LITMIR.BIZ

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of Paris? If not look on p. 319 of my book (the very long one).⁵⁷

      I think probably the greatest influence on my purely literary taste since the old days has been old Germanic poetry, which, as a friend says, sometimes makes everything else seem a little thin and halfhearted. There is a metre in Icelandic called the Drapa which goes like this:

       Wildest brunt of winter Woke amidst the oak-wood

      (This isn’t meant to make sense) First you have the three alliterations (wild—wint—woke). Then you have the half-rhyme (consonantal but not vocalic) of-unt and-int. Then you have the full rhyme woke-oak. All these features are required to make a couplet. And note well—the beats must be long in quantity as well as accented: i.e.

       Wildest broth of weather

would be unmetrical. This sounds mere puzzle poetry. In fact it works up a storm of sound which, when combined, as it usually is, with a tragic theme, and contrasting its rock-like form with the vain liquidity of sorrow, produces an almost unbearable tension of stoical pathos-‘iron tears down Pluto’s cheek.’⁵⁸ W. H. Auden (one of the few good young poets) has caught something of it in places. You might try hammering one out some night when sleep is denied: but the thing is so difficult to our metrical habits, that you won’t finish it by morning.

      But I don’t know why I have digressed into Icelandic prosody. More to the points—read any of Charles Williams’ novels (Gollancz) which you can get hold of—specially The Place of the Lion and Many Dimensions. In the rare genre of ‘theological shocker’ which Chesterton (I think) invented, these are superb. On the first level they are exciting stories: beyond that, the philosophical implications are extremely interesting: finally he has the power (absolutely unknown in our generation) of painting virtue. His morally best characters are his artistically best. The fact that Gollancz publishes them (in lurid covers) suggests that all this substantial edification—for it is nothing less—must be reaching the ordinary thriller-reader. If so, I may be telling you about a historical event of the first moment.

      I think it is hospitality heroical on your own part and that of your wife to ask guests to a sick-house. Do accept my real (not conventional) thanks for this very great kindness. But I can’t well come. I am busy this vac. with work undertaken at haste and now to be repented—not heaven knows, at leisure, but at length: and such breaks as I shall take have to be concerted with a good many other people’s plans. But I hope some lawful occasion will take me your way sooner or later. Till then, better health,

      Yours truly,

      C. S. Lewis

      TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

      [The Kilns]

      June 28th 1936

      My dear Barfield

1. I lent The Silver Trumpet⁵⁹ to Tolkien and hear that it is the greatest success among his children that they have ever known. His own fairy-tales, which are excellent, have now no market: and its first reading—children are so practical!—led to a universal wail ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’

      All the things which the wiseacres on child psychology in our circle said when you wrote it turn out to be nonsense. ‘They liked the sad parts’, said Tolkien ‘because they were sad and the puzzling parts because they were puzzling, as children always do.’ The youngest boy liked Gamboy because ‘she was clever and the bad people in books usually aren’t.’ The tags of the Podger have become so popular as to be almost a nuisance in the house. In fine, you have scored a direct hit.

      2. After the sugar, the rhubarb. Can you repeat the poem on the dedication you sent me? I liked it immensely, not only, I hope, for the intimacy, but for the felicity (not hitherto the commonest excellence in your work or mine): but after keeping it on my table for about ten days with the intention of copying it onto the fly leaf of the book, I cannot find it high or low. I am very, very sorry.

3. I wish I could Christianise the Summa⁶⁰ for you—but I dunno, I dunno! When a truth has ceased to be a mistress for pleasure and become a wife for fruit it is almost unnatural to go back to the dialectic ardours of the wooing. There may come a moment—one of those recoveries of virginity, or to speak more suitably to the subject, one of those Nth deaths, and then I’ll try

      4. We must exchange week end visits this Vac: I am ready to begin discussing dates.

5. Cecil now has The Place of the Lion: get it out of him before he returns it to me. And read The Castle by Kafka⁶¹ (Seeker).

      Yours

The Alligator of Love⁶²

      TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford

      [? July 1936]

      My dear Harwood

How nice to get poems again! It was a bit of a shock to find you writing vers libre just as if you were beardless and modern, but that poem is the best of the three all the same: specially the second stanza (‘there is no rainbow’⁶³ ‘light like fine sand’⁶⁴ are lovely[)]. The first doesn’t work with me because I never have resisting lids nor close them consciously and my eyes at bedtime are hungry for darkness not light.⁶⁵

      The Hero etc is also good. The third one is not quite a success to my mind. Makes his room for makes his room here or makes this his room creaks rather, and the rest has the opposite fault—too facile. It is a good subject of course.

      There was a young person of Streatham Who said to his friends when he met ’em ‘Old Lewis is dyin’ For The Place of the Lion But I keep people’s books once I get ‘em.’

      Have a heart!

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

Ubi est leonis locus? Caecilii lar et focus? ⁶⁶

      TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      [Magdalen College

      28 July 1936]

      My dear Griffiths

      First, about the PS in your letter. I think both your old attitude to poetry (when you looked for religion in it) and your present one (in which you reject it as a bridge you have now finally crossed) are equally based on an error common to all modern critics—that of taking poetry as a substantive thing like chemistry or agriculture.

Surely the truth is that poetry is simply a special kind of speech, a way of saying things, and one can no more talk about poetry in the abstract than about ‘saying’. When what the poet is saying is religious, poetry is simply a part of religion. When what he says is simply entertaining, poetry is a form of entertainment. When what he says is wicked, poetry is simply a form of sin. Whenever one is talking, if one begins to utilize rhythm, metaphor, association etc, one is beginning to use ‘poetry’: but the whole place of that poetry in the scheme of things depends on what you are talking about. In fact, in a sense there is no such thing as poetry. It is not an element

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