© Don W. King
A version of this first appeared in SEVEN: An Anglo-American
Literary Review 15 (1998): 73-96.
Glints of Light: The
Unpublished Short Poetry of C. S. Lewis
In The Collected
Poems of C. S. Lewis (1994), Walter Hooper begins his
“Introduction” by noting that “this volume brings together for the first time
all C. S. Lewis’s short poems into a single volume.” He includes Poems (1964) and Spirits in
Bondage (1919) “as well as a ‘Miscellany’ of seventeen short poems
previously either unpublished or uncollected.
The poems cover the whole of Lewis’s life, from those he wrote as a
young man of sixteen to those written within a few weeks of his death” (ix).[1] Hooper’s choice for the title of this volume
is deliberately judicious in that he identifies this the “collected” rather
than the “complete” poems of Lewis.[2]
Indeed, a close
examination of the record indicates there are at least ten short poems or poem
fragments that remain unpublished.[3] Admittedly, these poems, written during a
period covering at least 1913-1932, are not Lewis at his best, in part because
some are school exercises imitating classical models or because some sacrifice
poesy to the altar of autobiography. Of
these Luci Shaw says “though there are some gleams of
vision, some powerful images, and some felicitous phrases, they are clearly
inferior, to my mind, to the poems collected and published by Hooper.”[4] Literary merit aside, however, they are
important contributions to the body of evidence illustrating how important
poetry was to Lewis’ literary maturation.
While they are not fully polished works, they are glints of light
illuminating Lewis’ early aspirations to achieve acclaim as a poet. This essay will introduce these unpublished
poems, note when they were written, offer a preliminary literary assessment,
link them to later published poems, and discuss their place in the corpus of
Lewis’ poetry.
The first unpublished poem,
“‘Carpe Diem’ after Horace,” is included in a letter the young Lewis sent his
father postmarked October 19, 1913. In
the letter he is clearly pleased with himself since the poem has achieved
distinction at
When, in haughty exultation,
thou durst laugh in
Fortune’s face,
Or when thou hast sunk down
weary, trampled in
The ceaseless race,
Dellius, think on this I pray
thee—but the
Twinkling of an eye,
May endure thy pain or
pleasure; for thou knowest
Thou shalt die
Whether on some
breeze-kissed upland, with a
Flask of mellow wine,
Thou hast all the world
forgotten, stretched be-
Neath the friendly pine,
Or, in foolish toil
consuming all the springtime
Of thy life,
Thou hast worked for useless
silver and endured
The bitter strife
Still unchanged thy doom remaineth. Thou art
Set towards thy goal,
Out into the empty breezes
soon shall flicker
Here then by the plashing
streamlet fill the
Tinkling glass I pray
Bring the short lived rosy
garlands, and be
Happy—FOR
TODAY. (LP,
IV, 88)
Lewis uses Horace’s “Aequam
Memento Rebus” (Book II, Ode iii) as his model, [MC1]though
he slightly shifts the sober, at times depressing Horatian
tone to an upbeat, seize-the-day affirmation.
This is most apparent in a comparison of the final stanzas. Horace says:
Omnes eodem
cogimur, omnium
Versatur urna
serius ocius
Sors exitura
et nos in aeternum
Exsilium impositura
cumbae.
(One bourne
constrains us all; for all
The lots are shaken in the
urn,
Whence, soon or late, will
fall our turn
Of exile’s barge without
recall.)[5]
We notice, however, that while Lewis maintains the
notion Dellius is surely heading for death (“still
unchanged thy doom remaineth”), he includes an
imperative that tries to thwart the inevitable, if only for a moment: “Here then by the plashing streamlet fill the
/ Tinkling glass I pray / Bring the short lived rosy garlands, and be /
Happy—FOR TODAY.” This final shout urges
Dellius to take advantage of the day (carpe diem, of course, means seize the
day) and to find happiness, though fleeting and transient. Lewis’ “‘Carpe Diem’ after Horace” reflects
youthful exuberance and earnest effort.
While it is a poetic derivative, it is also a poetic finger exercise for
Lewis’ later mature poetic efforts.
“In Winter When the Frosty Nights Are
Long” is a thirty line fragment of rhyme royal
(appropriately complementing the poem’s cadence and diction) written about the
same time as “‘Carpe Diem’ after Horace.”
Warren Lewis says it is a poem “written on the type of paper in use for
exercises in the Upper Fifth at Malvern,” and he dates it “tentatively in the
winter of this year [1913] or in the spring of 1914” (LP, IV, 121). The poem is a
dream vision revealing Lewis’ deep love for the beauty of nature:
In winter when the frosty
nights are long
And sedge is stiff about the
frozen meres,
One night above a volume of
old song
Of legendary loves and magic
fears
Sweetened by long elapse of
slumbering years,
I nodded in the frosty
firelight beam
And fell on sleep and
straightway dreamed a dream.
I thought it was a luminous
summer night,
And in the star-flecked
welkin overhead
A fading sickle of soft
golden light
Its wonder over all the
landscape spread,
While fleecy clouds athwart
its paleness sped:
Ten thousand thousand points of light did peep
Out of the boundless
heaven’s velvet deep.
Meseemed I stood upon a goodly plain
Full of soft streams and
meadows deep in corn,
While the far thunder of a
foaming main
Across the calm, delicious
air was born.
Beyond the plain, a mountain
waste forlorn
Clear seen beneath the
trembling silver light,
Rose, and yet rose with
height still piled on height.
Higher than mountains
seemed, than Alpine peaks
Or fabled mountains spied
from the moon,
And tortured into grim
fantastic freaks
Of rock: oerhanging cliffs
that seemed to swoon
Towards me, ready with vast
ruin soon
To fall and whelm the plain,
and vallies steep
Engulphed with icy torrents swift and
deep.
The eye could hardly reach,
and senses failed
In gazing on those
unimagined . . . (121)
The first stanza suggests the powerful influence of
literature upon the dreamer (“a volume of old song / Of
legendary loves and magic fear”) while the second takes him from a wintry
present to an enchanted summer evening, the sky filled with “ten thousand thousand points of light.”
In the third and fourth stanzas, nature, while beautiful, suddenly
appears terrifying and contrasts with the serenity portrayed in the first
two. The dreamer feels the mountains are
about to overwhelm him (“tortured into grim fantastic freaks / Of rock”), and the stone and earth are on the verge of
burying him. The paradox of nature’s
beauty and awful power connects this fragment to Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”:
One summer evening (led by
her [Nature]) I found
A little boat tied to a
willow tree . . . I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy
ridge . . .
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the
silent lake . . .
When, from behind that
craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge
peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power
instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature
the grim shape
Towered up between me and
the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with
purpose of its own
And measured motion like a
living thing,
Strode after me. (I, 357-58; 373-74; 377-85)
We know from letters, journals, and diaries Lewis
greatly enjoyed Wordsworth’s poetry, especially “The Prelude”; Lewis desired
early in life to write an important narrative poem, so it is not surprising to
detect the influence of this poem on the young Lewis.[6] Yet, while Wordsworth completes his
terrifying vision of Nature’s hidden power in the remainder of “The Prelude,”
Lewis does not.
As a poem it is
inconsistent. While the young Lewis
manages to create an appropriately enchanted mood for the poem, it too is
derivative, imitative, and unconvincing.
Shaw also faults it for clichéd expressions such as “slumbering years,”
“luminous summer night,” “fleecy clouds,” “heaven’s velvet deep,” “foaming
main,” “mountain waste,” and “icy torrents.”[7] At the same time, the most valuable aspect of
the poem is the way it anticipates themes Lewis deals with later in Spirits in Bondage (hereafter SB).[8] In brief, most of the poems in that volume
were written between 1915-1918, primarily when Lewis was sixteen or seventeen
and only a few years after “In Winter When the Frosty Nights Are Long.” Some were undoubtedly written while he was
studying under W. T. Kirkpatrick, while others were written during vacations at
Little Lea, after his matriculation at
And the honey-bee
Hums his drowsy melody
And wanders in his course
a-straying
Through the sweet and
tangled glade
With his golden mead oe’rladen,
Where beneath the pleasant
shade
Of the darkling boughs a
maiden
—Milky limbs and fiery
tress,
All at sweetest random laid—
Slumbers, drunken with the
excess
Of the
noontide’s loveliness.[9] (31)
The lyricism of “In Winter When the Frosty Nights Are Long” is forced and uneven, but its focus upon the beauty of
nature links it with Lewis’ other efforts in Spirit in Bondage. This is a
poem revealing the soul of an earnest if imperfect poet.
Also
during this time period is, “Ovid’s ‘Pars
Estis Pauci.’”[10] In the tradition of the earlier Horatian poem, this twenty line poem uses Ovid’s poetry as
the model. In a letter to his father
postmarked June 22, 1914, Lewis writes:
“I enclose a few verses in imitation of Ovid, which were top of the form
last week . . . Do you care for that metre? There are a great many rhymes in it, which
makes it difficult; but the thing I want to learn is ‘to move easily in
shackles’[11] (I
wonder who said that? Do you know?)” (LP, IV, 191). This time rather than a Tennysonian
meter, Lewis uses one patterned after the seventh chorus of Swinburne’s
“Atalanta in
Of the host whom I NAMED
As friends, ye alone
Dear few!,
were ashamed
In troubles unknown
To leave me deserted; but
boldly ye cherished my cause as your own.
My thanks shall endure
--The poor tribute I paid
To a faith that was pure—
Till my ashes be laid
In the urn; and the Stygian
boatman I seek, an impalpable shade.
But nay!
For the days
Of a mortal are few;
Shall they limit your praise
Nay rather to you
Each new generation shall
offer—if aught be remembered—your due.
For the lofty frame
That my VERSES ENFOLD,
Men still shall acclaim
Thro’ ages untold:
And still shall they speak
of your virtue; your honour they still shall uphold.
(191-92)
The first stanza, reflecting a warrior’s comitatus,
praises the devotion of real friends when trouble comes. The second pledges lifelong thanks to these
loyal friends until his body, following the Roman tradition, is burned, and his
spirit, “an impalpable shade,” is ferried by Charon,
the classical boatman of hell, to the shore where “hope never comes.” The third and fourth stanzas employ a
literary dissembling used by Spenser,
Shakespeare, and others poets; that is, Lewis says lines of poetry themselves
immortalize the persons written about since every time future generations of
readers enjoy the lines the persons written about come “alive” again. So it is he writes “that my VERSES ENFOLD,”
forever immortalize the virtue of his friends’ loyalty and their “honour they still shall uphold.” As with “’Carpe Diem’ after Horace,” this
poem illustrates Lewis’ early pattern of writing set pieces of poetry.
Furthermore, both poems
pre-figured his penchant throughout his life to write poems imitating or
inspired by classical models and themes.
For instance, his first published
poem, dating from this period as well (July 1913), “Quam Bene Saturno,”[12]
celebrates the benevolent rule of Saturn in the days of the Titans before the
successful rebellion of Jove. Since that
time peace has been replaced with strife and contention. Like the poems inspired by Horace and Ovid,
this is almost certainly a response to a school exercise employing iambic
tetrameter and a simple rhyme scheme.
Moreover, these poems introduce a central characteristic of many of his
poems: heavy, intrusive literary
allusiveness. Unfortunately, as we will
see, this characteristic often detracts from the success of Lewis’ poems. As Lewis matures, he also turns his hand to
translations of works by classical writers such as “From the Latin of Milton’s De Idea Platonica Quemadmodum Aristoteles Intellexit”[13]
(1945), his translation of Milton’s “On the Platonic
Idea as Understood by Aristotle,” probably a school exercise by Milton dated
between 1628-30. In still another
instance, we see him writing a poem focusing upon a classical writer in his
“Arrangement of Pindar”[14]
(1949). Accordingly, these early efforts
imitating Horace and Ovid, while perhaps not great poetry, reveal Lewis’
lasting affection for classical poetry, one he gave expression to throughout
his life.[15]
The
next three poems, focusing upon the three pivotal teachers in Lewis’ early
life, are difficult to date, but in Warren Lewis’ unpublished, “C. S.
Lewis: A Biography,” he says his brother
began work on “an autobiographical poem which Jack began to write in the
‘twenties and then abandoned”.[16] Accordingly, the following three
autobiographical fragments appear to date from 1920 to 1929. They are less important as poetry than as
autobiography, but they do illustrate Lewis’ desire to use poetry to explain
the story of his life, and they are worth looking at in addition since they are
narrative rather than lyrical.
Unquestionably Lewis longed to write effective narrative poetry as his
later devotion to Dymer
demonstrates, but in point of fact his best poetry is short, especially the
lyrical pieces.
The first fragment focuses
upon Robert Capron, Headmaster of Wynyard School, Watford, Hertfordshire, where
Lewis was a pupil from 1908-1910; in Surprised
by Joy (hereafter SJ) Capron
becomes the tyrannical Oldie of Belsen. The end of
I have failed . . . if I
have not shown you a powerful, violent, brutal man, without intellectual tastes
or attainments, regarding his school as at once a mere livlihood
[sic], and a safety valve for his ill temper, who by secluding himself from all
who were not under his domination, had reached such a degree of tyranny that
the kindest verdict I can pass on him, is to agree with my friend Balfour that
he was not quite sane. (LP, III, 41)
Heart-breaking school
Recieved [sic] me
, where an ogre hearted man held rule,
Secret and irresponsable [sic], out of the call
Of men’s reproach, like
Cyclops in his savage hall:
For at his gate no neighbour went in, nor his own
Three fading daughters
easily won out alone,
Nor if they did, dared wag
their tongues, but, in a trice
Their errand done, whisked
home again, three pattering mice,
Pale, busy meek: more pitiable far than we
From whom he ground the
bread of his adversity,
Himself a theme for
pity: for within him boiled
The spirit of Gengis Khan or Timur, ever foiled
And force back to the
dogs-eared Virgil and the desk
To earn his food: ridiculous, old, poor, grotesque,
A man to be forgiven. Here let him pass, by me
Forgiven: and let the memory pass. Let me not see
Under the curled moustaches
on the likerous, red,
Moist lips, the flat
Assyrian smile we used to dread
When in the death-still room
the weeping of one boy
Gave the starved dragon
inklings of ancestral joy,
Antediluvian taste of blood. (LP,
III, 41-42)[17]
There are several
fascinating implications to consider in this twenty one line fragment. First, the content of these lines are greatly
expanded upon in Chapter Two, “Concentration Camp” (22-41) of SJ (given the bitterness of the memory
of Capron it is not surprising this is the longest chapter in Lewis’
autobiography). One conclusion we can
draw from this fragment and the other autobiographical poetic fragments is they
served as rough drafts for prose versions appearing later in SJ.
Second, as noted already, we see him using numerous classical allusions
including comparing Capron to Cyclops, the historical marauders Gengis Khan and Timor, and the Biblical Assyrian conqueror,
Sennacherib,[18] all
reflecting the characteristic depth of his learning but also a pedantic
intrusiveness. Third, and perhaps
because this piece was written when Lewis was older, there is an objectivity we
might not expect as he is able to feel compassion for Capron’s pitiful
daughters who had to endure his cruelty all the time and to forgive
Capron: “ridiculous, old, poor,
grotesque, / A man to be forgiven.” At
the same time, however, we can question the sincerity of such forgiveness since
Lewis ends by dwelling on how he will not remember that Capron’s enjoyment of
punishing the boys “gave the starved dragon inklings of ancestral joy, /
Antediluvian taste of blood.” Clearly
the trauma of Capron’s educational method lived long in Lewis’ memory as his
reincarnation as Oldie in SJ indicates.
The second of these poetic
fragments is a forty-two-line panegyric to Harry Wakelyn
Smith, Lewis’ favorite teacher at
And after this they sent me
to another place,
New miseries, another
school. But I retrace
Only the good which there I
found;[19]
one master dear,
At thought of whom the bird
of memory sings. More clear
And dulcet grows the
firmament of the world within.
Mediterranean metres at my ear begin
And at my veins with Dionysiac drum to knock,
Like goat foot dancers
thudding on the thin soiled rock
Of blue volcanic country,
where the hammered hills
Grow hot like metal, and
metallic sunshine fills
The basin of the burning sky
till the blue is dark,
And the small insects’
shadow is as deep and stark
As the jagg’d
rocks: and from on high the Olympians
throw
The thunderbolt,
and quakings from the gods below
Trouble the earth: and gods in the leaf shaking mountains
Cluster, and in cold water
glens and sacred fountains
Gods and half gods and sons
of gods, and all the crew
Of Maenads in the mountain
tread the bloodied dew
In honour
of the beautiful and beastlike son
Of Semele—Then cold Platonic forms:
the One
Arching forever above all
height; the long process
From lovely, up through lovlier [sic] things, to Lovliness
[sic]
Herself, and in herself,
abstract, alone, complete—
Then Sabine woods and
worshipped river heads and neat
Virgilian farms, and cattle,
and the care of bees,
The old pieties of temperate
Numa’s time. All these,
An old man with a
honey-sweet and singing voice
Led me among; an innocent
old man whose choice
Once made to dwell with
beauty and melodious thought,
Unchanged, from early youth
to sad old age, had brought
The spirit gently ripening
onward to the place
Where courage droops. “Mý
Joízv met’ àmousías!”[20]
Gentlemen (for he chose to
call us urchins so)
Let us not rest save where
the springs of beauty flow”.
Therefore the ancient beauty
brought him clear delight
Each day, and all day long,
and in the wakeful night
Forgetfulness of the unhappy
thousand things
Age thinks of, making equal
to the wealth of Kings
His poverty. Oh Master, may the earth be green
Above thy grave! Far hidden in the lands unseen,
Far off now, and mature
among the ghosts, yet fare
Well and thrice well
forevermore and everywhere. (262-63)
In the first twenty six lines Lewis pays homage to how
Smith exposed him to classical poetry and its “mediterranean
metres” as well as “cold Platonic forms” and the
wonder of Virgil’s poetry. The rest of
the poem credits Smith with infusing into Lewis “beauty and melodious thought”
as he recalls the way Smith urged the young boys to pursue poetry earnestly and
not to rest “‘save where the springs of beauty flow.’” The fragment ends with Lewis asking that
Smith’s spirit blessed.
In SJ Lewis recalls how influential Smith as a teacher had been upon
him:
Except at Oldie’s I had been
fortunate in my teachers ever since I was born; but Smewgy
was “beyond expectation, beyond hope.”
He was a gray-head with large spectacles and a wide mouth which combined
to give him a froglike expression, but nothing could be less froglike than his
voice. He was honey-tongued. Every verse he read turned into music on his
lips: something midway between speech
and song. It is not the only good way of
reading verse, but it is the way to enchant boys. . . He first taught me the
right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured
and mouthed in solitude. Of
Lewis also recalls Smith “could also analyze. An idiom or a textual crux, once expounded
upon by Smewgy, became as clear as day” (112). As we saw with the poetic fragment on
Capron, the fragment on Lewis’ pleasant memories of Smith is used as a source
for his expanded recollections in SJ.[21]
The
last of these autobiographical fragments is the longest, and, perhaps the best,
for it gives a wonderful picture of Lewis’ greatest teacher, W. T. Kirkpatrick:
Old Kirk, like father Time
himself, was coming after,
With clouds of cheap tobacco
smoke, with claps of laughter,
My third and greatest
teacher who of old had taught
My father; then my brother;
and now I was brought
A solitary pupil where he
lived alone
With few books and no
friends, and in his garden, sown
Up to the gates with green
utilitarian kale,
Laboured all day, a tall, gnarled
shape, hirsute and hale
As Charon: crude antiquity: a leathery, lean
Northeaster of a man whose seventy years had seen,
Unflinching, many hopes
destroyed. He drew his blood
From the brave, bitter Presbyterian
race who stood
For Calvin to the gallow’s foot. But Kirk
allowed
No God in the world, nor spirit in man. He
did not shroud
That unbelief in pious
frauds, as teachers love.
He thought the reverence
owed to boys was Truth. He drove
With lance in rest and loud
Have-at-thee on the foe,
Hammer of priests and kings,
true lineage of Rousseau
Hume and Voltaire. And all the enlightenment’s gay din
Of onset rang about his
veteran ears, and in
And out of season
(Covenanter still) he preached
The word of death.
But mark this
well: his daring reached
Never so far as to forbid
each seventh day
A Presbyterian shift of
suits from rusty grey
To rusty black. He gardened differently clad
On Sundays. Such peculiar praise the Mighty had
One day in seven from this
redoubtable, whose boast
Of reason meant to shake the
Throne. On the iron coast
Of such a man, with noise of
yeasty waves, the young
Spring-swellings of my
uncorrected mind were flung
So often that even now I see
him as he spoke
Fling up his arm, and hear
him from the cloud of smoke
Break in. “I hear you well enough. Stop there!
I hear!
Have you read this—and
that—and the other?--Hah! I fear
You’ve got no facts. Give me the FACTS!” Repeated shame
Silenced my babbling: months wore on, and I became
Aware how the discourse of
men (what none before
Of all my teachers showed
me), asks for something more
Than lungs and lips. Across my landscape, like the dawn,
Some image of the sovranty [sic] of truth was drawn,
And how to have believed an
unproved thing by will
Pollutes the mind’s
virginity; how reasons kill
Beloved supposals: day makes dry lesser lights,
And mountain air is med’cinal. Oh Attic
nights
And rigour
of debate! Shrewd blows. Parry and thrust.
No quarter. And above us like a battle dust
Fine particles of poets and
philosophers
Went flying in the midnight
room. I had my spurs
Of intellectual knighthood
in that bannered field
From Kirk’s strong hand. He first hung on my maiden shield
Who now is dead, and died
without hope, like a beast.
Let tongue and pen betray me
if I break the least
Of the oaths he then
administered, the glittering laws
Of battle; blameless
champion of a pitiful cause. (LP, IV, 64-65)
In these fifty four lines Lewis presents a vivid
picture of Kirkpatrick,
immortalized as “The Great Knock” in SJ. In the poetic fragment Lewis describes
Kirkpatrick with both wit and respect.
For example, on the one hand, he says Kirkpatrick was like “father Time
himself” trailing “clouds of cheap tobacco smoke” and planting a garden “with
green utilitarian kale.” On the other
hand, he notes the old man was a Charon-like figure,
and he follows this with a wonderfully evocative metaphor that is perhaps the
best in the whole poem: “[He was] a
leathery, lean / Northeaster of a man.”
The fragment also augments our picture of Kirkpatrick’s spiritual stance
since his heritage is that of “the brave, bitter Presbyterian race who stood /
for Calvin to the gallow’s foot”; this heritage
notwithstanding, Lewis notes “Kirk allowed / No God in the world, nor spirit in
man.” Furthermore, Lewis’ respect for
Kirkpatrick’s honest disbelief is clear:
“He did not shroud / That unbelief in pious
frauds, as teachers love. / He thought the reverence owed to boys was
Truth.” Yet, in the telling conclusion
to the first half of the fragment, Lewis notes even Kirkpatrick tipped his hat
to an Almighty he rejected since “each seventh day / A Presbyterian shift of
suits from rusty grey / To rusty black
[occurred]. He gardened differently clad
/ On Sundays.”
In the second half of the
fragment Lewis emphasizes how Kirkpatrick went about training his “uncorrected
mind” to think logically. Time after
time, session after session, class after class, Kirkpatrick would drum into the
young Lewis his own methodical logic, demanding: “Give me the FACTS!” Such brutal treatment to a lesser mind might
have been stunting, but oddly Lewis admired the way Kirkpatrick demonstrated
the supremacy of debate in discovering truth:
“I had my spurs / Of intellectual knighthood in
that bannered field / From Kirk’s strong hand.”
Lewis confesses an eternal indebtedness to his old teacher and offers
his highest praise as the fifty four line fragment ends: “Blameless champion of a pitiful cause.”[22] In SJ
Lewis expands on these lines to give a lengthy portrait of Kirkpatrick. For instance, about Kirkpatrick’s philosophy
he writes: “If ever a man came near to
being a logical entity, that man was Kirk.
Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist. The idea that human beings should exercise
their vocal chords for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering
truth was to him preposterous” (135-36).
However, Lewis does see in Kirkpatrick a curious contradiction:
I have said that he was
almost wholly logical; but not quite. He
had been a Presbyterian and was now an Atheist.
He spent Sunday, as he spent most of his time on weekdays, working in
his garden. But one curious trait from
his Presbyterian youth survived. He
always, on Sundays, gardened in a different, and slightly more respectable,
suit. An Ulster Scot may come to
disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath. (136)
One especially striking thing about the Kirkpatrick
poetic fragment is the concrete imagery:
“clouds of cheap tobacco,” “claps of laughter,” ‘the iron coast of such
a man,” and “maiden shield [of intellectual
knighthood]” are richly evocative; one wishes Lewis had included them in SJ as it is poorer for their absence.
The
value of these autobiographical poetic fragments is threefold although as
poetry they are inconsistent. First,
they clearly underscore the primary role poetry played in Lewis’ developing
literary life. As the three fragments
make obvious, when as a young man he contemplates telling his life’s story,
Lewis turns to poetry as his natural medium.
Second, they illustrate how significant these three teachers were in
shaping Lewis’ intellectual life: from Capron he learned how literature could
help him survive a brutal reality; from Smith he learned how poetry could open
to him the experience of beauty; and from Kirkpatrick he learned how learning
could help him engage in intellectual discourse and discovery. Third, these three fragments offer unique
insights into the brilliant writer Lewis came to be while supplementing the
extended prose versions of the same persons in SJ. As poetry, however, they
are uneven. On the one hand, Shaw notes
the “vivid imagery” of lines such as “where the hammered hills / Grow hot like
metal, and metallic sunshine fills / The basin of the burning sky till the blue
is dark” and “may the earth be green / Above thy grave” from the poem on Wakelyn.[23] In addition, the hexameter of each argues for
a common source, perhaps the autobiographical poem Warren Lewis refers as the
source for SJ. On the other hand, many of the couplets are
forced and clumsy and Lewis’s allusiveness is bookish and irritating; as Chad
Walsh puts it Lewis stumbles as a poet when he “tries to say weighty things,”
becomes “preachy or editorializes,” and “fails to convert his ideas into
effective symbols.”[24] These deficiencies are characteristic and
help explain why Dymer,
his supreme effort at narrative poetry, leaves many readers cold.
The
next short unpublished poem, “The Carpet Rises in the Draught,” probably dates
from 1922-23.[25] Warren
Lewis connects this fragment with “the aloof and solitary nature of Clive’s
life during his adolescence . . . [as it describes] the emptiness and silence
of Little Lea as it was after [our mother’s] death in 1908” (LP, XI, 251). The thirteen line fragment echoes passages
from Spirits in Bondage, especially
the melancholic poems questioning the meaning of life:
The carpet rises in the
draught. The little scarlet leaf,
That’s blown in from the
window sill, is wicked past belief:
That old face in the picture
there is bad as bad can be,
And thro’ its chromolithic eyes it says strange things to me.
Beyond this room, if I went
out, there’s thirty feet or more
Of passage thro’ the empty
house and many an open door
And many an empty room
that’s full of breeze and sunless light
With empty beds for visitors
all neat and cold and white.
And sometimes now a door
will bang and then at other whiles
A little bit of wind gets
lost—strays in beneath the tiles
And among beams and water
pipes it makes a fretting sound
Behind the walls, between
the laths it wheezes round around,
There’s so much room about a
house . . . . (251)
The fragment reinforces what Lewis writes in SJ about how Little Lea, for all its
other benefits to him and Warren, was bereft of beauty: “This absence of beauty, now that I come to
think of it, is characteristic of our childhood. No picture on the walls of my father’s house
ever attracted—and indeed none deserved—our attention. We never saw a beautiful building nor
imagined that a building could be beautiful” (6). In particular, the image of the draught
cutting through the house is chilling; here we find no breath of life, no warm
breeze of love, no spirit of joy, the very thing he also laments in “Song of
the Pilgrims” in SB:
Dwellers at the back of the
North Wind,
What have we done to
you? How have we sinned
Wandering the Earth from
Orkney unto
. . .—The
red-rose and the white-rose gardens blow
In the green Northern land
to which we go,
Surely the ways are long and
the years are slow.
We have forsaken all things
sweet and fair,
We have found nothing worth
a moment’s care
Because the real flowers are
blowing there. (47)
However, as a poem “The Carpet Rises in the Draught”
is flawed. Shaw says “I rather like
this,”[26]
perhaps because of the eerie, forsaken mood it creates. At the same time, lines such as “the little
scarlet leaf . . . is wicked beyond belief,” “as bad as bad can be,” and “among
beams and water pipes” are poor and the ponderous heptameter is particularly
awkward. Its value is chiefly the
additional light it sheds on Lewis’ sense of home, his nostalgia for the past,
and his impulse to record these in poetry.
The
next fragment we can reliably date since it occurs in a letter to Owen Barfield
on May 6, 1932.[27] It
appears to be another poetic attempt by Lewis to chronicle his pursuit of joy:
I will write down the
portion that I understand
Of twenty years wherein I
went from land to land.
At many bays and harbours I put in with joy
Hoping that there I should
have built my second
And stayed. But either stealing harpies drove me thence,
Or the trees bled, or
oracles, whose[28] airy
sense
I could not understand, yet
must obey, once more
Sent me to sea to follow the
retreating shore
Of this land which I call at
last my home, where most
I feared to come; attempting
not to find whose coast
I ranged half round the
world, with fain design to shun
The last fear whence the
last security is won.
Oh perfect life, unquivering, self-enkindled flame
From which my fading candle
first was lit, oh name
Too lightly spoken,
therefore left unspoken here,
Terror of burning, nobleness
of light, most dear
And comfortable warmth of
the world’s beating side,
Feed from thy unconsumed what
wastes in me, and guide
My soul into the silent
places till I make
A good end of this book for
after-travellers’ sake.
In times whose faded chronicle has in the room
That memory cannot turn the
key of, they to whom
I owe this mortal body and
terrestrial years,
Uttered the Christian story
to my dreaming ears.
And I lived then in
Run off me like the water
from the water-bird;
And what my mortal mother
told me in the day
At night my elder mother
nature wiped away;
And when I heard them
telling of my soul, I turned
Aside to read a different
lecture whence I learned
What was to me the stranger
and more urgent news,
That I had blood and body
now, my own, to use
For tasting and for touching
the young world, for leaping
And climbing, running,
wearying out the day, and sleeping ---[29]
Though by this time Lewis
had already published a poem entitled “Joy,” his return to the same theme in
this fragment is instructive.[30] For instance, it illustrates again Lewis’
penchant for heavy, intrusive classical literary allusions such as “my second
Troy,” “stealing harpies” and the bleeding tree from which Polydorus
warns Aeneas to flee Thrace in the Aeneid (Book III), and “trees [that] bled” from the wood of suicides in the “Inferno”
(Canto XIII) of The Divine Comedy. In addition, we see him ascribe irony to his
realization that his search for joy led him to orthodox Christianity, “where
most / I feared to come.” Yet his prayer
is to a God who is decidedly Platonic (“Oh perfect life, unquivering,
self-enkindled flame / From which my fading candle first was lit”), and his
request is for private, peaceful withdrawal from the world rather than for
public, combative debate Lewis later became famous for (“guide / My soul into
the silent places till I make / A good end of this book for after-travellers’ sake”).
Most
telling is the third stanza where we see again the influence of Wordsworth,
whose own poetry was highly autobiographical and has been mentioned above. In addition to “The Prelude,” “Tintern Abbey” is a poem Lewis favored. In the final lines of Lewis’ poetic fragment,
the influence of “Tintern Abbey” may be
inferred: “For nature then / (The
coarser pleasures of my boyish days, / And their glad
animal movements all gone by) / To me was all in all” (72-75). Had Lewis finished his poem it is fascinating
to speculate whether he would have been influenced further by the climatic
lines of “Tintern Abbey”:
That time is past,
And all its aching joys are
now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I . . . . For I have
learned
To look on nature, not as in
the hour
Of thoughtless youth . . . . I have felt
A presence that disturbs me
with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a
sense sublime
Of something far more deeply
interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light
of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the
living air,
And the blue sky, and in the
mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that
impels
All thinking things, all
objects of all thought,
And rolls through all
things. (83-86, 88-90, 93-102)
Wordsworth’s affirmation of the superiority of
recollecting memories of nature as an older person over the actual experiences
he had as a child in nature is moving, but we cannot help wondering if he
protests too much. If this is so, then
this passage becomes bittersweet and may have struck Lewis similarly.
As a
poem, “I Will Write Down” has some merit though it is also inconsistent. The hexameter here is not as clumsy as in
earlier poems, the cadence is rapid, and the couplets are easy rather than harsh
on the ears. There are effective images
(“perfect life, unquivering, self-enkindled flame”)
mixed with tired ones (“my fading candle” and “the world’s beating side”). Furthermore, in a poem meant to convey
something of the emotion of the spiritual search of his soul, it is odd he uses
“And when I heard them telling of my soul, I turned / Aside to read a different
lecture.” This bookishness,
characteristic of so much of Lewis’ poetry, the published and the unpublished,
explains why his poetry sometimes does not work. That is, his great learning and literary
knowledge may have become the point
of his poetic efforts; in effect he may have sacrificed success as a poet
because he was not able to escape the literary, academic, and intellectual
collective that so defined him. Ruth
Pitter, friend and poetess Lewis respected and wrote to frequently about his
poetry, muses on this:
Now, I wonder.
Is his poetry after all
not? About how many poets or poems would
readers agree 100% or even 50%? ‘The
peaks of poetry are shiftingly veiled,
and different readers catch different glimpses of the transcendental.’ I should like to know more about the actual
process of conception in his [Lewis’] case.
Did his great learning, a really staggering skill in verse inhibit the
poetry? Did he ever (like most of us)
catch some floating bit of emotional thistledown & go on from that, or did
he plan on a subject like an architect?
(Producing perhaps short epics?)
He had a great stock of the makings of a poet: strong visual memory, strong recollections of
childhood: desperately strong yearnings
for lost
Pitter’s comments may provide the best analysis of
Lewis’ deficiencies as a poet.
The
last two short poems, both existing heretofore only in Lewis’ handwriting, are
nowhere dated. The poems, the thirty
four line “To Mrs. Dyson, Angrie”
and the eighteen line “Lines to Mr. Compton Mackenzie” are personal on the one
hand since they are addressed to specific individuals, but scholastic on the
other hand since they employ bookish or academic rhetorical strategies
throughout. Complicating this is the
lack of context for them. Why did he
write these poems? Was he simply
engaging in literary play with no intention of ever sending the poems? Was he as critical of both persons as the tone of the poems suggest or was he merely verbally
jousting, tongue-in-cheek? Furthermore,
were the poems ever sent or received? If
so, what reactions followed? Until more
reliable biographical material is available many of these questions will remain
unanswered.
We can, however, be fairly
certain “To Mrs. Dyson, Angrie” was penned about the
wife of Lewis’ long-time friend Hugo Dyson, Margaret Mary Bosworth
Robinson. It may be that the poem is
playful verbal banter since Lewis seems to have genuinely enjoyed Mrs. Dyson’s
company (a rarity for him), a fact revealed in a letter to his brother Warren
where he describes first meeting with the Dysons: “[Last weekend] I went to spend a night at
Reading with a man called Hugo Dyson . . . We had a grand evening. Rare luck to stay with a friend whose wife is
so nice that one almost (I can’t say
quite) almost regrets the change when
he takes you up to his study for serious smoking and for the real midnight
talking” (22 Nov. 1931).[32].
When
we consider as well that Hugo Dyson was one of Lewis’ closest friends (he and Tolkien were instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to
Christianity), especially because Lewis “enjoyed his sort of humour,”[35]
it is probable the poem was a playful apology for an unintended slight or
missed appointment such as a dinner engagement:
These inky firmaments and
flaws [sic] of rain,
The wet weed swaying on the
fallows dun,
How falsely our philosophers
explain!
These neither spot I’ the
sun
Nor anticyclone from the
western main
Hath made to be. No! with unkindly
charm
The mortal
Choosing to “arme
Those lookes,
the heav’n of mildnesse
with Disdain.”
Since, lady, in your face
Daunger the giant hath meek Pity slain,
Mist drapes our woods and
gusts of anger chace [sic]
Leaves (like our hearts)
from every rivelled [sic] tree.
Yet, sure, in such a gentle
heart or place
For mercy too should be.
If but the power were equal
to the will,
I would speed hence, a
suppliant, to your bowers;
Scarce would I stay to fill
Some pearly chariot with dim
Syrian flowers,
To gild for such a progress
the pale horns
Of some poor ten or twenty
unicorns,
--To harvest some thrice
happy hippogriff,
--To load with gifts of
frankincense the hands
Of seven dusky legions,
if--sad if--
(There is no other rhyme for
hippogriff)
Power jumped with will. But jealous fate withstands.
So to your queenly self, so
to your lord
(If such a style accord
With any mortal; as great
Venus’ groom,
Anchises old, tho’
declined to the tomb
Was honoured
for the sea-born goddess sake)
Excuse your slave, for even
the humblest take
Free pardon from necessity;
and make,
Smiling, our autumn skies
put off their gloom.[36]
In brief, the poem argues that the dark, dreary skies with its soggy weather is not the result of climatic
conditions elsewhere in the world.
Instead, the bad weather is due to the anger of the noble woman, “the
mortal
The poem lacks a regular
meter, and the heavy allusiveness intrudes again (“arme
those lookes, the heav’n of
mildnesse with Disdain”). In addition, the poem has a bookish tone with
its use of allegorical motifs (“Daunger the giant hath meek Pity slain”). The rhyme scheme is not coherent and often absurd
(“if—sad—if” with “hippogriff”). On the
other hand, the humorous comparison of Hugo (“your lord”) with old Anchises, the father of Aeneas, was probably a hit with the
Dysons, and there is a silliness in the poem that
suggests it was all done in fun; published poems reflecting a similar
jocularity include “Abecedarium Philosophicum”
(1933) and “Awake, My Lute” (1943).[38]
The
final unpublished short poem addresses Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie
(1883-1972), a prolific Scottish novelist, essayist, and historian. He took a B.A. in history at
Good heavens, Sir, will you
condemn us
To talk of
And Venus--or perhaps Wenoos?
Each language has its native
use,
And words like Saturn [?]
are abom-
inable here, if not at
Man, were you never taught
at school
The genuinely English rule?
Antepenultimatis with us
For the most part are
shortened. Thus
Crime, criminal, and rare,
but rarity
(It rhymes in Thomas Hood
with charity)
It’s English, which you
claim to love,
You’re mangling in the
interests of
A long-dead alien form of
speech.
Learn your own tongue before
you teach,
And leave us meanwhile for
our share
“The freedom of oure ain vulgaire.”[39]
Unlike the playful banter we find in Lewis’ poem to
Mrs. Dyson, he seems pedantic and querulous here. He is quibbling over Mackenzie’s propensity
to misuse English, particularly his use of archaic words and pronunciation; for
instance, Lewis has “condemn us” rhyme with “Remus,”
a gentle satire on insisting modern English poets retain the ancient
pronunciation of Latin or Greek names.[40] Because we do not know which work of
Mackenzie Lewis has in mind, we can only speculate as to what prompted this
poem. Perhaps Lewis is arguing with
Mackenzie’s habit of writing odd sounding dialects or his use of worn out
inflections. What we can see, however,
in this eighteen line poem is Lewis’ again using numerous literary allusions
(“The freedom of oure ain vulgaire” ), absurd rhymes (“Wenoos” with “native use”), and farcical humor (“Crime, criminal, and rare, but rarity / (It rhymes in Thomas Hood with charity”). Lewis’ irritation with Mackenzie is real, but
he avoids the invective we see in poems like “To Mr. Roy Campbell” (1939) and
“To Mr. Kingsley Amis on His Late Verses” (1954).[41]
In conclusion, these short
poems advance our understanding of Lewis’ maturation as a poet. While this essay has made it clear most of
them are unsuccessful as poems, they indicate the devotion Lewis had to poetry
and the halting, faltering nature of them as poems is useful in measuring
Lewis’ growth as a poet. For instance,
Lewis’ over reliance on heavy literary allusiveness, his penchant toward
clumsy, awkward hexameters, and his often forced and contrived rhyme schemes
are “worked out” to some degree in these efforts so that in the later poetry
these weakness are not as pronounced. In a sense these poems are a training ground,
an aesthetic drill field, for the practice of poetry. For that reason alone
they are interesting additions to the corpus of Lewis’ poetry. In addition, though some are unfinished
fragments, they tend to focus on themes Lewis deals with elsewhere in completed
poems. In them we see his characteristic
love of language and classical literature.
Furthermore, his poems on the three important teachers in his life add
crucial biographical details that flesh out the prose versions of these
teachers in SJ. The poems to Mrs. Dyson and Compton Mackenzie
require additional critical study, but at least we see in them Lewis’ tendency
toward verbal banter, playful or otherwise.
In all these poems we see a poet who only later becomes fully realised as a master of prose. While the poems discussed in this paper are
not the final word on Lewis’ unpublished poetry[42]
since there are at least four long narrative poetic fragments still to be
published, they glisten, if not with gold, then
with glints of light.
Works Cited
Christopher, Joe. Email to the author, 7 April, 1997.
Green,
Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S.
Lewis: A Biography.
Hooper, Walter. C. S.
Lewis: A Companion and Guide.
------------------. Letter to the author.
24 March 1996.
------------------. “C. S. Lewis’s Poetry.” E-mail to the author. 7 Jan. 1997.
------------------. “Introduction.” In C. S. Lewis. The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis.
Lewis, C. S. All My
Road Before Me:
The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922-27.
Ed. Walter Hooper.
--------------. Letter to Owen Barfield, May 6, 1932, Letters
from C. S. Lewis to Owen Barfield, vol. 2 (1932-1940), cat. no.
26-50, index no. 0055-0097,
--------------. Letters of C. S. Lewis.
Ed. Warren Lewis. Rev. edition edited
by Walter Hooper.
--------------. [Clive Hamilton, pseud.]. Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics.
--------------. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of
My Early Life.
--------------. They
Stand Together: The Letters of C. S.
Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963). Ed.
Walter Hooper.
Lewis,
--------------. “C. S. Lewis:
A Biography.” Unpublished
manuscript.
--------------. “The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850-1930.” 11 volumes.
Lindskoog, Kathryn. Finding the Landlord: A
Guidebook to C. C. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress.
Occasional Poets: An
Anthology. Ed. Richard Adams.
Sayer, George. Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times.
Shaw, Luci. Letter to the author. 7 May, 1997.
The Complete Works of Horace. Ed. Caspar Kraemer,
Jr.
Notes
[1] With the
amount of scholarly interest in Lewis’ poetry having recently increased, it is
not surprising The Collected Poems of C.
S. Lewis has come under intense critical scrutiny, especially the
“Miscellany.” Kathryn Lindskoog has written at length in The Lewis Legacy about her concerns; see especially “Here We Go
Again: Two New Lewis Forgeries.” The
Lewis Legacy no. 64 (Spring 1995):1, and the entire no. 65 (Summer 1995),
particularly pp. 1-8 where she raises numerous questions about the poem “
[2] Actually, there was some confusion regarding the eventual title of this volume. 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).
[3] In fact there are another dozen or so unpublished poems; most are either doggerel, forced exercises to make a point to a correspondent, or so fragmentary as to be of little interest.
[4] Letter to the author, 7 May, 1997. Shaw, author of Listen to the Green and other volumes of poetry, is a well-known contemporary American poet.
[5] Translated by J. H. Deazeley, in The Complete Works of Horace, p. 186.
[6] In a letter to Arthur Greeves, the young Lewis writes:
You will perhaps be surprised
to hear that I am reading “The Prelude” by way of graduating in
Wordsworth-ism. What’s even funnier, I
rather like it! I’m coming to the
conclusion that there are two orders of poetry—real poetry and the sort you
read while smoking a pipe. “The Prelude”
is nearly always on the second level but very comfortable and interesting all
the same . . . You read it, didn’t
you? I expect like me you recognized
lots of the early parts from recollections of your own childhood. I fancy the first Book the best. (18
September 1919; They Stand Together,
p. 261)
A month later he adds: “I finished the Prelude and liked it. It is about as bad a poem could be in some ways but one considers the great passages not too dearly bought at the price of the rest” (18 Oct. 1919; TST, 263). Five years later his appreciation of the poem is even greater: “I brought Wordsworth out to the garden and there in the delicious coolness I read Book I of ‘The Prelude.’ This poem is really beginning to replace Paradise Lost as my literary metropolis” (14 June 1925; All My Road, p. 333).
[7] Letter to the author, 7 May, 1997.
[8] Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics.
[9] Other poems reflecting this include “The Satyr” (5), “The Autumn Morning” (34), “The Ass” (51), “How He Saw Angus the God” (61), and “The Roads” (63).
[10] The title comes from Ovid’s Ex Ponto 3.2.25. The complete phrase is pars estis pauci melior and means “you few are a better group,” referring to several loyal friends who remained dedicated to and supportive of him during his exile. Stanzas one and three appear in the Hooper and Green biography, p. 38.
[11] The phrase probably refers to the requirement to write in an assigned meter.
[12] “Quam Bene Saturno.”
[13] “From
the Latin of Milton’s De Idea Platonica Quemadmodum
Aristoteles Intellexit,”
(a translation), English 5, no. 30
(1945): 195.
[14] “Arrangement
of Pindar,”
Mandrake 1, no. 6 (1949): 43-45. Pindar
(518?-438? BC), the greatest lyric poet of ancient
[15] Other poems of this sort include “After Kirby’s Kalevala” (a translation), The Oxford Magazine 55 (May 13, 1937): 595; “Vitrea Circe,” Punch 214 (June 23, 1948): 543; “The Prodigality of Firdausi,” Punch 215 (December 1, 1948): 510; and “Vowels and Sirens,” The Times Literary Supplement, Special Autumn Issue (August 29, 1954): xiv.
[16] Warren Lewis, “C. S. Lewis: A Biography,” p. 12.
[17] Warren Lewis completes the story of Capron in The Lewis Papers:
We will her anticipate the end
of the story of Robert Capron and
[18] Lewis writes about Sennacherib in “Sonnet”:
The Bible says Sennacherib’s campaign was spoiled
By angels: in Herodotus it says, by mice—
Innumerably nibbling all one night they toiled
To eat his bowstrings piecemeal as warm wind eats ice.
But muscular archangels, I suggest, employed
Seven little jaws at labour on each slender string
And by their aid, weak masters though they be, destroyed
The
smiling-lipped Assyrian, cruel-bearded king. (1-8; The
[19] Perhaps an echo to the Inferno, Canto I, lines 8-9: “Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey / The tale, I’ll write what else I found therewith.”
[20] In SJ Lewis comments on this phrase: “’Never let us live with amousia,’ was one of [Smewgy’s] favorite maxims: amousia, the absence of the Muses” (112).
[21] Warren Lewis adds the following: “Mr. Smith died at his little house in the school grounds, South Lodge, where he lived alone, on the 13th November 1918, a victim of the epidemic of influenza which swept Europe and Africa in that year” (LP, III, 263).
[22] A. N. Wilson publishes a short excerpt from this fragment in his biography, p. 251. The excerpt covers the twelve lines running from “Across my landscape “ through “From Kirk’s strong hand.”
[23] Letter to the author, 7 May, 1997.
[24]
[25] Warren Lewis writes: “This fragment has been dated in Clive’s handwriting ‘probably 1922-23.’ The ‘room’ in line 5 is ‘the little end room,’ the upstairs sitting room generally used by Warren and Clive when their father was out of the house, and the ‘fretting’ of the ‘lost’ wind was a familiar sound in the attic which in earlier days was their play room” (LP, Vol. XI, 251).
[26] Letter to the author, 7 May, 1997.
[27] About these lines, Green and Hooper write: “In the spring of 1932 he [Lewis] had another go at writing the story of Joy leading on to conversion. This, like the first attempt, was to be in the form of a long narrative poem. Only 34 lines of it [in their book they only quote the first twelve] have survived in a letter written to Owen Barfield on 6 May 1932 in which he says: ‘I am not satisfied with any part I have yet written and the design is ludicrously ambitious. But I feel it will be several years anyway before I give it up’” (127). Later they refer to this as “a new verse autobiography” beginning with “an idea of [Lewis’] Chestertonian ‘voyage’” (127). Still later, they add: “Lewis added another 100 lines of this new autobiography before he went on his annual spring walking tour with Barfield and Dom Bede Griffiths shortly after Easter of 1932” (128). As of this writing I have been unable to discover where the “100 lines” Hooper and Green refer to are located.
Kathryn Lindskoog’s Finding the Landlord, adds the following about the complete thirty four line fragment:
Written in hexameter like Homer’s Odyssey. . . [Lewis’ poem begins] with the lines ‘I will write down the portion that I understand / Of twenty years wherein I went from land to land,’ Lewis went on to claim that he went halfway round the world searching for a home. . . . The unpublished second stanza is a prayer to God for nurture and guidance to enable Lewis to complete this book well for the sake of readers who might be helped by it. In this stanza he likens God to a self-kindled flame and likens himself to a fading candle; he describes God as an unquivering light and the warmth of the world. He feels too reverent to use the word God. In the third stanza, Lewis recalls that in his childhood he heard the Christian story, but it didn’t interest him. He was much more interested in the joys of being alive in the world than in any news about his soul. (xxv)
Lindskoog believes this poem is the source inspiration for Lewis’ allegorical The Pilgrim’s Regress.
[28] Lindskoog correctly points out this word is “whose”; see The Lewis Legacy, 65 (Spring 1995): 3. In the Hooper and Green biography they print this word as “whole.”
[29] From a
letter to Owen Barfield, May 6, 1932, Letters from C. S. Lewis to Owen
Barfield, vol. 2 (1932-1940), cat. no. 26-50, index
no. 0065,
[30] See “Joy,” The Beacon, III no. 31 (May 1924): 444-45.
[31] from MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3.:fols. 63-64, entry by Ruth Pitter, 29 Sept. 1948; Bodleian Library
[32] Letters of C. S. Lewis. Ed. Warren Lewis, p. 293.
[33] Brothers and Friends, p. 99.
[34] Brothers and Friends, p. 192.
[35] Sayer, p. 150.
[36] From MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fols. 1-3; Bodleian Library.
[37] Joe
Christopher, author of a book and dozens of articles on Lewis, says about this
poem: “In the poem to Mrs. Dyson, note
that one of her names is Margaret. This
means pearl, so the reference in the
poem to
[38] “Abecedarium Philosophicum,” The
This bit of silliness is a tour de force in which Lewis and
Barfield collaborate to write a poem with lines dedicated to each letter of the
alphabet. Famous philosophers or
philosophical ideas serve as the jokes of each sentence. Good fun. “Awake ,
My Lute,” The Atlantic Monthly 172
(November 1943): 113, 115. The key to this concoction of incoherent revelries
concerning boring lecturers, shipmates on the
[39] From
MS. Eng. lett. c. 861, fol.
69; Bodleian Library. Beneath the poem
is the following, apparently in Lewis’ handwriting: “C. S. Lewis,
[40] According to Marjorie Meade, Lewis takes issue publicly on this point in his letter to the Editor, “Poetic Licence,” The Sunday Times (August 11, 1946): 6. Meade says Lewis discusses the “poetic licence” granted writers when working on a rhyme scheme using foreign names, adding it is not necessary for an English poet to retain ancient pronunciations in English. Such assimilation into English vernacular indicates the health of the language. In his letter Lewis is responding to several others which criticize the freedom of rhyme in “Thoughts of England” by John Gwynne-Hughes, The Sunday Times (June 23, 1946): 4. A letter by H. Lang Jones (July 7, 1946) complains of other poets who rhyme Aphrodite with white, thus the occasion for Lewis’ letter. Though speculation, these letters may help date the poem on Mackenzie to this general time.
[41] “To Mr. Roy Campbell,” The Cherwell 56 (May 6, 1939): 35. An attack on the politics though not the poetry of South African
poet Ignatius Roy Dunnachie Campbell (1901-1957). “Rifles may flower and terrapins may flame,”
the first line, alludes to
[42] Before
we complete this review of Lewis short unpublished poems, several matters need
clarification. First, Hooper and Green
quote in their biography from a poem beginning “And while the rain is on the
leads”; they suggest it is from a diary from January 1915 (44). Rather than being the opening to an
unpublished short poem, this line appears as the first line of stanza four in
the poem “Ballade of a Winter’s Morning” in CP (234-35). Second, again in the Green and Hooper
biography, they quote from a poem fragment beginning “How can I ask thee,
Father, to defend” (183). According to
Hooper, this fragment “is all there is” (Hooper e-mail). Third, they quote in a footnote from a poem
fragment beginning “The floating islands, the flat golden sky” (171). Again, according to Hooper, this fragment is
all Lewis wrote: “[This] poem . . .exists only in that
single fragment. Lewis did not write any
more” (Hooper e-mail); the fragment is reprinted in Hooper’s C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (220). Finally, in CP (250-52) Hooper includes “