Lewis, C

A version of this essay appears in C. S. Lewis: A Reader's Encyclopedia (1998) published by Zondervan. Only students taking English 401: C. S. Lewis: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse at Montreat College have permission to use material from the essay.

Notes on The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis

This collection is not the complete poems of Lewis. Instead, Walter Hooper has collected Spirits in Bondage (1919), Poems (1964), and "A Miscellany of Additional Poems," a supplement of seventeen other short poems (eleven previously unpublished). With one exception, the previously unpublished poems date from the time Lewis was seventeen to nineteen years old; all appear in The Lewis Papers, the eleven volume typed manuscript of the Lewis family (1850-1930) compiled by Warren Lewis (available at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois). In addition, Hooper publishes for the first time an introductory letter purportedly written by Lewis, though this is disputed by Kathryn Lindskoog (see the Bibliography). Since both Spirits in Bondage and Poems are discussed elsewhere, the focus here will be upon the miscellany.

The poems in the miscellany are: "The Hills of Down"* (*denotes previously unpublished), "Against Potpourri"*, "A Prelude"*, "Ballade of a Winter's Morning"*, "Laus Mortis"*, "Sonnet-To Sir Philip Sydney"*, "Of Ships"*, "Couplets"*, "Circe-A Fragment"*, "Exercise"*, "Joy", "Leaving Forever the Home of One's Youth"*, "Awake My Lute!", "Essence", "Consolation", "Finchley Avenue", and "Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman". Especially interesting in this regard are the unpublished poems; all except "Leaving Forever the Home of One's Youth" were a part of the lost "Metrical Meditations of a Cod" and bear special notice.

In "The Hills of Down," dated by Warren Lewis as Easter 1915, Lewis anticipates some of the poetry in Spirits in Bondage since the poem indicates both a longing for the "faery town" and a love for the immediate beauty of nature. While the former also frightens him ("I dare not go / To dreaming Avalon"), the latter powerfully draws him:

Not I alone,
If I were gone, must weep;
Themselves would moan
From glen to topmost steep.
Cold, snow pure wells
|Sweet with the spring tide's scent,
Forsaken fells
That only I frequent-
And uplands bare
Would call for me above,
Were I not there
To roam the hills I love.

For I alone
Have loved their loneliness;
None else hath known
Nor seen the goodliness
Of the green hills of Down.
The soft low hills of Down.

In a similar vein, the persona in "Death in Battle" from SB notes his own heightened, when solitary, love of Nature: "Ah, to be ever alone, / In flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod, / In the dewy upland places, in the garden of God, / This would atone!" Characteristic of Lewis' youthful poetry then is the tension between the physical and/or mental ugliness of his present reality and the beauty and wonder of Nature and/or the faery world. Given the fact that much of his early poetry was written under the shadow of World War I, either in his anticipation of serving or during his time at the front, this tension is not surprising. His search for joy could often been realized through the beauty he found in Nature or the faery world.

"Against Potpourri" (summer 1915) is a mild invective against those who believe they capture the essence of flower's summer beauty through a potpourri: "Folly! Though they shed / Some fragrance yet, there is no man shall find / Delight and beauty here among the dead." Such futility is underscored in the poem's dark conclusion: "For but one flower shall outline them all-- / The eternal poppy, deathless weed of death." "A Prelude" (summer 1915) chronicles how thoughts before bed can charm away the winter's chill and night's phantoms. "Ballade of a Winter's Morning" (Christmas 1915) celebrates a friendship (probably with Arthur Greeves) whose essential link is love of books: "Old tomes full oft re-read with care, / Where hoary rhymes and legends blend / With noble pictures rich and rare / To make us merry friend by friend."

"Laus Mortis" (Easter 1916) is an almost clinical description of "the wone of old horse-mastering Hades," inspired no doubt by Lewis' readings of Dante's Divine Comedy and Virgil's Aeneid: "Time this people knoweth not, nor treason / Of his guile that steals swift joys away, / Nor this garish pomp of changing season / And the interflow of night and day." Lewis' love of literature continues, particularly for Sydney's "Arcadia," in his "Sonnet-To Sir Philip Sydney" (autumn 1916) where he praises the poet, "stainless knight of God," for his "silver chimes of old romance." In "Of Ships" (Christmas 1916), written upon one of his returns to Little Lea from his studies with W. T. Kirkpatrick at Bookham, Lewis muses on "the soul of a ship" and notes no matter the type "the man of honest heart shall love them all": "'Argo' or 'Golden Hind' or 'Mary Lee', / From every country where man's foot has trod, / Sure they're all ships to brave the winds of God / And have their business in his glorious sea." A second Christmas poem from this year, "Couplets," celebrates spring and connects its annual rebirth with "fairy men who nightly habit there" and "the earthy gods / [Who] have left their cloven print in the dewy sods."

"Circe-A Fragment" (April 1917) is primarily a descriptive two-stanza piece, inspired no doubt by Lewis' reading of the Odyssey: "Her couch was of the mighty sea beast's tusk / With gold and Tyrian scarlet overlaid / Set in a chamber where the wafted musk / With scent of pines a wanton medly made / Through the wide pillared arches of her hall." "Exercise" (April 1917) is an ubi sunt poem with Lewis asking a series of rhetorical questions about where the glory and romance of faery have gone: "Where are the magic swords / That elves of long ago / Smithied beneath the snow / For heroes' rich rewards?" In the tradition of The Wanderer, his rhetorical questions have a melancholy reply: "The loves, the wisdoms high / The sorrows, where are they? / They are nothing at all today, / They are less than you and I." "Leaving for ever the Home of One's Youth" (1930), is a bittersweet remembrance of Little Lea for the delights he and Warren had there with each other in childhood combined with the blank reality of the present: "The past you mourn for, when it was in flight, / Lived, like the present, in continual death."

The miscellany is notable both for what it tells us about Lewis' life and for what it shows us about Lewis' development as a poet. Here we see many of the themes he develops later in Spirits in Bondage and Dymer, including love of the faery world, Nature, and art as well as a kind of overshadowing melancholy so common among adolescents. The poems as a whole are well-written, finger exercises for his later, more mature efforts. In addition, our knowledge of them enhances our understanding of the vital role poetry played in Lewis' aesthetic maturation.

One curious things about this volume in closing. While the title page says The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis, the cover of the book says Poems. In a letter Hooper explains this error: "After deciding to re-print the earlier Poems (1964), the publishers rushed to get the cover ready. However, I saw this as an opportunity to include many poems which were either out of print, such as Spirits in Bondage, or had never been published. In the end, the publishers used the cover they had already printed, and so the cover gives one title and the title-page another" (letter of 24 March 1996).

Bibliography

Kathryn Lindskoog has written at length in The Lewis Legacy about her concerns regarding this

volume. Specifically, see: "Here We Go Again: Two New Lewis Forgeries." The

Lewis Legacy no. 64 (Spring 1995):1.

The entire The Lewis Legacy no. 65 (Summer 1995), especially pp. 1-8, 12; she raises

numerous questions about the poem "Finchley Avenue" (252).