S8E23 – AA – “Venusian Verse”, After Hours with Dr. Don W. King

Did you know that Perelandra was conceived first in verse? Did you know that Lewis’ friend and poet, Ruth Pitter, converted the final chapter into poetry? In today’s episode, Dr. Don W. King explains all…

S8E23: “Venusian Verse”, After Hours with Dr. Don W. King (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote of the Week

He who has never uttered one word twice,
First made the earths, and after them there came
Not better earths but beasts: then there arise
Not nobler beasts but spirits: then He dies
Their death to save the fallen: but these shall be
Not mended, but clothed on in Paradise
With new creation fashioned gloriously:
So change itself is changed for ever.
Blest be He!

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

Biographical Information

Today we are joined by Dr. Joshua Herring, a recurring guest, who David met at the Undiscovered C. S. Lewis Conference last year.

Dr. Don W. King has been the faculty of Montreat College since 1974, where he is a Faculty Fellow and Professor of English. From 1999 to 2015 he served as Editor of the Christian Scholar’s Review. His 90+ essays and reviews have appeared in many different publications, including VII: Journal and The Journal of Inklings Studies. He is also author of many books which include: “Inkling, Historian, Soldier, and Brother: A Life of Warren Hamilton Lewis”, “Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman”, “The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition”, and “Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter, A Critical Edition”.

Chit-Chat

Dr. King included quite a lot of notes of current and future publications, so David copied them across…

• “Joy Davidman’s Unpublished Letters: January 4, 1949, to December 19, 1952.” VII, Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center 40 (2024): forthcoming.
• “Frankenstein’s Nursery Rhymes: The Unpublished Poetry of Joy Davidman.” Sehnsucht: The C. S. Journal 19 (2025). Forthcoming.
• “C. S. Lewis’s Poetry: Yearning for Lost Eden.” In the Routledge Companion to C. S. Lewis. Eds. Mary Baggett and David Baggett. 2025. Forthcoming.
• “Review of The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs. By Diana Pavlac Glyer. Journal of Inklings Studies (2025). Forthcoming.
• “Amor Agonistes: The Love Sonnets of Louise Labé and Joy Davidman.”

Toast

• David was drinking an Athletic Brewing non-alcoholic beer, “Round of Cheers”.
• Dr. King had a mug of apple cider.

Discussion

01. “Ruth 101”

• When planning for this season, David came across Dr. King’s paper, “The Poetry of Prose: C.S. Lewis, Ruth Pitter, and Perelandra”.

Q. Let’s begin by talking about Ruth Pitter – who was she and how did she intersect with Lewis’?

• Pitter was a well-known and critically acclaimed twentieth-century British poet. She published 18 volumes of poetry. She earned her living in London as an artisan, by painting furniture and running a business, Deane and Forester, with her lifelong friend Kathleen O’Hara.
• Pitter lived in Chelsea, a conclave for artists in London, during WWII. Because of the war, she had to work in a munitions factory. The pressures of the nightly bombings and being denied being able to work as an artisan—she ran a business that specialised in painting furniture—caused her to became increasingly depressed. Yet as she neared complete despair, unsolicited hope came from an unlikely source: she heard the BBC radio broadcasts of C. S. Lewis, later published as “Mere Christianity”. She recalls:

There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking—well—I must find somebody or something because like this I cannot go on. I stopped in the middle of Battersea Bridge one dreadful March night when it was cold, and the wind was howling over the bridge, and it was as dark as the pit, and I stood and leaned against the parapet and thought—like this I cannot go on. And it didn’t come to me at once but some time afterwards I heard the broadcast talks of C. S. Lewis, and I at once grappled them to my soul, as Shakespeare says. And I used to assemble the family to hear because I thought that they were so good that even from the point of view of enjoyment people shouldn’t miss them, and I got every word of his that I could, and I could see by hard argument there was only the one way for it. I had to be intellectually satisfied as well as emotionally because at that time of life one doesn’t just fall into it [Christianity] in adolescent emotion, and I was satisfied at every point that it was the one way and the hard way to do things.

Ruth Pitter

• While Pitter’s conversion to Christianity was several years away, hearing Lewis on the radio was a critical step down the path to Christian faith.
• Pitter’s had what she thought was an impossible desire to meet Lewis. But her meeting him was fortuitously advanced when Herbert Palmer—a minor poet and friend of both Lewis and Pitter—began corresponding with Lewis in the autumn of 1945; Palmer soon agreed to help Pitter meet Lewis. 
• In a letter of November 15, 1945, in which she comments briefly on several of Lewis’s books, including “The Pilgrim’s Regress”, she writes Palmer: 

Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it’s worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life. One’s homesickness for Heaven finds at least an inn there; and it’s an inn on the right road. You’re absolutely right about his importance—portentous.

Ruth Pitter, Letter to Herbert Palmer, November 15th, 1945

Palmer replied and said Lewis was surprised to learn of her interest in him; Palmer quotes from Lewis’s letter to him of December 15:

I am astonished at what Miss Pitter says and am most deeply rejoiced to find that my work is not (as her rash kindness betrayed her into saying) the ‘joy of her life,’ but the occasion which sometimes awakes that joy into activity. The little I have seen of her work I admired very greatly.

C. S. Lewis, Letter to Herbert Palmer, December 15, 1945

• To this high compliment, Pitter says: “I am quite [exalted] at receiving the message from C. S. Lewis, for whom my enthusiasm is of a kind I thought dead in my bosom—haven’t felt anything like it for 30 years.
• Palmer’s next reply further heightens Pitter’s anticipation when he quotes from Lewis’s letter to him on July 5: “C. S. Lewis sends you his Duty, and says you may see him when you like (Sunday [July 7?]). On July 8, Pitter writes Palmer:

Many thanks for the kind messages from C. S. Lewis. I will write to him, and ask if I may go to see him: and in this prospect I feel more excitement, and more diffidence, than I have felt since the age of 18 or so.

Ruth Pitter, Letter to Herbert Palmer, July 8th, 1946

• Pitter then writes Lewis and asks to meet him. In his response to her letter, he expresses surprise that she was hesitant in asking for the meeting: “But what you should be ‘trepidant’ about in calling on a middle aged don I can’t imagine” (July 13). Pitter’s July 17 letter to Lewis recalls the visit:

I have hunted these out wishing you to see something more recent than the “Trophy,” and particularly that you should see “A Mad Lady’s Garland,” which though only grotesque & satirical (with the exception of “Fowls Celestial and Terrestrial”, included as a deliberate archaism) I think is my best & most original. Please keep the other two if you have a mind to them, but perhaps I may have the “Garland” back some time, as it is the only copy I have bar the American. My visit to you has discountenanced all the gypsy’s warnings of people who say “never meet your favorite authors. They are so disappointing.” With heartfelt thanks.

Ruth Pitter, Letter to C. S. Lewis, July 17th, 1946

Lewis quickly reads A Trophy of Arms and writes Pitter on July 19:

“[Trophy of Arms] is enough for one letter for it has most deeply delighted me. I was prepared for the more definitely mystical poems, but not for this cool, classical quality. You do it time after time—create a silence and vacancy and awe all round the poem. If the Lady in Comus had written poetry one imagines it would have been rather like this.”

C. S. Lewis, Letter to Ruth Pitter, July 19th, 1946

• He comments on his favorites, noting in particular that “Cadaverous in Storm” is wonderful and that “‘alleluia all my gashes cry’ [from ‘A Solemn Meditation’] just takes one up into regions poetry hasn’t visited for nearly a hundred years. . . . Why wasn’t I told you were as good as this?” (720–21). It is not hard to imagine the thrill Pitter received upon reading Lewis’s high praise, particularly since she admired him as writer, scholar, and sage, ever mindful of how his radio broadcasts and books had nurtured her faith.
• Lewis then begins sending his poems to Pitter for a critique. After thanking her for taking the time to respond, he says he is relieved that she found the poems effective and confesses “that in most of these poems I am enamoured of metrical subtleties—not as a game: the truth is I often lust after a metre as a man might lust after a woman.”
• Lewis started writing Pitter regularly about his own verse, admiring her native ability and appreciating her critical insights. In effect, Pitter became Lewis’s mentor as a poet.

02. “It Began With a Poem…”

Q. Would you mind telling us about how “Perelandra” began in Poetry?

• Poetic prose has been defined as “ordinary spoken and written language (prose) that makes use of cadence, rhythm, figurative language, or other devices ordinarily associated with poetry” (Harry Shaw). 
• A brief examination of Perelandra confirms that it contains some of the most sustained poetic prose that Lewis ever wrote. While the majority of the book is prose narrative, approximately one quarter of the novel may be deemed poetic. Thomas Peters claims that “Perelandra reads like poetry”. Writing about the Ransom trilogy, Kath Filmer argues that Lewis’s frequent use of metaphor in his poetry is readily transferred to his prose; his fiction, she contends, has “that imaginative, ‘magical’ quality that he failed to express in his poetry”.
• In explaining what stimulated his writing the story, Lewis characteristically connects it with his poetic impulse of conceiving images in his essay collection “Of Other Worlds”:

The starting point for my second novel, Perelandra , was my mental pictures of floating islands. The whole of the rest of my labours in a sense consisted in building up a world in which floating islands could exist.

C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds

• Hooper suggests that the novel may have had its genesis in poetic form, citing the only surviving fragment: 

The floating islands, the flat golden sky 
At noon, the peacock sunset: tepid waves 
With the land sliding over them like a skin: 
The alien Eve, green-bodied, stepping forth 
To meet my hero from her forest home, 
Proud, courteous, unafraid; no thought infirm 
Alters her cheek. 

C. S. Lewis

• In recalling all he saw on Perelandra, Ransom corrects Lewis (the character in the novel) for assuming that “it’s all too vague for you to put in words”:

“On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.”

C. S. Lewis, Ransom, Perelandra

• Indeed, chapter three in its entirety and much of chapter four can be cited as evidence of this claim, for there, Lewis creates lavish verbal pictures of the paradisal environment that Ransom enjoys. What he writes is a lyrical shower unprecedented in his fiction and characterized by a cloudburst of figurative language, including effusive metaphors, similes, and symbols (Filmer).

03. “Ruth’s Homage”

Q. So could you please tell us about how Ruth Pitter responded to Perelandra, and her project in response to it?

• A Spenserian stanza is comprised of nine lines. The first eight lines are in iambic pentameter and rhyme abab bcbc. The ninth also has the c rhyme but is in iambic hexameter (often called an alexandrine).
• Pitter recalls in her journal:

I had been transcribing the paean of praise towards the end of Perelandra into irregular Spenserian stanzas simply as a mnemonic: I wished so much to have these enormous transcendental ideas in a form I could memorise & use wherever I happened to be.

Ruth Pitter

• Pitter’s deep admiration for Perelandra led her to ask Lewis if she might transcribe the ending of the novel into Spenserian stanzas. At first he is amused—“I’m rather shocked at your wasting your verse on my prose” (April 27)—but this soon gives way to curiosity: “When am I to see the Spenserians?” (May 8). Two months later he responds to Pitter’s Spenserian transcriptions: “I like them—and you manage to be closer to the original in verse than some of my continental translators seem to get in prose” (July 6).

04. “Battling with the Bodleian!”

• Dr. King came across these transcriptions through researching for his book on Lewis’ poetry. He had to negotiate with a stubborn Englishman at the Bodleian Library to access some of her works.

05. “Poetry vs Prose”

Q. How do you think Ruth’s poetry compares to Jack’s prose?

• A comparison of Pitter’s transcriptions passages from Perelandra often sharpens and clarifies Lewis’s prose. For instance, Pitter’s “XVI” is powerful poetry communicating the boundless love, mercy, and compassion of God while at the same time refining the meaning of Lewis’s original. 
• The passage in Perelandra reads:

“Each thing was made for Him. He is the centre cause we are with Him, each of us is at the centre. It is not as in a city of the Darkened World where they say that each must live for all. In His city all things are made for each. When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.” 

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

• Here is Pitter’s transcription: 

He is the Centre, and each thing was made 
For Him, and in Him each for ever dwells: 
Not, as in cities of the dark is said, 
Each one for all: but utter love compels 

All to the service of each one. So tells 
The story of the wounded World: He came 
For each man, not for men. His miracles 
Of strongest mercy would have been the same 

If but one living soul had dwelt there in that flame. 

Ruth Pitter

• While Pitter’s version loses the power of Lewis’s line “Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre,” she considerably clarifies his “He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less”: “He came / For each man, not for men. His miracles / Of strongest mercy would have been the same / If but one living soul had dwelt there in that flame.”
• In general  Pitter’s transcriptions reconfigure Lewis’s prose into poetic language and cadence, at times making his original more elegant. For example, Lewis singled out Pitter’s “XXIII” for its “high eloquence”: 

Yet seeming also is the cause and end 
For which Time is so long, and Heaven deep 
Lest if we never met the roads that tend 
Nowhere, nor darkness, where the answers sleep 

To questions silence must for ever keep: 
Nothing could image in our mind that Sea, 
That Gulf and that Abyss, the Father. Leap 
Into that depth, O thoughts: only to be 

Sunk drowned and echoless for ever. Blest be He! 

Ruth Pitter, XXIII

• Lewis’s original is:

Yet this seeming also is the end and final cause for which He spreads out Time so long and Heaven so deep; lest, if we never met the dark, and the road that leads nowhither, and the question to which no answer is imaginable, we should have in our minds no likeness of the Abyss of the Father, into which if a creature drop down his thoughts for ever he shall hear no echo return to him. Blessed, blessed, blessed be He!

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

• At least part of Pitter’s success in making this passage more eloquent is her turning Lewis’s difficult “the question to which no answer is imaginable” into the memorable “where the answers sleep / To questions silence must for ever keep.” Furthermore, Lewis’s ambiguous “Abyss of the Father” is helped by the synonyms “Sea” and “Gulf.” 
• In brief, Lewis’s prose concerning the Great Dance was ore that Pitter often transformed into gold.
• Dr. King discussed the reviews the two authors received. Lest we think that Pitter’s efforts at transcribing the end of Perelandra were presumptuous self-indulgence, consider the criticism levelled at Lewis when the novel was first published:

Bravely as Mr. Lewis has assaulted the high and mighty symbols of human hope, serious and imaginative as is his purpose, the things he intends . . . cannot be done at the pace and within the structure of narrative prose. It is a subject and verse at its most immense… passages in this book which tremble near the absurd because they have to be so much explained, might well have been majestic and beyond question in the simple, inevitable dress of poetry.

Kate O’Brien, Perelandra Book Review

• Accordingly, Pitter’s transcriptions, while faithful to the source, suggest both the underlying poetic nature of Lewis’s prose in Perelandra and offer an attempt to turn it into verse.
• Ruth Pitter was a trusted confidante for Lewis the poet. In other letters to her he expounded at length upon different kinds of poetry, the role of the individual poet, his deep love of John Milton, his “experiments” in verse, the “hard” subjects for poetry, and his favourite meters. Undoubtedly Pitter was grateful to be a sounding board, thankful that she could in some small way repay Lewis for the broad- cast talks that had helped her avoid the “slough of despond” she felt herself slipping into as World War II came to a close.

Even after his death she paid him a compliment by alluding to Perelandra in her “Still by Choice” (1966). “Angels” speculates about the real character of an angel (“terrible, tender, or severe?”), and she overtly refers to Lewis’s eldila :

“Or likelier, now we dream of space, Lewis’s dread sublime / Pillars of light, no limbs, no face, / Sickening our space and time?”

Ruth Pitter, Still by Choice

• Dr. King quoted two short poems by Pitter. The first is entitled “If You Came” (1937), and is one of the closest writings Pitter had to a love poem. Listeners can hear Pitter read it herself in a salvaged recording on Poetry Archive.

If you came to my secret glade,
Weary with heat,
I would set you down in the shade
I would wash your feet.

If you came in the winter sad,
Wanting for bread,
I would give you the last that I had,
I would give you my bed.

But the place is hidden apart
Like a nest by a brook,
And I will not show you my heart
By a word, by a look.

The place is hidden apart
Like the nest of a bird:
And I will not show you my heart
By a look, by a word.

Ruth Pitter, If You Came

• The next poem Dr. King shared was “Sudden Heaven”, which he is near certain influenced Lewis’ own poem, “The Day With a White Mark”.

All was as it had ever been
The worn, familiar book
The oak beyond the hawthorne scene
The misty woodlands look
The starling perched upon the tree
With his long tress of straw.

When suddenly heaven blazed on me,
And suddenly I saw,
Saw all as it would ever be
In bliss too great to tell
Forever safe, forever free,
All bright with miracle.

Saw as in heaven the thorn arrayed,
The tree beside the door
And I must die,
But oh my shade
Shall dwell there evermore.

Ruth Pitter, Sudden Heaven

06. “Beginning Pitter”

Q. If our readers have had their interest piqued in Pitter, where should they begin?

• One collection of Pitter’s works is called “The Bridge”, written during the second world war, which is her recollection of her experiences at the time. He also recommended “Still by Choice”.
• Dr. King has written a biography on Pitter, called “Hunting the Unicorn: A Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter”. He has also written a book on her collected letters, titled “Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter”.
• Though she did not draw attention to herself, Pitter was recognised by a number of British luminaries, including Hilaire Belloc and Inkling Lord David Cecil. Owen Barfield was also a big fan.

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

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More Information

• Montreat College
• Dr. Don W. King’s Amazon Author Page
• The Poetry of Prose

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