Lewis, C

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

Notes on Poems

Scholars turning their attention to Poems find a collection of Lewis' poetry published in various places over the years and not dependent upon a unified theme. Consequently, these poems are readily accessible, can be considered individually unlike those in Spirits in Bondage and Dymer, and comment upon various issues important to Lewis at the time they were written. Problematic, however, is the fact that many of the selections in Poems differ from the originals published earlier in various journals and periodicals (many were published under "N W", short for the Anglo-Saxon phrase "nat whilk," or "I know not whom," Lewis' shorthand way of identifying himself as the author). While the differences are sometimes minor (alternate punctuations or capitializations), others are significant, including re-arranged, deleted, or added lines, word changes, and, on occasion, extra stanzas. Most of the authors of the Poems essays either do not know about these variations or choose to work with the versions provided in Poems.

Compounding this problem is the recent publication of The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis (1994), and discussed elsewhere on this page. Although recent issues of Kathryn Lindskoog's The Lewis Legacy discuss some of the problems associated with the CP, they tend to comment less about the poetry of Poems (1964) than about authorship. Prompted at least in part by the publication of CP, a series of articles in The Lewis Legacy questions the validity of the "Introductory Letter" purported to be by Lewis, the incompleteness of CP, and inexplicable revisions to poems Lewis published during his lifetime (see The Lewis Legacy, No. 64 (Spring 1995). Also targetted are specific poems and their variants, especially "Finchley Avenue," first published in Occasional Poets: An Anthology (1986) and subsequently publish in Collected Poems (see The Lewis Legacy, No. 65 (Summer 1995). Finally, whole-text variants of "March for Drum, Trumpet, and Twenty-One Giants," "The Day with a White Mark," and "Under Sentence" (published as "The Condemned" in Poems) with notes and commentary are published (see The Lewis Legacy, No. 66 (Autumn 1995). These short articles are must reading.

As noted above, Poems lacks a unified structure such as we see in Spirits in Bondage and Dymer; however, some of Lewis' best poetry is found in this volume. Hooper gives the book a four part structure: Part I: The Hidden Country; Part II: The Backward Glance; Part III: A Larger World; and Part IV: Further Up & Further In. Unfortunately, he never explains this structure, nor why certain poems are placed in one section rather than another. A four part structure can work, however, by grouping the poems thematically.

The first group of poems celebrates the ideas, traditions, and values Lewis associates with the past: honor, truth, chivalry, loyalty, faithfulness, honest sentiment, nature, and proven things. The best example of this occurs in the opening poem, "A Confession" [first published as "Spartan Nactus." Punch 227 (Dec. 1, 1954): 685; there are significant differences between the two versions]. Tongue in cheek, Lewis begins with: "I am so coarse, the things the poets see / Are obstinately invisible to me." This opening serves as his platform from which he attacks modern poetry (T. S. Eliot in particular) and its absurd metaphors: "For twenty years I've stared my level best / To see if evening-any evening-would suggest / A patient etherized upon a table; / In vain. I simply wasn't able." He ends the poem, still tongue in cheek, taking the pose of an foolish, uneducated person ("I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom / A primrose was a yellow primrose") who can only appreciate stock responses, those emotional reactions to ideas, objects, and notions intrinsically connected with the past:

[I am] one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things . . . peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem. (1)

Actually Lewis' affection for the past permeates all his work from his Narnian stories through his literary criticism. Other poems in this group include "Pan's Purge" (5), "The Late Passenger" (47), "The Future of Forestry" (61), "Eden's Courtesy" (98), "The Phoenix" (121), "Noon's Intensity" (114), and "Sweet Desire" (114).

The second group of poems is related to the first because they lament the shallowness of modern life including the popular press, technological progress, reliance on the scientific method, the destruction of the environment, and what he calls elsewhere "chronological snobbery," the idea that simply because something is new, it is by nature better than something old. For instance, he turns his rapier pen upon the muckrakers in "Odora Canum Vis: A Defence of Certain Biographers and Critics " [first published in The Month 272 (May 1954)272]:

Come now, don't be too eager to condemn
Our little smut-hounds if they way their tails
(O shake like jellies as the tails wag them)
The moment the least whiff of sex assails
Their quivering snouts. Such conduct after all,
Though comic, is in them quite natural. (59)

Such disdain, a distinctive characteristic throughout this volume, appears again in "Evolutionary Hymn" [first published in The Cambridge Review 79 (Nov. 30, 1957): 227]:

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where. (55)

Other poems in this group include "The Country of the Blind" (33), "As One Oldster to Another" (56), "An Expostulation" (58), "The Condemned" (63), and "Deception" (90).

The third group consists of poems focusing on the spiritual life such as religious doubt, angels, God's reality and presence in the world, man's pilgrimage, and the role of the Christian apologist. In "Caught" (first published in The Pilgrim's Regress in 1933), we find a persona who is struggling to come to grips with a fierce omnipotence, much as a dog would strain at the leash of an unyielding master. The poem begins with the persona noting that he feels like a person trapped in a burning desert bathed by unrelenting, suffocating light and heat. God, like the sun, is the "inevitable Eye" that confines a desert traveller in smothering tents and "hammers the rocks with light." He is an unyielding, unrelenting, uncompromising force. In desperation the persona longs for "one cool breath in seven / One air from northern climes / The changing and the castleclouded heaven / Of my old Pagan times" (115).

These lines suggest a powerful longing for freedom from the "heat" of God's eye; he is ready to retreat from the demands of an unyielding God toward the comfortable fastness of his pagan days. Such an option, however, is denied him: "But you have seized all in your rage / Of Oneness. Round about / Beating my wings, all ways, within your cage, / I flutter, but not out" (116). Here God is pictured as possessive, angry, and intent on His unanimity. At the same time the persona pictures himself as a bird trapped in a cage, straining earnestly to wing his way out, but to no avail. This poem leaves us with two distinct impressions. The first, of course, is of a "convert" who yearns for his preconversion days where, rightly or wrongly, he believes life held more freedom, more satisfaction. The second is that God is an allencompassing, smothering, demanding entity, uncompromising in His jealous possession of a follower.

At the other end of the spectrum is "Love's as Warm as Tears" where we find a persona reflecting on the measureless love of God. Early stanzas show love as warm as tears, as fierce as fire, as fresh as spring; in all love connects to the human experience. However, in the last stanza, love transcends the human:

Love's as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His. (124)

Characteristic of Poems because the collection includes poems spanning Lewis' life, these two poems illustrate the spirit maturation Lewis experienced. Other poems in this group are "The Salamander" (72), "Wormwood" (87), "Deadly Sins" (91), "Nearly They Stood" (102), "Relapse" (103), "Angel's Song" (107), "Forbidden Pleasure" (115), "Legion" (119), "Pilgrim's Problem" (119), "Sonnet" (120), "The Nativity" (122), "Prayer" (122), "No Beauty We Could Desire" (124), "Stephan to Lazarus" (125), "Evensong" (128), "The Apologist's Evening Prayer" (129), "Footnote to All Prayers" (129), and "After Prayers, Lie Cold" (130).

The final group of poems deal with personal loss involving friendships, romantic love, and physical pleasures. At least several of the poems in this group almost certainly concern Joy Davidman. In "As the Ruin Falls," the persona rebukes himself with bitter honesty: "All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you. / I never had a selfless thought since I was born. / I am mercenary and selfseeking through and through: / I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn" (109). His selfconfession about his egocentricity continues as he admits that he "cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin"; he talks of love, he says, but he recognizes that his has not been a giving love: "selfimprisoned, always end where I begin."

However, the other person, the beloved, has taught the persona by example both what loving means (giving) and how miserable his ability to love has been: "Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack" (110). But there is an added dimension; the beloved appears to be leaving him: "I see the chasm. And everything you are was making / My heart into a bridge by which I might get back / From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking." To the beloved he credits his own faltering steps toward a love that is giving; indeed, the beloved has given him the capacity to be less selfish (she has made his heart a bridge) and less isolated (she has helped to end his "exile, and grow man"). His comment that the bridge is now breaking almost certainly refers to his anticipated loss of her. And so he blesses her : "For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains / You give me are more precious than all other gains. Other poems in this group include "Lines Written in a Copy of Milton's Work" (83), "To a Friend" (104), "To Charles Williams" (105), "After Vain Pretence" (106), "Joys That Sting" (108), "Old Poet's Remembered" (109), and "Scanzons" (118).

Bibliography

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