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Robinson Jeffers - Notes To "Descent To The Dead"
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It seems hardly necessary to stipulate that the elegiac tone of
these verses reflects the writer`s mood, and is not meant for economic
or political opinion.
Shane O`Neill`s cairn and the dateless monument called Ossian`s
Grave stand within a couple of miles of each other on the Antrim coast.
A dolmen is a prehistoric burial-house made of great stones set
on end, roofed by a slab of stone. There are many still standing in
Ireland and England.
Newgrange is one of three great artificial hills, on the Boyne
west of Drogheda. Passages and cells were made of megalithic
stonework, decorated with designs cut in the great stones, and the
hills were heaped over them. No one assigns a reasonable date to
these erections. Evidently they are burial mounds, like the pyramids.
The Irish round towers are well known, of course, slender, tapering
spires of stone and lime mortar, of mysterious origin, but
probably belfries and towers of refuge, built between 600 and
1200 A.D. They are associated with the earliest Christian churches.
Antrim is the northeasternmost county of Ireland, only a few
sea-miles from Scotland. lona is the sacred island of the Hebrides.
Avebury is a little Wiltshire village inside a great prehistoric
stone-circle and fosse. It was the religious and perhaps the political
capital of southern England before Stonehenge was built, i.e.,
before 2000 B.C., probably. The circle and the remaining stones
are greater than those at Stonehenge, but the stones were not
hewn to shape. Most of them are gone now; broken up to build
the village.
Dozmare Pool is in Cornwall, a little flat mere in a wide wilderness,
said to be the water where the sword Excalibur was cast
away when King Arthur died.
The ridgeways are ancient grass-grown roads on the ridges of the
hills, used by the pre-Celtic inhabitants of England, when the
lowlands were impassable swamp and forest.
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