© 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Unpublished Short Poetry of C. S. Lewis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previously either unpublished or uncollected.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fragments that remain unpublished.[3] Admittedly, these poems, written during a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 This essay will introduce these unpublished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The first unpublished poem,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 “