of Virginia Library

I. RITE AND FORE-TIME

53.11 "They make all shipshape " [Jones's underlining] pivot for Argosy II p. 95—IV [sic] 182

David Jones used the words "voyage" and "argosy" interchangeably. Here he indicates a correspondence between the cenacle that Peter and John prepare for the Last Supper and the symbolic voyage subsuming those of all the ships in the poem. This archetypal voyage begins on page 95 with a Greek vessel's approach to the port of Athens in the fifth century B.C., and concludes, on page 182, with the Greek vessel's final berthing beneath the

Acropolis. In the pages between the approach and the final berthing, a number of voyages take place in various historic periods. These voyages are all, with minor variations, westerly and then northerly in direction, and so trace a single course. Their directional consistency suggests that all the poem's ships typologically partake of the symbolic world-ship elaborately described in Part VI of the poem and here identified with the Supper room. Its sailing constitutes the single voyage of redeemed mankind. Jones writes, in An Introduction to Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1972), that "there is but one voyager's yarn to tell" (31)—the story of man, which is also, archetypically, that of Christ.

53.20 ". . . before all oreogenesis" pivot for Vorzeit

The reference here is to "the Vorzeit-masque" (63) in which men dance to the climatic oscillations of the Permocarboniferous glaciation, which was the last ice-age. The geological time of oreogenesis, when mountains were formed, occurred millions of centuries before men evolved and were able to dance during the most recent glaciation. The Precambrian oscillations of oreogenesis are analogous to those of glaciation, though the latter were much shorter in duration. In "RITE AND FORE-TIME", oreogenesis is seen as preparatory to, and somehow continuous with, the ice-age of human prehistory when man performed ritual dances to the rhythm of the geological music.

Between pages 186 and 187, David Jones placed a loose piece of paper on which he writes that

During Precambrian oreogenesis, climatic variation coincides with fluctuation in the height of mountains: "for one Great Summer / lifted up / by next Great Winter / down" (55). These processes begin the choric chanting of a cosmic lauds that culminates in the Benedicite of the last great glaciation (63). Then men, not mountains, dance, and in anticipation of the eucharistic rite—in which all ritual acts have their symbolic and theological culmination.