origins are strongest when the trace
is faintest - the conventual colony
squaring the haywire plain from a base
number should’ve been known to Ptolemy
if not the Wittenham Clumps and hills
but the town outlasted its first name -
however men and boys rise calm and still
from the water while viewing the domain
about them women and kids quietly talk
at the top - la femme qui rit mounts all trees
of Jesse that beechwood is her broadwalk
the weeds’ lunacy her geomancy
as they grab eclipse the scorching aeons
and rivers’ epithalamion
Dorchester on Thames
3 August 2018
Dorchester on Thames was a Roman colonia. It lies at the confluence of the Thame and the Thames. It might have been one of those rare cities in Britannia to have had continuous occupation in the sub-Roman age before it became a Saxon town in the Kingdom of Wessex. The Thame has often been imagined as a male river, the Isis Thames as female.
Dorchester Abbey has a 14th century Jesse Tree on the north chancel window. There ought to be a circumflex of course on ” rit” in “la femme qui rit”.
It was quite a Renaissance theme to write on ruined Roman towns - Joachim du Bellay (1522-60) dedicated his sonnet cycle to Rome itself, Edmund Spenser dedicated ” The Ruines of Time” to Verulanium at St Albans while Rodrigo Caro ( 1573-1647) wrote on the ruins of Italica in Spain.
Paul Nash (1889-1946) was the famous painter of the Wittenham Clumps. Poets and antiquarians have long celebrated these sites, among whom were John Leland (c 1503- 52), William Camden (1551-1632), Edmund Spenser (1552/3-1599) Michael Drayton (1563-1631) and Matthew Prior (1664-1721). The Ptolemy here is the Graeco-Roman mathematician and geographer of Alexandria, Claudius Ptolemaeus (c 100- 170 CE).