Spirits in Bondage

C. S. Lewis

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062565600
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Religious Poetry
• Index: Literature

A repackaged edition of the revered author's first book—a collection of poems, written in the wake of World War I, in which the young intellectual and soldier wrestles with the perplexing polarities of life, including love and war, evil and goodness, and other complex dichotomies.

In 1919, C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—published his first book, Spirits in Bondage, under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Written when Lewis was a student at Oxford and during the war when he served at the front in France, Spirits in Bondage reflects the intellectual and spiritual struggles of a young man wounded by war and conflicted over faith. As he contemplates the nature of morality, love, the presence of evil, the possibility of God, and other profound questions. Lewis reveals a side of himself unfamiliar to many readers.

PART ONE

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

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 music 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.

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 gr...