Overview

C.S. Lewis enjoyed both stories and poetry. His narrative poems combine his gift in story-telling with his skills as a poet. The four pieces in this book are the only narrative poems by Lewis known to be in existence. The poems are full of Lewis’s romantic imagination; they display his love and knowlege of classic mythology and his own mastery of the English language. Dymer (1926) • Launcelot (?early 1930s) • The Nameless Isle (1930) • The Queen of Drum (1938) ‘Dymer’ was begun by Lewis as a story in prose and the original idea had ‘come to him’ at the age of 17. It tells the story of a man who begets a monster. The monster kills his father and becomes a god. ‘Launcelot’ is based on the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail and ‘The Nameless Isle’ is the story of a shipwrecked mariner and his adventures on a magic island. ‘The Queen of Drum’ tells of an old pompous king and his young queen who eventually has to choose between heaven, hell and fairyland.

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9780006278375

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Reviews

Of course Lewis would be drawn to the long narrative: what form could better accommodate the heraldic solemnities of his Christian Romanticism? Oddly enough, he embraced the long poem some years before he turned to the church or struck the eloquently traditional vein of his prose. Dymer, the only one of these four surviving specimens published previously, was in fact written in a temper of extreme anarchism to illustrate the development by self-destruction, both of individuals and species. These are the author's words and we have no reason to doubt them, but they do establish what degree and kind of anarchism Lewis' mind would entertain. It turns out to be the imaginative insubordination of myth and fairytale, channeled into fabulous allegories of magi, monsters, knights errant, and preternatural queens sans merci in landscapes committed to the pathetic fallacy. There is nothing at all disordered about his prosody in any of the styles represented - rime royal, hexameters, alliterative measure - and nothing radical certainly in his occasionally quaint syntactic licenses. The poem least dependent on antiquarian models, The Queen of Drum, coincides largely with his religious conversion and argues for its liberating effect in a greater flexibility and poise before This legible, plain universe we use/ for waking business. Yet that other contrived universe has its power to charm, sometimes to haunt, and will deepen the affection Lewis so readily inspires. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English literature at Oxford University until 1954 when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement.

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