Poems Read online

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  PART I: THE HIDDEN COUNTRY A CONFESSION

  IMPENITENCE

  A CLICHÉ CAME OUT OF ITS CAGE

  PAN’S PURGE

  NARNIAN SUITE

  THE MAGICIAN AND THE DRYAD

  THE TRUE NATURE OF GNOMES

  THE BIRTH OF LANGUAGE

  THE PLANETS

  PINDAR SANG

  HERMIONE IN THE HOUSE OF PAULINA

  YOUNG KING COLE

  THE PRODIGALITY OF FIRDAUSI

  LE ROI S’AMUSE

  VITREA CIRCE

  THE LANDING

  THE DAY WITH A WHITE MARK

  DONKEYS’ DELIGHT

  THE SMALL MAN ORDERS HIS WEDDING

  THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

  ON BEING HUMAN

  THE ECSTASY

  THE SABOTEUSE

  THE LAST OF THE WINE

  AS ONE OLDSTER TO ANOTHER

  BALLADE OF DEAD GENTLEMEN

  THE ADAM UNPARADISED

  THE ADAM AT NIGHT

  SOLOMON

  THE LATE PASSENGER

  THE TURN OF THE TIDE

  PART II: THE BACKWARD GLANCE EVOLUTIONARY HYMN

  PRELUDE TO SPACE: AN EPITHALAMIUM

  SCIENCE-FICTION CRADLESONG

  AN EXPOSTULATION: AGAINST TOO MANY WRITERS OF SCIENCE-FICTION

  ODORA CANUM VIS: A DEFENCE OF CERTAIN MODERN BIOGRAPHERS AND CRITICS

  ON A VULGAR ERROR

  THE FUTURE OF FORESTRY

  LINES DURING A GENERAL ELECTION

  THE CONDEMNED

  THE GENUINE ARTICLE

  ON THE ATOMIC BOMB: METRICAL EXPERIMENT

  TO THE AUTHOR OF FLOWERING RIFLE

  TO ROY CAMPBELL

  CORONATION MARCH

  ‘MAN IS A LUMPE WHERE ALL BEASTS KNEADED BE’

  ON A PICTURE BY CHIRICO

  ON A THEME FROM NICOLAS OF CUSA

  WHAT THE BIRD SAID EARLY IN THE YEAR

  THE SALAMANDER

  INFATUATION

  VOWELS AND SIRENS

  THE PRUDENT JAILER

  AUBADE

  PATTERN

  AFTER ARISTOTLE

  REASON

  TO ANDREW MARVELL

  LINES WRITTEN IN A COPY OF MILTON’S WORKS

  SCHOLAR’S MELANCHOLY

  PART III: A LARGER WORLD WORMWOOD

  VIRTUE’S INDEPENDENCE

  POSTURING

  DECEPTION

  DEADLY SINS

  THE DRAGON SPEAKS

  DRAGON-SLAYER

  LILITH

  A PAGEANT PLAYED IN VAIN

  WHEN THE CURTAIN’S DOWN

  DIVINE JUSTICE

  EDEN’S COURTESY

  THE METEORITE

  TWO KINDS OF MEMORY

  RE-ADJUSTMENT

  NEARLY THEY STOOD

  RELAPSE

  LATE SUMMER

  TO A FRIEND

  TO CHARLES WILLIAMS

  AFTER VAIN PRETENCE

  ANGEL’S SONG

  JOYS THAT STING

  OLD POETS REMEMBERED

  AS THE RUIN FALLS

  PART IV: FURTHER UP AND FURTHER IN POEM FOR PSYCHOANALYSTS AND/OR THEOLOGIANS

  NOON’S INTENSITY

  SWEET DESIRE

  CAUGHT

  FORBIDDEN PLEASURE

  THE NAKED SEED

  SCAZONS

  LEGION

  PILGRIM’S PROBLEM

  SONNET

  THE PHOENIX

  THE NATIVITY

  PRAYER

  LOVE’S AS WARM AS TEARS

  NO BEAUTY WE COULD DESIRE

  STEPHEN TO LAZARUS

  FIVE SONNETS

  EVENSONG

  THE APOLOGIST’S EVENING PRAYER

  FOOTNOTE TO ALL PRAYERS

  AFTER PRAYERS, LIE COLD

  PART V: A FAREWELL TO SHADOWLANDS EPIGRAMS AND EPITAPHS

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY C. S. LEWIS

  FURTHER READING

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PREFACE

  C. S. Lewis published his first poem, ‘Quam Bene Saturno’, in the Cherbourg School Magazine of 1913. The young classical student writes ‘after Tibullus’ as many others have done. He begins:

  Alas! what happy days were those

  When Saturn ruled a peaceful race . . .

  and ends:

  But now . . . With Jove our haughty lord

  No peace we know but many a wound:

  And famine, slaughter, fire and sword

  With grim array our path surround.

  He was then fourteen. He never tired of the Classical Poets; throughout his life we find him happy to use Pagan deities as spiritual symbols. Occasionally he attempts the metres of the Latin lyrics in English: Sapphics (p. 2), Asclepiads (p. 33), Alcaics (p. 41), Hendecasyllabics (p. 78), not to mention the ‘Scazons’ of p. 118, which are not in strict classical metre, but loosely imitate the general effect.

  Lewis’s ambition to become a great poet really began with the publication in 1919 (when he was twenty) of Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics under the transparent pseudonym of Clive Hamilton (his own first name and his mother’s maiden name). The poems abound in what he called ‘thoughtful wishing’ (not wishful thinking) and his purpose is clear in the opening lyric:

  In my coracle of verses I will sing of lands unknown,

  Flying from the scarlet city where a Lord that knows no pity

  Mocks the broken people praying round his iron throne,

  —Sing about the Hidden Country fresh and full of quiet green,

  Sailing over seas uncharted to a port that none has seen.

  Seven years later, as a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, Clive Hamilton published Dymer (1926), a long narrative poem in nine cantos of rhyme royal. In the Preface to the second edition (1950) Lewis recalls much of the psychological motivation behind Dymer. He was an idealist and an atheist when he wrote the poem. There were other experiments in writing long poems but none were ever published. Till We Have Faces was, in its infancy, a poem; it grew into a novel.

  Lewis, however, continued to write short lyrics all his life. Many are included in his first prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933). Others were published during the thirties in the Oxford Magazine under a new pseudonym—Nat Whilk (Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not whom’). But his voice had changed: Lewis became a Christian in 1929. And ‘the new voice’, says Owen Barfield, ‘with its unmistakable note of magisterial humility, when it spoke in 1933 in The Pilgrim’s Regress, was already the voice of the author of Screwtape, of The Personal Heresy, of the Broadcast Talks, of the Founding President of the Socratic Club’. As for his other poems, though many were published they are not easy to come by. Twenty-four appeared (between 1946 and 1954) in the pages of Punch over the initials ‘N. W.’ There were also occasional contributions to the Spectator, Time and Tide and other magazines. Their history is recorded in the appendix to this volume.

  A sampling of all Lewis’s works will reveal the same man in his poetry as in his clear and sparkling prose. His wonderful imagination is the guiding thread. It is continuously at work—in his first school poem, through Screwtape, literary criticism, planetary romances, and fairytales. It is basic to the man. And this is why, I think, his admirers find it so pleasant to be instructed by him in subjects they have hitherto cared so little for. Everything he touched had his kind of magic about it. His poetry, like his prose, is teeming with ideas and the good fruits of humour, wit, common sense, and scholarship.

  The reader will be struck by the range of these poems: there is room for God and the Pagan deities, unicorns and space-ships. Lewis did not, of course, believe in the factual existence of Dryads (any more than Sp
enser or Milton); nor did he believe in their non-existence as a nihilist would. The whole rich and genial universe of mythological beings—giants, dragons, paradises, gods—were to him abbreviated symbols of qualities present in the world, or as Lewis in one place calls them, ‘words of a language which speaks the else unspeakable’. When Subjectivists throw the gods out with the bath-water they empty out truths we cannot recover. ‘Nature’, he says, ‘has that in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do’. We find, as well, a defence for talking-beasts in ‘Impenitence’ where Lewis calls them:

  Masks for Man, cartoons, parodies by Nature

  Formed to reveal us.

  Now let me say something about the compiling of this book. Lewis began collecting his poems over ten years ago for a volume to be called Young King Cole and Other Pieces. Some poems, including two from The Pilgrim’s Regress, had been typed; others, added later, were in his handwriting. They were in no particular order. It was not always easy to determine his final version of a poem, especially if there were slightly different versions or if the poem had already appeared in print. Nor is it clear that the selection he had made represented a considered judgment on his part; for, as I discovered in conversation with him, he simply did not know what he had written. Anyone who had lived in his house could have understood this. Although Lewis owned a huge library, he possessed few of his own works. His phenomenal memory recorded almost everything he had read except his own writings—an appealing fault. Often, when I quoted lines from his own poems he would ask who the author was. He was a very great scholar, but no expert in the field of C. S. Lewis.

  I have, therefore, felt justified in collecting everything I could find among his literary remains and in following my judgement as to what should be printed. I found some poems scribbled on scraps of paper or in the flyleaves of books. Others came from notebooks and are at least as old as the poems in The Pilgrim’s Regress. As most of these had never been given titles, I usually drew titles from among the lines. Even the headings for the five Parts are taken from Lewis’s own works. The present collection excludes, however, his own youthful publications of poetry Spirits in Bondage and Dymer, but includes the poems scattered through his first prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, as well as subsequent pieces published in periodicals. I have chosen to arrange the poems more or less topically rather than attempt a chronological ordering. This is because I often had little else to go by except Lewis’s handwriting and, too, I know from experience that he was continually revising them.

  While I was his secretary he sometimes used to dictate poems. Even after he thought one was completed he might suggest a change here. Then a change there. Because of this I warn readers from attempting to date his poems on internal evidence. For instance, the poem which in this volume is entitled ‘To a Friend’ was originally written ‘To C. W.’ and later published (1942) as ‘To G. M.’ It is best to fight shy of what Lewis himself called the ‘Personal Heresy’: reading a man’s works as autobiography.

  The fact that he did not publish these poems during his lifetime suggests that Lewis was hesitant about their publication. He knew his poems were very unlike most contemporary verse. Because of this, he could not be certain of the reaction of his readers. The answer is not far to seek. In the poem, ‘A Confession’, Lewis says with ironical disappointment:

  I am so coarse, the things the poets see

  Are obstinately invisible to me.

  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.

  Lewis found Mr Eliot’s comparison of an evening to a patient on an operating table unpleasant, one example of the decay of proper feelings. He mistrusted, in fact, the free play of mere immediate experience. He believed, rather, that man’s attitudes and actions should be governed by, what he calls in the same poem, Stock Responses (e.g. love is sweet, death bitter, and virtue lovely). Man must, for his own safety and pleasure, be taught to copy the Stock Responses in hopes that he may, by willed imitation, make the proper responses. He found this perfectly summed up in Aristotle’s ‘We learn how to do things by doing the things we are learning to do’. This concern is expressed, directly or indirectly, in almost all of Lewis’s books, but most clearly in his defence of Milton’s style (A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, Ch. VIII). His belief that poetry did not need to be eccentric to enrich a response and of ‘being normal without being vulgar’, one of the characteristics which distinguish him from many contemporary poets, made him think he might be classed as an Angry Old Man. If so, he concluded that he was much less angry with things in general than are the Young Men, and having perhaps the better claim to Age than some do to Youth.

  It is possible that some who have read those poems which have appeared in periodicals will be confused by his revisions and new titles. Because of this, I have appended to this volume a list of the published poems, indicating (1) whether they have been revised; (2) their original titles, if different; and (3) their original sources. This apparatus is not meant to suggest that Lewis had high pretensions about his poetry. It most certainly means, on the other hand, that for me this has been one of those rare jobs in which labour is more pleasure than anything else.

  I want to thank the editors of The Cambridge Review, The Cherwell, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Month, The Oxford Magazine, Punch, The Spectator, Time and Tide and The Times Literary Supplement for permission to reprint some of the poems in this book; they are acknowledged individually in the appendix. I am indebted to Mr Charles Böhmer whose initiative and generosity made this venture possible, to Mr George Sayer for lending me poems given him by Lewis, to Mr Owen Barfield for his useful criticism, and to Dr and Mrs Austin Farrer for their encouragement and wise counsel. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Major W. H. Lewis for allowing me the honour of editing his brother’s poems.

  Walter Hooper

  1964

  Oxford

  PART I

  THE HIDDEN COUNTRY

  A CONFESSION

  I am so coarse, the things the poets see

  Are obstinately invisible to me.

  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.

  To me each evening looked far more

  Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore

  Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind

  Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

  Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east

  Never, for me, resembled in the least

  A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;

  Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,

  Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known

  The moon look like a hump-backed crone—

  Rather, a prodigy, even now

  Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow

  Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place

  I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

  Never the white sun of the wintriest day

  Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.

  I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom

  A primrose was a yellow primrose, 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.

  IMPENITENCE

  All the world’s wiseacres in arms against them

  Shan’t detach my heart for a single moment


  From the man-like beasts of the earthy stories—

  Badger or Moly.

  Rat the oarsman, neat Mrs Tiggy Winkle,

  Benjamin, pert Nutkin, or (ages older)

  Henryson’s shrill Mouse, or the Mice the Frogs once

  Fought with in Homer.

  Not that I’m so craz’d as to think the creatures

  Do behave that way, nor at all deluded

  By some half-false sweetness of early childhood

  Sharply remembered.

  Look again. Look well at the beasts, the true ones.

  Can’t you see? . . . cool primness of cats, or coney’s

  Half indignant stare of amazement, mouse’s

  Twinkling adroitness,

  Tipsy bear’s rotundity, toad’s complacence . . .

  Why! they all cry out to be used as symbols,

  Masks for Man, cartoons, parodies by Nature

  Formed to reveal us

  Each to each, not fiercely but in her gentlest

  Vein of household laughter. And if the love so

  Raised—it will, no doubt—splashes over on the

  Actual archtypes,

  Who’s the worse for that? Marry, gup! Begone, you

  Fusty kill-joys, new Manichaeans! Here’s a

  Health to Toad Hall, here’s to the Beaver doing

  Sums with the Butcher!

  A CLICHÉ CAME OUT OF ITS CAGE

  1

  You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’. Oh bright

  Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House

  Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,

  And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,

  Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses

  To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.

  Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before

  The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands

  Tended it. By the hearth the white-arm’d venerable mother

  Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. Duly at the hour

  Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave

  Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush