Looking at C. S. Lewis' poems on C. S. Lewis Reading Day

For C. S. Lewis Reading Day, 29 November

One of the most extraordinary things about C. S. Lewis was how he was able to write excellent, enduring work in so many fields.

Of course, to this day, his name is probably first associated with the Narnia books. Then there are his numerous works of Christian non-fiction (Mere Christianity, Miracles, etc.), which are hugely popular with American Christians of all denominations, whilst mostly ignored by British people.

Then there is his imaginative literature (the beautiful, under-appreciated novel Till We Have Faces; the justly celebrated The Screwtape Letters), including science fiction (The Space Trilogy); and then—what for me remains his most impressive work—his several academic books on medieval and Renaissance literature and intellectual history.

(Most scholarly books go ‘out of date’ very quickly, but The Allegory of Love, though nearly a century old, is still one of the best books to read on the topic. Similarly, whilst much new work has been done since The Discarded Image, it remains perhaps the best introduction to that complex period and its way of thinking that a new student can read, in my view.)

His poetry, however, has not enjoyed nearly as much of an outing. I can see, at least partially, why, but it is certainly not anything to do with its quality. Since it is 29 November, Lewis’ birthday and, as agreed by Lewis fans, “C. S. Lewis Reading Day”, I offer this brief article pointing readers to a few C. S. Lewis poems which I particularly love. But first a note on his earliest work.

Spirits in Bondage (1919)

Apart from such long narrative poems as Dymer, which I won’t cover here, Lewis only released two poetry books—at least as far as I can tell—that bear his stamp of approval. In 1919 he released the dark and chilling collection Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics. It will be a shock for anyone used to Lewis’ more typical sunnier side.

Lewis was a staunch—if slightly unreasonably angry—atheist until around 1929–31 (there is some disagreement over the year) when, after years of reflection and not a few conversations with brilliant friends, including J. R. R. Tolkien, he accepted first the ‘Idea’ of a God, and then that Jesus Christ was his Son.

Spirits in Bondage represents where Lewis was for many years before that grand event, but the collection also partly belongs to the poetry of the Great War, and ought to be studied with Wilfred Owen and the rest. However, its overriding tension is that between Lewis’ boyhood and lifelong love of myth, and his belief, at this point, that, beyond these phantoms, life was a cruel and pitiless thing. Spirits in Bondage perfecly represents that attitude which Lewis described in Surprised by Joy:

Such, then, was the state of my imaginative life; over and against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism’. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

I could go on quoting that extraordinary passage—and do read Surprised by Joy if you haven’t; it is one of the best books of any time—but I am sure that the idea is clear.

It is an angry and dark book, but the poet, though he uses the word ‘hate’ in relation to God and gods more than once, does seem to be obsessed with, almost hounded by the idea of the divine.

There is not a ‘bad’ poem in Spirits in Bondage. The craft is there. But it is unhappy reading and not representative of the Lewis who deserves fame and recognition.

Poems (1964)

Lewis passed away a week before his sixty-fifth birthday on 22 November 1963—oddly, the same day as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which occupied the headlines rather more than Lewis’ passing. In 1964, Walter Hooper, Lewis’ secretary, concluded the editing of and released Poems. At 150 pages, it is quite slim for a life’s work in poetry. How curious that when he was young, Lewis wanted to be a poet, and, in the end, it was the one genre out of those he put his hand to where his achievements were most modest.

He was a traditionalist. Even the collection of 1919, though highly ‘modern’ in its philosophy, is metrically and formally conservative. This makes sense. Readers will recall that in the 1910s and 1920s there were two main competing strains in the world of English poetry: the breaking down to ‘make it new’ of Ezra Pound et al, and a tradition that belonged more with English folk song and elegy, often pessimistic in outlook, as typified by, for example, A. E. Housman’s enormously popular A Shropshire Lad (1896) and the poems of Thomas Hardy. Lewis definitely belongs more in the latter camp in 1919, using archaisms such as ‘Lo!’, ‘Lest’, ‘I’ the’ (for ‘In the’), and even ‘evèning’, for metrical reasons. In 1964 he keeps the style but the pessimism is necessarily gone, and one ends up with a poetry that, although formally traditional, has the voice of Lewis and no one else.

But he is not an easy poet. The lyrics of 1919 are quite clear, but those from the 1964 volume require a couple of readings just to get a handle on what he is saying. This is partly because of Lewis’ complexity of thought; and it is partly because of his love of and expertise in complex Renaissance poetry (Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Shakespeare, etc.). He read this more perhaps than anything else; indeed it was to some extent his ‘day job’ to do so; and one sees that influence throughout the 1964 poems (as well as the early works).

Furthermore, whereas in other genres Lewis’ great skill is to simplify and make clear complex material—whether it be theology, Renaissance literature, philosophical questions, or what have you—his poems necessarily exhibit more complexity; and whereas Lewis was reluctant to show off his immense learning in other works, here we encounter poems about such great but not terribly widely-known poets as the Greek Pindar and even the Iranian Ferdowsi.

Some of Lewis’ poems are intellectual and theological. ‘On Being Human’ and ‘Angel’s Song’ consider what the ‘life’ of angels is like using high, almost scholastic terminology. But he is at his best when he adds his ‘human’ side to such things, like in ‘Scazons’:

Walking to-day by a cottage I shed tears

When I remembered how once I had walked there

With my friends who are mortal and dead. Years

Little had healed the wound that was laid bare.


Out, little spear that stabs! I, fool, believed

I had outgrown the local, unique sting,

I had transmuted wholly (I was deceived)

Into Love universal the lov’d thing.


But Thou, Lord, surely knewest thine own plan

When the angelic indifferencies with no bar

Universally loved, but Thou gav’st man

The tether and pang of the particular,


Which, like a chemic drop, infinitesimal,

Plashed into pure water, changing the whole,

Embodies and embitters and turns all

Spirit’s sweet water into astringent soul,


That we, though small, might quiver with fire’s same

Substantial form as Thou – not reflect merely

Like lunar angels back to Thee cold flame.

Gods are we, Thou hast said; and we pay dearly.

It’s a fine, human poem, tinged with intellectual refinement and theological reading, that resonates with anyone, I’d say, who has felt similar things.

Many poems are humbler. I love the curious mixture of humour, humility, and looming darkness in ‘As One Oldster to Another’:

Well, yes the bones ache. There were easier

Beds thirty years back. Sleep, then importunate,

Now with reserve doles out her favours;

Food disagrees; there are draughts in houses.


Headlong, the down night train rushes on with us,

Screams through the stations. . . how many more? Is it

Time soon to think of taking down one’s

Case from the rack? Are we nearly there now?


Yet neither loss of friends, nor an emptying

Future, not England tamed and the ruin of

Long-billed hopes thus far have taught my

Obstinate heart a sedate deportment.


Still beauty calls as once in the mazes of

Boyhood. The bird-like soul quivers. Into her

Flash darts of unfulfill’d desire and

Pierce with a bright, unabated anguish.


Armed thus with anguish, joy met us even in

Youth – who forgets? This side of the terminus,

Then, now, and always, thus, and only

Thus, were the doors of delight set open.

It is a difficult poem in places – a little obscure, here and there, in what is precisely being said, but the imagining of death as a train coming into its ‘terminus’ with the homely thought that it might be ‘Time soon to think of taking one’s | Case from the rack’ is delightful, albeit in a drear context, and points to the poem’s concluding note on how ‘the doors of delight’ are, and were, ‘set open’, ‘Then, now, and always, thus, and only | Thus’.

(One also hears in ‘Then, now, and always’ an echo of the Christian doxology Gloria Patri that Lewis must have prayed several times a day: ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be’ (Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper): for the mystical Lewis, even joy is, in some sense, God, or part of Him.)

There are other poems like this that I haven’t space to quote. There are also a few Biblical poems which are almost Midrashic in their imaginative elaborations on the Bible stories. Perhaps my favourite, ‘The Late Passenger’, imagines the mysterious figure of ‘the unicorn’ who is shut out of Noah’s Ark. Noah speaks to his hapless sons:

‘Look, look! It would not wait. It turns away. It takes its flight.

Fine work you’ve made of it, my sons, between you all to-night!


Even if I could outrun it now, it would not turn again

– Not now. Our great discourtesy has earned its high disdain.


[…]


Oh long shall be the furrows ploughed across the hearts of men

Before it comes to stable and to manger once again,


And dark and crooked all the ways in which our race shall walk,

And shrivelled all their manhood like a flower with a broken stalk,


And all the world, oh Ham, may curse the hour when you were born;

Because of you the Ark must sail without the Unicorn.

It’s a dark and mysterious poem, like Lewis’ ‘The Phoenix’, where the mystical animal is also a symbol for Christ, much as Aslan is in Narnia.

For the present writer, though, the most extraordinary poems, those to which I can go back frequently, are those which describe the complexities and subtleties of the spiritual life. (Indeed, I remember a monk talking about Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters and wondering how it was possible that Lewis had such insight into monastic life without having participated in it himself.) Those interested in that aspect of Lewis miss out on a lot if they do not visit his poetry.

There are many poems one could quote here; I hesitate to pick one, but I suppose that the simple ‘Evensong’, with its Compline atmosphere, is the best for this short and simple article:

Now that night is creeping

O’er our tràvail’d senses,

To Thy care unsleeping

We commit our sleep.

Nature for a season

Conquers our defences,

But th’ eternal Reason

Watch and Ward will keep.


All the soul we render

Back to Thee completely,

Trusting Thou wilt tend her

Through the deathlike hours,

And all night remake her

To Thy likeness sweetly,

Then with dawn awake her

And give back her powers.


Slumber’s less uncertain

Brother soon will bind us

– Darker falls the curtain,

Stifling-close ‘tis drawn:

But amidst that prison

Still Thy voice can find us,

And, as Thou hast risen,

Raise us in Thy dawn.

I haven’t much to add to this; in my view, it can stand with some of the best spiritual lyrics of George Herbert.

I hope this brief article has drummed up a little enthusiasm for Lewis’ neglected poetry. There is much more that is fascinating, beautiful, moving, and educational—in a range of genres and metres. For those interested, there are two chief editions.

1. The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper (London: Harper Collins, 1994) [contains 1964, 1919, and a miscellany; editing of mixed quality]

2. The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition, edited by Don W. King (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2015)

I haven’t had chance to look at number 2, but I am sure that Professor King, a devoted scholar of Lewis, did a fine job on it. Number 1 is an acceptable if imperfect edition. I have used it for this short article. It does have the advantage of being more easily accessible and more affordable than number 2.

C. R. A. Eager

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