Poetry by Young C. S. Lewis

This year’s literary itinerary included stops at two volumes of poetry by America’s favorite Anglican, C. S. Lewis. The first, Spirits in Bondage, was composed before Lewis became a Christian and includes railings against a God the young man didn’t believe in. The other is a book of poems from Lewis’s Christian years, collected by Walter Hooper, secretary to Lewis late in his life and curator of his literary estate. Having read Lewis’s own accounts of his atheistic years, I expected to enjoy the later poems more, but my expectations were wrong.

Perhaps Spirits in Bondage presents less mature work than the later book. It’s still more advanced than any poetry I might have written. Perhaps it occasionally cries out blasphemous doubts. What Christian hasn’t struggled with doubt and left the battle with the limp of Jacob? I loved these poems because here I found deep questions, stirring emotions, and vivid images expressed by the Lewis I know and love. It’s all here: the scholarship, the dry clip of twentieth-century language moistened with the elegance of earlier eras, the piercing psychological insights, the intelligent arguments, and the humility that suggests the author would gladly sit over a pint with any reader and enjoy a conversation that wouldn’t leave the lesser one embarrassed by the chasm of intellectual ability that separated the two.

The young atheist’s poems, though, also lifted me with passages about desires for and visions of moral standards, about life after death, and about eternal peace. The same collection that contains these lines:

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.

also contains these:

When glory I have built in dreams
Along some fiery sunset gleams,
And my dead sin and foolishness
Grow one with Nature’s whole distress, [i.e., when I go the way of all flesh]
To perfect being I shall win,
And where I end will Life begin.

At this point in his life, the future Christian apologist sees God as an inevitable fly in the ointment of the eternal life of “perfect being” he foresees in those lines above. Consider this passage:

For in that house I know a little, silent room
Where Someone’s always waiting, waiting in the gloom
To draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fast –
Yet thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.

That atheist would later in his life bless the Hound of Heaven that drove him to that silent room, and he would explain that among the tools He wielded in order to “win at last” was the special sensation Lewis called “joy,” the phenomenon he first experienced as a child looking at his brother’s toy garden. His description of it in these poems is perhaps even better than his more familiar prose account in Surprised by Joy:

But only the strange power
Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour
Can build a bridge of light or sound or form
To lead you out of all this strife and storm;
When of some beauty we are grown a part
Till from its very glory’s midmost heart
Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light
Into our souls. All things are seen aright
. . . . . . .
The miracle is done
And for one little moment we are one
With the eternal stream of loveliness
That flows so calm, aloft from all distress
Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire
Making us faint with overstrong desire
To sport and swim for ever in its deep.

I don’t like the impersonal you in the fourth line of this excerpt. And I think the poem loses power by constantly affirming that the experience is something that happens to “us” rather than just describing what happens to the author. But I love reading this poem, knowing what God eventually made of these astonishing moments in this astonishing life. Lewis called the piece “Dungeon Grates,” showing that he knew that the materialistic world he moved in was only a narrow prison and that the surrounding world of the eternal stream of loveliness was a wide land of freedom. In fact, doesn’t the book’s title, Spirits in Bondage, indicate a belief in the existence of a spiritual liberty? Lewis eventually entered that liberty. May he continue to go further up and further in.