© Don W. King
This first appeared in two parts as “The
Religious Verse of C. S. Lewis: Part One.” The
Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal No. 97 (Spring 2000): 12-27; "Part
Two."
The Religious Verse of C. S. Lewis
That there has yet to be a survey of Lewis’ religious poetry is ironic since for many his reputation rests upon his work as a Christian writer. Of special interest is how such a survey illustrates Lewis’ journey of faith from atheism to Christianity. For instance, Owen Barfield says that “[his early poetry, Dymer in particular] is practically the only place where the voice of the earlier Lewis [pre-conversion to Christ] . . . is heard speaking not through the memory of the later Lewis but one could say in his own person.”[1] After Lewis’ conversion, however, many of his poems dealt with religious themes; in fact, of the more than two hundred poems he wrote throughout his life, over fifty (or one quarter of all his poems) may be classed as religious verse. These poems focus upon the character of God; biblical themes, events or motifs; and the Christian life, including prayer, the nature of love, joy in Christ, spiritual pride, the incarnation, the resurrection, angels, thanksgiving, grief, doubt, heaven, hell, and temptation.[2] Given the popularity of Lewis’ The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and Mere Christianity, attention should be given his religious verse since many offer commentary on his prose apologetics as well as powerful insights into his maturation in Christ.
Accordingly, this essay is a thematic survey of Lewis’ religious verse, beginning with his youthful, jaundiced perception of God as found in Spirits in Bondage (hereafter SB) where he portrays God as cruel and malicious. After his conversion to Christianity in 1931, however, a radical shift in his understanding of God is revealed in the poetry of The Pilgrim’s Regress; these poems reflect Lewis’ conversion to Christ and his initial growth as a believer. Later religious poems offer mature ruminations on life in Christ. In total Lewis’ religious verse provides us valuable insights into his efficacy as a communicator of Christian truth while powerfully supplementing his work as a prose apologist.
Spirits in Bondage
Written primarily when Lewis was between sixteen and eighteen years old and living under the looming darkness of World War I, SB is the culmination of Lewis’ earliest efforts at verse and is a watershed in his literary life. Although limited in its poetic scope and technique, SB shows Lewis living as a frustrated dualist. On the one hand, sanguine poems in SB show he delights in Nature’s beauty and mystical otherness; many expose a longing to know more intimately a reality that transcends the merely physical, often characterized by the world of faery. On the other hand, morose poems demonstrate Lewis’ struggle to comprehend man’s inhumanity to man as witnessed in the trench warfare of WWI; furthermore, these poems rail against a God he denies yet blames for man’s painful condition.[3] As a result, he writes of a cruel, malicious, inexorable deity.
For example, “Satan Speaks (I),” the first poem in SB, recalls Lewis’ remark to his lifelong friend, Arthur Greeves, when he writes: “I have formulated my equation Matter=Nature=Satan.”[4] Later he adds SB “is mainly strung round the idea that I mentioned to you before—that nature is wholly diabolical & malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.”[5] “Satan Speaks (I),” opens with Lewis emphasizing a God of rules, laws, and universal force: “I am Nature, the Mighty Mother, / I am the law: ye have no other.”[6] After clearly establishing there is no grace, no charity, no empathy in this Darwinian God of Nature, he follows with a series of couplet stanzas underscoring this God’s mechanistic character making frequent use of war imagery: “I am the battle’s filth and strain, / I am the widow’s empty pain. / I am the sea to smother your breath, / I am the bomb, the falling death.” This God is brutish, oppressive, insatiable, unapproachable, and destructive.
A later poem in SB with the same title, “Satan Speaks (XIII),” refines Lewis’ evolving thoughts about this “diabolical & malevolent” deity. The God here is also connected to nature—“I am the Lord your God: even he that made / Material things”—but Lewis’ blasphemous parody goes on to demonstrate this God is more “personal.”[7] He harangues his creatures, using pain and suffering to remind them he is the only God; there is no gentler, kindlier deity as they would like to believe. He mocks their “dreams of some other gods,” giving them a miserable existence and calling them vermin. As if to prove his ultimate authority, he sardonically challenges “that other God” to come from his realm of glory to “steal forth my own thought’s children into light.” Still mocking, he claims the gentler, kindlier deity is detached, unconcerned: “He walks the airy fields of endless day.” The poem ends with the malicious God reasserting his supremacy: “My order still is strong / And like to me nor second none I know. / Whither the mammoth went this creature too shall go.”[8] The malicious God of SB countenances no competitors, so he prophesies man or the other God will follow the mammoth into extinction.[9]
The character of this malicious God is developed further in “Ode for New Year’s Day” where all “ye sons of pain” are advised to curse the hour of their birth as well as the parents who brought them into existence. “God’s hate” descends, and he lets loose his ire:
Madness is come over us and great and little wars.
He has not left one valley, one isle of fresh and green
Where old friends could forgather amid the howling wreck.
It’s vainly we are praying. We cannot, cannot check
The Power who slays and puts aside the beauty that has been.
It’s truth they tell . . . none hears the heart’s complaining
For Nature will not pity, nor the red God lend an ear.[10]
Employing the image of a no-man’s-land battlefield, Lewis pictures a stripped, denuded, sterile scene; to intercede in prayer with the malicious God is futile since he is the author of all suffering and pain.[11] The speaker notes “I too have been mad in the hour of bitter paining / And lifted up my voice to God, thinking that he could hear / The curse wherewith I cursed Him because the Good was dead.” What he has come to realize, however, is such intercession is based on fantasy: “I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts / Have made a phantom called the Good.” In fact, the malicious God, intent on ruling his universe, is not even aware of his suffering creatures: “And what should the great Lord know of it / Who tosses the dust of chaos and gives the suns their parts? . . . Here he builds a nebula, and there he slays a sun / And works his own fierce pleasure.” He is utterly above and beyond human pain: “Do you think he ever hears / The wail of hearts he has broken, the sound of human ill? / He cares not for our virtues, our little hopes and fears, / And how could it all go on, love, if he knew of laughter and tears?” The poem ends with the speaker longing to cheat this malicious God by fleeing into “some other country beyond the rosy West” away from the “rankling hate of God.”
Lewis’ reflections on this cruel deity reach a climax in “De Profundis.”[12] In effect, the speaker challenges and then damns the malicious God: “Come let us curse our Master ere we die, / For all our hopes in endless ruin lie. / The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.”[13] The shocking tone of this opening explains Warren Lewis’ reaction to his first reading of SB when he writes his father:
While I am in complete agreement
with you as to the excellence of part of IT’s book, I
am of the opinion it would have been better if it had never been published.
Even at 23 [
When Lewis learns of
In fact, “De Profundis” reflects an angry adolescent, shaking his fist at a God he denies, rejects, hates, yet fears. In a patent slap at meliorism, the popular pre-WWI notion the world was gradually getting better and could be improved further by human effort, Lewis says: “Four thousand years of toil and hope and thought / Wherein men laboured upward and still wrought / New worlds and better, Thou hast made as naught.” All human effort to build beautiful cities and to acquire knowledge and wisdom are nothing but offal to the malicious God, for “the earth grew black with wrong, / Our hope was crushed and silenced was our song.” What is left man against this malicious God, this “universal strength”? Though admitting “it is but froth of folly to rebel,” this is precisely what he advocates. The indomitable spirit of man will resist forever the interfering, capricious hand of this cruel, malicious God:
Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee,
For looking in my own heart I can prove thee,
And know this frail, bruised being is above thee.
Our love, our hope, our thirsting for the right,
Our mercy and long seeking of the light,
Shall we change these for thy relentless might?
Laugh then and slay. Shatter all things of worth,
Heap torment still on torment for thy mirth--
Thou art not Lord while there are Men on earth.
Though foolhardy, man’s best shall not be traded for the malicious God’s might. He may kill man, but he will not conquer man’s will. Indeed, although it is false bravado, the speaker claims the malicious God will never truly be Lord as long as men live. The malicious deity of SB is like Moloch of Milton’s Paradise Lost—angry, bloodthirsty, vindictive.[16]
The Poetry of The Pilgrim’s Regress
Yet, by the time Lewis published The Pilgrim’s Regress (hereafter PR) in 1933, fourteen years after SB and two years after his conversion to Christ, his view of God had undergone profound changes. He no longer viewed God as malicious, arbitrary, and cruel, and many passages in Surprised by Joy chronicle this change. The culmination of Lewis’ evolving view of God is revealed where he writes of his conversion from atheism to theism, perhaps the most quoted portion of SJ:
You must picture me alone in that
room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for
a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so
earnestly desired not to meet. That
which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and
admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and
reluctant convert in all
Not surprisingly, his religious verse reflects these views. PR contains sixteen poems that focus primarily upon the spiritual life; as a group they rank among the best of Lewis’ poems, perhaps in part because they so intimately and immediately reflect aspects of Lewis’ new life in Christ.[18]
The first poem, “He Whom I Bow To” (144-45),[19] sonnet-like although written in rhyming alexandrines, does not appear until three-quarters of way through PR. This late appearance suggests that as John, the hero of PR, awakens to the beauty of poetry, he correspondingly awakens to the truth of his broken spiritual condition and need for God’s grace.[20] The speaker confesses that language used to address God is so inadequate “prayers always, taken at their word, blaspheme” and “all men are idolaters, crying unheard / To senseless idols, if thou take them at their word.” Accordingly, anticipating the later “Legion,” the poem ends with the prayer “take not, oh Lord, our literal sense, but in thy great, / Unbroken speech our halting metaphor translate.”
Among the most powerful poems in PR is “You Rest Upon Me All My Days” (147-48),[21] reflecting a tone similar to poems in SB which confront the cruel, malicious God; the difference here is that God, while demanding and jealous, loves rather than hates the speaker. The speaker grapples with a fierce omnipotence, much as a dog strains at the leash of an unyielding master. 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 traveler in smothering tents and “hammers the rocks with light.” He is an unyielding, unrelenting, uncompromising force. In desperation the speaker longs for “one cool breath in seven / One air from northern climes / The changing and the castleclouded heaven / Of my old Pagan times.” It is difficult not to slip into the “personal heresy” and to read these lines as recalling Lewis’ affection for Norse myth and literature in terms of both its religious and metaphorical influences on his youth and young adulthood. Regardless, 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.” Here a God is pictured as possessive, jealous, and demanding, and the speaker pictures himself as a bird trapped in a cage, straining earnestly though vainly to wing his way out.
The poem leaves two distinct impressions. The first is of a “convert” who yearns for his preconversion days where, rightly or wrongly, he believes life held more freedom, more satisfaction. Indeed, the tone is similar to George Herbert's “The Collar” where the speaker advises himself to “leave thy cold dispute / Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, / Thy ropes of sands, / Which petty thoughts have made.” As in Herbert’s poem, Lewis’ speaker is frustrated (“beating my wings”) yet thwarted (“I flutter, but not out”). The second is that God is an allencompassing, smothering, demanding deity, uncompromising in His jealous possession of a follower. Such a God seizes “all in [His] rage / Of Oneness.” These impressions combine to highlight the speaker in “You Rest Upon Me All My Days” as one who regards with nostalgia his pre-conversion lifestyle, yet he also has grudging appreciation for this jealous God. He senses it is now Yahweh, not Moloch that he serves.
Since “You Rest Upon Me All My Days” largely resolves the question of God’s real character, Lewis’ religious verse in PR turns to consider what it means to live as a Christian. For example, “My Heart Is Empty” (162),[22] with its alternating alexandrines and trimeters examines the contradiction between living the expected “abundant life” and the cold reality of spiritual torpor. It is a candid admission the speaker’s spiritual life is a dry, arid wasteland: “All the fountains that should run / With longing, are in me / Dried up. In all my countryside there is not one / That drips to find the sea.” What is worse, he has no desire to experience God’s love, except as it serves to lessen his own pain. Yet the speaker avoids despair by calling out to the one “who didst take / All care for Lazarus in the careless tomb.” The vigor of his faith in Christ is seen in his belief that if God will intervene in his own Lazarus-like life, he may survive for later rebirth, much as a seed “which grows / Through winter ripe for birth.” Just as the dormant seed avoids the chilling winter wind, so he will endure this winter of his life: “Because, while it forgets, the heaven remembering throws / Sweet influence still on earth, / —Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes / Still turning round the earth.” The pleading tone of Lewis’ poem is similar to many of Herbert’s. For instance, “Dullness” from The Temple begins “Why do I languish thus, drooping and dull, / As if I were all earth? / O give me quickness, that I may with mirth / Praise the brim-full!”[23]
The next three poems in PR anticipate material Lewis returns to The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. The rhyming alexandrines of “Thou Only Art Alternative to God” (177)[24] baldly posit we either serve God or Satan; there is no other choice: “God is: thou art: / The rest illusion.” The speaker notes he can either serve the pure “white light without flame” of God or the “infernal starving in the strength of fire” of Satan. It ends with the speaker noting fearfully: “Lord, open not too often my weak eyes to this!” The poem’s portrayal of a malicious Satan borrows heavily from “Satan Speaks (I)” and “Satan Speaks (XIII)” of Spirits in Bondage. In addition, this poem contains the kernal of Screwtape’s counsel to Wormword about keeping his patient from engaging in dialectic thinking, encouraging him instead to promote muddle-headedness and hazy logic. The focus upon Hell continues in Lewis’ triolet “God in His Mercy” (180),[25] a terse, pithy, epigrammatic observation about why God created Hell. Framed around the refrain “God in his mercy made / The fixed pains of Hell,” the poem says God actually limits misery by creating Hell as a fixed area for the suffering of those within. That is, God’s creation of Hell is not cruel, but merciful since God limits the place and thus the extent of suffering for those who reject him. He could have just as easily permitted Hell to be boundless, limitless, and formless. By carving out a limited sphere for those who choose Hell, God is being kind, echoing the line from SJ, “the hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man.” In The Great Divorce George Macdonald puts it differently: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done. All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”[26]
In the third poem
about Hell, “Nearly They Stood Who Fall” (181-82),[27]
Lewis, reflecting the pervasive influence of
Oh had his powerful Destiny ordain’d
Me some inferior Angel, I had stood
Then happy; no unbounded hope had rais’d
Ambition. Yet why not? some other Power
As great might have aspir’d, and me though mean
Drawn to his part; but other Powers as great
Fell not, but stand unshak’n, from within
Or from without, to all tempations arm’d.
Hadst thou the same free Will and Power to stand?
Thou hadst.[28]
Playing off Satan’s realization that he could have chosen not to fall, Lewis affirms in “Nearly They Stood Who Fall” that human choices and their consequences are critically important; they are deadly serious and connect us to a spiritual reality that exists whether we recognize it or not. The three poems on hell in PR are sober reflections on the nature of man’s spiritual adversary, the extent of God’s mercy, and the spiritual significance of human responsibility.
The next two poems concern spiritual pride, what Lewis calls the “great” sin in Mere Christianity, and already noted as something he struggled with throughout his life.[29] The first poem, “I Have Scraped Clean the Plateau” (183),[30] centers its alexandrines on the ugliness of self-righteous pride. The female persona, echoing the autonomy of Dymer, rejects both the earth—it is filthy, unchaste, a “sluttish helot”—and man—“filthy flesh,” embracing instead a hard, flinty asceticism: “I have made my soul (once filthy) a hard, pure, bright / Mirror of steel . . . / I have a mineral soul.” Her rejection and isolation are attempts to live only for self, unsullied by aspects of human life that might shake her belief in her own superiority: “So I, borrowing nothing and repaying / Nothing, neither growing nor decaying, / Myself am to myself, a mortal God, a self-contained / Unwindowed monad, unindebted and unstained.” These lines anticipate Orual’s self-righteousness and self-sufficiency through Part I of Till We Have Faces and the initial self-absorbed pride of Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength.
“Because of Endless Pride” (184-85),[31] treats spiritual pride from an opposite perspective as the persona recognizes that in every hour of his life he looks “upon my secret mirror / Trying all postures there / To make my image fair.” [32] Instead of delighting in the luscious, rich grapes God gives him for nourishment, he admires the “white hand” holding them. Though he catches himself admiring himself in the mirror of his soul, he is sensitive enough to know “who made the glass, whose light makes dark, whose fair / Makes foul, my shadowy form reflected there / That Self-Love, brought to bed of Love may die and bear / Her sweet son in despair.” The answer to spiritual pride, therefore, is humility, and recognizing it is God, not self, who rules human life and the natural world. Lewis may have been influenced in part by Herbert’s “The Bunch of Grapes” that ends:
But can he want the grape, who hath the wine?
I have their fruit and more.
Blessed be God, who prosper’d Noah’s vine,
And made it bring forth grapes good store.
But much more him I must adore,
Who of the laws sowre juice sweet wine did make,
Ev’n God himself, being pressed for my sake.[33]
Moving from poems focusing upon spiritual pride, “Iron Will Eat the World’s Old Beauty Up” (187)[34] is a direct commentary on the modern world as Lewis sees it, employing themes from SB and echoing his distrust of human progress when it occurs at the expense of beauty and truth. He imagines the industrial revolution, particularly the new machines of his own day, involved in the destruction of nature; as the new cities and buildings emerge (the “iron forests”), they will block out nature so there will be “no green or growth.” In addition, the growing popularity of sensational journalism—“the printing presses with their clapping wings”—shall drown out the wisdom of the past: “Harpy wings, / Filling your minds all day with foolish things, / Will tame the eagle Thought: till she sings / Parrot-like in her cage to please dark kings.”[35] The poem also reflects Lewis’ disgust with chronological snobbery by parodying it in the last stanza: “The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, / And fools crying, Because it has begun / It will continue as it has begun!” Indeed the inevitably of human progress is undercut throughout the poem since each stanza ends with a parenthetical portion noting God’s continued presence and rule in the world, regardless of human pride and arrogance. The last parenthesis is an apt way to finish the poem: “(Though they [man] lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, / Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?).”
Lewis follows this up with two poems emphasizing the relationship between the spiritual life and sexual temptation.[36] In both he is frank without being prurient. The three sonnet-like quatrains of “Quick!” (189),[37] recalling portions of Dymer, almost certainly deals with auto-eroticism, particularly as the speaker emphasizes his struggles when “old festering fire begins to play / Once more within” and he wrenches his “hands the other way.” To his credit, the speaker, in the manner of John Donne in his “Holy Sonnet: Batter My Heart” appeals to God to overpower his perverse desire and to replace it with a heavenly one: “Quick, Lord! Before new scorpions bring / New venom—ere fiends blow the fire / A second time—quick, show me that sweet thing / Which, ’spite of all, more deeply I desire.”[38] Donne puts it this way: “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you / As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; / That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend / Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.[39] The heat of unbridled lust is continued in “When Lilith Means to Draw Me” (190-91),[40] a poem that suggests there is something ultimately unfulfilling, even emptying, when one reaches the end of repeated sexual gratification. The persona freely confesses Lilith, symbolizing sexual temptation, “does not overawe me / With beauty’s pomp and power.” As a matter of fact, he sees the cup (sexual gratification) she offers as unable to satisfy: “Her cup, whereof who taste, / (She promises no better) thirst far more.” In spite of this, he ponders why he returns again and again to her cup. His realization is that her offerings, while insipid and sterile, appear more satisfying than the dry, arid reality in which he moves and lives: “The witch’s wine, / Though promising nothing, seems / In that land of no streams, / To promise best—the unrelished anodyne.” These two poems, as well as the sexually explicit portions of Dymer, reveal that like most human beings Lewis knew the subtle yet powerful pull of sexual temptation.
“Once the Worm-laid Egg Broke in the Wood” (192-93)[41] is an almost humorous poem in blank verse given from the point of view of an old, lonely dragon; full of self-pity over his isolation, he cannot bring himself to give up his golden hoard in exchange for fellowship with others. Actually, he has even eaten his mate since “worm grows not to dragon till he eat worm.” In particular he fears men who plot “in the towns to steal my gold,” whispering of him, “laying plans, / Merciless men.” He prays that God will give him peace, yet it is a hollow request since he wants such peace on his terms: “But ask not that I should give up the gold, / Nor move, nor die; others would get the gold. / Kill, rather, Lord, the men and the other dragons / That I may sleep, go when I will to drink.” “Soul’s ease,” serving God on our terms, praying, like King Claudius in Hamlet without truly repenting for the murder of his brother—“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (III.iii.69-70)—these sophisticated spiritual dodges are specious, revealing the bankruptcy of our souls.[42] In addition, the poem implies many human beings are like the dragon—preferring material things over vital engagement with others.
The second dragon poem focuses upon a dragon-slayer rather than a dragon. In “I Have Come Back with Victory Got” (195-96),[43] the tercets reveal a warrior returning from killing a dragon. The warrior is filled with joy for having defeated his greatest foe and prepared to fight even greater battles. After describing the details of his victory, he claims that when he bit into the heart of his vanquished enemy, “I felt a pulse within me start / As though my breast would break apart.” Flushed with victory, he feels invincible: “Behemoth is my serving man! / Before the conquered hosts of Pan / Riding tamed Leviathan.”[44] Still in celebration, he sings: “RESVRGAM and IO PAEAN, / IO, IO, IO, PAEAN!!”[45] He realizes his conquest of the dragon has been a rite of passage, signifying his bravery, courage, and honor: “Now I know the stake I played for, / Now I know what a worm’s made for!” Avoiding pride, the warrior essentially delights in experiencing through his victory the full exercise of gifts God has given him. Although there is always the temptation to reserve for ourselves some of the glory that should rightly go to God, the warrior here manages to delight in a job well done without subsuming to the pull of vainglory.
The last three poems of PR concern God’s authority, man’s dignity, and angel’s wonder. In “I Am not One that Easily Flits Past in Thought” (197),[46] the speaker considers the authority of God, especially over death and time. The rhyming alexandrines express the paradox that God both makes and unmakes: “Therefore among the riddles that no man has read / I put thy paradox, Who liveth and was dead. / As Thou hast made substantially, thou wilt unmake / In earnest and for everlasting.” While we might wish to recall those who have died, such musings are really futile:
Whom Thy great Exit banishes, no after age
Of epilogue leads back upon the lighted stage.
Where is Prince Hamlet when the curtain’s down?
Where fled
Dreams at the dawn, or colours when the light is sped?
We are thy colours, fugitive, never restored,
Never repeated again. Thou only art the Lord,
Thou only art holy.
In this, the most theocentric poem
in the PR, Lewis affirms God’s
sovereign rule over time as well and ends by recalling lines from Psalm
139: “Thou art Lord of the unbreathable
transmortal air / Where mortal thinking fails:
night’s nuptial darkness, where / All lost embraces intermingle and are
bless’d, / And all die, but all are, while Thou continuest.”[47] This paradoxical ending, that although all
die they nonetheless “live” under the eternal authority of God, also echoes
lines from the Te Deum: “When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of
death, / Thou didst open the
“Passing To-day by a Cottage, I Shed Tears” (198),[48] shifts the focus to how God lends us the dignity of being created in His image, replete with both the positive and negative this encompasses. For instance, as humans we can know the pain of loss: “Passing to-day by a cottage, I shed tears / When I remembered how once I had dwelled there / With my mortal friends who are dead.” Nor does time heal such losses: “I, fool, believed / I had outgrown the local, unique sting, / I had transmuted away (I was deceived) / Into love universal the lov’d thing.” That is, God created us, unlike angels, with “the tether and pang of the particular”; because we are created in His image, we can know experientially the heights of pleasure but also the depths of pain. This profound dignity means that while we share His nature, we also enter into His knowledge, one involving responsibility and consequence. Accordingly, though we are small compared to Him, we “quiver with fire’s same / Substantial form as Thou—nor reflect merely, / As lunar angel, back to thee, cold flame. / Gods we are, Thou hast said: and we pay dearly.” Entering into the divine image means entering into divine suffering, but such price is worth the anguish it necessarily involves. The last poem in PR, “I Know Not, I” (198-99),[49] plays off the previous poem as it presents an angel pondering over what it must be like to be a man: “I know not, I, / What the men together say, / How lovers, lovers die / And youth pass away.” He has no understanding of romantic love, aging, love of country, and especially human grief: “Why at grave [do] they grieve / For one voice and face, / And not, and not receive / Another in its place.” Yet, while the angel has in the past appeared satisfied with his even, emotionally balanced existence, the poem’s conclusion belies this: “Sorrow it is they call / This cup: whence my lip, / Woe’s me, never in all / My endless days must sip.” Paradoxically, the angel’s sorrow is his regret that he cannot experience the pang of the particular reserved only for human beings.[50]
The sixteen poems in PR are Lewis’ most moving, unified, and deliberate attempt at sustained religious verse. Although the poems appear within the text of this prose allegory, and thus rightly must be read as commentary on the story of John, the poems also exist outside the text,[51] offering us insight into Lewis’ own spiritual and poetic maturation.[52] In them we see him striving to come to grips with what his new faith in Christ means to his intellectual, sexual, and spiritual life. Lewis never again clusters this many poems around such a unified theme, and so the poems of PR testify to the artistic and spiritual progress of his poetic pilgrimage.
Poems on Prayer
As
Lewis matured in Christ, he continued to write religious verse from pieces on
the incarnation and the resurrection to ones on the seven deadly sins and the
life of the soul. A favorite topic was
prayer. He discussed it in disparate
prose works such as The Screwtape Letters
and Letters to Malcolm, while
petitionary prayer was the subject of the essay “The Efficacy of Prayer” where
he pondered over the following questions:
If God is sovereign and omniscient, of what value is prayer? That is, if He knows already what is going to
happen, why bother to ask Him to change His mind? Can our petitions to God really change His will?[53] In the poems on prayer, Lewis does not offer
a systematic theology of prayer, but rather snapshots of his thinking about
prayer. For instance, in “Sonnet” Lewis
connects the defeat of the cruel Assyrian conqueror, Sennacherib, recorded in 2
Kings 19 and by the historian Herodotus to the relationship between prayer and
divine action.[54] The Biblical account suggests angels intervene
to save
More often than not, however, Lewis’ poems dealing with prayer do not focus upon the nature of prayer; instead, they are prayers. Sometimes they are powerful pleas for God’s intercession. The Italian sonnet “Legion” is such a poem. Akin to “Quick” from PR and Donne’s “Batter My Heart,” “Legion” implores God to see the real character of the speaker. The real man is the one who desperately turns to Him at the very moment of the poem’s composition: “Lord, hear my voice; this present voice, I mean, / Not that which may be speaking an hour hence / When pride or pity of self or craving sense / Blunt the mind’s edge, now momentarily clear.”[55] He implores God not to consider the myriad of other selves within him that in only a few minutes will feign to be the real him. While he knows God will not override his free will, he beseeches Him to see his real will in this moment; if not, his warring selves may cancel God’s work in him: “Hold me to this. Oh strain / A point; use legal fictions. For, if all / My quarreling selves must bear an equal voice, / Farewell—thou hast created me in vain.” The desperate tone suggests the state of the soul familiar to many Christians who struggle with the internal war between the flesh and the spirit. Like Lewis, many have despaired of self and longed for Christ to over-rule their wills. This is a poignant prayer for God’s grace.
Rather than being an intercession for grace, “They Tell Me, Lord” is a poem where a speaker comes to a surprising conclusion about the dialog of prayer.[56] He notes some think prayer a futile exercise, “since but one voice is heard, it’s all dream, / One talker aping two.” He admits there is but one voice, but with this twist: the voice is not his, but God’s: “Seeing me empty, you forsake / The listener’s role and through / My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake / The thoughts I never knew.” Since, therefore, it is God speaking to him through prayer, God has no need to reply to Himself: “While we seem / Two talkers, thou are One forever, and I / No dreamer, but thy dream.” Lewis’ deeply penetrating spiritual insight about prayer—that when we are empty, then God can speak through and to us—rivals similar ones in The Problem of Pain and Mere Christianity.
Other poems are prayerful meditations. For instance, Lewis’ “No Beauty We Could Desire” is about how one who seeks joy eventually finds it in Christ.[57] The poem begins almost with a sigh as the speaker admits “yes, you are everywhere,” but then goes on to say he can never “bring the noble Hart to bay.” When he tried to track what he longed for, he was thwarted by confusing scents: “Nowhere sometimes, then again everywhere. / Other scents, too, seemed to them almost the same.” As a result, he stopped the search for joy through things (including poetry), and made himself available instead to be found by the source of the joy: “Not in Nature, not even in Man, but in one / Particular Man, with a date, so tall, weighing / So much, talking Aramaic, having learned a trade.” This realization was the fulcrum leveraging his understanding that in Christ there is a beauty beyond any earthly one: “Not in all food, not in all bread and wine / (Not, I mean, as my littleness requires) / But this wine, this bread . . . no beauty we could desire.” In the person of Christ there was no greater beauty for him to desire, and the Eucharist became a visible symbol of this beauty. The joy he found in Christ surpassed all earthly joys, and this poem becomes the measure of Lewis’ personal devotion to His Lord.
Another prayerful
meditation is “Arise my Body,” a sonnet written in rhyming alexandrines about
experiencing God’s forgiveness: “Arise
my body, my small body, we have striven / Enough, and He is merciful: we are forgiven.”[58] In addition, it recalls how, when one is
spent through weary struggles with God and life, the best course is to rest,
patiently enduring all that is sent one’s way.
Lewis’ uses several effective metaphors to suggest such spent
struggles: “A meadow whipt flat under
heavy rain, a cup / Emptied and clean, a garment washed and folded up, / Faded
in colour, thinned almost to raggedness / By dirt and by the washing of that
dirtiness.” Although such passivity is
not especially pleasant, it is superior to the certain coming of pain involved
in everyday living: “Lie cold; consent /
To weariness and pardon’s watery element. / Drink all
the bitter water and the chilly death; / Soon enough
comes the riot of warm blood and breath.”
In this meditation Lewis may be faintly echoing
God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Still another prayerful meditation is “Epitaph,” a poem that finds the dead person it commemorates both a microcosm of the universe and a promise of future life in Lenten lands.[59] Its opening lines effectively suggest the vastness of the universe summed up in this person’s life: “Here lies the whole world after one / Peculiar mode; a buried sun, / Stars and immensities of sky / And cities here discarded lie.”[60] “Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman” is a later powerful re-working of this epitaph.” Lewis concentrates his imagery more intensely in the opening lines of the revision: “Here the whole world (stars, water, air, / And field, and forest, as they were / Reflected in a single mind).” In addition, the revision contains Christian motifs, culminating in the promise of resurrection: “Like cast off clothes was left behind / In ashes yet with hope that she, / Re-born from holy poverty, / In lenten lands, hereafter may / Resume them on her Easter Day.”
In addition to prayers of intercession and meditation, several of Lewis’ religious poems are confessions. For example, “Evensong” is a confession one might make before falling asleep.[61] The speaker commits his body and mind to God as “Nature for a season / Conquers our defences.” Furthermore, he offers his soul to God, “trusting Thou wilt tend her / Through the deathlike hours, / And all night remake her / To Thy likeness sweetly.” The ending is more ominous as he considers death, “slumber’s less uncertain Brother,” but he transfers the confidence he has in God’s watching over his sleep to a similar confidence in his jurisdiction over death: “And, as Thou hast risen, / Raise us in Thy dawn.” A confessional prayer with a tone similar to “Legion” is “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,” written in heroic couplets.[62] The speaker, famous for his brilliant defenses of the faith, his “cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf / At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh,” pauses and asks to be delivered from his own high opinion of himself: “Let me not trust, instead / Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.” As he approaches sleep, he prays to be delivered from all thoughts, even his thoughts of God, and especially from his thoughts of self: “Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye, / Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.” This frank admission of the danger of spiritual pride in the life of one who defends God is consistent with Lewis’ other writings on spiritual pride. He know well that regardless his best intentions, an outwardly successful apologist can seek self-glory rather than God’s. This prayer is a sober reminder against self-promotion.
The Italian sonnet, “Prayer for My Brother,” is still another confessional prayer and dates from WWII.[63] It is an apology to God for praying as if his prayer could ever overrule God’s intended good for his brother: “How can I ask thee, Father, to defend / In peril of war my dearest friend to-day, / As though I knew, better than Thou, the way, / Or with more love than thine desired the end?” Yet, Lewis reasons, God has given man prayer to lend him the dignity of agreeing with Him: “But prayer / Thou givest to man, not man to thee: thy laws / Suffering our mortal wish that way to share / The eternal will; at taste of whose air / Man’s word becomes, by miracle, a cause.” Whether intercession, meditation, or confession, Lewis’ poems on prayer are among his best and indicate the central role of prayer his life.
Other Religious Poems
Lewis
rarely wrote poems directly connected to a biblical narrative, perhaps in part
because he saw little need to plow well-tilled ground. However in the instances where he plays off
biblical narratives, the results are engaging.
For example, “The Sailing of the
“Stephen to Lazarus” melds two biblical narratives as the poem imagines St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr as described in Acts 6: 8-7:60, reflecting upon the resurrection of Lazarus found in John 11.[67] In an interesting twist, Stephen wonders if Lazarus was not in fact the first martyr; he reasons this way by noting that while Stephen “gave up no more than life,” Lazarus gave up death and its peace. That is, while Stephen left this life and its vale of tears for the peace of death in Christ, Lazarus had to give up the peace of death and “put out a second time to sea / Well knowing that [his] death (in vain / Died once) must be all died again?” Stephen implies, therefore, that Lazarus’ resurrection to the pain of life is a more noble martyrdom than his to the peace of death.
While poems linked to a biblical narrative are rare, those connected to biblical themes appear frequently. For example, in addition to “Sonnet” mentioned above where angels and mice work together to accomplish the defeat of Sennacherib, several poems focus upon angels. In “On Being Human” Lewis notes that while angels have some real advantages over mankind, they are also limited.[68] Although the poem admits angels have direct knowledge of spiritual and philosophical truth denied to mankind, it subtly underscores that they lack the five senses God shares with mankind. Lewis uses humor to show that while angels understand the Platonic eternal forms of earthly realities, they lack rich, sensuous understanding of earthly experience:
The lavish pinks, the new-mown field, the ravishing
Sea-smell, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest;
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
Which from each scent in widening circle goes,
The pleasure and the pang—can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.
Lewis’ point, therefore, is that in some ways it is better to be human than angelic. The playfulness of poem is characteristic of many others, and its theme is an insightful gloss to the angelic eldila of the Ransom space trilogy. There Lewis describes them as “white and semi-transparent—rather like ice” with “inorganic” voices speaking syllables sounding “more as if they were played on an instrument than as if they were spoken . . . as if rock or crystal or light had spoken.”[69]
Two
religious poems deal with the biblical theme of Christ’s nativity. “The Turn of the Tide” is finely crafted; for
instance, Lewis uses internal rhyme in each odd line and final rhyme in each
even line. In the poem Lewis focuses
upon the very moment of Christ’s birth and how this marks a universal turn of
the tide: from the certitude of death
for all to the promise of new life for all.[70] Profoundly influenced by Milton’s “On the
Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” Lewis, in a slow and deliberate fashion,
chronicles how the spiritual impact of Christ’s birth quietly yet inexorably
sweeps over the world invigorating and bringing to life a dead, silent planet.[71] For instance, at the moment just before
Christ’s birth, Lewis pictures a world on the verge of its dying moment: “Breathless was the air over Bethlehem; black
and bare / The fields; hard as granite were the clods; Hedges stiff with ice;
the sedge, in the vice / Of the ponds, like little iron rods. / The deathly stillness spread from
“Is this perhaps the last
Of our story and the glories of our crown?—
The entropy worked out?—the central redoubt
Abandoned?—The world-spring running down?”
Then they could speak no more. Weakness overbore
Even them; they were as flies in a web,
In lethargy stone-dumb. The death had almost come,
And the tide lay motionless at ebb.
Yet at this critical juncture in the history of the universe, Lewis likens Christ’s birth to a stabbing “shock / Of returning life, the start, the burning pang at heart, / Setting galaxies to tingle and rock.” This event promises “rumor and noise of resuming joys / Along the nerves of the universe.”
Symbolic of this
renewal is “a music infinitely small,” yet clear,
loud, and deep: “Such a note as neither
Throne nor Potentate had known / Since the Word created the abyss.” At this universal sound “Heaven danced” and
“revel, mirth and shout / Descended to” earth and the frozen universe began to
thaw: “Saturn laughed and lost his
latter age’s frost / And his beard, Niagara-like, unfroze.” The reviving universe reaches its fever pitch
of re-birth in the re-igniting of the
A shiver of re-birth and deliverance round the Earth
Went gliding; her bonds were released;
Into broken light the breeze once more awoke the seas,
In the forest it wakened every beast;
Capripods fell to dance from
Taproban to
Leprechauns from Down to
In his green Asian dell the
Burst forth and was the
In spite of the universal
significance and magnitude of this paradoxical rebirth—the condemned cosmos
revived by God’s incarnation—Lewis manages to treat it with great tenderness
and poignancy: “So Death lay in
arrest. But at
“The Nativity” continues Lewis’ interest in God’s physical incarnation, but here he focuses instead upon the animals present at the nativity and links them to human parallels.[73] Specifically, Lewis personifies three animals and attributes we associate with them to the state of the speaker’s spiritual condition. First, he says he is slow like an ox, but he sees “glory in the stable grow” so that “with the ox’s dullness” he eventually gains “an ox’s strength.” Second, he says he is stubborn as an ass, but he sees “my Saviour where I looked for hay” so that through his ass-like folly he learns “the patience of a beast.” Finally, he is like a straying sheep watching “the manger where my Lord is laid” so that his “baa-ing nature” (repentance) will someday win “some woolly innocence!” The spiritual condition of the speaker—from being as slow and dull as an ox to as stubborn and hard as an ass to as broken and contrite as an erring sheep—is nicely encapsulated in this brief reflection.
Still other religious poems concern God’s glory as does the Italian sonnet “Noon’s Intensity.”[74] Utilizing the light of the sun as a metaphor for God’s glory, the octet identifies God’s “alchemic beams [that] turn all to gold.” The speaker then describes how sunlight, and by extension God’s glory, is spreads over all the earth: “From the night / You will not yet withdraw her silver light, / And often with Saturnian tints the cold / Atlantic swells at morning shall enfold / The Cornish cliffs burnished with copper bright.” The poem goes on to suggest our sight may one day be “trained by slow degrees” until “we have such sight / As dares the pure projection to behold.” Biblical allusions come into focus in the sestet. For instance the lines “When Sol comes ascendant, it may be / More perfectly in him our eyes shall see / All baser virtues” recall Moses’ encounter with God in Exodus 33: 18-19a: “Then Moses said, ‘I pray Thee, show me Thy glory!’ And He said, ‘I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you” (NAS).[75] The speaker delights in the fact that now he can “hear you [God] talking / And yet not die.” He adds that until he is given the opportunity “the pure projection to behold,” God has “left free, / Unscorched by your own noon’s intensity / One cool and evening hour for garden walking.” The final line alludes to a pre-lapsarian state and the immediate fellowship the speaker has with God when they would walk together in “the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). This ending also echoes the descent of Perelandra-Venus, a reflection of God’s glory and love, at the conclusion of That Hideous Strength:
And now it came. It was fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light: it was Charity, not as mortals imagine it, not even as it has been humanised for them since the Incarnation of the Word, but the translunary virtue, fallen upon them direct from the Third Heaven, unmitigated. They were blinded, scorched, deafened. They thought it would burn their bones. They could not bear that it should continue. The could not bear that it should cease. So Perelandra, triumphant among planets, whom men call Venus, came and was with them in the room.[76]
“Noon’s Intensity” similarly celebrates God’s glory and his condescending love for man.
A related poem is “The Phoenix” where Christ’s glory is considered.[77] To do this Lewis employs the Egyptian myth of the fabulous bird that is reborn every five hundred years as a metaphor for Christ’s glory. After consuming itself in fire, the phoenix rises renewed from the ashes to begin another long life. For this reason it is often seen as an emblem of immortality. In the poem the bird flies into the speaker’s garden, its brilliant flame lighting up the entire landscape. With great delight he shouts out and praises its glory, which is overheard by a passing “dark girl.” Together they approach the “Wonder,” but, ironically, when they reach the bird, he sees her eyes focused on him, “not on the Bird.” The speaker then warns her against looking for in him what she should find in the Bird: “Make not of your spoon your meat, for silver / . . . contains no nourishment.” The speaker warns the dark girl against hoping to find in him purpose and meaning (via romantic love) instead of finding them in the glory of Bird: “I will be all things, any thing, to you, save only that. / Break not our hearts by telling me you never saw / The Phoenix, that my trumpery silhouette, thrusting between, / Made an eclipse.” In effect