The Pilgrim’s Regress: Notes on Quotations and Allusions

compiled by Arend Smilde, Utrecht, The Netherlands

www.solcon.nl/arendsmilde

Books by C. S. Lewis are usually full of quotations from and allusions to a great variety of sources, often unspecified. The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis’s first work in prose, probably beats all the others on this score. Lewis certainly wasn’t quite aware himself of how often or how much or how literally or indeed whom he was quoting (cf. third note to chapter V/4, below). Reading and writing appear to have have been, for him, much like breathing in and breathing out.

Surely no list of references could ever be perfectly complete in these circumstances. But the present list would have been much further from perfect without the results of two earlier attempts, as published in

– Henry Noel, “A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress”, Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society Vol. 2 No. 4 (February 1971), pp. 4–13

– Kathryn Lindskoog, Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s “Pilgrim’s Regress” (Cornerstone Press, Chicago 1995).

I am also grateful for much help received from

– Dr. John Bremer, director of the Philosophical Insitute in Kensington, Maryland, U.S.A. and a chief contributor to the C. S. Lewis Encylopedia (1998), who kindly sent me his nearly finished but unpublished work on the epigraphs at the beginning of each of the ten “Books” in the Regress.

– Mr. Paul Leopold in Stockholm, Sweden, who has kindly and generously helped me, and continues to do so, by answering what must by now have run into hundreds of large and small questions regarding C. S. Lewis, especially The Pilgrim’s Regress.

Passages where I still couldn’t obtain the information which I would have liked to give are marked by a double question mark in bold type, ??. Additions, corrections and suggestions for new entries are welcome.

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Dedication

Arthur Greeves: Lifelong friend of C. S. Lewis’s from his birthplace Belfast. Greeves lived from 1895 till 1966. Their friendship began in 1914 on the basis of a shared delight in Norse mythology. By that time Lewis was already mostly living in England. Their correspondence, which in the early years was both copious and highly confidential, was edited by Walter Hooper and published in 1979 as They Stand Together, and later included in Lewis’s Collected Letters (3 volumes, 2000– ).

Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress in Arthur Greeves’s home in Belfast during a two-week holiday which he spent there in September 1932. The poems included in the last parts of the book had been written earlier.

Preface to Third Edition

Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet: Three English philosophers, Thomas H. Green (1836–1882), Francis H. Bradley (1846–1924) and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923); major figures in the neo-Hegelian, “Idealistic” school of philosophy that flourished during their lifetime.

the word “Romanticism”: The semantic analysis following here gives a taste of one kind of scholarship taught and practiced by Lewis in Oxford and Cambridge. In his book Studies in Words (1960) a few handfuls of words were treated in a similar, if more comprehensive manner. But no chapter is devoted in that book to Romanticism or romantic. One reason for this might have been be the existence, ever since 1925, of a long and excellent essay on “Four romantic words” by Logan Pearsall Smith.

Alexandre Dumas, etc.: The amount of names “dropped” here in the course of Lewis’s items 1 through 7 may be too large for many details to be given with them. I have confined myself to making an alphabetical list of these names, followed by years of birth and death and, occasionally, one or two other details that could be found relevant in the present context. – Ludovico Ariosto (1454–1533), Italian poet, author of Orlando furioso. / Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), French poet, author of Les fleurs du mal. / Matteo Boiardo (1434–1494), Italian poet, author of Orlando innamorato. / George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), English poet, author of Don Juan. / Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), English poet and philosopher, author of Christabel and Biographia Literaria. / Pierre Corneille (1606–1684), French dramatist, author of Le Cid. / Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), French novelist, author of Les Trois Mousquetaires. / John Dryden (1631–1700), English poet and dramatist. / E. R. Eddison (1882–1945), English fantasy writer, author of The Worm Ouroboros. / Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), English sculptor who made the memorial stone for Oscar Wilde’s grave in Paris. / Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), French novelist, author of Madame Bovary. / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German writer and poet, author of Die Leiden des jungen Werther and Faust. / Maurice H. Hewlett (1861–1923), English novelist and poet. / Homer (c. 800 b.c.), ancient Greek poet, alleged author of Ilias and Odyssee. / John Keats (1795–1821), English poet. / D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), English novelist and poet, author of Sons and Lovers. / Thomas Malory (c. 1400–1470), English writer and editor of a large collection of Arthurian legends called Morte d’Arthur. / Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475–1564), Italian poet, painter, sculptor and architect. / William Morris (1834–1896), English poet and painter. / Alfred de Musset (1810–1857), French poet and dramatist. / Ossian, legendary Irish bard of the third century a.d., presented by James Macpherson (1736–1796) as the author of Fingal and Temora, pseudo-Celtic poems which Macpherson claimed to have translated from Celtic originals. / Edgar Allen Poe (c. 1809–1849), American short-story writer. / Mario Praz (1896–1982), Italian essayist and literary critic, author of The Romantic Agony (La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella literatura romantica, 1930). / Marcel Proust (1871–1922), French writer, author of À la recherche du temps perdu. / Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), English writer of “Gothic” novels, i.e. romantic thrillers fashionable in the late 18th century. / Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), French poet and dramatist, author of Cyrano de Bergerac. / Denis de Rougemont (1906–1985), Swiss Francophone writer, author of L’Amour et l’Occident. / Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), French writer

and philosopher. / Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), English poet, author of Prometheus Unbound and Ode to the West Wind. / Sophocles (c. 496–406 b.c.), ancient Greek dramatist (tragedian). / Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599), English poet, author of The Faerie Queene. / James Stephens (1882–1952), Irish writer and poet, author of The Crock of Gold. / Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), Italian poet, author of La Gerusalemme liberata. / Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863), French poet, novelist and dramatist. / Richard Wagner (1813–1883), German opera composer whose Tristan und Isolde was first performed in 1865. / The Werther: German sentimental short novel (1774) by Goethe (see above). / Walter Whitman (1819–1892), American poet.

perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn: John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819).

Maeterlinck: Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1959), Belgian Francophone poet and dramatist of the “Symbolist” school in literature; author of Pelléas et Mélisande (which served as the basis of an opera by the French composer Claude Debussy).

Yeats: William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet and dramatist.

false Florimels: In The Faerie Queene (1596), the unfinished long poem by Edmund Spenser, Florimell is a modest and beautiful maiden who succeeds in keeping all men with dishonourable intentions at a distance. The mother of one of these provides her son with a “false Florimell” – an easy prey to him and others (see below, fourth epigraph for Book Two). Later the real Florimell, now married to a worthy lover, is at last brought face to face with the false Florimell who, as a result, “vanisht into nought” (F.Q. V.3, 24 ff.).

Arthur Conan Doyle: English writer (1959–1930), chiefly known for his detective stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. After his son was killed in action during the First World War, he got increasingly immersed in spiritualism. This resulted in books like A History of Spiritualism (1926).

the Blue Flower: A symbol of romantic longing in the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) by the German writer Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801).

our America, our New-found-land: John Donne (1572–1631), Elegy XX, “To His Mistress Going to Bed”.

The Well at the World’s End: Fantasy story by William Morris, published posthumously in 1896.

Kubla Khan: Unfinished poem by Coleridge, published in 1816 but allegedly written in 1797 after he composed it, as Coleridge said, in his sleep. Having written fifty-four lines he was interrupted for some business, after which the rest of the poem had vanished from his memory and never came back.

the Siege Perilous: A chair at King Arthur’s Round Table which was strictly reserved for the man who found “the Grail”.

The Criterion: English literary journal (1922–1939) edited by T. S. Eliot.

Scaliger: Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), Italian humanist and doctor of medicine, whose writings include Poetices libri VII (“Seven Books on Poetics”).

Maenad: i.e. through sensual pleasures. “Maenad” is another word for Bacchante, a priestess of Bacchus (Greek: Dionysus), the god of vine, wine and mystic ecstasy.

Mystagogue: i.e. through arousing your curiosity about mysteries and your desire to be initiated in them.

“Drive out the bondmaid’s son”: Genesis XXI.10, where Sarah suggests that Abraham should chase away his Egyptian slave Hagar and her son.

“Quench not the smoking flax”: Isaiah XLII.3 and XLIII.17.

praeparatio evangelica: (Latin) “Preparation for the Gospel”; title of a book of Christian apologetics by the early Christian author and church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 265–339 a.d.). Eusebius tried in this book to show why the religion of the Jews was preferable to that of the Greeks. In an unfinished work called Demonstratio evangelica he went on to explain why Christianity had meanwhile supplanted the Jewish religion.

tearing each other to pieces on the Don: Lewis is referring to the battle of Stalingrad (August 1942–February 1943) and its aftermath, when the advance of German armies in southern Russia began to turn into their slow and devastating retreat. The Don is the great Russian river which, on the latitude of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), is not very far to the west of that city.

“the heresies that men leave are hated most”: Slightly misquoted from Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream II.2, 139–140, Lysander to Hermia: “...the heresies that men do leave / Are hated most of those they did deceive”. In his later autobiographical book, Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter XIV, Lewis used the same (mis)quotation, ascribing it to John Donne.

Prohibition: The years 1920–1933 as a period in the history of the United States of America, when there was an official ban on the production, transportation, sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks.

hearken to the over-wise or to the over-foolish giant: John Keats (1795–1821), Hyperion II, 309–310: “Or shall we listen to the over-wise, / Or to the over-foolish giant, God?”

at once rational and animal: A reference to the Latin phrase animal rationale – a well-known definition of “a human” in some ancient and medieval philosophers including Seneca and St Thomas Aquinas.

Jakob Boehme or Behmen: German mystical writer (1575–1624); variant spellings of his name also include Böhm or (now usual) Böhme. In a letter of 5 January 1930, Lewis mentioned what seemed to him at the time a momentous experience while reading Böhme’s book The Signature of All Things (i.e. an English translation of De signatura rerum, oder Von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen, published in 1621). His early enthusiasm appears to have cooled down pretty soon: Lewis was hardly ever to mention Böhme again in any of his later books or letters.

in Trine-land one feels “in tune with the infinite”: A reference to the American popular mystical writer Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1952) and his best-selling book In Tune with the Infinite (1897).

Book One, THE DATA

Epigraphs

Plato: The Republic (Politeia) VI, 505e.

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae) III.2/p, by the Roman philosopher and statesman Ancius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius (480–526 a.d.)

Hooker: Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594) I (p. 205 in the Dent edition), by English theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600).

Chapter I/2, The Island

the other Law in his members: From the New Testament, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans VII.23. “But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”

Oreads: Generic name for mountain nymphs in ancient Greek popular belief.

Chapter I/4, Leah for Rachel

Leah for Rachel (cf. II/5): A reference to the Old Testament story of Jacob and his uncle Laban, Genesis XXIX. Leah and Rachel are Laban’s two daughters; Rachel is the younger one, and beautiful. Jacob loves her and he offers to “serve” Laban for seven years in exchange for Rachel. After these seven years and after his first night with his wife, Jacob finds that he has been given not Rachel but Leah.

brown girl: Roger Lancelyn Green, a friend and biographer of C. S. Lewis, has suggested that the “brown girls” in this book might go back to a dream which Lewis recorded in his diary on 26 April 1922 (C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and other reminiscences, ed. James Como, new edition, p. 213). In the published selection from that diary, All My Road Before Me (ed. Walter Hooper, 1991) this passage has not been included; nor did Green give the correct date. The original entry for 26 August (not April) 1922 begins as follows:

“I dreamed that W[arnie] and I were being entertained in a palace which I called ‘Malvern’ and some sort of old boy’s festival was in progress. At the point at which I begin to remember things this had gone on already for a long time and we were being ticked off for some misbehaviour by a very stately woman who forbade us henceforth to speak to the boys. From her I turned alone and went down a flight of steps into a bathroom – a beautiful place with innumerable basins whose marble floor, green veined like the deep sea, could be seen spread out from the top of the stairs. This led out into a place on the banks of the Thames near Iffley where a sort of regatta was going on. The next thing I remember was coming back from this to ‘Malvern’. On the way up I met a big cart, driven by a girl who had no clothes on. She had very light brown hair: but dark skin, pink brown, like sand. I smiled at her in the confidential way you might smile at a girl when you’d seen a hole in her stocking and she smiled back in just the same way, as much as to say ‘Yes I know. Isn’t it a scream.’ Then I went up back to Malvern and woke up – having seen the girl again, this time in the distance beyond the river, with other people in the cart. W and I did most of our packing before breakfast...” (etc., as printed in All My Road Before Me).

Chapter I/5, Ichabod

Ichabod (cf. II/6): (Hebrew) “The glory is departed’; from the Old Testament story in I Samuel IV.21–22. The wife of Pinehas just turned widow calls her newborn child “Ichabod” because the Ark of God – a portable sanctuary – has been taken by Israel’s enemies and because her husband as well as her father in law have died.

Chapter I/6, Quem quaeritis in sepulchro? Non est hic

Quem quaeritis in sepulchro? Non est hic (cf. II/7): (Latin) “Whom do you seek in the grave? He is not here.” From the Latin liturgy for Easter, based on Luke XXIV.5–6, Quid quaeritis viventem cum mortuis? non est hic – “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here.”

Book Two, THRILL

Epigraphs

Exodus: The second of the Ten Commandments, Exodus XX.4.

Plato: Second Epistle, 312e–313a; a letter addressed to Dionysius, the ruler of Syracuse, who was puzzled by what Plato called the Idea of the Good.

Dante: Purgatory (Purgatorio, second part of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia) XVIII, 38–39. Ma non ciascun segno / È buono, ancor che buona sia la cera, “But every seal is not a good one, even if imprinted in good wax” (Robert Hollander’s translation). Lewis’s version is probably his own, and in any case very free.

Spenser: The Faerie Queene III.8. For the background to this passage see the note on “false Florimels” in the Preface, above.

Chapter II/1, Dixit insipiens

Dixit insipiens: (Latin) “The fool hath said...” Psalm XIV.1 and LIII.1. Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”

Going West, perhaps, young man?: From a famous phrase – “go West, young man, go West!” – in the writing of Horace Greeley (1811–1872). Greeley was an American journalist and social reformer, and founder of the New York Tribune. He seems to have borrowed the phrase from a fellow American journalist, John Soule (1815–1872) of the Terre Haute Express (Indiana, 1851).

Mr. Enlightenment: The chapter headline calls him a personification of “Nineteenth Century Rationalism” although the Enlightenment in a strictly historical sense is the name of an eighteenth-century movement. Apparently Lewis was thinking of “enlightenment” in a slightly broader sense which includes its direct spiritual heirs.

round as an orange: Probably borrowed from E. Nesbit’s Five Children – and It (1902), chapter I: “Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. This is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy.” Lewis quoted this in a letter to his father of 30 October 1930 (Collected Letters I, p. 680) as he was complaining about popular distortions of Darwin’s theory of evolution: “The infants seem to be taught that ‘in the beginning was the Ape’ from whom all other life developed...

Claptrap: A word coined in the eighteenth century to denote fashionable nonsense, contrived to elicit applause (as distinguished from nonsense in general).

Chapter II/2, The Hill

Jehovah-Jirah: (Hebrew) “The Lord will provide”, Genesis XXII.14. Abraham was “tempted” by God with a command to sacrifice his son Isaac. On their way to the appointed place, Abraham tells Isaac that “God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.” Just in time “the angel of the Lord” intervenes and keeps Abraham from killing Isaac. Abraham then finds “a ram caught in a thicket”, which he offers instead of his son; “and Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh.”

Chapter II/3, A Little Southward

To travel hopefully is better than to arrive: Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque (1881), “El Dorado’; “...to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.” Lewis criticized this assertion in several places, e.g. a letter of 28 August 1930 to Arthur Greeves (Collected Letters I, p. 931).

Chapter II/5, Leah for Rachel

What is truth?: Gospel according to St John XVIII.38.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth: From a letter of John Keats dated 22 November 1817.

Chapter II/6, Ichabod

But O alas! so long our bodies, etc.: John Donne, “The Ecstasy”, 49–50 and 68. “But, o alas! so long, so far, / Our bodies why do we forbear?”

Chapter II/7, Non est Hic

Eschropolis: (Greek) “City of filth and obscenity”.

Chapter II/8, Great Promises

Atalanta: A figure in ancient Greek mythology, daughter of a Boeotian king. She excelled in foot races and would only marry the man who could outrun her.

Book Three, THROUGH DARKEST ZEITGEISTHEIM

Title

Through Darkest...: Titles, headings, captions etc. like this perhaps got their currency in English after Sir Henry Stanley’s two African travel books, Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest Africa (1890) and after William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had been the first to respond to this with his own book called Through Darkest England and How to Get Out (1890).

Epigraphs

Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War (Historiae) III.82–83 by the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460–c. 395 b.c.) of Athens.

Anon.: ?? Source not found. These lines may be Lewis’s own translation of some Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse poetry, of the same character as the Edda fragments in chapter VI/6 or as the Guide’s directions at the beginning of chapter X/8. The most conspicuous formal characteristic of this type of poetry is alliteration.

Shaw: “Apparent Anachronisms”, note to Caesar and Cleopatra (1901) by George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), English dramatist.

Chapter III/1, Eschropolis

Silly Twenties (chapter headline): The tags in this and the next two chapter headlines – Silly, Dirty and Lunatic Twenties – possibly had some currency when Lewis wrote this, in the early 1930s; more likely they are inventions of his own. Still in use is another phrase, Roaring Twenties; but this seems to have exclusively American connotations and not to refer to artistic and cultural trends in Europe.

Victoriana: In a letter of 1945 (Collected Letters II, pp. 678–679) Lewis said this figure was his parody of the English poet Edith Sitwell (1887–1964). He was probably thinking primarily of Sitwell’s volume Façade (1922).

columbine: In traditional English “pantomime” (a kind of play performed at Christmas time) Columbine is one of the stock figures. She is the sweetheart of Harlequin. Since we know from Lewis that “Victoriana was Edith Sitwell”, the appearance of “a columbine” may be taken as an allusion to Edith and Osbert Sitwell’s volume of poetry Twentieth-Century Harlequinade (1915). In his 1945 letter Lewis also wrote that he had later come to have a higher regard for Edith Sitwell.

an aspidistra in a pot: The aspidistra became a very popular English houseplant in the late nineteenth century because it was strong enough to survive the fumes from gas lighting. The “cast-iron plant”, as it was called, became an almost invariable item of lower middle and lower class English interiors and thus a symbol of the kind of life that was supposed to be going on there.

Chapter III/8, Parrot Disease

There are two only generally necessary to damnation: Parody on a passage in the Anglican Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer. “Question. How many Sacraments hath Christ ordained in his Church? Answer. Two only, as generally necessary to salvation; that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.” (“Two only” implies a rejection of the Roman Catholic list of seven Sacraments.)

Book Four, BACK TO THE ROAD

Epigraph

Bacon: Essays, “Of Truth”, by the English statesman, philosopher and essayist Francis Bacon (1561–1626); pp. 4–5 in the edition by Richard Foster Jones: Essays, Advancement Of Learning, New Atlantis And Other Pieces (Odyssey Press, New York 1937).

Chapter IV/1, Let Grill be Grill

Let Grill be Grill: Spenser, The Faerie Queene II.12.87 (conclusion of Book II). Sir Guyon has destroyed the Bower of Bliss of the enchantress Acrasia and liberates her captives, breaking the spell by which they had been turned into beasts. One of them (called Grill) wants to remain a beast –

Saide Guyon: “See the mind of beastly man,

That hath so soon forgot the excellence

Of his creation, when his life began

That now he chooseth, with vile difference

To be a beast, and lacke intelligence:

Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind;

But let us hence depart, whilest wether serves and winde.”

psittacosis: Scientific name for parrot fever or parrot disease, an infectious disease of parrots that can be transmitted to humans, in whom it may produce pneumonia.

Chapter IV/2, Archtype and Ectype

Archtype and Ectype (see also VIII/10): “Original and copy”; concepts presumably borrowed here from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) II.30 (“Of Real and Fantastical ideas”) and II.31 (“Of Adequate and Inadequate Ideas”). Greek ectypon means an impress from a commemorative medal, seal or signet ring. For Lewis’s orthography see a passage from his letter of 24 October 1940 to Sister Penelope: “On archtypal or archetypal, note as the first principle of textual criticism in dealing with me that all odd spellings [have no] more interesting explanation than ignorance – now I can’t spell!” (Collected Letters II, p. 451).

riddle about the copy and the original: At the time of writing The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis had been working for several years on what was to become The Allegory of Love (1936), with a long chapter on the thirteenth-century French Roman de la Rose. As Lewis points out in that chapter, the Roman’s inevitable “palinode” – denunciation of erotic love after all that has been said in its favour – is put into the mouth of the lady Reason; and Reason not only approaches the hero as a rival mistress but hints to an idea expressed more fully in another part of the poem – “that courtly love is a mimesis or a parody of which divine love is the archtype” (see The Allegory of Love III.5, pp. 147 and 151).

Chapter IV/3, Esse is percipi

Esse is percipi: (Latin) “To be = to be perceived”; statement by the Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) in his Principles of Human Knowledge, §3. “For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percepi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”

Book Five, THE GRAND CANYON

Epigraphs

Pindar: Pythian Ode X, 29–30, by the ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar (c. 520–c. 440 b.c.). Cf. C. S. Lewis’s own poem of 1949, “Pindar Sang”, in Collected Poems (1994), pp. 29–31.

Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound (Prometheus desmotès), 546–551, by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus (524– 455 b.c.)

Milton: Paradise Regained (1671) IV, 309–311.

Chapter V/2, Mother Kirk’s Story

Peccatum Adae: (Latin) “The sin of Adam”; theological term derived from the New Testament, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, cap. V.

Chapter V/3, The Self-Sufficiency of Vertue

I must be the captain of my soul and the master of my fate: From the last stanza of the poem “Invictus” by the English poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903).

Chapter V/4, Mr. Sensible

“the philosophy of all sensible men” (chapter headline): Perhaps adapted from the American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), who wrote “I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion” (Lectures and Biographical Sketches: “the Preacher”). – Another possible source is the novel Endymion, chapter LXXXI, by the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881): “‘As for that,’ said Waldenshare, ‘sensible men are all of the same religion.’ ‘Pray, what is that?’ inquired the Prince. ‘Sensible men never tell.’”

Hippocrene: (Latin, from Greek) “Horse spring”; in ancient Greece, a spring on Mount Helicon near the home of the Muses. Its water was thought to engender poetic inspiration and to have gushed forth when the winged horse Pegasus touched his hoof there.

Regum aequabit opes animis: (Latin) “equal to a king in the riches of the spirit.” Virgil (70–19 b.c., Roman poet), Georgics IV, 132. With regard not only to the following spate Latin and Greek quotations coming from Mr. Sensible, but also to Lewis’s own writing habits, it may be useful for the reader to be reminded of a passage in a letter from Lewis to Arthur Greeves, this book’s dedicatee, written after Greeves had criticised the yet unpublished manuscript. In that letter of 17 December 1932, Lewis began his reply as follows:

“1. Quotations. I hadn’t realised that they were so numerous as you apparently found them. Mr Sensible, as you rightly saw, is in a separate position; the shower of quotations is part of the character and it wd. be a waste of time to translate them, since the dialogue

(I hope) makes it clear that his quotations were always silly and he always missed the point of the authors he quoted. The other ones may be too numerous, and perhaps can be reduced & translated. But not beyond a certain point: for one of the contentions of the book is that the deacy of our old classical learning is a contributary cause of atheism (see the chapter on Ignorantia). The quotations at the beginnings of the Books are of course never looked at at all by most readers, so I don’t think they matter much.”

Thou little knowest that sentence is passed upon thee: ??

Omnes eodem cogimur: (Latin) “We are all being gathered to the same fold.” Horace (65–8 b.c., Roman poet), Odes (Carmina) II.3, 25.

quo dives Tullus et Ancus: (Latin) “whither rich Tullus and Ancus” – i.e. the underworld, the land of the dead. Horace, Odes (Carmina) IV.7, 15.

nullius addictus: (Latin) “In no way bound”, i.e. not taking sides. Horace, Epistles I.1, 14. Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri – “I am not bound to swear by the statement of any authority.”

en déshabille: (French) “in undress”, i.e. informally.

J’aime le jeu, l’amour ... et la campagne – enfin, tout!: “I like games, love, books, music, town and country – everything, in fact!” Jean de la Fontaine (1621–1695, French poet), Les amours de Psyché et de Cupidon I.2. n.b. some Regress editions have champagne for campagne.

haud equidem invideo: (Latin) “I am not envious at all.” Virgil, Eclogues (Bucolica, “pastoral poems”) I, 11. Non equidem invideo, miror magis – “I am not envious but, rather, surprised.”

You do not insist on my accompanying you? ... Why then I am very willing that your should go!: Quoted almost literally from the opening paragraph of James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785): “When I was at Ferney, in 1764, I mentioned our design to Voltaire. He looked at me, as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, ‘You do not insist on my accompanying you?’ – ‘No, sir.’ – ‘Then I am very willing that you should go.’”

Caelum non animum mutamus: (Latin) “[Crossing the sea] we change the scenery, not ourselves.” After Horace, Epistles I.11, 27. Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.

immortal longings: After Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra V.2, 283.

Et ego in Arcadia: (Latin) “I too [have been] in Arcadia.” Correctly phrased Et in Arcadia Ego, this saying of uncertain provenance is found on numerous tombs and also on paintings in which tombs are seen. Art historian Erwin Panovsky has traced its origins

back to a painting by Guercino (1591–1666) where it has the grammatically proper meaning, “even in Arcadia am I [=Death]”, through its history of misunderstanding in art and literature as “I too have been in Arcadia [a lovely place of fabled peace and innocence; therefore I also am an idealist]”. Lewis has shuffled the word order so that it can have properly the latter meaning, which is Mr Sensible’s.

monochronos hèdonè: (Greek) “fleeting pleasure”.

the proper study of mankind is man: Alexander Pope (1688–1744), An Essay on Man II, 2.

Eadem sunt omnia semper: (Latin) “Everything is always the same”. Lucretius (Roman poet and philosopher, c. 95–55 b.c.), De rerum natura III, 949.

the unchanging heart beneath the shifting disguises: Cf. Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost (1943) IX, “The Doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart”, where he argues that in reading the literature of other times and places, we will not grow in wisdom as long as we are chiefly interested in what is the same everywhere in humanity.

the reasonableness which I commend: “Reasonableness” is a characteristic item in the vocabulary of the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), especially in the collocation “sweet reasonableness”.

le bon sens: (French) “common sense”.

bridewell: “jail” (from a London prison called Bridewell).

Auream quisquis: (Latin) A scrap from Horace, Odes (Carmina) II.10, 5. Auream quisquis mediocritatem diligit – “The man who cherishes the golden mean.”

Do manus!: (Latin) “I give up!”

que sais-je?: (French) “What do I know?” Motto of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), engraved on his personal seal.

brown charm: “brown” as in “brown study”; reverie, mood of deep absorption or thoughtfulness.

Chapter V/5, Table Talk

“the religion of all sensible men” (chapter headline): See first note to previous chapter.

Dapibus mensas onerabit inemptis: (Latin) “He loaded his table with delicacies not bought at the store.” Virgil, Georgics IV, 133 (this line immediately follows the one quoted in the previous chapter, Regum aequabit etc.).

“His humble sauce a radish or an egg”: William Cowper (1731–1800), The Task IV, 168.

Athanatous men prota Theous nomoi hos diakeitai – Tima: (Greek) “The most important thing is to honour the gods as is required by law.” First line of the Golden Verses, ascribed to the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (6th century b.c.).

Cras ingens iterabimus [aequor]: (Latin) “Tomorrow we will take up our course again over the huge [sea]”. Horace, Odes (Carmina) I.7, 32. The full passage is Nunc vino pellite curas; cras ingens iterabimus aequor, where the first half means “With wine now drive away care...”

Pellite cras ingens tum-tum, nomoi hos diakeitai: A drunken mixture of the previous two quotations; “Push off tomorrow on the huge... pom-pom, as is required.”

Chapter V/6, Drudge

Chorègia: (Greek) Defray of expenses; support; subsidy.

Chapter V/7, The Gaucherie of Vertue

autarkeia: (Greek) Economic self-sufficiency.

Vive la bagatelle: “Hurray for nonsense!” Laurence Sterne (1713–1768, English novelist), A Sentimental Journey, “The Letter”.

Thelema: Greek word for “will” in the sense of volition. In the novel Gargantua by the French author François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553), Thélème is the abbey of a highly exceptional kind of religious order – in fact, an anti-order in an anti-abbey – led by Frère Jean des Entommeurs; see Gargantua (= Book I in Gargantua et Pantagruel) LII et seq.

Do what you will: Supreme rule of the monastic life at Thélème: Fay ce que vouldras; see Gargantua LVII.

Book Six, NORTHWARD ALONG THE CANYON

Epigraphs

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, 1124b

Milton: Paradise Regained VI, 313–314. The passage follows almost immediately on the Milton epigraph for Book V, above.

Pascal: Pensées (1670), No. 353 in the Brunschvicg-edition of 1897 (section VI, “Les philosophes”), by the French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Je n’admire point l’excès d’une vertu, comme de la valeur, si je ne vois en même temps l’excès de la vertu opposée...

I. A. Richards: Practical Criticism (1929), Poem III, by the English literary critic and linguist Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979).

Chapter VI/2, Three Pale Men

Neo-Angular, Neo-Classical, Humanist: According to Chad Walsh (1914–1991), an American poet and critic and one of the earliest authoritative writers about C. S. Lewis, the three types presented here are based on T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) and George Santayana (1863–1952) respectively; see Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (1979), pp. 67–68.

Virtutes paganorum splendida vitia: (Latin) “The virtues of the pagans are splendid vices.” ?? Source not found, but probably either in Augustine (as “virtutes gentium” etc., not “paganorum”) or in Tertullian, De carne Christi.

Epichaerecacia: (Greek) gloating, malicious pleasure, spiteful joy at another’s misfortune.

Euphuia: (Greek) shapeliness; goodness of disposition; quickness of understanding.

Chapter VI/6, Furthest North

Marxomanni: In addition to the obvious reference to Marxists, there may be a word-play here on Marcomanni, the name of a Germanic people in the first centuries of the

Christian era. The Marcomanni did not, however, live in Northern Europe but in Bohemia, in the area of the present-day Czech Republic.

lots of sub-species besides the Marxomanni – Mussolimini, Swastici... Lewis was writing this less than two months after the astonishing electoral success of both Nazis and Communists in the German general elections of 31 July 1932. The two parties between them won more than half of the seats in parliament.

Wind age, wolf age, etc.: Passages from “The Prophecy of the Volva” (Voluspá), which is part of the Edda, a collection of mythological Old Norse poems made in the 12th century a.d.

ploughing the sand: The expression might in the present context be a reference to the poem “Hymn to the Earth”, published in 1929, by the American poet Elinor Wylie (1885–1928): “Hail, element of earth, receive thy own / And cherish, at thy charitable breast, / This man, this mongrel beast: / He plows the sand, and, at his hardest need, / He sows himself for seed.”

Chapter VI/7, Fools’ Paradise

intelligence ... moves nothing: ?? Source not found, but doubtless Lewis was thinking of something in Aristotle.

Book Seven, SOUTHWARD ALONG THE CANYON

Epigraphs

Virgil: Aeneid V, 626–635. Spoken by Iris, who, sent by Juno, is trying to talk the wives of the Troyans into burning their ships and so putting an end to the Troyans’ quest for Italy.

Dante: Inferno IV, 40–42. Per tai difetti, non per altro rio, / Semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi, / Che senza speme vivemo in disio.

Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress II (1684), Mr Great-heart speaking to the heroine, Christiana, during their passage through the Valley of Humiliation.

Chapter VII/1, Vertue is Sick

clouds and wind without rain: Proverbs XXV.14, “Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds and wind without rain.”

Chapter VII/2, John Leading

“Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, he yields up moral questions in despair” (chapter headline): William Wordsworth (1770–1850), The Prelude XI, 304–305 (or X, 899–900 in the 1805 edition).

Chapter VII/5, Tea on the Lawn

wildflowers (chapter headline): Cf. the first lines of “Auguries of Innocence”, a poem of William Blake (1757–1827). “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”

Martha: Cf. the figure of Martha in the Gospel of St Luke X.38–42. While Jesus visited her home, Martha was “cumbered about much serving” and thought her sister Maria was wrong to sit listening to Him and failing to come and help her.

the language of the heart: Perhaps after Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, or Prologue to the Satires, 388. “Language of the heart” there is not opposed to orthodoxy but to academic learning.

When I became a man, I put away childish things: I Corinthians XIII.11.

The heaven and the heaven of heavens, etc.: From the prayer of King Salomo at the dedication of the Temple, I Kings VIII.27. “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much the less this house that I have builded?”

Chapter 8, This Side by Sunlight

the Valley of Humiliation: An episode in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the book that provided Lewis with the title and part of the general idea for The Pilgrim’s Regress.

Chapter 9, Wisdom – Exoteric

the manna turned to worms: Exodus XVI.20.

as one of my sons has said, that leaves the world more glorious yet: A reference to a passage in the Principles of Logic (1883) by the English Idealistic philosopher Francis Bradley (mentioned before with Green and Bosanquet in the Preface, second paragraph). “That the glory of this world (...) is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception (...) if it hides some colourless movement of atoms, some (...) unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.”

Chapter 10, Wisdom – Esoteric

hawthorn: A reference to the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and his short story “Young Goodman Brown”. The hero of this story goes into a wood by night to attend a Black Mass and is shocked to meet various people there whom he knew as respectable citizens. Hawthorne also wrote a story called “The Celestial Railroad” which is a parody on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Marx, Spencer, etc. (author’s footnotes): Karl Marx (1818–1883), German philosopher; Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), English philosopher who attempted to apply Darwin’s theory of natural selection to all phenomena; Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Jewish Dutch philosopher; Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), Austrian social philosopher and founder of Anthroposophy; Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher; Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), British Idealistic philosopher.

Chapter 12, More Wisdom

all this choir of heaven and furniture of earth are imaginations: From the Principles of Human Knowledge, §6, by George Berkeley (1685–1753), the Irish bishop and philosopher who became chiefly known for his “subjective-idealistic” theory of knowledge. Cf. note to IV/3 above, on “Esse is percipi”.

I am the Imaginer: I am one of his imaginations: See note to VIII/1 on “I am the doubter and the doubt”, below.

evangelium eternum: (Latin) “Eternal Gospel”, i.e. Pantheism.

Book Eight, AT BAY

Epigraphs

Hesiod: Works and Days (Erga kai hèmerai), 293–297, by the ancient Greek didactical poet Hesiod (8th century b.c.).

Hazlitt: The Round Table (1817) I.26, “On Classical Education”, by the English critic and essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830).

Chapter VIII/1, Two Kinds of Monist

Monist: Monism is the doctrine that everything in the universe derives from a single thing or principle, e.g. from spirit or from matter, so that no essential distinction can be made between God and Nature. It is the philosophical counterpart of Pantheism.

The flesh is but a living corruption: After Genesis VI.12, “And God looked upon the earth and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.”

I am the doubter and the doubt: From the sonnet “Brahma” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (cf. note to V/4). “They reckon ill who leave me out; / When me they fly, I am the wings; / I am the doubter and the doubt, / I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.”

filthy rags: A reference to Isaiah LXIV.6, where a more literal reading would be “dirty sanitary towels”. “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags...”

Chapter VIII/3, John Forgets Himself

sensuous curtain: See the quotation from Bradley in the second note to VII/9 above.

Chapter VIII/4, John Finds his Voice

Pheidian fancies: From Pheidias or Phidias, famous Greek sculptor of the 5th century b.c.; no extant original can be surely ascribed to him.

Chapter VIII/7, The Hermit

Stoics, Manichees, Spartiates: Stoics in ancient Greece were members of the school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium (c. 335–c. 265 b.c.), holding that virtue and happiness can be attained only by submission to destiny and the natural law; hence the wider meaning of “stoicism” as indifference or the attempt at indifference to pleasure and pain. – Manichees were followers of the Persian prophet Mani (mid-third century a.d.), who supposed good and evil to be equally original and equally strong powers in the universe. – Spartiates are Spartans, the ruling class in the ancient Greek city state of Sparta; they were famous for their discipline and military prowess and austere way of life.

better bread than is made of wheat: A fixed expression for “the best as the enemy of the good”; perhaps originating from the Spanish through a passage in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, chapter VII, where the hero is asked by a niece why he won’t simply stay at home rather than always going into the world in quest of “better bread than ever is made of wheat.”

a fox without a tail: From one of the Fables ascribed to the semi-legendary Greek author Aesop (6th century b.c.). A fox lost his tail in a poacher’s trap. When all the other animals laughed at him he tried to persuade his fellow foxes that they had better all cut off their tails since life was better that way.

Chapter VIII/8, History’s Words

if the feet have been put right the hands and the head will come right: Free interpretation of an obscure or at least ambiguous passage in the Gospel of St John, XIII.10.

Chapter VIII/9, Matter of Fact

Medium Aevum: (Latin) Middle Ages.

Homer in Pagus ridiculing some of the story pictures...: ??

Clopinel / Jean de Meung: Jean de Meung (1250–c.1305), author of the second, by far the largest part of the Roman de la Rose. He had a strong bent of cynical and satirical

remarks about women and erotic love. Cf. second note to IV/2 above and The Allegory of Love, pp. 144ff. His nickname Clopinel or Chopinel means “cripple”.

Chapter VIII/10, Archtype and Ectypon

the perilous siege in which only One can sit: See note on Siege Perilous in the Preface, above.

“out of the soul’s bliss,” he said, “there shall be a flowing over into the flesh”: ??. Source not found; but in his essay “Transposition” – a sermon held in 1944 – Lewis while quoted the same words referred to St Augustine.

Manna kept, is worms: See first note to VII/9 above.

Book Nine, ACROSS THE CANYON

Epigraphs

Langland: Piers the Plowman XIII, 181–185 (C text), a long allegorical poem ascribed to William Langland (c. 1331–c. 1399).

George Macdonald: Lilith (1895) XL, “The House of Death”, by the Scottish poet, novelist and preacher George MacDonald (1824–1905).

Chapter IX/3, This Side by Darkness

prophesied soft things: After Isaiah XXX.9–10, “This is a rebellious people (...) which say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.”

I am no negation: Personified Death is here denying a famous assertion by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 b.c.), in his Letter to Menoeceus, explaining why he did not fear death: “Where death is, I am not, and where I am, death is not.”

Chapter IX/4, Securus Te Projice

Securus te projice: (Latin) “Throw thyself without fear [onto Him; He will hold and will cure thee].” St Augustine, Confessions VIII.11.27. Proice te securus! excipiet et sanabit te.

you must dive into this water: “Must” as an inevitability, as appears from George Macdonald: An Anthology, edited by C. S. Lewis (1946), No. 279: “That is the way ... You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”

Chapter IX/5, Across the Canyon

Semele: Greek mythological figure, a princess from Thebes. The supreme god Zeus in the shape of a human begot Dionysius by Semele. She wished to see him also in his full divine power and majesty. This was granted, but she did not survive it

Chapter IX/6, Nella sua Voluntade

Nella sua voluntade: (Italian) “In His will [is our peace].” Dante, Paradiso III, 85. E la sua volontate è nostra pace – which in fact means “And His will is our peace.”

Slikisteinsauga: (Old Norse, or perhaps pseudo-Old Norse of Lewis’s invention) “Sleekstone eyes”. When the now obsolete word “sleekstone” was still in use, it meant a smooth stone used to make something else smooth (sleek) by rubbing or polishing it. The name somehow seems intended here to suggest eyes that can see things very far off.

Book Ten, THE REGRESS

Epigraphs

Plato: The Republic (Politeia) VII, 516–517.

Bernardus Silvestris: Cosmographia, “Microcosmos” IV, 31ff, by the twelfth-century philosophical poet Bernardus Silvestris, a medieval Platonist in the “school of Chartres”. Lewis quoted these same lines in a different translation, with the Latin original in a footnote, in The Allegory of Love (see notes to IV/2 above) III.6, p. 95.

Law: A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) XI, by the British Anglican divine William Law (1686–1761).

Chapter X/1, The Same yet Different

You all know that security is mortals’ greatest enemy: Shakespeare, Macbeth III.5, 32–33. “And you all know security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy”.

tenth hierarch: The spirit coming after and being outside the nine celestial choirs of angels.

Wormwood: Yet another synonym for Satan, borrowed from Revelation VIII.10–11. “And there fell a great star from heaven ... and the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”

Ahriman: The Persian prince of evil, who tempted Zoraster but was defeated by him; Ahriman brought death to the world by slaying the prototypes of man and the animals.

Chapter X/2, The Synthetic Man

synthetic man: Cf. C. S. Lewis’s Collected Letters I, p. 909, letter of 22 June 1930 to Arthur Greeves. “Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations (...).We (...) who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted.

a man of shreds and patches: Shakespeare, Hamlet III.4, 102. “A king of shreds and patches”.

Rabelais, “Do what you will”, Thelemites: See note to V/7 above.

Habe caritatem et fac quod vis: (Latin) “Have charity and do what you will.” From St Augustine’s seventh sermon on the First Epistle of John, cap. VIII: Dilige, et quod vis fac. This saying is often ascribed to Augustine slightly modified, Ama et fac quod vis. In

this form its meaning is easily construed as “Fall in love and do what you will.” Lewis modifies the original in a different way, which according to Walter Hooper was inspired by a sermon of St Thomas Aquinas on the Beatitudes; cf. Lewis’s Collected Letters II, p. 194, note 50.

“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”: Matthew XXII.40. When asked by the Pharisees, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?”, Jesus answers, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Chapter X/3, Limbo

in desire without hope: Dante, Inferno IV, 42. “Che senza speme vivemo in disio.” See also second epigraph for Book VII above.

Men say that his love and his wrath are one thing: ?? Lewis may have been thinking of George MacDonald in passages like the one in Unspoken Sermons II.3, quoted as No. 84 in Lewis’s MacDonald Anthology (see second note to IX/4): “The terror of God is but the other side of His love.”

Chapter X/5, Superbia

Superbia: (Latin) “Pride”, one of the “seven deadly sins” as defined in medieval theology. The others were Ira (Wrath), Gula (Gluttony), Avaritia (Avarice or Covetousness), Invidia (Envy), Accidia (Sloth) and Superbia (Pride).

“When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man”: From Te Deum Laudamus, widely known as the Ambrosian Hymn since it got wrongly attributed to St Ambrose. Tu ad liberandum suscepturus hominem non horruisti virginis uterum.

when she said that He had regarded the lowliness of His hand-maiden: From the Maginificat, the hymn of the Virgin Mary after Elisabeth has told her “blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”, Luke I.48.

Chapter X/7, Luxuria

Luxuria: (Latin) “Lust”; cf. note to Superbia in X/5, above.

a fountain of writhing and reptilian life: The scene must have been inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Book XXV.

Lilith: In Babylonian mythology, Lilith was a female spirit, childless and with poisonous breasts with which she tried to kill babies. In the Bible there is a single mention of her in Isaiah XXXIV.14, as “the satyr” (AV) or “night creatures” (NIV); in medieval Jewish mythology she became the malicious “first wife of Adam”. For C. S. Lewis the figure of Lilith personified what he regarded as a specifically feminine vice – the craving to be desirable rather than beautiful. See also his novel That Hideous Strength III.3, where Jane Studdock is reminded of the difference between Eve and Lilith. A different and probably earlier version of this poem is to be found as a postscript of Lewis’s letter to Arthur Greeves of 29 April 1930 (Collected Letters I, pp. 895–896).

Chapter X/8, The Northern Dragon

serpens nisi serpentem comederit: (Latin) “It isn’t a serpent if it doesn’t eat serpents.” ?? Source not found.

druery: Love-making.

Chapter X/9, The Southern Dragon

Behemoth: An animal mentioned in the Old Testament, Job XL.10, perhaps a hippopotamus but certainly very large and strong.

Leviathan: A huge aquatic animal mentioned in several places of the Old Testament: Job XLI.1, Psalms LXXIV.14 and CIV.26, and Isaiah XXVII.1.

resurgam: (Latin) “I shall rise again.”

Io Paean: Paean was the physician to the gods of ancient Greece, while Io was an exclamation often expressing suffering and invoking help; it later came to be used as a shout of praise or thankgsgiving, a cry of triumph or exultation, as Vertue uses it here.

Chapter X/10, The Brook

Osirian: From Osiris, Egyptian god of the lower world and judge of the dead.