Status Updates From The Collected Poems of C. S...

Finished Part II of this collection, up to the end of 1919, which is mostly made up of poems from WWI, including the published collection, “Spirits in Bondage”. Unrelentingly dark and despairing, with only moments and glimmers of brilliance and hope scattered throughout. But beautiful, beautiful writing.

“The Ass” (pub. 1919) is wonderful!

“Atoms dead could never thus
Stir the human heart of us
Unless the beauty that we see
The veil of endless beauty be,
Filled full of spirits that have trod
Far hence along the heavenly sod
And seen the bright footprints of God.”
~from “Song” (May 1918)

“Irish Nocturne”

Now the grey mist comes creeping up
From the waste ocean’s weedy strand
And fills the valley, as a cup
Is filled of evil drink in a wizard’s hand;
And the trees fade out of sight,
Like dreary ghosts unhealthily,
Into the damp, pale night,
Till you almost think that a clearer eye could see
Some shape come up of a demon seeking apart
His meat…

Ummm… Amazing!! Beginning of Bleak House?!

Rereading Lewis’s first published work, “Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics,” from 1919, as I read through his poetry chronologically in this collection. Many of these poems are from the WWI trenches… Dark, morbid, and hopeless—but beautiful in their own way. The “dark night of the soul” he lived through prior to his conversion always inspires and moves me.

From “Couplets” (Christmas 1916)

That we may mark with wonder and chaste dread
At hour of noon, when, with our limbs outspread,
Lazily in the whispering grass we lie
To gaze our full upon the windy sky
Far, far away, and kindly, friend with friend.
To talk the old, old talk that has no end,
Roaming without a name, without a chart
The unknown garden of another’s heart.

❤️❤️❤️

It is CRAZY that C. S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, could have written something so outrageously blasphemous as the Sonnet from the summer of 1916! It gives me such comfort and hope that NOBODY is beyond the redemption and forgiveness of God—a wonderful thought on this first day of Advent 2025!

These Easter 1916 poems ☠️☠️☠️

And Lewis arrived on the Front in the fall of 1917, so they are pre-firsthand war experience. They are grim and bleak…sheesh.

I want to know what happened to Lewis between Christmas 1915 and Easter 1916! 😳 Because his Christmas poems were relatively cozy and cheery, but these Easter poems are savagely cynical and hopeless… 🫣

This grouping of 5 poems, written Christmas 1915, was really wonderful!

“Yet More of the Wood Desolate”

Morbid and dark, but stunningly beautiful!

“Ballade of a Winter’s Morning”

SO cozy!!

“Against Potpourri” is a favourite so far.