The merger of Sherborne Prep School with Sherborne School has unexpectedly brought together in our alumni two members of the Auden Group – the poets Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis.
The poet and playwright Louis MacNeice CBE (1907-1963) attended Sherborne Prep School from 1917 to 1921 before going on to Marlborough, and the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (1904-1972) attended Sherborne School (Harper House) from 1917 to 1923. In the 1930s both MacNeice and Day-Lewis were members of the Auden Group, a collective of British and Irish writers that also included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood.
Both poets would later recall in their poems their schooldays in Sherborne.
Louis MacNeice in his poem ‘Carrickfergus’ (1937) wrote:
‘I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines
and the soldiers with their guns’
and in ‘Autumn Sequel’ (1953) he recalled with affection his headmaster at Sherborne Prep, Littleton Charles Powys, who appears as ‘Owen’ in Canto XXII:
‘Owen, who once was a walking belfry, the sun
Strode through his lips and boomed in his steps when first
At the age of ten I watched the wild flowers run
Into his fingers and all Dorset burst
In birdsong round his head, trill, twitter, chirp and chaff.
… Memory flicks
The pages over; this was my first master
Who taught me the names of butterflies and the tricks
Of Latin elegiacs; the dull plaster
Busts of the usual schoolroom came alive
And the dull schoolroom clock went faster, faster,
As Owen made the swallows loop and dive
From the high belfry louvres, and so brought
Us children to our senses. Which were five.’
In ‘Sketches for a Self-Portrait’ (Poems 1943-1947) Cecil Day-Lewis remembers ‘the mellow South West town/That spoke to him words unheeded but unforgotten…’, and the almost maternal role that Sherborne played in filling a void in his life following the death of his mother:
‘So I returned to school, a kaleidoscope
Of shaken images, arguments jangling like glass.
And the wise grey South West town claimed me, calmed me
With the sedatives of routine, the balm of multitude.’
and in ‘The Chrysanthemum Show’ (Poems 1943-1947) he recalls the feelings evoked in November 1917 when as a boy he visited the annual chrysanthemum show in the Wesleyan School Room (now the Powell Theatre) in Abbey Road, Sherborne.
Cecil Day-Lewis was a proud Old Shirburnian and in 1950 wrote ‘A Commemoration Ode’ to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Sherborne School by King Edward VI.
Find out more:
Cecil Day-Lewis’ time at Sherborne School
Cecil Day-Lewis, Poetry Foundation
Louis MacNeice, Poetry Foundation
Hear Louis MacNeice read his poem ‘Prayer before Birth’ on the Poetry Archive
Posted 7 October 2021 by Sherborne School Archives
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