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--