Ruskin, John

20 lines in five numbered stanzas of four lines each, with a textual reference ("Praeterita. Vol. III: Chap. III. 'The Alpine Rose'.") and an explanatory note on his composition of the poem for performance at Winnington School, fair copy with one correction, one page, folio ("A Pirie and Sons" watermark), c.1889; together with a transcription of the poem alongside a brief extract from Praeterita, entitled "The Grande Chartreuse", with an editorial note ("Insert in page 10"), 2 pages

The Works of John Ruskin, eds Cook and Wedderburn, vol. 2, pp.245-46

"...These lines were written to be sung by those who could sing, and danced by those who could dance, of the girls who had feeling and sound practise in such mysteries at the school of Winnington, near Northwick, Cheshire in the years 1855 to 58 [error for 1865 to 68]. ... I used to stay there when I had lectures to give at Liverpool, Rochdale, Glasgow, Bradford, or the like miserable and abysmal places, on the subjects of Heaven, Earth - bottomless pit and other places up and down the world..."

AN UNKNOWN MANUSCRIPT OF A LATE POEM BY THE "SAGE OF BRANTWOOD". This charming lyric in praise of pacifism was written to be sung by the students of Winnington Hall, a progressive girls' finishing school outside Manchester, where John Ruskin was an unofficial patron and occasional teacher for some ten happy years. Ruskin intended to include it in his late autobiography, Praetorita, but it was cancelled in proof and remained unpublished until the publication of the Poems volume of Cook and Wedderburn's monumental edition of Ruskin.

'Awake, awake' survives in a manuscript known to Cook and Wedderburn that contains a number of variant textual readings from the Praetorita proof (this manuscript is now in the Beinecke Library, Yale University). The Beinecke manuscript has a title, 'The Peace Song', and is found alongside a second poem also written for Winnington. Given the presence of the explanatory note and Praeterita chapter reference in the current manuscript, it was evidently written in the late 1880s when Ruskin was working on the third volume of Praeterita, and indeed the text of the current manuscript is closer to the Praeterita proof than to the Beinecke manuscript. However, Ruskin continued to revise the text after writing this manuscript: the text in proof has further textual revisions and is also rearranged into shorter lines (giving eight lines to the stanza).

Ruskin was an accomplished poet in his youth, winning the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford in 1839, but he wrote little verse in later life. POETICAL MANUSCRIPTS BY RUSKIN ARE EXCEPTIONALLY RARE AT AUCTION.