BOOKISHGAL

This ISBN-less book is one of the treasures among my treasures.

People know that C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, and most of those know that he also wrote philosophical/theological books. A subset of those are aware of his science fiction trilogy as well. But even among the ones who know all that, few remember that he also wrote poetry. I used to have two books of his poems, but somehow I’ve lost one over the years. But the one I still have is one of my dearest treasures.

This volume - a medium-sized hardcover - is from 1964, a reprint of the first publication of 1964, and is edited by Lewis’s friend Walter Hooper. The poems are sometimes inspired, sometimes absolutely satirical. He treats God and the pagan deities with equal delight and wonder, and makes the same sharp observations about human nature and its foibles that he does in his theological writings.

Let me give you some examples of what I love. In “A Confession,” he talks about how unpoetical he seems to be, compared to others who are considered great poets:

I’m like that old 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.

One shudders with bliss at the exalted poetry of those last four lines. He began the poem by saying, “I am so coarse, the things the poets see are obstinately invisible to me.” Not true, not true.

Then there’s the poem, “As the Ruin Falls,” (**) in which he laments what is essentially the human condition: that he is incapable of being anything other than a self-seeking, self-centred Ego:

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.

I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:

I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,

I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:

I talk of love – a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek –

But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

(** If you ever have the chance to hear the full poem put to music and sung by guitarist Phil Keaggy — DO. It will make you weep.)

It’s such poems that I go to when I’m feeling gloomy or sorry. But at other times, there are the hilarious ones that I read over and over in glee. Like this one, which is probably my favourite, in which he lampoons the attitude of his time, where people were so gung-ho about “progress” that they saw the human race doing nothing but climb ever higher in the universe, always getting better and better. This is called “Evolutionary Hymn,” and these are the first three verses:

Lead us, Evolution, lead us

Up the future’s endless stair:

Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.

For stagnation is despair:

Groping, guessing, yet progressing,

Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice in the present,

Joy or sorrow, what are they

While there’s always jam to-morrow

While we tread the onward way

Never knowing where we’re going,

We can never go astray.

To whatever variation

Our posterity may turn

Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,

Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,

Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,

Towards that unknown god we yearn.

You might be able to tell why this is one of my greatest treasures, and why I take this book out very often and read it over and over.

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