Narrative Poems

C. S. Lewis

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062565532
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

A repackaged edition of the revered author's collection of four poems: "Dymer, " "Launcelot, " "The Nameless Isle, " and "The Queen of Drum."

C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—was also a talented poet. In this collection of four longer works of verse, Lewis displays his deep love for medieval and Renaissance poetry and themes, influences that shaped—and resonate through—his fiction.

DYMER

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR TO THE 1950 EDITION OF DYMER

At its original appearance in 1926, Dymer, like many better books, found some good reviews and almost no readers. The idea of disturbing its repose in the grave now comes from its publishers, not from me, but I have a reason for wishing to be present at the exhumation. Nearly a quarter of a century has gone since I wrote it, and in that time things have changed both within me and round me; my old poem might be misunderstood by those who now read it for the first time.

I am told that the Persian poets draw a distinction between poetry which they have ‘found’ and poetry which they have ‘brought’: if you like, between the given and the invented, though they wisely refuse to identify this with the distinction between good and bad. Their terminology applies with unusual clarity to my poem. 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. Every one may allegorise it or psychoanalyse it as he pleases: and if I did so myself my interpretations would have no more authority than anyone else’s.

The Platonic and totalitarian state from which Dymer escapes in Canto I was a natural invention for one who detested the state in Plato’s Republic as much as he liked everything else in Plato, and who was, by temperament, an extreme anarchist. I put into it my hatred of my public school and my recent hatred of the army. But I was already critical of my own anarchism. There had been a time when the sense of defiant and almost drunken liberation which fills the first two acts of Siegfried had completely satisfied me. Now, I thought, I knew better. My hero therefore must go through his Siegfried moment in Cantos I and II and find in Canto IV what really comes of that mood in the end. For it seemed to me that two opposite forces in man tended equally to revolt. The one criticises and at need defies civilisation because it is not good enough, the other stabs it from below and behind because it is already too good for total baseness to endure. The hero who dethrones a tyrant will therefore be first fêted and afterwards murdered by the rabble who feel a disinterested hatred of order and reason as such. Hence, in Canto IV, Bran’s revolt which at once parodies and punishes Dymer’s. It will be remembered that, when I wrote, the first horrors of the Russian Revolution were still fresh in every one’s mind; and in my own country, Ulster, we had had opportunities of observing the daemonic character of popular political ‘causes’.

In those days the new psychology was just beginning to make itself felt in the circles I most frequented at Oxford. This joined forces with the fact that we felt ourselves (as young men always do) to be escaping from the illusions of adolescence, and as a result we were much exercised about the problem of fantasy or wishful thinking. The ‘Christiana Dream’, as we called it (after Christiana Pontifex in Butler’s novel), was the hidden enemy whom we were all determined to unmask and defeat. My hero, therefore, had to be a man who had succumbed to its allurements and finally got the better of them. But the particular form in which this was worked out depended on two peculiarities of my own history.

(1) From at least the age of six, romantic longing—Sehnsucht—had played an unusually central part in my experience. Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing. But it throws off what may be called systems of imagery. One among many such which it had thrown off for me was the Hesperian or Western Garden system, mainly derived from Euripides, Milton, Morris, and the early Yeats. By the time I wrote Dymer I had come, u...