Splendour in the Dark

C. S. Lewis's Dymer in His Life and Work

Jerry Root

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780830853755
• eBook ISBN: 9780830855292
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry

"... Root has done us all an immense service, by rescuing this neglected poem from obscurity and presenting us with an excellent, scholarly edition. ... Everyone who loves Lewis will not only enjoy this book but also find that Root's commentary on Dymer enhances their reading of Lewis's other works as well." – Malcolm Guite, Girton College, Cambridge

Several years before he converted to Christianity, C. S. Lewis published a narrative poem, Dymer, under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Later, of course, Lewis became well known for his beloved imaginative stories, such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Till We Have Faces, as well as his ability to defend and articulate the faith in works such as Mere Christianity.

But what about his literary work before his conversion?

In this Hansen Series volume, Jerry Root contends that Lewis's early poem Dymer can not only shed light on the development of Lewis's literary skills but also offer a glimpse of what was to come in his intellectual and spiritual growth—a "splendour in the dark," to borrow one of Lewis's own lines from the poem. Under Root's careful analysis, Dymer becomes a way to understand both Lewis's change of mind as well as the way in which each of us is led on a journey of faith.

This volume also includes the complete text of Dymer with annotations from David C. Downing, co-director of the Marion E. Wade Center.

About the Series

The Hansen Series celebrates the literary and spiritual contributions of seven British authors whose works have captivated readers across generations: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. These seven authors were all deeply involved in the friendships and intellectual exchanges that shaped the Inklings, a mid-twentieth-century group of Christian writers and thinkers in Oxford, England. This series invites readers to deepen their engagement with these timeless voices and their enduring influence on literature, faith, and the life of the imagination.

Dymer

Wade Annotated Edition

Annotations by
David C. Downing

Foreword

David C. Downing

C. S. LEWIS’S FIRST AND ONLY book-length narrative poem Dymer (originally published in 1926)1 was not a literary success. But it is a fascinating failure. Published five years before Lewis’s conversion to Christianity in 1931, the poem is a promising bit of apprentice work for a young writer who hadn’t yet discovered which medium was best for what he wanted to say—or indeed what it was that he truly wanted to say.

In his preface to the 1950 edition of Dymer (later reprinted in Narrative Poems), Lewis explained the origins of Dymer and how it can best be understood:

What I “found” what simply “came to me” was the story of a man who, on some mysterious bride, begets a monster: which monster, as soon as it has killed its father, becomes a god. This story arrived, complete, in my mind somewhere about my seventeenth year. To the best of my knowledge I did not consciously or voluntarily invent it, nor was it, in the plain sense of that word, a dream. All I know about it is that there was a time when it was not there, and then presently a time when it was. Everyone may allegorize it or psychoanalyse it as he pleases: and if I did so myself my interpretations would have no more authority than anyone else’s.2

Clearly, Lewis in his early years wanted to create a “modern myth,” similar to those he admired in George MacDonald and Franz Kafka. Lewis realized that most myths evolve gradually, the work of many voices over many centuries. But he believed there were also modern mythmakers, writers who could create archetypal patterns of events that transcended their actual choice of words in telling a story.

Lewis wrote a prose version of Dymer in 1916–1917, which has not survived. In 1918 he tried retelling the story in verse, taking his poetic form from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. In this version, the poem was called “The Redemption of Ask,” after the first man named Ask, the “Adam” character in Norse mythology. Finally in 1922 Lewis recast the story in rhyme royal, a stanza form invented by Chaucer. This poetic form consists in seven-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, with end-rhymes of ABABBCC. Lewis finished the poem in 1925, and it was published by J. M. Dent in 1926.

Lewis was hoping that Dymer would launch his career as a poet, but it received more negative reviews than positive, and it quickly sank into oblivion. By the mid-1920s, modernist poetry was in vogue, so that traditional, metered poetry had become passé, especially narrative poems. The poem itself is uneven, beginning with o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dymer: Wade Annotated Edition
• Hansen Lectures by Jerry Root
• Contributors
• Index to Dymer: Wade Annotated Edition
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• The Hansen Lectureship Series
• Notes
• Praise for Splendour in the Dark
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright