Literary
MANUSCRIPT POEM SIGNED BY C. S. LEWIS
LEWIS
(C. S., 1898-1963, Writer & Scholar, Author of 'The Screwtape Letters' and 'The Chronicles of Narnia')
Autograph Fair Copy with one correction of his poem Vowels and Siren with one variation from the printed version,
the poem starts Chosen to seduce you, / Those dove-like vowels, / Deuro – kudos – Odusseus. / Opening the bay, his prow. Appeared. The air rang with / Sirens' voices. / The hero, bound, in anguish / Tried to retract his choice..., however the third verse has a different last line and runs No word of solace / For a lover's longing / They breathed. Of vanished knowledge / Was their intemperate song..., whereas the published version has the word interrupted, he has also corrected the first word of the next verse but otherwise the last three verses are the same as the printed version, 1 side A4, Magdalen College, Oxford, no date but circa
Item Date: 1950
£19,500
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Background
Best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis was also an academic and a renowned Christian apologist. Until he was thirty, he was determined to be a poet. As a medieval scholar, Lewis felt a particular affinity for Old English alliterative verse. Vowels and Sirens, published in the TLS in 1952, has a robust medieval music appropriate to Odysseus' encounter with the Sirens. Provenance: By descent from Mary Shelley, later Mrs Daniel Neylan. She was a pupil of Lewis's from the early 1930's. See the article https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2012/06/14/letters-to-an-oxonian-lady-c-s-lewis-relationship-with-mary-neylan/
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