WHILE MUCH SCHOLARLY ATTENTION has been devoted to John Gower's revisions in Confessio Amantis, most of it has had to do with the political conditions under which he was working. One prominent exception involves his rewriting of what Peter Nicholson has called, “the two most famous lines in the entire poem” – a process that C.S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love characterized as purely aesthetic:

Gower, Lewis goes on to suggest, excelled at what Dryden was to call “the fairy way of writing” (220), and his careful revision of this passage from “The Tale of Rosiphilee” offers one instance of his responding to its appeal.

John Lawlor, in an oddly disputatious piece intended for a volume published in Lewis’ memory, takes issue with this reading. It betrays, he suggests, an overly romanticized view of Gower – Lewis had gone so far as to claim that Gower was “‘romantic’ in the nineteenth-century sense of the word” (220) – because it fails to appreciate that the word faye represents “a possible mode of being.” “The apparatus of past belief,” he writes, in an interesting anticipation of Todorov's distinction between the fantastic and the marvelous, “can become the vehicle of ‘romantic’ treatment only when it is freed from every touch of objective likelihood” (126). In other words, in a world where people might still believe in their existence, fairies could not possibly function as the vehicles of romantic fantasy. I agree with Lawlor's criticism here – though in general it seems to me far more appropriate to the Lewis of the Allegory of Love (written in 1936) than to the one of The Discarded Image (published posthumously thirty years later) – but I suspect that there are even more cogent objections to be raised to Lewis’ argument.