Spirits in Bondage E-Book

C.S. Lewis

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 54

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A rare glimpse of a young C. S. Lewis.Spirits in Bondage reveals the earliest published thoughts of C. S. Lewis. However, we find an unfamiliar Lewis--not the mature Christian but the young atheist cynic, who fought in the harrowing Great War. In these poems Lewis dreads the dangerous world that keeps us from living meaningful lives.Introduced by Karen Swallow Prior, this beautiful print edition of Spirits in Bondage will nuance our understanding of C. S. Lewis.

Leseprobe

SPIRITS IN BONDAGE

A CYCLE OF LYRICS

C. S. LEWIS

Introduced by

Karen Swallow Prior

LEXHAM PRESS

BELLINGHAM

WASHINGTON

MMXX

Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics

by C. S. Lewis

Copyright 2020 Lexham Press

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Originally published by William Heinemann (London: 1919).

Print ISBN 9781683593706

Digital ISBN 9781683593713

Library of Congress Control Number 2019956843

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Danielle Thevenaz

Cover Design: Micah Ellis

“The land where I shall never be

The love that I shall never see”

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTIONBY KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR

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)

XX

SONNET

XXI

THE AUTUMN MORNING

PART II: HESITATION

XXII

L’APPRENTI SORCIER

XXIII

ALEXANDRINES

XXIV

IN PRAISE OF SOLID PEOPLE

PART III: THE ESCAPE

XXV

SONG OF THE PILGRIMS

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

XXXVIII

LULLABY

XXXIX

WORLD’S DESIRE

XL

DEATH IN BATTLE

INTRODUCTION

KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR

Spirits in Bondage is a work of literary, intellectual, and spiritual immaturity—and promise. Published in 1919 under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton (C. S. Lewis’s first name and his deceased mother’s maiden name), Spirits in Bondage was his first published work and thus provides important insights into the artist as a young man—a young man who would become one of the most read and revered of modern Christian writers. To the reader familiar only with his prose, written at a time of greater personal and artistic maturity, this volume of poems will seem at once familiar and strange—familiar with faeries, satyrs, and talking animals and yet strange because of the unbelief, despair, and bitterness that pervade the poems.

Only 20 years old when the book was published, Lewis was an atheist during this time, as he would later recount in Surprised by Joy. The story of Lewis’s conversion—which occurred twelve years after the publication of this work—is well known: raised within a Christian context, Lewis embraced atheism as a teen, eventually returned to theism, and then—in 1931, when he was 32 years old, under the influence of his friend J. R. R. Tolkien—became a genuine if reluctant convert to Christianity. Reading these poems in retrospect, it is difficult not to see in them a deep longing for transcendence despite their repeated declarations of unbelief.

The dark mood that prevails in the collection is hardly surprising, given the circumstances in which they were written. Many of the poems were written or revised during the year Lewis spent in the trenches of World War I in France and during his recovery from injuries sustained there. The last poem in the collection, “Death in Battle,” would have served as Lewis’s farewell had he not survived the war.

Yet, this somber spirit has sources beyond Lewis’s atheism and nightmares of war. Poetry is always written in conversation with other poets, writers, and thinkers as well as with the general spirit of one’s age, and Lewis’s verses reflect a diverse range of literary and intellectual sources. The materialism, pessimism, and unbelief of the poems also characterized the general mood of the end of the nineteenth century. Echoes of later Victorian poets such as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy reverberate through many of the poems in Spirits in Bondage, particularly “In Prison” and “De Profundis,” which contend with an “evil God” and the vanity of any attempt to believe in “a just God that cares for earthly pain.”

This heavy influence by earlier poets appears not only in the ideas of the poems, but in their form as well. In fact, the intricate style of many of the poems was already outdated when they were published—partly explaining the cool critical reception that helped turn Lewis from writing poetry to prose, which would become his legacy. An overall weakness of the poems is their wooden parroting of other earlier poets. Clearly, Spirits in Bondage reveals a young literary scholar still in search of a perspective and voice truly his own.

Despite the derivative quality of the work, Lewis chose his influences well. Chief among these is John Milton, whose Paradise Lost provides the title phrase, Spirits in Bondage. This phrase appears in a speech by Satan in Book I when, after being expelled from heaven and thrown into hell, Satan rouses his legion of fallen angels by declaring:

… this Infernal Pit shall never hold

Caelestial Spirits in Bondage.

In Satan, Milton presents a reverse image of Christ who, according to traditional interpretations of 1 Peter 3:19 and 4:6, descended into hell to liberate the souls there. Such a reversal is characteristic of the poems in Spirits in Bondage in that it is based on a kind of dualism—a conception of the world in terms of opposing forces or ideals—that reflects the worldview found in it.