C

© Don W. King

A version of this essay first appeared in the Christian Scholar’s Review, 27 (Summer 1998): 454-474.

C. S. Lewis’ Spirits in Bondage: World War I Poet as Frustrated Dualist

Surprisingly, in the almost eighty years since these youthful poems were first published, only thirteen critical articles on Spirits in Bondage (hereafter SB) have appeared.[1] The paucity of critical commentary on SB may be in part due to the relative obscurity of the volume until it was reprinted in 1984; however, even since its reappearance scholars have been reticent to discuss these poems.[2] However SB is the culmination of Lewis’ earliest efforts at verse, and a watershed in his literary life. While limited in its scope and technique, SB reveals much about Lewis the youthful poet and prepares the way for Dymer seven years later. Above all else, SB shows Lewis living as a frustrated dualist. On the one hand, many sanguine poems in SB show his delight in Nature’s beauty and mystery; still others expose his longing to know more intimately a reality that transcends the merely physical, often characterized by the world of faery. On the other hand, in a number of morose poems he rails against man’s inhumanity to man and against a God he denies yet blames for man’s painful condition.[3] Central to this tension and before now not thoroughly explored is how Lewis’ experiences on the front line in France during World War I impact the poems. In addition, the war poetry of two of Lewis’ contemporaries, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, further informs our understanding of Lewis’ frustrated dualism. Accordingly, we will explore the poetry of SB from the perspective of his own war experiences and the insights afforded by Sassoon and Owen.

Suppression of World War I Memories

The failure to see a connection between Lewis’ wartime experience and SB has occurred in part because we have accepted too quickly Lewis’ statements in Surprised by Joy where he suppresses the horrors of the battlefield. The fact Lewis does not mention WWI until well over half way through SJ is a red flag suggesting masking is occurring.[4] Furthermore, he never adequately explains why he decides to enlist, since as an Irish citizen he is not oblige to do so; when he adds “I did feel that the decision absolved me from taking any further notice of the war . . . [and] accordingly I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible,” we are left unsatisfied. While he may have eventually faced conscription, he never mentions this in SJ.[5] Nor can we accept at face value his parting comment: “I said to my country, in effect, ‘You shall have me on a certain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but till then I shall live my own life. You may have my body, but not my mind. I will take part in battles but not read about them.’”[6]

In addition, if we accept what Lewis says in “Guns and Good Company,” the chapter in SJ where he deals most openly with his wartime experiences, we come away with the sense WWI for him is a rustic camping adventure punctuated by pneumonia, camaraderie, and the occasional falling bomb. For example, he summarizes his entire service in one sentence,[7] and then, while admitting he does meet some unpleasant people in the army, goes on to assert: “Every few days one seemed to meet a scholar, an original, a poet, a cheery buffoon, a raconteur, or at the least a man of good will.”[8] He then catalogs the books he reads, friends he makes, and comforts he manages with an easy breeziness bordering on the inane. Nowhere, for instance, does he write of the great loss of his friend Paddy Moore, whose mother he devotes the remainder of her life to keeping, his worries about Warren, nor his father’s pathological obsession with his welfare.[9] Lewis mollifies this to a degree near the end of the chapter when he says “I must not paint the wartime army all gold.”[10] But of describing the realities of the battlefield, he leaves to “those who saw more of it than I.”[11] Only in the last paragraph does he mention the brutal nature of his experience, and even here he ameliorates: “For the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H [igh] E [xplosives], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly on the memory.”[12] Though this catalogue of details is intended to be a stripped account, it actually reveals how much the war has remained with him regardless his attempts to block out or mask such memories. He ends the chapter by admitting his memories of the war show “rarely and faintly,” noting that “one imaginative moment seems to matter more than the realities that followed. It was the first bullet I heard—so far from me that it ‘whined’ like a journalist’s or a peacetime poet’s bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, ‘This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.’”[13] This bookish, “literary response” to war illustrates how Lewis, typical of many who experience battlefield brutalities, suppresses an unpleasant memory.

Notwithstanding these assertions by the older Lewis, the real impact of the ravages of war goes much deeper, and the many letters he writes at the time give this evidence. A review of letters to Greeves but especially to Albert Lewis shows them peppered with concerns about the war.[14] Concurrent with these letters and references to war, Lewis begins working in earnest on a number of poems that later appear in SB. The Lewis Papers affirm that from Easter 1915 until Lewis matriculates at University College, Oxford, in 1917, he spends his holidays at Little Lea writing verse, culminating in his putting fifty-two of the poems into a notebook entitled “The Metrical Meditations of a Cod.”[15] While the notebook containing the ‘Meditations” has not survived, it contained early versions of some poems later appearing in SB. Accordingly, just as Lewis admits to the presence of the war in his letters, so we can be certain he considers the war in the poetry he is writing.

The War Poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen

As we move to consider the impact of Lewis’ front-line experiences upon SB, it is proper to note how similar experiences affect other soldier poets. The sheer butchery of World War I is almost without equal, so grotesque it borders on being an outrage to the imagination; estimates place the number killed on the battlefield at 8,750,000 (including 750,000 British) with another 21,000,000 wounded. Even those brought up on World War II and Vietnam, wars with their own particular nightmares of death, recoil at this incredible loss of life and the seemingly absurd battlefield tactics. Literary responses to this debacle are not, of course, confined to poetry. Countless letters, diaries, and journals survive, and later memoirs and fictional accounts provide a rich cache of material detailing battlefield experiences. However, the poetry of World War I offers the most personal and poignant interpretation of those suffering its grip. If “every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,”[16] then surely World War I poetry suggests this as one of history’s greatest irony. The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, and, to a lesser extent Wilfred Owen, reflects this shift towards the ironic; Sassoon becomes “the most articulate spokesman for the mood of protest and rejection that animates the later poetry of the war,”[17] while Owen moves beyond Sassoon’s anger and accusation to throw “all of his resources into the struggle to express the deeper significance of the war.”[18] Taken together their poems offer a useful context wherein to examine Lewis as a war poet and the frustrated dualism of SB.

As one disaster follows another on the battlefield and the number of killed and wounded mounts—for example, at the battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, the British lost 60,000 men killed or wounded, a battlefield catastrophe unique even in this war of battlefield catastrophes—Sassoon and other poets are compelled to write poems reflecting the reality of war, especially since back home the press was heavily censored. For example, the official communique issued on the evening of July 1, 1916 says little and approaches a lie: “Attack launched north of River Somme this morning at 7:30 a.m., in conjunction with French. British troops have broken into German forward system of defenses on front of 16 miles. Fight is continuing. French attack on our immediate right proceeds equally satisfactorily.”[19] A soldier poet like Sassoon, witnessing the sickening horrors on the battlefield and functioning as an “independent contemplator,” writes poems giving a realistic, almost photographic picture.[20] Sassoon’s poems in particular have a biting, harsh edge, intending to tell the truth as seen by men in the field.

Indicative of such realism is “Attack” where Sassoon uses only thirteen lines to create a startling visual picture of a crowd of men swelling to confront the enemy. From the beginning we sense the ominous undercurrent: “At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun / In wild purple of the glow’ring sun, / Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud / The menacing scarred slope.”[21] Then, almost in slow motion, he reports the movement of creeping tanks, the deafening artillery barrage, and the awful human predicament: “Then, clumsily bowed / With bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear, / Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.” Moving out, “they leave their trenches, going over the top, / While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, / And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, / Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!” Perhaps nowhere else in the poetry of World War I do we see so finely condensed the brutal experience of soldiers leaving their trenches for an almost certain death.

Of particular note is Sassoon’s consideration of religion. In one of his most famous poems, “They,” he begins by having a bishop pontificate on the justness of the war since it opposes the “anti-Christ” and he continues by preaching how the boys will return from the conflict changed, the implication being they will be ennobled for having “challenged Death and dared him face to face.” Again, Sassoon’s irony bristles:

“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.

“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find

A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.”

And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange!”[22]

Yet, at times Sassoon finds God in the midst of the trenches. “The Redeemer” chronicles an experience where the poem’s persona, under fire one black night during a rainstorm and struggling to move down a trench, turns and glimpses a silhouette caused by a flare exploding overhead: “[It] lit the face of what had been a form / Floundering in mirk. He stood before me there; / I say that He was Christ.” Sassoon’s Christ, however, wears “no thorny crown, only a woolen cap,” for he is an English soldier willing to die to defend England, this particular night bearing a heavy load of planks to place in the trenches to keep them all from sinking in the mud; in the sacrifice of such a soldier, bearing his own kind of wooden cross, Sassoon sees Christlikeness: “I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless / All groping things with freedom bright as air, / And with His mercy washed and made them fair.”[23] In many other poems Sassoon considers the role of religion and the presence or absence of God on the battlefield.[24] When we examine Lewis’ war poems we will see that he also addresses the subject of God and war, and while his skepticism is as strong as Sassoon’s, his approach to the relationship between God and war is different from Sassoon’s.

If poems by Sassoon give the war a dark, bitter edge, those by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the best poet of World War I, present an integrated vision of the conflict. Though only four of his poems are published during his short lifetime (he was killed in action a week before the Armistice in November 1918), his complete war poems are marked by “the originality and force of their language, the passionate nature of the indignation and pity they express, [and] their blending of harsh realism with a sensuousness unatrophied by the horrors from which they flowered.”[25] Eschewing for the most part Sassoon’s irony which in the end limits the range of emotions he can explore in his war poems, Owen instead targets the human condition; he seeks to understand the impact of the war on soldiers and non-combatants alike, often capturing poignant and startling revelations. For instance, in “Strange Meeting” he pictures a soldier who stumbles into a deep tunnel where he finds a number of groaning sleepers.[26] Discerning he is in Hell, the soldier tries to comfort one of the sleepers who awakens at his presence, telling him there is now “no cause to mourn” since the battlefield terrors cannot touch them in this place. In reply, the sleeper says “‘None . . . save the undone years, / The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, / Was my life also; I went hunting wild, / After the wildest beauty in the world.” He goes on to list all he will miss of the world above and leads to the poem’s dramatic end: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. / I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned / Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.” Yet the poem is not bitterly ironic since both the soldier and sleeper are presented sympathetically. It is Owen’s fine sense of delineating such incongruities and ambiguities that gives his poetry such power.

This is not to say he never takes the bitter way; indeed, after Owen meets Sassoon in spring 1917 at Craiglockhart where both are recovering from “neurasthenia,” several poems have a sharper edge. The best of these and perhaps his most famous poem, “Dulce Et Decorum Est,”[27] begins as a powerful description of the awful conditions of a battle:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

As the poem continues the men are suddenly gassed and fumble to get their masks on in time; one man does not. In describing the death of this soldier, Owen strikes deeply at the senselessness and brutality of war:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

From Horace’s Odes, 3.2.13, the Latin phrase “it is sweet and meet to die for one’s country,” is shown to be a damnable deception. Owen, like Sassoon, penetrates the veneer of war’s respectability and shows its horrific side for all to see.[28]

Owen also considers religion and God, and like Sassoon, he finds God in the image of his fellow sufferers; “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo” is his rejoinder to Sassoon’s “The Redeemer: “I, too, saw God through mud,— / The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.”[29] In “Greater Love” laments the battlefield as a place “where God seems not to care.”[30] Unlike Sassoon, however, Owen uses direct biblical stories as in “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” In this poem he retells the story of Abram (European powers) and Isaac (its young soldiers) with the sardonic ending that when the angel calls out for the “Ram of Pride” to be sacrificed, “the old man would not so, but slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”[31] “At a Calvary Near the Ancre” portrays a crucifix near a crossroads, a common sight during the war, where the persona mocks the church and its disciples who have left Christ on the battlefield; on the other hand, Jesus’ new disciples are “the Soldiers [who] bear with Him.” Nearby the priests evidence pride and are finally condemned: “The scribes on all the people shove / And brawl allegiance to the state, / But they who love the greater love / Lay down their life; they do not hate.”[32]

Unique to Owen, however, is his ability to see deeply into the many dimensions of the battlefield, even to find beauty there. Indeed, his tendency to find beauty even on the battlefield sets him apart from Sassoon, the latter’s distress so great he cannot see beyond his bitterly ironic outrages. Again “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo” leads us to find beauty in the clash of mud, bullets, and flesh. The poem notes that men involved in such a hell have their own kind of beauty: “I have perceived much beauty / In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; / Heard music in the silentness of duty; / Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.”[33] Furthermore, Owen’s language communicates a beauty we do not typically see in Sassoon. For instance, lines like “Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead,” “For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple. / There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple,” and “The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall . . . And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds” are beyond Sassoon. Nor does Sassoon ever approach the tender poignancy of the ending of “Futility”:

Think how it [the sun] wakes the seeds,—

Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?[34]

The range of Owen’s poetic achievements in his war poetry surpasses Sassoon’s though both give powerful indictments of the carnage they witness.

Spirits in Bondage

It is too much to say that SB is solely driven by Lewis’ own battlefield experiences since we know more than half the poems are written before Lewis goes to France. Nor do we know how much war poetry Lewis reads, though in a letter to Greeves he writes: “I saw a book of poems ‘Counter-Attack’ by Siegfried Sassoon (a horrid man) published by [Heinemann] in a red cover and horrid type” (Oct. 6?, 1918).[35] However, because fourteen poems in SB deal directly with war, it would be an egregious oversight not to see a clear connection between Lewis’ battlefield experiences and these poems.[36] Moreover, though Lewis avoids direct descriptions of battlefields scenes like those portrayed by Sassoon and Owen, there is a real sense in which our understanding of their war poetry informs our reading of SB. That is, SB reveals Lewis as a frustrated dualist; on the one hand, like Sassoon, he uses bitter irony to declaim against a God he both denies and yet blames for the war, while on the other hand, like Owen, he can see beauty, and this capacity enables him to make repeated imaginative leaps over the dirt, grit, and angst of the human condition.

This bifurcation results in the poems falling into one of two categories: those that are morose, dealing often with his battlefield experiences and his atheism; and those that are sanguine, dealing often with his affection for nature and redemptive beauty. Some morose poems see life as demeaning, futile, and empty, primarily as a result of wartime brutalities, while others comment upon a God who is hateful, cruel, and red; He “kills us for His sport.” In contrast, however, many sanguine poems see Nature as kindly and benevolent in the lyrical and romantic tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Yeats, and other sanguine poems intimate beauty is the evidence there is “something” beyond the material world, often connected to faery, and experiencing such beauty is the only way to transcend life’s bleak reality.[37]

Morose Poems

“French Nocturne (Monchy-le-Preux)” may be the first poem Lewis writes directly relating his trench experiences and thus becomes the natural place to begin considering Lewis’ morose poems focusing upon war.[38] It begins with a Sassoon-like portrayal of what an “independent contemplator” sees; trenches stretch out in either direction in an apparently endless fashion. Nearby “the jaws of a sacked village, stark and grim, / Out on the ridge have swallowed up the sun, / And in one angry streak his blood has run / To left and right along the horizon dim.” Lewis’ image of the sunset is characteristic of World War I poetry according to Paul Fussell: “When a participant in the war wants an ironic effect, a conventional way to achieve one is simply to juxtapose a sunrise or sunset with the unlovely physical details of the war. . . . These sunrises and sunsets . . . move to the very center of English poetry of the Great War.”[39] Sassoon’s poem “Break of Day” is the best example of this as a soldier who is waiting for the beginning of an attack notices how peaceful the countryside before him appears: “Now a red, sleepy sun above the rim / Of twilight stares along the quiet weald, / And the kind, simple country shines revealed / In solitude’s of peace, no longer dim.”[40] A more ominous sunrise, however, occurs in his “Attack”: “At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun / In wild purple of the glow’ring sun.” Owen’s sunset in the last line of “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is equally disturbing: “And each slow dusk [is] a drawing-down of blinds.” Indeed, the poems of both Sassoon and Owen are peppered with sunrises and sunsets, in part because “stand-to,” the practice of looking twice a day toward enemy lines to discern any movement, normally occurs at dawn and dusk; accordingly, Lewis’ sunset with its angry streak of blood marks this as a war poem in the tradition of both Sassoon and Owen.

“French Nocturne” continues with the persona following a plane that appears to fly straight into the moon; this leads him to associate the plane’s upward movement with the world of dreams he once held dear. However, it is only a brief reprieve since the reality of the battlefield quickly recalls itself:

False, mocking fancy! Once I too could dream,

Who now can only see with vulgar eye

That he’s no nearer to the moon than I

And she’s a stone that catches the sun’s beam.

What call have I to dream of anything?

I am a wolf. Back to the world again,

And speech of fellow-brutes that once were men

Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.

Sassoon-like, Lewis writes that war reduces everything to the merely physical. For instance, there is nothing enchanting about the moon; it is simply a cold, reflective rock. Furthermore, soldiers can hardly dream, a distinguishing human quality, since now they are vicious animals, brute predators intent on blood and destruction. Even their capacity to sing, to make harmonious music, has been reduced to the rasping, grating snapping of wolves.

However, “Apology” is Lewis’ most Sassoon-like war poem. Its tone is bitter and ironic, giving an explanation for why he will not write verse celebrating the glory of war. He begins by addressing Despoina, another name for Persephone, Queen of Hades,[41] telling her he has a reason for speaking “of nothing glad nor noble in my verse / To lighten hearts beneath this present curse / And build a heaven of dreams in real hell.”[42] The poem actually works on two levels; that is, he directs Despoina to tell the dead in hell why his verse is morose and can not bring them comfort, while he, in the role of Despoina, explains why he will not give the lie about the glory of war to soldiers in nightmarish battlefield conditions, their “real hell.” Just as it is a cruelty to remind the dead “down in the rotting grave where the lithe worms crawl, / [Of] green fields above that smiled so sweet,” so it is to remind soldiers living in the vile trenches where the rats crawl of the green fields back home. Neither the dead nor soldiers want to be told how wonderful and vital life is for those not experiencing their hell. To emphasize this, Lewis says what good is it “to tell old tales of Troynovant [Troy] / Or praises of dead heroes, tried and sage.” The old stories of war’s valor, heroism, and honor ring hollow: “Can it be good / To think of glory now, when all is done, / And all our labour underneath the sun / Has brought us this—and not the thing we would.” “This” is their “present curse”; for the dead, hell, and for the soldier, the trenches. It is as futile for them to build a case for the glory of their deeds as it was for Mammon in Book III of Paradise Lost to argue the fallen angels can build a literal Heaven in Hell: “As he [God] our darkness, cannot we his light / Imitate when we please? . . . / What can Heaven show more?”[43] Though Lewis’ final comments are not as sarcastic as Beelzebub’s who mocks Mammon for “hatching vain empires,” he does reject the idea of using the old myths of glory: “All these were rosy visions of the night, / That loveliness and wisdom feigned of old. / But now we wake. The East is pale and cold, / No hope is in the dawn, and no delight.” His use of “feigned” links the poem to Owen’s declamation against the “old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori,” and the final idea of waking at dawn to no hope shows Lewis again using sunrise in the ironic manner of other World War I poets. Because of its nihilistic ending, this is Lewis’ most morose battlefield poem.

The next group of morose poems illustrate Lewis’ attempt to come to grips with a God he does not want to exist yet blames for human misery. Unlike Sassoon and Owen who contrast the compassionate Christ they see in battered soldiers with the stern, unfeeling God they identify with organized religion, Lewis sees only a cruel, malicious, and inexorable God; nowhere does he consider Christ, perhaps suggesting his effort to live somehow consistently as an atheist. That is, while he is willing to accuse and defame an evil God, he rejects the idea of a personal, intimate Christ. Two poems with the same title offer us the chance to see how Lewis’ thoughts about his malicious God develop. “Satan Speaks (I),” the first poem in SB, begins by recalling Lewis’ comments to Greeves when he writes “I have formulated my equation Matter=Nature=Satan.”[44] Later he adds SB “is mainly strung round the idea that I mentioned to you before—that nature is wholly diabolical & malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.”[45] The poem opens with Lewis emphasizing a God of rules, laws, and universal force: “I am Nature, the Mighty Mother, / I am the law: ye have no other.” After clearly establishing there is no grace, no charity, no empathy in this Darwinian God of Nature, he follows with a series of couplet stanzas underscoring this God’s mechanistic nature making frequent use of war imagery: “I am the battle’s filth and strain, / I am the widow’s empty pain. / I am the sea to smother your breath, / I am the bomb, the falling death.” This God is brutish, oppressive, insatiable, unapproachable, and destructive.

However the later “Satan Speaks (XIII) presents a slightly different God, revealing Lewis’ evolving thoughts about his “diabolical & malevolent” deity.[46] While the God here is also connected to nature, “I am the Lord your God: even he that made / Material things,” Lewis’ blasphemous parody goes on to demonstrate this God is more “personal” though malicious, proud, and condescending. He harangues his creatures, reminding them he uses pain and suffering to underscore the fact that he, and only he, is God, and that there is no softer, gentler deity as they would like to believe; he mocks their “dreams of some other gods,” by giving them a miserable existence, calls them vermin, and then appears surprised “they hate my world!” As if to prove his ultimate authority, he sardonically challenges “that other God” to come from his realm of glory to “steal forth my own thought’s children into light,” but then he claims the softer, gentler God is detached, unconcerned for man as “he walks the airy fields of endless day.” The poem ends with the malicious God reasserting his supremacy: “My order still is strong / And like to me nor second none I know. / Whither the mammoth went this creature too shall go.” Whether “this creature” refers to man or the softer, gentler God, the malicious God countenances no competitors; he prophesies man or the other God will follow the mammoth into extinction.

“De Profundis” frankly challenges the authority of this cruel, malicious deity, almost certainly reflecting Lewis’ reading of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. In effect, he damns the malicious God: “Come let us curse our Master ere we die, / For all our hopes in endless ruin lie. / The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.”[47] The shocking tone of the opening lines of “De Profundis” reflects an angry adolescent, shaking his fist at a malicious God he denies, rejects, hates, yet fears. In a patent slap at meliorism, the popular pre-war notion the world is gradually getting better and can be improved further by human effort, Lewis says: “Four thousand years of toil and hope and thought / Wherein men laboured upward and still wrought / New worlds and better, Thou hast made as naught.” All human effort to build beautiful cities and to acquire knowledge and wisdom are nothing but offal to the malicious God, for “the earth grew black with wrong, / Our hope was crushed and silenced was our song.” In a return to an idea first mentioned in “Satan Speaks (XIII),” the speaker does momentarily entertain the thought that perhaps somewhere there is “a just God that cares for earthly pain,” but even this is rejected, since, even if true, “yet far away beyond our labouring night, / He wanders in the depths of endless light, / Singing alone his musics of delight.” What is left man against this malicious God, this “universal strength”? Though admitting “it is but froth of folly to rebel,” this is precisely what he advocates. The indomitable spirit of man will resist forever the interfering, capricious hand of a cruel, malicious God:

Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee,

For looking in my own heart I can prove thee,

And know this frail, bruised being is above thee.

Our love, our hope, our thirsting for the right,

Our mercy and long seeking of the light,

Shall we change these for thy relentless might?

Laugh then and slay. Shatter all things of worth,

Heap torment still on torment for thy mirth--

Thou art not Lord while there are Men on earth.

Though foolhardy, man’s best shall not be traded for the malicious God’s might. He may kill man, even delighting in the carnage, but he will not conquer man’s will. Indeed, although it is false bravado, the speaker claims the malicious God will never truly be Lord as long as men live.

Lewis’ war poems dealing with a malicious God reveal the morose extent to which he is living as a frustrated dualist. Without question Lewis’ atheism is profoundly influenced by his great tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick, as well as the philosophical ideas he encounters elsewhere; yet, the battlefield horrors he witnesses informs these poems even more deeply and expose a young man grappling to understand his place in a world that appears to be tittering on the brink of collapse. Although his angry, defiant responses in some of the poems are immature and adolescent, they are a measure of the passion with which he inculcates his poetry. It is poetry, not prose, he uses to work through the crises he is experiencing, giving outward expression to his deeply internalized feelings. What saves SB from turning into a volume of so much teenage whining, however, is the sanguine poetry representing the other dimension of Lewis’ dualism. Here, too, we will find immaturity, but even more maturation as Lewis focuses upon his love of nature and beauty far in excess of his introspective meditations. Indeed, Lewis’ sanguine poems are among his first poetic attempts to put in writing his longing for joy he later recounts in SJ; as such these poems reveal his yearning to experience a transcendent truth he realizes only later. In these poems, therefore, we see the incubation of Lewis the theist.

Sanguine Poems

The first group of sanguine poems are primarily lyrical and celebrate landscapes, rest, literature, music, nature (Wordsworthian instead of Darwinian), stars, and human love. For instance, “Irish Nocturne” celebrates Lewis’ homeland and is probably influenced by Yeats. It begins with a description of an eerie landscape with mist filling a valley like “evil drink in a wizard’s hand,” and then alludes to ghosts, demons, Grendel (the Beowulf monster), and other ominous supernatural creatures associated with Ireland. Lewis then uses the mist as metaphor to indicate Ireland’s obscured understanding of itself:

Bitter and bitter it is for thee, O my heart,

Looking upon this land, where poets sang,

Thus with the dreary shroud

Unwholesome, over it spread,

And knowing the fog and the cloud

In her people’s heart and head

Even as it lies for ever upon her coasts

Making them dim and dreamy lest her sons should ever arise

And remember all their boasts.[48]

The poem ends with Lewis lamenting this mist since it breeds “lonely desire and many words and brooding and never a deed.” Lewis’ complaint against his countrymen for being dreamers and talkers but not doers is a stereotypical one about the Irish; however, because Lewis does not connect this poem to a specific incident, it is difficult to know how seriously we should take his lament.

Also within this group of sanguine poems are those that celebrate both the idea of retreating away from the bustle of the everyday world as well as the place of retreat. For instance, Lewis sets “Noon” it in a garden bower, using ornamental description to paint a picture of a silent, static, sultry, and heavily aromatic Eden-like oasis. Heat is especially utilized to create the sense this is a place where all activities gradually cease:

Noon! and in the garden bower

The hot air quivers o’er the grass,

The little lake is smooth as glass

And still so heavily the hour

Drags, that scarce the proudest flower

Pressed upon its burning bed

Has strength to lift a languid head.[49]

Indeed, roses and violets faint, swoon, and sink in such heat. Even the bees, so necessary to pollinating the flowers, are affected; these are not “busy bees” and their buzz is a “drowsy melody” as they wander drunkenly with “golden mead o’erladen.” The poem ends by picturing a drowsing female figure; Lewis gifts as a poet are demonstrated here as the elaborate figurative language and rhyming iambic tetrameter reflect the poem’s winding down to a halt: “A maiden / — Milky limb and fiery tress, / All at sweetest random laid— / Slumbers, drunken with the excess / Of the noontide’s loveliness.” This garden of retreat experienced at noon in the full heat of summer’s sun is a bower of nature’s excess, an apt spot to be renewed and refreshed.

Moving from sanguine poems emphasizing rest or retreat, we see in “Hymn (For Boys’ Voices) a poem where Lewis says the wonders of nature’s beauty are ever before and accessible to us if only we will open our eyes and see. The things magicians do, the games faeries play, nature’s power, immortality, even God’s perspective—all these and more—can be ours: “If we could but understand! / We could revel day and night / In all power and all delight / If we learned to think aright.”[50] Affirming this, however, does not make it happen, and the poem gives us no way to do what he recommends other than the poem’s circular argument. Directly related to “Hymn” and following it in SB is “Our Daily Bread,” beginning: “We need no barbarous words nor solemn spell / To raise the unknown. It lies before our feet.”[51] While this poem also does not give us a coherent method for seeing what Lewis does, it surpasses “Hymn” in its personal view as Lewis explains his visits to regular spots in nature create the context where “the Living voices call” him, and he catches “a sight of lands beyond the wall, / I see a strange god’s face.” Furthermore, he intimates the allure of such visions will one day pull him out of the work-a-day world:

And some day this will work upon me so

I shall arise and leave both friends and home

And over many lands a pilgrim go

Through alien woods and foam,

Seeking the last steep edges of the earth

Whence I may leap into that gulf of light

Wherein, before my narrowing Self had birth,

Part of me lived aright.

Lewis returns to the idea of being a pilgrim looking for beauty in other poems.[52] Also of note is Lewis’ clear debt to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” especially the ending that recalls:

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty water rolling evermore.

Lewis’ longing to become a part of the mysterious beauty of nature he sees is given expression more effectively in later poems where he directly connects nature to faery.

The second group of sanguine poems in SB concern how faery is the proof of transcendent beauty. “Song,” one of the few sanguine poems we can document as having been written while Lewis is serving in France,[53] begins by affirming “faeries must be in the woods . . . / Else how could the dead things be / Half so lovely as they are?”[54] In like manner he questions how it is that stars fill us with delight and cause us “dreams divine” unless each of them is a “happy isle” where “the Other People go / On the bright sward to and fro?” The notion that earthly beauty is a reflection of faery, as if the latter infuses the former, has Platonic connotations, but again Lewis is not concerned here with Platonic forms. Instead, he is saying earthly beauty as expressed in our apprehension of faery proves the reality of transcendent beauty:

Atoms dead could never thus

Stir the human heart of us

Unless the beauty that we see

The veil of endless beauty be,

Filled full of spirits that have trod

Far hence along the heavenly sod

And seen the bright footprints of God.

In the midst of war, Lewis reaches for beauty as that which brings sense to a senseless situation. His yearning for beauty mitigates against the horror he sees regularly on the battlefield.

“Dungeon Grates” is Lewis’ most comprehensive attempt to illustrate how faery is the evidence of transcendent beauty and how such beauty mitigates against the felt sense produced by war that human existence is meaningless. Man’s essential condition, heightened by war, the opening lines suggest, is one of loneliness, grief, burdens, and pain; these beat him down toward his death except for those moments when he captures “a sudden glimpse of spirit faces.”[55] That is, though his life may appear to be lived in a cell behind dungeon bars, the apprehension of beauty, “the fragrant breath” of “flowery places,” the longing “for which the hearts of men are always sore,” reminds man of another reality beyond time. Anticipating what he comes to hammer home consistently in Surprised by Joy, however, Lewis says this reality is not one to seek actively:

It lies beyond endeavour; neither prayer

Nor fasting, nor much wisdom winneth there,

Seeing how many prophets and wise men

Have sought for it and still returned again

With hope undone.

In fact, beauty comes unlooked for, serendipitously: “But only the strange power/ Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour / Can build a bridge of light or sound or form / To lead you out of all this strife and storm.” For the first time he attempts to explain how beauty leads us, claiming that when we mesh with beauty, when “we are grown a part” of it until “from its very glory’s midmost heart / Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light / Into our souls,” then we will see all things as they really are, “seven times more true than what for truth we hold / In vulgar hours.” This Wordsworthian ethic culminates in lines reminiscent of “Tintern Abbey”:

The miracle is done

And for one little moment we are one

With the eternal stream of loveliness

That flows so calm, aloof from all distress

Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire

Making us faint with overstrong desire

To sport and swim for ever in its deep.

Though such Wordsworthian epiphanies are momentary and rare, we feed off them for a long time, sustained by them because through them “we know we are not made of mortal stuff.” Indeed, such momentary visitations of beauty help us survive our otherwise burdensome human condition:

And we can bear all trials that come after,

The hate of men and the fool’s loud bestial laughter

And Nature’s rule and cruelties unclean,

For we have seen the Glory--we have seen.

Here Lewis honors the visitations of beauty as a harbinger whereby man can endure an otherwise dark, meaningless world.

Conclusion

An overall evaluation of SB suggests several things. First, the title underscores the bifurcation discussed above; that is, the book is about how the spirit of man—variously portrayed in the poems as either proud and indomitable or longing for beauty—is shackled by an earthly existence marked by suffering and theological uncertainty. Consequently, Lewis shows in SB he realizes some narrowing of the gap between his sense life is directed by a malicious God and at the same time faery provides evidence of a mitigating transcendental beauty. Second, his use of the lyric form leads to many poems where we glimpse his deeply felt emotional life, but it also limits his range of poetic sensibilities; for instance, though he grapples with theological and aesthetic ponderings, the short nature of the lyric prevents him from anywhere working out a resolution to the tensions he is experiencing. Third, SB gives Lewis hope he might some day achieve acclaim as a poet. The rigor of academic study at Oxford after the war, while not a death knell to his muse, certainly muted his poetic efforts; quite properly he invests most of his time into high level achievement as an undergraduate. Still, we know he continues to write poetry as letters and diaries indicate, and he actively seeks to see his poetry is published. Fourth, his experience in writing SB, particularly the war poems, serves him well, though he largely abandons lyric poetry between 1922-26 to devote himself to a long narrative poem, Dymer, where he attempts to consider again the tensions he first explores in this youthful collection. Finally, while Lewis clearly does not rank as a WWI poet on the level of a Sassoon or Owen, the fourteen poems in SB influenced by his wartime experiences are deeply felt and communicate more immediately the reality of his experiences in France than his memories of the war later recorded in Surprised by Joy.

Those who know Lewis only through his childrens’ stories, Christian apologetics, or Ransom space trilogy should extend their reading to Lewis’ poetry. His first published works, SB and Dymer, are volumes of poetry; in addition, he writes many other poems that are later collected by Walter Hooper and published as Poems (1964). Hooper also publishes Narrative Poems in 1969, a volume that reprints Dymer as well as three other narrative poems. Most recently Hooper has published The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis (1994), a work that reprints Spirits in Bondage and Poems, and includes for the first time “A Miscellany of Additional Poems,” a supplement of seventeen other short poems, eleven previously unpublished. Consequently, anyone interested in Lewis as a writer should become aware of the important role poetry has in shaping his literary life, particularly his aspirations to achieve acclaim as a poet. Owen Barfield remembers Lewis when he first met him as one “whose ruling ambition was to become a great poet. At that time if you thought of Lewis you automatically thought of poetry.”[56] Tracing these aspirations and influences as he moves from boyhood to mature adult is fascinating and sheds significant light upon the prose for which he later becomes best known. Reading and writing poetry are integral to Lewis’ literary life. He does not sip or taste poetry in a casual, off-handed manner; rather it is for him a stream intricately threaded through his life becoming a literary well—a nourishing reservoir almost without bottom—one from which he drinks deeply and passionately. The reservoir is one he draws from frequently through reading Virgil, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, and others. At the same time, he works throughout his life to produce poems worthy of the same well.[57] Spirits in Bondage, the earliest outpourings of his poetic impulse, gives evidence to Lewis’ poetic aspirations as well as his frustrated dualism.