Narrative Poems

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Narrative Poems Page 17

by C. S. Lewis

12Queen is sick

  1half-past two

  2that pause of

  3Gesseran

  4Transl.: ‘We forget sweetly.’

  1longer

  2and

  3Calma

  1corner

  1These two lines originally followed lines 3 and 4.

  2slow-brightening

  3 . . . earthen taste,

  And now on the rock slabs her feet

  Touch dry, warm moss and found it sweet.

  There wading . . .

  4 . . . was darkened.

  Peak after peak, that had stood single

  Stole from her tired eyes to mingle

  And melt its fluid shape among

  The notch-edged darkness whence it sprung;

  And all one gloom the moorland grew

  Save where some pool had caught the hue

  Of the sky’s deepening arch that spread

  Pale and enormous overhead.

  And still . . .

  5took

  6[had risen] grew bright

  7 . . . moulding

  And milkwhite cloak of silkworm

  And sword . . .

  8It came,

  9To all things, water, rocks, and air

  And sap-green lives and the warm blooded brood,

  With its aloofness should, in the first stare

  10unlikeness

  11 . . . among the dead,

  A long way off. The small ancestral dread

  Mixed with the world’s and with her soul’s falling,

  Dread within dread. She heard it calling

  ‘Quick. . . .

  12His

  13baits

  14In fairy woods or dies and wakes in Hell,

  15I cannot

 

 

 


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