Quotations and Allusions
in C.
S. Lewis, Perelandra
compiled
by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)
C. S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra (1943), like most of his books,
contains a great number of allusions to unspecified books and situations. Here
is a listing by chapter and sub-chapter of many such words and phrases with
brief references to what I have found to be their sources. I have also included
a few other items where a short explanation may be of use to some readers. The
list is based on notes I made for my Dutch translation of this book, published
in 2006.
Double question marks in bold type ( ?? ) mark those places where I
am still hoping to find relevant details. Additions, corrections, and proposals
for new entries are welcome.
Page numbers in square brackets refer to the first edition.
DEDICATION
some ladies at Wantage
These “ladies” are the nuns of
the Community of St Mary the Virgin, founded in 1848 as one of the first Anglican religious orders. They lived
in a convent at Wantage, a place some 25 km south of Oxford. One of them,
sister Penelope, wrote to Lewis in
August 1939 to thank him for his first science-fiction book, Out of the
Silent Planet. A fruitful pen-friendship followed. The Mother Superior
invited Lewis to come and talk to the Junior Sisters in April 1942, when he had
nearly finished writing Perelandra. Two years later he wrote an
introduction for Sister Penelope’s translation of Athanasius, De incarnatione Verbi (The
Incarnation of the Word of God, 1944). Lewis’s Collected Letters
contain 41 letters to her from the years 1939–1957.
CHAPTER
1 [pp. 7–20 in the first edition]
creatures called eldila [7]
“Eldil” is one of several names and words in the Ransom
trilogy which Lewis probably borrowed, loosely, from his friend J. R. R.
Tolkien long before The Lord of the Rings
was finished. Tolkien later pointed out that “the Eldils
... owe something to the Eldar in my work” (letter of
17 July 1971 to Roger Lancelyn Green, quoted in Green
& Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, revised ed. 2002, p.
210).
H. G. Wells [9]
Wells (1866–1946) was a
pioneer of English science fiction and, as such, an inspiration for C. S.
Lewis. Lewis acknowledged his debt in a prefatory note in Out of the Silent
Planet.
Selenites [9]
A name for the inhabitants of
the Moon in H. G. Wells’s novel The First Men in the Moon (1901); derived from the Greek word selene, “Moon”.
Tellurian [10]
from a Latin word for the
planet Earth, tellus.
archon [18]
from the Greek word archôn, “leader” or “director”, a general title for high magistrates in
ancient Greece. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the name
was used by the Gnostics for the seven rulers of the seven celestial spheres,
each of which was linked up with one of the known planets, which included the
Sun and the Moon.
Natvilcius [19, note]
a fictitious name for a
fictitious figure; it is a Latinized form of Nat Whilk, Anglo-Saxon for “I know not
who”. Lewis occasionally used “Nat Whilk” or “N.W.”
as a pseudonym when he published a poem. The personal notes he made after the
death of his wife in 1960 (A Grief
Observed, 1961) were initially published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk.
your familiar [20]
i.e.
“familiar spirit” – a kind of
spirit which often assumes animal form and is supposed to attend and aid a
witch, wizard etc.
CHAPTER
2 [first ed. pp.
21–34]
photosome [23]
A fancy Greek word for
“light-body”.
the defence of Moscow [24]
Lewis began writing Perelandra
in the autumn of 1941, when the German invasion of Russia began to falter as
the winter set in before Moscow was captured.
powers and principalities [24]
Ephesians 6:12.
Schiaparelli ... is all wrong
[27, 33]
Finding out the rotation period
of Venus has indeed long been impossible because of the cloud cover. From the
17th century till the 19th, estimates varied from about 23 hours to about 24
Earth days, until Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910)
concluded from his observations in 1877–1878 that Venus rotates on itself in
the same time as its revolution around the Sun (224.7 days). The truth at last
came out by radar observations in 1962. The planet’s rotation on itself was
found to be retrograde and take 243 days – slower than its journey round the
Sun. This means that a day on Venus begins in the West and has a duration of
116 Earth days.
hopes deferred [32]
Proverbs 13:12.
all the earth became full of
darkness and cruel habitations [32]
Psalm 74:20.
CHAPTER
3 [first ed. pp. 34–49]
B. … who is an Anthroposophist … “seeing life” in a
very different sense [34]
A barely hidden allusion to Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield (1898-1997), who became an anthroposophist
in 1923. Anthroposophy is a school of thought and mental training program for
discovery of a spiritual world. It was founded by Rudolf Steiner in the early
twentieth century as a secession from the Theosophical Society.
CHAPTER
4 [first ed. pp. 49–65]
garden of the Hesperides [49]
In Greek mythology, this is a
garden at the foot of the Atlas Mountains in North-West Africa, present-day
Morocco. There the Hesperides, daughters of Atlas and Hesperis,
were guarding a tree with golden apples and were helped in this task by a
dragon.
Cyclops [49]
One-eyed giants in Greek
mythology.
the verse in Pope, “die of a rose in aromatic pain” [52]
Alexander Pope
(1688–1744), An Essay on Man I, 200.
“Sober certainty of waking bliss” [55]
John Milton (1608–1674), Comus, 263.
Circe or Alcina
[61]
In Greek mythology, Circe is a
well-known sorceress. She lived on the island of Aeaea,
where she had the habit of turning visitors into animals. Alcina
is an wicked sorceress in Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto
(1474–1533) with a role roughly similar to that of Circe.
a Titian satyr [62]
Half-human creature in Greek
mythology as depicted by the Italian painter Titan (c. 1490–1576).
CHAPTER
5 [first ed. pp. 65–79]
walking before him as if on the other side of a brook, was the Lady
herself... [65]
Cf.
Dante, Purgatorio
XVIII, 34–42. Lewis pointed out the parallel between his Green Lady and Dante’s
Matilda in a letter of 29 October 1944 to Charles A. Brady (Collected Letters II, p. 630).
I was young today … tomorrow I
shall be older … [65-66]
As pointed out by Sanford
Schwartz in his 2009 study* of the Ransom trilogy, Lewis in Perelandra draws heavily on some central
ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) − including Bergson’s
notion of reality as, fundamentally, a perpetual spontaneous movement toward
novel forms of life and ever-higher levels of development. Time, in this
context, has no length or meaning apart from the absolutely new states which
are constantly but unpredictably being produced.
For
an instructive general account of Bergson’s career as a thinker from the days
when Lewis absorbed his thought, see also T. E. Hulme’s essay “The Philosophy
of Intensive Manifolds” in Speculations (1924).
* C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the
Space Trilogy (Oxford University Press,
2009), chapter II, “Paradise Reframed: Keeping Time on Planet Venus”.
Artemis [72]
Nature goddess of the ancient Greeks. In Ilias (XXI, 470) she is called
the queen of wild beasts; in classical literature she often appears as the
goddess of hunting. The Romans identified her with Diana.
Mænad [72]
in ancient Greece, a female
participant in festivities in honour of the god
Bacchus (Dionysos).
Only my spirit praises Maleldil who comes down from Deep Heaven into this lowness
and will make me to be blessed by all the times... [74]
There is a strong resemblance
here to the “Magnificat”, the song of Mary in the Gospel of Luke 1:46–55.
Maleldil Himself wept when He saw
it [75]
Cf. Gospel of John 11:33–38,
where Jesus “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled”, and “wept”, at the sight
of the people who wept over the death of Lazarus.
CHAPTER
6 [first ed. pp. 79–96]
Giant’s Causeway [81]
A part of the north coast of
Antrim, Northern Ireland, with thousands of basalt columns.
Something like a shooting star
seemed to have streaked across the sky [85]
Cf. Luke 10:18, “I beheld
Satan as lightning fall from heaven’; and Revelation 8:10–11, “And the third
angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a
lamp ... 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.’
The sea beside the island was
a mass of the large silver fishes [86]
As the Green Lady’s first
appearance mirrors an episode in Dante (see note to chapter 5, p. 65), so the
present scene might be an echo of what Lewis read in De planctu
Naturae, “The Complaint of Nature”, by 12th-century author Alanus ab Insulis. In The Allegory
of Love, chapter II.6, p. 107, Lewis translated a passage describing how
the whole world rejoiced at the coming of the virgin Natura: “...The fishes,
even, swimming up to the eyebrows of the waves, so far forth as the lumpish
kind of their sensuality suffered them, foretold by their glad cheer the coming
of their lady...”
CHAPTER 7 [first ed. pp. 96–111]
Cambridge combination room [100]
British
universities such as those of Oxford and Cambridge are organized as a group of
largely independent colleges. Each college has its own “Common Rooms”, usually
three: Junior, Middle and Senior, for students, graduates and tenured staff
respectively. In Cambridge the term for these rooms is “Combination Room”, and
in addition to them there is a Combination Room for the university as a whole.
inter-sidereal [101]
“between the stars” or
possibly “between the galaxies”; derived from sidus,
a Latin word for star or constellation.
emergent evolution [102]
Title of a book, Emergent
Evolution (1923) by C. Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936), where it is argued
that physical and psychic events are all part of a single natural order and,
further, that this order does not evolve gradually – as Darwin thought – but
through sudden and unpredictable phenomena, called “emergents”.
Morgan borrowed the word from George Henry Lewes, a nineteenth century author
who used it in his Problems of Life and Mind (1873–1879).
God is a spirit [103]
John 4:24.
nisus [106]
Latin word for “exertion” or
“forward urge”. In the present context Lewis is almost certainly borrowing the
word from Space, Time and Deity (1920) by the Australian philosopher
Samuel Alexander, who professed a type of “emergent-evolutionism”. While Lewis
remained unimpressed by Alexander’s main argument, the book played a small but
vital part in his conversion to Christianity, as described in his autobiography
Surprised by Joy, chapter 14.
qui dort
dîne []
(French) “Who sleeps, dines”
(i.e. sleeping allows one to go without food).
CHAPTER 8
[first ed. pp. 111–121]
when the morning stars sang
together [121]
Cf. Job 38:7, God answering
Job “out of the whirlwind”: “Where wast thou when I
laid the foundations of the earth ... when the morning stars sang together, and
all the sons of God shouted for joy?’
CHAPTER
9 [first ed. pp.
122–141]
a man who had been on the Somme [123]
i.e. a man who as a soldier in
the First World War had taken part in the great and calamitous battles in the
area around the Somme river in northern France, in the summer of 1916, where
hundreds of thousands of young men were killed.
it is for this that I came
here, that you may have Death in abundance [130]
Cf. John 10:10, “I am come
that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
More or less the same play on
these words is made by G. K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, chapter
VI, “The Five Deaths of the Faith”, par. 8, when he is describing the
Albigensian heresy as
Schopenhauer hovering over the future; but it was also
Manichaeus rising from the dead; that men might have death and that they might
have it more abundantly.
As a background to this
background, it is interesting to note a reference to Schopenhauer by Bernard
Shaw in his Preface to Back to Methuselah
(1920), as he is discussing the pre-Darwinian evolutionism of Lamarck:
In 1819 Schopenhauer published
his treatise on The World as Will, which is the metaphysical complement to
Lamarck’s natural history, as it demonstrates that the driving force behind
Evolution is a will-to-live, and to live, as Christ said long before, more
abundantly.
Felix peccatum Adae [138]
“Happy sin of Adam”; see also
chapter 17 [p. 248]: “the sin whereby it came is called Fortunate”. The phrase
seems to be loosely borrowed from the Exsultet
(or Exultet), hymn for the evening before Easter Day in the Roman
Catholic liturgy. The relevant lines are:
O certe
necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est!
O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit
habere Redemptorem!
(“O truly necessary sin of
Adam, which the death of Christ has blotted out! / O happy fault, that merited
such and so great a Redeemer!”). As John Hick notes in his 1966 book Evil and the God of Love (ch. XIII.1, p. 280, note 1 or ch.
XII.1 in the 1977 edition):
The date and the authorship of
this Exultet are uncertain. It has
been attributed, but without adequate evidence, to St. Augustine, to St.
Ambrose, and to Gregory the Great. As part of the Easter liturgy it goes back
at least to the seventh century and possibly to the beginnings of the fifth
century. On its history see Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, 1948 (New York: Capricorn Books,
1960), pp. 286-7.
CHAPTER
10 [first ed. pp. 142–158]
the Prince of Darkness is a
gentleman [146]
Shakespeare, King Lear, III.4.
Mephistopheles [146]
A demon with a pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Hebrew name,
first appearing in the late medieval German legend of Dr Faustus. Lewis/Ransom
must be thinking of the way he appears in Goethe’s play Faust, as “the
sneering, jeering, leering tempter” (Brewer’s Phrase and Fable). At the
beginning of the second “Study” scene, Mephistopheles says to Faust:
|
So gefällst du mir. Wir werden, hoff ich, uns vertragen; Denn dir die Grillen zu verjagen, Bin ich als edler Junker hier, In rotem, goldverbrämtem Kleide, Das Mäntelchen von starrer Seide, Die Hahnenfeder auf dem Hut, Mit einem langen, spitzen Degen, Und rate nun dir, kurz und gut, Dergleichen gleichfalls anzulegen; Damit du, losgebunden, frei, Erfahrest, was das Leben sei. |
That I like to hear. We shall, I hope, bear with
each other; For to dispel thy crotchets,
brother, As a young lord, I now
appear, In scarlet dress, trimmed
with gold lacing, A stiff silk cloak with
stylish facing, A tall cock’s feather in my
hat, A long, sharp rapier to
defend me, And I advise thee, short and
flat, In the same costume to
attend me; If thou wouldst,
unembarrassed, see What sort of thing this life
may be. (transl. Charles T. Brooks,
1868) |
Paradise Lost [146]
Main work of John Milton
(1608–1674), English poet. Lewis discussed Satan’s character as presented by
Milton in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), chapter XIII.
what “creative” meant ... she laughed for a whole minute on end [150]
cf. George Macdonald in his
sermon “The Creation in Christ” (Unspoken
Sermons, third series, Nr. 1):
The word creation
applied to the loftiest success of human genius, seems to me a mockery of
humanity, itself in process of creation.
Lewis selected this fragment
as Nr. 171 in his Macdonald Anthology
(1946).
Agrippina [151]
Iulia Agrippina or “Agrippina
minor” (15–59 c.e.),
fourth and last wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, who was her third husband
and was probably poisoned by her; mother of Nero, who put her to death after
she had helped him to become the next emperor. Like Messalina, Claudius’ first
wife, she was notorious for her ambition and cruelty.
Lady Macbeth [151]
wife of the tragic hero in
Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. She encourages him to murder his
King and succeed to the throne; after this she maintains self-control for some
time but in the end the consciousness of her guilt drives her mad.
CHAPTER
11 [first ed. pp. 159–171]
“’Tis not in mortals to command success” [161]
Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Cato, I.2, 43.
Horatius stood on the bridge [162]
Horatius Cocles
(“the one-eyed”), a legendary hero of early Roman history. He defended, all
alone, the wooden bridge over the Tiber against approaching enemies so that the
Romans were able to demolish the bridge. He then leapt into the river and
crossed it swimming. The usual way for this story to reach British people of
Ransom’s generation would be through Lord Macaulay’s poetic rendering in Lays
of Ancient Rome (1842).
Constantine [162]
Constantine the Great (c.
280–337), Roman emperor. During the time (306–324) of his struggle for power
over the whole empire he became a champion of Christianity. He was baptised shortly before his death.
“fallings from him, vanishings” [165]
William Wordsworth
(1770–1850), Ode. Intimations of
Immortality, IX (“Fallings from us, vanishings...”).
lose his nerve as St. Peter
had done
[167]
Matthew 36:69–75.
sat before Him like Pilate [169]
Matthew 27.
the slaying before the
foundation of the world [169]
Cf. Revelation 13:8.
CHAPTER
12 [first ed. pp. 171–183]
“When I wake up after Thy image, I shall be satisfied” [172]
Psalm 17:15.
“Eloi, Eoli, lama sabachthani” [174]
Matthew 27:46.
The Battle of Maldon [177]
Old English poem, probably
dating from the tenth century.
Surd [178]
In mathematics, a surd is an
expression containing one or more irrational roots of numbers, such as √2.
The idea that something which
had once been of his own kind ... might even now be imprisoned in the thing he
was pursuing redoubled his hatred [179]
Cf. George MacDonald in Unspoken
Sermons I, on “Love thine enemy”:
It is the very presence of
this fading humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an
animal only, and not a man or a woman that did us hurt, we should not hate: we
should only kill. We hate the man just because we are prevented from loving
him. We push over the verge of the creation – we damn – just because we
cannot embrace.
My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, so flew’d
so sanded... [181]
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV.1.
CHAPTER
14 [first ed. pp. 197–210]
Æneid [199]
Main work of the Roman poet
Virgil (70–19 b.c.).
Chanson de Roland [199]
“Song of Roland”, Old French
epic poem about an episode in the exploits of Charlemagne and his faithful in
Spain.
Kalevala [199]
Finnish national epic,
compiled from folk poetry in the years 1835–1849 by the Finnish philologist
Elias Lönnrot.
The Hunting of the Snark
[199]
a long nonsense poem (1876) by
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland.
a rhyme about Germanic
sound-laws [199]
C. S. Lewis himself wrote such
a rhyme early in his career as a tutor in Oxford, as a playful protest against
an unreadable textbook that was in use at the time. Its opening lines are
printed in Walter Hooper’s preface to Lewis’s Selected Literary Essays
(Cambridge University Press 1969), page xv.
corridor train [209]
A train in the now usual sense
that wagons are connected by a corridor through which passengers can go from
one wagon to the next.
CHAPTER
15 [first ed. pp. 210–223]
a wound in his heel [215]
Cf.
Gen. 3:15, “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy
seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
Compare also chapter 14, p. 209: “the face smashed out of all recognition.”
Tellus [216]
See
note to chapter 1, p. 10, Tellurian.
CHAPTER
16 [first ed. pp. 223–235]
Elwin, the friend of the eldila [224]
In
fact, the name (and variants like Alwin, Alvin and Elvin) derives from
Anglo-Saxon Aelf-wine, “friend of the elves”.
one of Maleldil’s sayers
[225]
The apostle Paul, in Galatians
4:1–7. One of C. S. Lewis’s favourite comments on
that Bible passage no doubt was in George Macdonald’s sermon “Abba, Father!”
(in Unspoken Sermons, second series, 1885).
concentric wheels [227]
cf. Ezekiel 1:16, “Their
appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.” In
a letter of 4 March 1953, Lewis acknowledged, in a general way, his “heavy debt
to Ezekiel” for the way he described his eldils (Collected
Letters III, p. 302).
archaic statues from Ægina [229]
Ægina is an island in the Saronic Gulf, south of Athens.
Fifteen statues found on this island have since the 19th century been
considered as supreme examples of archaic sculpture.
like a quantitative ... like
an accentual metre [230]
In poetry, “quantitative” metres produce their rhythmic effects chiefly by the varied
lengths of the syllables, i.e. the time it takes to pronounce them; “accentual”
metres produce their effects chiefly by the varied
tonic stress (loudness) of the syllables. Most poetry in the modern European
languages is “accentual”, as the speech rhythms of these languages (with the
exception of French) naturally lend themselves to this form. Classical Greek
and Latin poetry is “quantitative”.
A faint breath, as Virgil
says, reaches even the late generations [231]
Aeneid VII, 646.
Mars and Venus ... the follies
that have been talked of them on Earth [232]
Viz. the idea that Aphrodite
(Venus) was married to Hephaestus, the smith, and committed adultery with Ares
(Mars). One of many allusions to this in European literature is in
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (I.5), where the eunuch Mardian says, “Yet have I fierce affections, and think
/ What Venus did with Mars.”
CHAPTER
17 [first ed. pp. 235–256]
Tor and Tinidril,
Baru and Baru’ah, Ask and
Embla, Yatsur and Yatsura
[237]
A heterogeneous series of
names for the first pair of humans.
– Tor and Tinidril, according to Tolkien, “are clearly Tor and
his elf-wife Idril blended with Tinuviel
(the second name of Luthien)”, i.e. the names are
derived from those of characters in Tolkien’s work; see his letter of 1971,
already quoted in the note on eldila in
chapter 1.
– A baru,
in ancient Assyro-Babylonian religion, was a
soothsayer acting as prophet and intermediary of Shamash, the god of
divination. Baru’ah is probably an invented
female form. If Lewis was indeed referring to this baru,
it is curious that he shouldn't have rather chosen the god Shamash and his
sister Ishtar, since the latter goddess represented the planet Venus.
– Ask and Embla are the first
two human beings according to one old Norse creation myth. Three gods walking
along the seashore find two trees and make them into the first man and a woman.
Ask or Askr is sometimes thought to have denoted an
ash tree; Embla an elm. One place where the story appears is the Poetic Edda,
“Völuspá”, stanza 17.
– Yatsur
is Hebrew for the experience of being kneaded or moulded
into the right form; it is the passive participle of the verb yatsar. Its use, along with a female variant, as a
name for the first human pair is perhaps an invention of Lewis’s.
Animal rationale [238]
A well-known definition of
“human being” in some ancient and medieval philosophers including Seneca and St
Thomas Aquinas.
“The Great Dance does not wait
to be perfect...” [246]
The whole of the following
hymnic episode was rewritten as a poem – “done
into irregular Spenserian stanzas” – by
Ruth Pitter (1897–1992), a friend of Lewis
from 1946 onwards. This version was first published in Don W. King, C.
S. Lewis, Poet: The legacy of his poetic impulse (Kent State University
Press, Kent, Ohio, 2001), Appendix I/5.
More readily available, the poem is also included in King’s online essay, “The Poetry of Prose: C. S. Lewis, Ruth Pitter,
and Perelandra”.
“Spenserian
stanzas” are stanzas in the form invented by Edmund Spenser for his long
allegorical poem The Faerie Queene (1596).
They consist of eight iambic pentameters followed by one iambic alexandrine,
with the rhyme scheme a b a b b c b c c.
Pitter’s choice for this model is
highly appropriate in light of what Lewis wrote about Spenser at the end of The
Allegory of Love, pp. 357–359 and especially in lecture notes on
Spenser as edited by Alastair Fowler, published as Spenser’s Images of Life (1967), p. 95–96:
What Spenser has done is to make an image of the whole
of life, a hymn to the universe that he and his contemporaries believed
themselves to inhabit. ... For the universe, as they conceived it, is a great
dance or ceremony or society. It is Chalcidius’ caelestis chorea and Alanus’
cosmic city of which Earth is a suburb.
On Chalcidius
(a 4th-century writer and perhaps a Christian) as the probable origin of the
“Great Dance” idea, and also on Alanus (a French
12th-century writer developing this idea) see Lewis’s The Discarded Image (1964), pp. 55 and 58.
the sin whereby it came is
called Fortunate [248]
See note to chapter 9 [p.
138], Felix peccatum Adae.
This is the Morning Star
[248]
Revelation 2:28.
Glund ... Lurga
... Neruval [248]
The planets Jupiter, Saturn
and (presumably) Uranus.
the end and final cause for which
He spreads out Time so long and Heaven so deep
cf. Plato’s creation story in Timaeus 37d-38b (translation R. D. Archer Hind, 1888):
... he essayed to make this All [i.e. the physical
universe] the like [i.e. like its pattern or ideal] to the best of his power.
Now so it was that the nature of the ideal was eternal. But to bestow this
attribute altogether upon a created thing was impossible; so he bethought him
to make a moving image of eternity, and while he was ordering the universe he
made of eternity that abides in unity an eternal image moving according to
number, even that which we have named Time. ... Time then has come into being
along with the universe ... and it was made after the pattern of the eternal
nature, that it might be as like to it as was possible.
The animals had gone ...
“Where are the beasts?” [253]
cf. Spenser’s Faerie Queene,
VII.7.59, final lines of the “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie”:
Then was that whole assembly
quite dismist,
And Natur’s
selfe did vanish, whither no man wist.
We are coming to have it in
our own choice... [254]
cf. The Faerie Queene, VII.7.58 (“them”
refers to “all things”, including the gods or planets):
Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne;
But they raigne over change, and do their states maintaine.
UPDATES:
4 September 2008 (reference to
Chesterton in note to ch. 9, “It is for this that I
came here”).
8 March 2009 (added note on
George MacDonald about hatred in ch. 12)
20 January
2011 (minor corrections; expanded note on Great Dance in ch.
17)
29 May
2013 (two final references to Spenser’s Mutability Cantos)
10 June
2015 (revised note on felix peccatum Adae in ch. 9)
14
October 2015 (added note on the end and final
cause in ch. 17)
7 January
2019 (added note on I was young today
in ch. 5)
15 June
2020 (added notes on B. … who is an Anthroposophist in ch. 3; on Cambridge combination room and qui dort dîne in ch. 7, on surd in ch. 12,
and on corridor train in ch. 14.
27
November 2020 (minor correction to note on Agrippina in ch. 10)