© Don W. King
A version of this essay first appeared in the Christian Scholar’s Review, 27 (Summer 1998): 454-474.
C. S. Lewis’ Spirits in Bondage: World
War I Poet as Frustrated Dualist
Surprisingly, in
the almost eighty years since these youthful poems were first published, only
thirteen critical articles on Spirits in
Bondage (hereafter SB) have appeared.[1] The paucity of critical commentary on SB may be in part due to the relative
obscurity of the volume until it was reprinted in 1984; however, even since its
reappearance scholars have been reticent to discuss these poems.[2] However SB
is the culmination of Lewis’ earliest efforts at verse, and a watershed in his
literary life. While limited in its
scope and technique, SB reveals much
about Lewis the youthful poet and prepares the way for Dymer seven years later.
Above all else, SB shows Lewis
living as a frustrated dualist. On the one hand, many sanguine poems in SB show his delight in Nature’s beauty and
mystery; still others expose his longing to know more intimately a reality that
transcends the merely physical, often characterized by the world of faery. On the other hand, in a number of morose poems he rails against man’s
inhumanity to man and against a God he denies yet blames for man’s painful
condition.[3] Central to this tension and before now not
thoroughly explored is how Lewis’ experiences on the front line in
Suppression of World War I Memories
The failure to see a connection between Lewis’ wartime experience and SB has occurred in part because we have accepted too quickly Lewis’ statements in Surprised by Joy where he suppresses the horrors of the battlefield. The fact Lewis does not mention WWI until well over half way through SJ is a red flag suggesting masking is occurring.[4] Furthermore, he never adequately explains why he decides to enlist, since as an Irish citizen he is not oblige to do so; when he adds “I did feel that the decision absolved me from taking any further notice of the war . . . [and] accordingly I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible,” we are left unsatisfied. While he may have eventually faced conscription, he never mentions this in SJ.[5] Nor can we accept at face value his parting comment: “I said to my country, in effect, ‘You shall have me on a certain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but till then I shall live my own life. You may have my body, but not my mind. I will take part in battles but not read about them.’”[6]
In addition, if we accept what Lewis says in “Guns and Good Company,” the chapter in SJ where he deals most openly with his wartime experiences, we come away with the sense WWI for him is a rustic camping adventure punctuated by pneumonia, camaraderie, and the occasional falling bomb. For example, he summarizes his entire service in one sentence,[7] and then, while admitting he does meet some unpleasant people in the army, goes on to assert: “Every few days one seemed to meet a scholar, an original, a poet, a cheery buffoon, a raconteur, or at the least a man of good will.”[8] He then catalogs the books he reads, friends he makes, and comforts he manages with an easy breeziness bordering on the inane. Nowhere, for instance, does he write of the great loss of his friend Paddy Moore, whose mother he devotes the remainder of her life to keeping, his worries about Warren, nor his father’s pathological obsession with his welfare.[9] Lewis mollifies this to a degree near the end of the chapter when he says “I must not paint the wartime army all gold.”[10] But of describing the realities of the battlefield, he leaves to “those who saw more of it than I.”[11] Only in the last paragraph does he mention the brutal nature of his experience, and even here he ameliorates: “For the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H [igh] E [xplosives], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly on the memory.”[12] Though this catalogue of details is intended to be a stripped account, it actually reveals how much the war has remained with him regardless his attempts to block out or mask such memories. He ends the chapter by admitting his memories of the war show “rarely and faintly,” noting that “one imaginative moment seems to matter more than the realities that followed. It was the first bullet I heard—so far from me that it ‘whined’ like a journalist’s or a peacetime poet’s bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, ‘This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.’”[13] This bookish, “literary response” to war illustrates how Lewis, typical of many who experience battlefield brutalities, suppresses an unpleasant memory.
Notwithstanding
these assertions by the older Lewis, the real impact of the ravages of war goes
much deeper, and the many letters he writes at the time give this
evidence. A review of letters to Greeves but especially to
Albert Lewis shows them peppered with concerns about the war.[14] Concurrent with these letters and references
to war, Lewis begins working in earnest on a number of poems that later appear
in SB. The
Lewis Papers affirm that from Easter 1915 until Lewis matriculates at
The War Poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen
As we move to
consider the impact of
Lewis’ front-line experiences upon SB, it is proper to note how similar experiences affect other soldier
poets. The sheer butchery of World War I
is almost without equal, so grotesque it borders on being an outrage to the
imagination; estimates place the number killed on the battlefield at 8,750,000
(including 750,000 British) with another 21,000,000 wounded. Even those brought up on World War II and
As one disaster follows another on the battlefield and the number of killed and wounded mounts—for example, at the battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, the British lost 60,000 men killed or wounded, a battlefield catastrophe unique even in this war of battlefield catastrophes—Sassoon and other poets are compelled to write poems reflecting the reality of war, especially since back home the press was heavily censored. For example, the official communique issued on the evening of July 1, 1916 says little and approaches a lie: “Attack launched north of River Somme this morning at 7:30 a.m., in conjunction with French. British troops have broken into German forward system of defenses on front of 16 miles. Fight is continuing. French attack on our immediate right proceeds equally satisfactorily.”[19] A soldier poet like Sassoon, witnessing the sickening horrors on the battlefield and functioning as an “independent contemplator,” writes poems giving a realistic, almost photographic picture.[20] Sassoon’s poems in particular have a biting, harsh edge, intending to tell the truth as seen by men in the field.
Indicative of such realism is “Attack” where Sassoon uses only thirteen lines to create a startling visual picture of a crowd of men swelling to confront the enemy. From the beginning we sense the ominous undercurrent: “At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun / In wild purple of the glow’ring sun, / Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud / The menacing scarred slope.”[21] Then, almost in slow motion, he reports the movement of creeping tanks, the deafening artillery barrage, and the awful human predicament: “Then, clumsily bowed / With bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear, / Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.” Moving out, “they leave their trenches, going over the top, / While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, / And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, / Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!” Perhaps nowhere else in the poetry of World War I do we see so finely condensed the brutal experience of soldiers leaving their trenches for an almost certain death.
Of particular note is Sassoon’s consideration of religion. In one of his most famous poems, “They,” he begins by having a bishop pontificate on the justness of the war since it opposes the “anti-Christ” and he continues by preaching how the boys will return from the conflict changed, the implication being they will be ennobled for having “challenged Death and dared him face to face.” Again, Sassoon’s irony bristles:
“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.
“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;
Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find
A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.”
And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange!”[22]
Yet, at times Sassoon finds God in the midst of the trenches. “The Redeemer” chronicles an experience where the poem’s persona, under fire one black night during a rainstorm and struggling to move down a trench, turns and glimpses a silhouette caused by a flare exploding overhead: “[It] lit the face of what had been a form / Floundering in mirk. He stood before me there; / I say that He was Christ.” Sassoon’s Christ, however, wears “no thorny crown, only a woolen cap,” for he is an English soldier willing to die to defend England, this particular night bearing a heavy load of planks to place in the trenches to keep them all from sinking in the mud; in the sacrifice of such a soldier, bearing his own kind of wooden cross, Sassoon sees Christlikeness: “I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless / All groping things with freedom bright as air, / And with His mercy washed and made them fair.”[23] In many other poems Sassoon considers the role of religion and the presence or absence of God on the battlefield.[24] When we examine Lewis’ war poems we will see that he also addresses the subject of God and war, and while his skepticism is as strong as Sassoon’s, his approach to the relationship between God and war is different from Sassoon’s.
If poems by Sassoon give the war a dark, bitter edge, those by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the best poet of World War I, present an integrated vision of the conflict. Though only four of his poems are published during his short lifetime (he was killed in action a week before the Armistice in November 1918), his complete war poems are marked by “the originality and force of their language, the passionate nature of the indignation and pity they express, [and] their blending of harsh realism with a sensuousness unatrophied by the horrors from which they flowered.”[25] Eschewing for the most part Sassoon’s irony which in the end limits the range of emotions he can explore in his war poems, Owen instead targets the human condition; he seeks to understand the impact of the war on soldiers and non-combatants alike, often capturing poignant and startling revelations. For instance, in “Strange Meeting” he pictures a soldier who stumbles into a deep tunnel where he finds a number of groaning sleepers.[26] Discerning he is in Hell, the soldier tries to comfort one of the sleepers who awakens at his presence, telling him there is now “no cause to mourn” since the battlefield terrors cannot touch them in this place. In reply, the sleeper says “‘None . . . save the undone years, / The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, / Was my life also; I went hunting wild, / After the wildest beauty in the world.” He goes on to list all he will miss of the world above and leads to the poem’s dramatic end: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. / I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned / Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.” Yet the poem is not bitterly ironic since both the soldier and sleeper are presented sympathetically. It is Owen’s fine sense of delineating such incongruities and ambiguities that gives his poetry such power.
This is not to say he never takes the bitter way; indeed, after Owen meets Sassoon in spring 1917 at Craiglockhart where both are recovering from “neurasthenia,” several poems have a sharper edge. The best of these and perhaps his most famous poem, “Dulce Et Decorum Est,”[27] begins as a powerful description of the awful conditions of a battle:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
As the poem continues the men are suddenly gassed and fumble to get their masks on in time; one man does not. In describing the death of this soldier, Owen strikes deeply at the senselessness and brutality of war:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
From Horace’s Odes, 3.2.13, the Latin phrase “it is sweet and meet to die for one’s country,” is shown to be a damnable deception. Owen, like Sassoon, penetrates the veneer of war’s respectability and shows its horrific side for all to see.[28]
Owen
also considers religion and God, and like Sassoon, he finds God in the image of
his fellow sufferers; “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo” is his rejoinder to Sassoon’s
“The Redeemer: “I, too, saw God through
mud,— / The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches
smiled.”[29] In “Greater Love” laments the battlefield as
a place “where God seems not to care.”[30] Unlike Sassoon, however, Owen uses direct
biblical stories as in “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” In this poem he retells the story of Abram
(European powers) and Isaac (its young soldiers) with the sardonic ending that
when the angel calls out for the “Ram of Pride” to be sacrificed, “the old man
would not so, but slew his son, / And half the seed of
Unique to Owen, however, is his ability to see deeply into the many dimensions of the battlefield, even to find beauty there. Indeed, his tendency to find beauty even on the battlefield sets him apart from Sassoon, the latter’s distress so great he cannot see beyond his bitterly ironic outrages. Again “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo” leads us to find beauty in the clash of mud, bullets, and flesh. The poem notes that men involved in such a hell have their own kind of beauty: “I have perceived much beauty / In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; / Heard music in the silentness of duty; / Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.”[33] Furthermore, Owen’s language communicates a beauty we do not typically see in Sassoon. For instance, lines like “Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead,” “For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple. / There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple,” and “The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall . . . And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds” are beyond Sassoon. Nor does Sassoon ever approach the tender poignancy of the ending of “Futility”:
Think how it [the sun] wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?[34]
The range of Owen’s poetic achievements in his war poetry surpasses Sassoon’s though both give powerful indictments of the carnage they witness.
Spirits in Bondage
It
is too much to say that SB is solely
driven by Lewis’ own battlefield experiences since we know more than half the
poems are written before Lewis goes to
This bifurcation results in the poems falling into one of two categories: those that are morose, dealing often with his battlefield experiences and his atheism; and those that are sanguine, dealing often with his affection for nature and redemptive beauty. Some morose poems see life as demeaning, futile, and empty, primarily as a result of wartime brutalities, while others comment upon a God who is hateful, cruel, and red; He “kills us for His sport.” In contrast, however, many sanguine poems see Nature as kindly and benevolent in the lyrical and romantic tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Yeats, and other sanguine poems intimate beauty is the evidence there is “something” beyond the material world, often connected to faery, and experiencing such beauty is the only way to transcend life’s bleak reality.[37]
Morose Poems
“French Nocturne (Monchy-le-Preux)” may be the first poem Lewis writes directly relating his trench experiences and thus becomes the natural place to begin considering Lewis’ morose poems focusing upon war.[38] It begins with a Sassoon-like portrayal of what an “independent contemplator” sees; trenches stretch out in either direction in an apparently endless fashion. Nearby “the jaws of a sacked village, stark and grim, / Out on the ridge have swallowed up the sun, / And in one angry streak his blood has run / To left and right along the horizon dim.” Lewis’ image of the sunset is characteristic of World War I poetry according to Paul Fussell: “When a participant in the war wants an ironic effect, a conventional way to achieve one is simply to juxtapose a sunrise or sunset with the unlovely physical details of the war. . . . These sunrises and sunsets . . . move to the very center of English poetry of the Great War.”[39] Sassoon’s poem “Break of Day” is the best example of this as a soldier who is waiting for the beginning of an attack notices how peaceful the countryside before him appears: “Now a red, sleepy sun above the rim / Of twilight stares along the quiet weald, / And the kind, simple country shines revealed / In solitude’s of peace, no longer dim.”[40] A more ominous sunrise, however, occurs in his “Attack”: “At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun / In wild purple of the glow’ring sun.” Owen’s sunset in the last line of “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is equally disturbing: “And each slow dusk [is] a drawing-down of blinds.” Indeed, the poems of both Sassoon and Owen are peppered with sunrises and sunsets, in part because “stand-to,” the practice of looking twice a day toward enemy lines to discern any movement, normally occurs at dawn and dusk; accordingly, Lewis’ sunset with its angry streak of blood marks this as a war poem in the tradition of both Sassoon and Owen.
“French Nocturne” continues with the persona following a plane that appears to fly straight into the moon; this leads him to associate the plane’s upward movement with the world of dreams he once held dear. However, it is only a brief reprieve since the reality of the battlefield quickly recalls itself:
False, mocking fancy! Once I too could dream,
Who now can only see with vulgar eye
That he’s no nearer to the moon than I
And she’s a stone that catches the sun’s beam.
What call have I to dream of anything?
I am a wolf. Back to the world again,
And speech of fellow-brutes that once were men
Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.
Sassoon-like, Lewis writes that war reduces everything to the merely physical. For instance, there is nothing enchanting about the moon; it is simply a cold, reflective rock. Furthermore, soldiers can hardly dream, a distinguishing human quality, since now they are vicious animals, brute predators intent on blood and destruction. Even their capacity to sing, to make harmonious music, has been reduced to the rasping, grating snapping of wolves.
However,
“Apology” is Lewis’ most Sassoon-like war poem.
Its tone is bitter and ironic, giving an explanation for why he will not
write verse celebrating the glory of war.
He begins by addressing Despoina, another name for Persephone, Queen of
Hades,[41]
telling her he has a reason for speaking “of nothing glad nor noble in my verse
/ To lighten hearts beneath this present curse / And build a heaven of dreams
in real hell.”[42] The poem actually works on two levels; that
is, he directs Despoina to tell the dead in hell why his verse is morose and
can not bring them comfort, while he, in the role of Despoina, explains why he
will not give the lie about the glory of war to soldiers in nightmarish
battlefield conditions, their “real hell.”
Just as it is a cruelty to remind the dead “down in the rotting grave
where the lithe worms crawl, / [Of] green fields above that smiled so sweet,”
so it is to remind soldiers living in the vile trenches where the rats crawl of
the green fields back home. Neither the
dead nor soldiers want to be told how wonderful and vital life is for those not
experiencing their hell. To emphasize
this, Lewis says what good is it “to tell old tales of Troynovant [
The next group of morose poems illustrate Lewis’ attempt to come to grips with a God he does not want to exist yet blames for human misery. Unlike Sassoon and Owen who contrast the compassionate Christ they see in battered soldiers with the stern, unfeeling God they identify with organized religion, Lewis sees only a cruel, malicious, and inexorable God; nowhere does he consider Christ, perhaps suggesting his effort to live somehow consistently as an atheist. That is, while he is willing to accuse and defame an evil God, he rejects the idea of a personal, intimate Christ. Two poems with the same title offer us the chance to see how Lewis’ thoughts about his malicious God develop. “Satan Speaks (I),” the first poem in SB, begins by recalling Lewis’ comments to Greeves when he writes “I have formulated my equation Matter=Nature=Satan.”[44] 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.”[45] The poem 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.” 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 nature 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.
However the later “Satan Speaks (XIII) presents a slightly different God, revealing Lewis’ evolving thoughts about his “diabolical & malevolent” deity.[46] While the God here is also connected to nature, “I am the Lord your God: even he that made / Material things,” Lewis’ blasphemous parody goes on to demonstrate this God is more “personal” though malicious, proud, and condescending. He harangues his creatures, reminding them he uses pain and suffering to underscore the fact that he, and only he, is God, and that there is no softer, gentler deity as they would like to believe; he mocks their “dreams of some other gods,” by giving them a miserable existence, calls them vermin, and then appears surprised “they hate my world!” 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,” but then he claims the softer, gentler God is detached, unconcerned for man as “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.” Whether “this creature” refers to man or the softer, gentler God, the malicious God countenances no competitors; he prophesies man or the other God will follow the mammoth into extinction.
“De Profundis” frankly challenges the authority of this cruel, malicious deity, almost certainly reflecting Lewis’ reading of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. In effect, he 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.”[47] The shocking tone of the opening lines of “De Profundis” reflects an angry adolescent, shaking his fist at a malicious God he denies, rejects, hates, yet fears. In a patent slap at meliorism, the popular pre-war notion the world is gradually getting better and can 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.” In a return to an idea first mentioned in “Satan Speaks (XIII),” the speaker does momentarily entertain the thought that perhaps somewhere there is “a just God that cares for earthly pain,” but even this is rejected, since, even if true, “yet far away beyond our labouring night, / He wanders in the depths of endless light, / Singing alone his musics of delight.” 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 a 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, even delighting in the carnage, 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.
Lewis’ war poems dealing with a malicious God reveal the morose extent to which he is living as a frustrated dualist. Without question Lewis’ atheism is profoundly influenced by his great tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick, as well as the philosophical ideas he encounters elsewhere; yet, the battlefield horrors he witnesses informs these poems even more deeply and expose a young man grappling to understand his place in a world that appears to be tittering on the brink of collapse. Although his angry, defiant responses in some of the poems are immature and adolescent, they are a measure of the passion with which he inculcates his poetry. It is poetry, not prose, he uses to work through the crises he is experiencing, giving outward expression to his deeply internalized feelings. What saves SB from turning into a volume of so much teenage whining, however, is the sanguine poetry representing the other dimension of Lewis’ dualism. Here, too, we will find immaturity, but even more maturation as Lewis focuses upon his love of nature and beauty far in excess of his introspective meditations. Indeed, Lewis’ sanguine poems are among his first poetic attempts to put in writing his longing for joy he later recounts in SJ; as such these poems reveal his yearning to experience a transcendent truth he realizes only later. In these poems, therefore, we see the incubation of Lewis the theist.
Sanguine Poems
The first group of sanguine poems are primarily lyrical and celebrate
landscapes, rest, literature, music, nature (Wordsworthian instead of
Darwinian), stars, and human love. For
instance, “Irish Nocturne” celebrates Lewis’ homeland and is probably
influenced by Yeats. It begins with a
description of an eerie landscape with mist filling a valley like “evil drink
in a wizard’s hand,” and then alludes to ghosts, demons, Grendel (the Beowulf monster), and other ominous
supernatural creatures associated with
Bitter and bitter it is for thee, O my heart,
Looking upon this land, where poets sang,
Thus with the dreary shroud
Unwholesome, over it spread,
And knowing the fog and the cloud
In her people’s heart and head
Even as it lies for ever upon her coasts
Making them dim and dreamy lest her sons should ever arise
And remember all their boasts.[48]
The poem ends with Lewis lamenting this mist since it breeds “lonely desire and many words and brooding and never a deed.” Lewis’ complaint against his countrymen for being dreamers and talkers but not doers is a stereotypical one about the Irish; however, because Lewis does not connect this poem to a specific incident, it is difficult to know how seriously we should take his lament.
Also within this group of sanguine poems are those that celebrate both the idea of retreating away from the bustle of the everyday world as well as the place of retreat. For instance, Lewis sets “Noon” it in a garden bower, using ornamental description to paint a picture of a silent, static, sultry, and heavily aromatic Eden-like oasis. Heat is especially utilized to create the sense this is a place where all activities gradually cease:
Noon! and in the garden bower
The hot air quivers o’er the grass,
The little lake is smooth as glass
And still so heavily the hour
Drags, that scarce the proudest flower
Pressed upon its burning bed
Has strength to lift a languid head.[49]
Indeed, roses and violets faint, swoon, and sink in such heat. Even the bees, so necessary to pollinating the flowers, are affected; these are not “busy bees” and their buzz is a “drowsy melody” as they wander drunkenly with “golden mead o’erladen.” The poem ends by picturing a drowsing female figure; Lewis gifts as a poet are demonstrated here as the elaborate figurative language and rhyming iambic tetrameter reflect the poem’s winding down to a halt: “A maiden / — Milky limb and fiery tress, / All at sweetest random laid— / Slumbers, drunken with the excess / Of the noontide’s loveliness.” This garden of retreat experienced at noon in the full heat of summer’s sun is a bower of nature’s excess, an apt spot to be renewed and refreshed.
Moving from sanguine poems emphasizing rest or retreat, we see in “Hymn (For Boys’ Voices) a poem where Lewis says the wonders of nature’s beauty are ever before and accessible to us if only we will open our eyes and see. The things magicians do, the games faeries play, nature’s power, immortality, even God’s perspective—all these and more—can be ours: “If we could but understand! / We could revel day and night / In all power and all delight / If we learned to think aright.”[50] Affirming this, however, does not make it happen, and the poem gives us no way to do what he recommends other than the poem’s circular argument. Directly related to “Hymn” and following it in SB is “Our Daily Bread,” beginning: “We need no barbarous words nor solemn spell / To raise the unknown. It lies before our feet.”[51] While this poem also does not give us a coherent method for seeing what Lewis does, it surpasses “Hymn” in its personal view as Lewis explains his visits to regular spots in nature create the context where “the Living voices call” him, and he catches “a sight of lands beyond the wall, / I see a strange god’s face.” Furthermore, he intimates the allure of such visions will one day pull him out of the work-a-day world:
And some day this will work upon me so
I shall arise and leave both friends and home
And over many lands a pilgrim go
Through alien woods and foam,
Seeking the last steep edges of the earth
Whence I may leap into that gulf of light
Wherein, before my narrowing Self had birth,
Part of me lived aright.
Lewis returns to the idea of being a pilgrim looking for beauty in other poems.[52] Also of note is Lewis’ clear debt to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” especially the ending that recalls:
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty water rolling evermore.
Lewis’ longing to become a part of the mysterious beauty of nature he sees is given expression more effectively in later poems where he directly connects nature to faery.
The second group of sanguine poems in SB concern how faery is the proof of transcendent beauty. “Song,” one of the few sanguine poems we can document as having been written while Lewis is serving in France,[53] begins by affirming “faeries must be in the woods . . . / Else how could the dead things be / Half so lovely as they are?”[54] In like manner he questions how it is that stars fill us with delight and cause us “dreams divine” unless each of them is a “happy isle” where “the Other People go / On the bright sward to and fro?” The notion that earthly beauty is a reflection of faery, as if the latter infuses the former, has Platonic connotations, but again Lewis is not concerned here with Platonic forms. Instead, he is saying earthly beauty as expressed in our apprehension of faery proves the reality of transcendent beauty:
Atoms dead could never thus
Stir the human heart of us
Unless the beauty that we see
The veil of endless beauty be,
Filled full of spirits that have trod
Far hence along the heavenly sod
And seen the bright footprints of God.
In the midst of war, Lewis reaches for beauty as that which brings sense to a senseless situation. His yearning for beauty mitigates against the horror he sees regularly on the battlefield.
“Dungeon Grates” is Lewis’ most comprehensive attempt to illustrate how faery is the evidence of transcendent beauty and how such beauty mitigates against the felt sense produced by war that human existence is meaningless. Man’s essential condition, heightened by war, the opening lines suggest, is one of loneliness, grief, burdens, and pain; these beat him down toward his death except for those moments when he captures “a sudden glimpse of spirit faces.”[55] That is, though his life may appear to be lived in a cell behind dungeon bars, the apprehension of beauty, “the fragrant breath” of “flowery places,” the longing “for which the hearts of men are always sore,” reminds man of another reality beyond time. Anticipating what he comes to hammer home consistently in Surprised by Joy, however, Lewis says this reality is not one to seek actively:
It lies beyond endeavour; neither prayer
Nor fasting, nor much wisdom winneth there,
Seeing how many prophets and wise men
Have sought for it and still returned again
With hope undone.
In fact, beauty comes unlooked for, serendipitously: “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.” For the first time he attempts to explain how beauty leads us, claiming that when we mesh with beauty, when “we are grown a part” of it until “from its very glory’s midmost heart / Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light / Into our souls,” then we will see all things as they really are, “seven times more true than what for truth we hold / In vulgar hours.” This Wordsworthian ethic culminates in lines reminiscent of “Tintern Abbey”:
The miracle is done
And for one little moment we are one
With the eternal stream of loveliness
That flows so calm, aloof 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.
Though such Wordsworthian epiphanies are momentary and rare, we feed off them for a long time, sustained by them because through them “we know we are not made of mortal stuff.” Indeed, such momentary visitations of beauty help us survive our otherwise burdensome human condition:
And we can bear all trials that come after,
The hate of men and the fool’s loud bestial laughter
And Nature’s rule and cruelties unclean,
For we have seen the Glory--we have seen.
Here Lewis honors the visitations of beauty as a harbinger whereby man can endure an otherwise dark, meaningless world.
Conclusion
An overall
evaluation of SB suggests several
things. First, the title underscores the
bifurcation discussed above; that is, the book is about how the spirit of
man—variously portrayed in the poems as either proud and indomitable or longing
for beauty—is shackled by an earthly existence marked by suffering and
theological uncertainty. Consequently,
Lewis shows in SB he realizes some
narrowing of the gap between his sense life is directed by a malicious God and
at the same time faery provides evidence of a mitigating transcendental
beauty. Second, his use of the lyric
form leads to many poems where we glimpse his deeply felt emotional life, but
it also limits his range of poetic sensibilities; for instance, though he
grapples with theological and aesthetic ponderings, the short nature of the
lyric prevents him from anywhere working out a resolution to the tensions he is
experiencing. Third, SB gives Lewis hope he might some day
achieve acclaim as a poet. The rigor of
academic study at
Those who know
Lewis only through his childrens’ stories, Christian apologetics, or Ransom
space trilogy should extend their reading to Lewis’ poetry. His first published works, SB and Dymer, are volumes of poetry; in addition, he writes many other
poems that are later collected by Walter Hooper and published as Poems (1964). Hooper also publishes Narrative Poems in 1969,
a volume that reprints Dymer as well
as three other narrative poems. Most
recently Hooper has published The
Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis (1994),
a work that reprints Spirits in Bondage
and Poems, and includes for the first
time “A Miscellany of Additional Poems,” a supplement of seventeen other short
poems, eleven previously unpublished.
Consequently, anyone interested in Lewis as a writer should become aware
of the important role poetry has in shaping his literary life, particularly his
aspirations to achieve acclaim as a poet.
Owen Barfield remembers Lewis when he first met him as one “whose ruling
ambition was to become a great poet. At
that time if you thought of Lewis you automatically thought of poetry.”[56] Tracing these aspirations and influences as
he moves from boyhood to mature adult is fascinating and sheds significant
light upon the prose for which he later becomes best known.
[1] In chronological
order, the critical essays are: Rodger Lancelyn Green, “C. S. Lewis and Andrew Lang.” Notes
and Queries 22 (May 1975): 208-09; George Musacchio, “War Poet.”
The Lamp-Post of the
[2] Walter Hooper’s “Preface” to the 1984 reprint of Spirits in Bondage is arguably the best piece of criticism currently available concerning these poems. Hooper’s great contribution is less literary analysis than literary history (though his accuracy even here is currently under question by Kathryn Lindskoog and others); his preface is long on how the volume came to be and short on literary analysis. For example, he reveals many of the poems later published in Spirits in Bondage were originally included in a hand-copied notebook entitled “The Metrical Meditations of a Cod.” Furthermore, he argues convincingly that certain poems almost certainly were written while Lewis lived and studied with his great tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick. We learn from Hooper that while Lewis’ father was privy to the typescript of the poems, “it seems doubtful if Mr. Lewis understood the ‘general idea’ behind the cycle” (xiii-xiv). Hooper goes on to provide an account of the important factors influencing Lewis while he was composing Spirits in Bondage, including his search for joy, his experiences at public school, his thrill at discovering “pure Northernness,” his friendship with Arthur Greeves, his studies under Kirkpatrick, his acceptance at Oxford, his military service, his reading of philosophy, and his aspiration to achieve acclaim as a poet. Of the latter Hooper quotes a letter to Greeves in which Lewis writes he is busy “scribbling verse” while at the front, hopes to have it published, and then expects to be killed; after which “I shall enjoy a 9 days immortality while friends who know nothing about poetry imagine that I must have been a genius--which usually happens in such cases” (xxix).
Also
of value is Hooper’s tracing of the publication history of the book from its
initial rejection by Macmillans to its eventual
publication by Heinemann under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. We learn as well of its generally favorable
evaluation by reviewers except for Lewis’ father and brother, Warren.
[3] Peter Schakel in his Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces devotes a thoughtful chapter to Lewis’ poetry in Spirits in Bondage and Dymer. Arguing the poetry demonstrates “a bifurcation and tension between the rationalism and the romantic”(93) aspects of Lewis’ personality, Schakel says “in [Spirits in Bondage]its ‘enlightened’ rationalism on the one hand and deep sense of longing for a world of the spirit on the other, the collection provides an early and immature version of themes which would be treated much more satisfactorily in Till We Have Faces” (94). He then offers cogent though brief comments upon “De Profundis” (where he says these opposing themes are united), “The Philosopher,” “The Escape,” “Dungeon Grates,” and “How He Saw Angus the God.” Schakel says the volume as a whole “is uneven as a collection of poetry: there are a few gems, usually brief passages rather than entire poems. Its strength is expression of youthful emotions rather than handling of poetic skills. Its best quality as poetry is its visual imagery” (98).
[4] In
another place Lewis admits as much “But before I say anything of my life
there [
[5] Warren Lewis records a letter on June 17?, 1915 from his brother to their father where Lewis considers this point: “A propos of conscription, I sincerely hope that one of two things may happen. Either that the war may be over before I am eighteen, or that conscription may not come into force before I have volunteered. I shouldn’t fancy going out to meet the others—as a conscript.” See “The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850-1930.” 11 volumes; hereafter LP. This excerpt is from LP, IV, pp. 322-323.
[6] Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p.158 (hereafter SJ).
[7] SJ, 187-88.
[8] 189.
[9] It could be argued Lewis does not discuss these issues because they are not germane to the limited scope of SJ—his youthful search for joy—but if he then introduces some aspects of his experience in WWI, should we not expect a fuller discussion of them? Lewis’ reticence to recall these issues is in part due to his effort to suppress the brutal realities of the battlefield; such suppression is not pathological but rather the normal response of many under crisis situations.
[10] SJ, 194.
[11] 195.
[12] 196.
[13] 196.
[14] See C. S. Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914‑1963). Ed. by Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 54-240 (hereafter TST) and LP, Volumes IV and V.
[15] Warren Lewis writes in LP, IV, 306:
It would be during this visit
[From Albert’s [Lewis] pocket diary:--“Thursday, April 1st.,
1915. Jacks arrived for Easter”] to
Little Lea that Clive wrote the first poetry which he himself considered worthy
of preservation so late as 1917. In the
two years intervening between Easter 1915 and Easter 1917, he wrote fifty two
poems which he copied carefully into an old Malvern Upper Fifth Divinity note
book, prefixing them with a chronological list of titles. The whole is entitled “The metrical
meditations of a Cod.” It is perhaps not
irrelevant to explain
here the
[16] Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 7.
[17] John Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 78.
[18] 155.
[19] Cited in Fussell, 176.
[20] In Siegfried’s Journey (New York: 1946) Sassoon writes:
In spite of my hatred of war and ‘Empery’s insatiate lust of power,’ there was an awful attraction in its hold over my mind, which since childhood had shown a tendency towards tragic emotions about human existence. While at Lancaster Gate [where he is recovering from wounds] I was disquieted by a craving to be back on the Western Front as an independent contemplator. No longer feeling any impulse to write bitterly, I imagined myself describing it in a comprehensive way, seeing it like a painter and imbuing my poetry with Whitmanesque humanity and amplitude. (pp. 104-05)
[21] Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 95 (written at Craiglockhart, 1917).
[22] 57 (written Oct. 31, 1916).”
[23] 16-17 (written Nov. 1915-Mar. 1916).
[24] See in The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, “The Prince of Wounds,” Golgotha,” “Stand-to: Good Friday Morning,” “At Carnoy,” “To His Dead Body,” “A Mystic as Soldier,” “In the Church of St. Ouen,” “Attack,” “Reconciliation,” “Vicarious Christ,” and especially “Christ and the Soldier.”
[25] C. Day Lewis from his “Introduction” to The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. by C. Day Lewis (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1963), p. 11.
[26] 35-36.
[27] 55.
[28] Other poems in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen with a similar sharpness include “Disabled,” “The Last Laugh,” “The Letter,” “The Chances,” “S[elf] .I[nflicted]. W[ound].,” “Smile, Smile, Smile,” and “Inspection.”
[29] 39.
[30] 41.
[31] 42.
[32] 82.
[33] 39.
[34] 58.
[35] C. S.
Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914‑1963). Ed. by Walter Hooper (New
York: Macmillan, 1979), p. 232
(hereafter TST). Several years later after recounting a story
from a friend who met Sassoon and said he “agonized in silence,” Lewis
adds: “Are all our modern poets like
this? Were the old ones so? It is almost enough to prove R.[obert]
Still
later in an essay, “Talking about Bicycles” (in Resistance, October, 1946; reprinted in Present Concerns.
Most of our juniors were
brought up Unenchanted about war. The Unenchanted man
sees (quite correctly) the waste and cruelty and sees nothing else. The Enchanted man is in the Rupert Brooke or
Philip Sidney state of mind—he’s thinking of glory and battle-poetry and
forlorn hopes and last stands and chivalry.
Then comes the Disenchanted Age—say Siegfried Sassoon. But there is also a fourth stage, though very
few people in modern
Lewis goes on to say the war poetry of Homer or The Battle of Maldon is Re-enchantment while that of the Lays or Ancient Rome or Lepanto is Enchantment since “the poets obviously have no idea what a battle is like” (70). Similarly, he continues, with Unenchantment and Disenchantment, and he implicitly refers to Sassoon:
[Suppose] you read an author in whom love is treated as lust and all war as murder—and so forth. But are you reading a Disenchanted man or only an Unenchanted man? Has the writer been through the Enchantment and come out on to the bleak highlands, or is he simply a subman who is . . . free from the heroic mirage as a coward is free? If Disenchanted, he may have something worth hearing to say, though less than a Re-enchanted man. If Unenchanted, into the fire with his book. He is talking of what he doesn’t understand. But the great danger we have to guard against in this age is the Unenchanted man, mistaking himself for, and mistaken by others for, the Disenchanted man. (70-71).
In addition to what Lewis implies here about Sassoon—his Unenchantment being mistaken for Disenchantment—he also offers insight into his own suppressed view of war. That is, the question becomes whether his own “enchanted” view of the war is “no more than an illusion of memory . . . [since one remembers] a good many more exciting experiences than one really had” (71). Lewis answers this by noting “memory is the supreme example of the four ages . . . But what then? Isn’t the warehousing [of memories] just as much a fact as anything else? Is the vision any less important because a particular kind of polarized light between past and present happens to be the mechanism that brings it into focus? (71).
[36] See C.
S. Lewis [Clive Hamilton, pseud.], Spirits in Bondage:
A Cycle of Lyrics.
[37] When possible, I will give the earliest known date of composition; unfortunately, this will only be possible for a limited number since the earliest versions have not survived.
[38] Walter Hooper in the “Preface” to SB suggests this poem dates somewhere around December 1917, within a month of Lewis reaching the trenches; see p. xxx.
[39] Fussell, 55.
[40] The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, p. 95.
[41] Two essays addressing the identity of Despoina are worth noting here. Joe Christopher 1994 essay,
“Is ‘D’ for Despoina?” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal No. 85 (Spring 1994): 48-59, is fascinating
speculation about whether Mrs. Moore is the inspiration for Despoina
in both “Apology” and “Ode for New Year’s Day.”
By referring to Lewis’ diaries and letters (especially to Arthur Greeves) where Lewis often referred to Mrs. Moore as “D”,
Christopher patches together a convincing though not verifiable conjecture in
support of this idea. He does not
analyze the poems as such but uses them in terms of the dating he tries to
establish, so that he concludes with “the mysterious ‘D’ and the literary use
of Despoina,
coming in the same general time period, are probably related; the discussion of
the two poems does not invalidate this conjecture and, in a general way, tends
to identify Janie Moore with Despoina; since she is
already identified with ‘D’, the triple identification of ‘D’, Despoina, and Moore seems likely “(at least, to
[Christopher]; 58-59).
John Bremer’s discussion of this same topic in his
“From Despoina to Diotima: The Mistress of C. S. Lewis” The Lewis Legacy No. 61 (Summer 1994):
6-18, is more thorough, perceptive, and, in the end he disagrees with
Christopher’s identification of Janie Moore with Despoina. He begins by providing a detailed chronology
of Lewis’ life from his first connection to
With regard to the second, Bremer follows with a helpful summary of the details we know about the writing, composition, and publication of the poems that finally make up SB. He concludes the first part of his essay by arguing that it “is absolutely clear . . . that Janie Moore and Jack’s feelings for her and his sexual relationship with her do not play any significant part in the composition, the literal putting together, of these poems into a lyric cycle . . . . Nor does she seem to have affected any individual poems” (11). Later Bremer discusses “Apology,” “Ode for New Year’s Day”, and “World’s Desire” (poems where Despoina or a woman seems to be addressed) and claims Mrs. Moore, in the sense that she inspired Lewis or was the object of admiration or veneration, “never touched his writings” (16). This fine essay ends with an intelligent discussion that posits possible references to “D” in the letters and diaries as Despoina (symbolically linked to the idea of “mistress” but not connected with the figure who is mentioned in SB), Demeter (the Earth-mother), and Diotima (the introducer to love in Greek literature).
[42] SB, 12. Lewis shows his indebtedness to
[43] PL, II, 269-70, 273.
[44] TST, 214.
[45] 230.
[46] The implications of Lewis’ theological dualism is beyond the scope of this study. While a poem like this clearly suggests Lewis may have embraced such dualism for a brief time, it is not a position he holds very long. In Mere Christianity he writes convincingly against holding this position since logically it assumes even if there are two gods, a “good” one and a “bad” one, there must be another god behind these two that created them.
[47] SB, 20-21.
[48] 9-10.
[49] 31. An early version of this poem dates from Christmas, 1915. See LP, V, 46.
[50] 59.
[51] 60. In the “Preface” to SB Hooper says this was one of the poems Lewis sent Heinemann as replacements for the five he rejected. I have been unable to verify Hooper’s assertion, but if it is accurate this means the poem dates sometime before or during September 1918 since Heinemann’s letter to Lewis dates September 3, 1918.
[52] See “Song of the Pilgrims” in SB.
[53] Lewis sends an early version of the poem to Greeves in a letter dated May 23, 1918; TST, 215-216.
[54] SB, 50.
[55] 25.
[56] Owen
Barfield, address at
[57] Joe Christopher offers this insight: “I’d say that Lewis wanted to be a Romantic poet and he actually was (most often) a classical epigrammist—he wanted to be John Keats and he was actually Ben Jonson” (Email to author, November 18, 1997).