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SPIRITS IN BONDAGE A CYCLE OF LYRICS

By Clive Hamilton [C. S. Lewis]

Contents

Historical Background. Prologue.

Part I. The Prison House. I. Satan Speaks

II. French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux) III. The Satyr

IV. Victory

V. Irish Nocturne

VI. Spooks

VII. Apology

VIII. Ode for New Year's Day

IX. Night

X. To Sleep

XI. In Prison

XII. De Profundis XIII. Satan Speaks XIV. The Witch

XV. Dungeon Grates XVI. The Philosopher XVII. The Ocean Strand XVIII. Noon

XIX. Milton Read Again (In Surrey) XXI. The Autumn Morning

Part II. Hesitation. XXIII. Alexandrines

XXIV. In Praise of Solid People

Part III. The Escape. XXVI. Song XXVII. The Ass

XXVIII. Ballade Mystique

XXIX. Night

XXX. Oxford

XXXI. Hymn (For Boys' Voices) XXXII. "Our Daily Bread"

XXXIII. How He Saw Angus the God

XXXIV. The Roads XXXV. Hesperus XXXVI. The Star Bath XXXVII. Tu Ne Quaesieris

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XXXVIII. Lullaby XXXIX. World's Desire XL. Death in Battle

In Three Parts

I. The Prison House

II. Hesitation

III. The Escape

"The land where I shall never be

The love that I shall never see"

Historical Background

Published under the pseudonym, Clive Hamilton, Spirits in Bondage was C. S. Lewis' first book. Released in 1919 by Heinemann,

it was reprinted in 1984 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and included in Lewis' 1994 Collected Poems. It is the first of Lewis' major published works to enter the public domain in the United States. Readers should be aware that in other countries it may still be under copyright protection.

Most of the poems appear to have been written between 1915 and 1918, a period during which Lewis was a student under W. T. Kirkpatrick, a military trainee at Oxford, and a soldier serving in the trenches of World War I. Their outlook varies from Roman-tic expressions of love for the beauty and simplicity of nature to cynical statements about the presence of evil in this world. In a September 12, 1918 letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis said that his book was, "mainly strung around the idea that I men-

tioned 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." In his cynical poems, Lewis is dealing with the same questions about evil in nature that Alfred Lord Tennyson explored from a position of troubled faith in "In Memoriam A. H." (Stanzas 54f). In a letter written perhaps to reassure his father, Lewis claimed, "You know who the God I blaspheme is and that it is not the God that you or I worship, or any other Christian."

Whatever Lewis believed at that time, the attitude in many of these poems is quite different from the attitude he expressed in his many Christian books from the 1930s on. Attempts in movies and on stage plays to portray Lewis as a sheltered professor who knew little about pain until the death of his wife late in life, have to deal not only with the many tragedies he experienced from a boy on, but also with the disturbing issues he faced in many of these early poems.

Prologue

As of old Phoenician men, to the Tin Isles sailing Straight against the sunset and the edges of the earth, Chaunted loud above the storm and the strange sea's wailing, Legends of their people and the land that gave them birth-- Sang aloud to Baal-Peor, sang unto the horned maiden,

Sang how they should come again with the Brethon treasure laden, Sang of all the pride and glory of their hardy enterprise,

How they found the outer islands, where the unknown stars arise; And the rowers down below, rowing hard as they could row,

Toiling at the stroke and feather through the wet and weary weather,

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Even they forgot their burden in the measure of a song,

And the merchants and the masters and the bondsmen all together, Dreaming of the wondrous islands, brought the gallant ship along; So in mighty deeps alone on the chainless breezes blown

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.

Part I The Prison House

I. Satan Speaks

I am Nature, the Mighty Mother, I am the law: ye have none other.

I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh, I am the lust in your itching flesh.

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.

I am the fact and the crushing reason

To thwart your fantasy's new-born treason.

I am the spider making her net,

I am the beast with jaws blood-wet.

I am a wolf that follows the sun

And I will catch him ere day be done.

II. French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux)

Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread

And all is still; now even this gross line

Drinks in the frosty silences divine

The pale, green moon is riding overhead.

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.

There comes a buzzing plane: and now, it seems

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Flies straight into the moon. Lo! where he steers

Across the pallid globe and surely nears

In that white land some harbour of dear dreams!

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.

III. The Satyr

When the flowery hands of spring

Forth their woodland riches fling,

Through the meadows, through the valleys

Goes the satyr carolling.

From the mountain and the moor, Forest green and ocean shore

All the faerie kin he rallies

Making music evermore.

See! the shaggy pelt doth grow On his twisted shanks below, And his dreadful feet are cloven

Though his brow be white as snow--

Though his brow be clear and white

And beneath it fancies bright,

Wisdom and high thoughts are woven

And the musics of delight,

Though his temples too be fair Yet two horns are growing there Bursting forth to part asunder All the riches of his hair.

Faerie maidens he may meet

Fly the horns and cloven feet,

But, his sad brown eyes with wonder

Seeing-stay from their retreat.

IV. Victory

Roland is dead, Cuchulain's crest is low,

The battered war-rear wastes and turns to rust, And Helen's eyes and Iseult's lips are dust

And dust the shoulders and the breasts of snow.

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The faerie people from our woods are gone, No Dryads have I found in all our trees,

No Triton blows his horn about our seas

And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon.

The ancient songs they wither as the grass

And waste as doth a garment waxen old,

All poets have been fools who thought to mould

A monument more durable than brass.

For these decay: but not for that decays

The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man

That never rested yet since life began

From striving with red Nature and her ways.

Now in the filth of war, the baresark shout

Of battle, it is vexed. And yet so oft

Out of the deeps, of old, it rose aloft

That they who watch the ages may not doubt.

Though often bruised, oft broken by the rod, Yet, like the phoenix, from each fiery bed Higher the stricken spirit lifts its head

And higher-till the beast become a god.

V. Irish Nocturne

Now the grey mist comes creeping up From the waste ocean's weedy strand And fills the valley, as a cup

If filled of evil drink in a wizard's hand;

And the trees fade out of sight, Like dreary ghosts unhealthily, Into the damp, pale night,

Till you almost think that a clearer eye could see Some shape come up of a demon seeking apart His meat, as Grendel sought in Harte

The thanes that sat by the wintry log-- Grendel or the shadowy mass

Of Balor, or the man with the face of clay, The grey, grey walker who used to pass Over the rock-arch nightly to his prey.

But here at the dumb, slow stream where the willows hang, With never a wind to blow the mists apart,

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;

For I know that the colourless skies

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And the blurred horizons breed

Lonely desire and many words and brooding and never a deed.

VI. Spooks

Last night I dreamed that I was come again Unto the house where my beloved dwells After long years of wandering and pain.

And I stood out beneath the drenching rain

And all the street was bare, and black with night, But in my true love's house was warmth and light.

Yet I could not draw near nor enter in, And long I wondered if some secret sin Or old, unhappy anger held me fast;

Till suddenly it came into my head

That I was killed long since and lying dead-- Only a homeless wraith that way had passed.

So thus I found my true love's house again And stood unseen amid the winter night And the lamp burned within, a rosy light, And the wet street was shining in the rain.

VII. Apology

If men should ask, Despoina, why I tell

Of nothing glad nor noble in my verse

To lighten hearts beneath this present curse

And build a heaven of dreams in real hell,

Go you to them and speak among them thus: "There were no greater grief than to recall,

Down in the rotting grave where the lithe worms crawl,

Green fields above that smiled so sweet to us."

Is it good to tell old tales of Troynovant Or praises of dead heroes, tried and sage, Or sing the queens of unforgotten age, Brynhild and Maeve and virgin Bradamant?

How should I sing of them? Can it be good To think of glory now, when all is done, And all our labour underneath the sun

Has brought us this-and not the thing we would?

All these were rosy visions of the night, The loveliness and wisdom feigned of old. But now we wake. The East is pale and cold, No hope is in the dawn, and no delight.

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VIII. Ode for New Year's Day

Woe unto you, ye sons of pain that are this day in earth, Now cry for all your torment: now curse your hour of birth And the fathers who begat you to a portion nothing worth. And Thou, my own beloved, for as brave as ere thou art, Bow down thine head, Despoina, clasp thy pale arms over it,

Lie low with fast-closed eyelids, clenched teeth, enduring heart,

For sorrow on sorrow is coming wherein all flesh has part. The sky above is sickening, the clouds of God's hate cover it, Body and soul shall suffer beyond all word or thought,

Till the pain and noisy terror that these first years have wrought

Seem but the soft arising and prelude of the storm

That fiercer still and heavier with sharper lightnings fraught

Shall pour red wrath upon us over a world deform.

Thrice happy, O Despoina, were the men who were alive

In the great age and the golden age when still the cycle ran On upward curve and easily, for them both maid and man And beast and tree and spirit in the green earth could thrive. But now one age is ending, and God calls home the stars And looses the wheel of the ages and sends it spinning back Amid the death of nations, and points a downward track, And madness is come over us and great and little wars.

He has not left one valley, one isle of fresh and green Where old friends could forgather amid the howling wreck. It's vainly we are praying. We cannot, cannot check

The Power who slays and puts aside the beauty that has been.

It's truth they tell, Despoina, none hears the heart's complaining

For Nature will not pity, nor the red God lend an ear, Yet I too have been mad in the hour of bitter paining

And lifted up my voice to God, thinking that he could hear

The curse wherewith I cursed Him because the Good was dead. But lo! I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts

Have made a phantom called the Good, while a few years have sped

Over a little planet. And what should the great Lord know of it

Who tosses the dust of chaos and gives the suns their parts?

Hither and thither he moves them; for an hour we see the show of it: Only a little hour, and the life of the race is done.

And here he builds a nebula, and there he slays a sun

And works his own fierce pleasure. All things he shall fulfill,