When C. S. Lewis Cursed God:

From Loki Bound to Dymer

52 years after his death in 1963 the “Complete” Poems of CS Lewis were finally published last year (2015). Almost 500 pages of glorious poetry, and its all here: his boyhood descriptions of battle at age 9, his brutal experiences in the trenches of WWI, his anger at God, and his conversion to Christianity — and I’m chanting through it this summer! Yet he has always been considered a failure as a poet. His first two books, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926), a series of war poems and a long narrative poem respectively, were instant failures, and are seldom read even today. But I would like to post a few of my favorite lines for your consideration:

“Loki Bound” (age 14)

At age 14, CS Lewis wrote his first epic poem, “Loki Bound,” of which only fragments survive. Through the voice of Loki, his growing disdain for god/Odin can be seen:

I walked with Odin through the shapeless void.
Ah! We were brothers then….And viewed the wild chaotic waste, the sun
The moon, the stars, all ignorant of their tasks,
Knowing not each his place, then Odin told
How he would build a world, a home for man,
And lay the Ocean round it like a cloak
— — -
But even in that early age I saw
The awful error and injustice dread.
Then, knowing what I knew, addressed the god.
Odin! and who art thou to make a soul
And force it into being? Who art thou
To bring forth men to suffer in the world
Without their own desire?
— —
Lo! The bald ravens flutter down to earth:
’Tis Oden that I see. The cloud grey steed
Flies through the storm clouds, and upon his back
The grim creator of the world is borne.”
-Collected Poems (34).

“New Year’s Eve” (age 17)

At age 17, the atheist CS Lewis compares God (or “the Thing”) to a man who crushes a beetle but barely notices it. It was 1915, and 7,000 soldiers were dying on the Western Front every day:

The beetle we crush on the pavement is slain: but we hear not its chiding,
No tale of the limbs that are twisted, breast-shattered and broken brain;
And we too? How shall we also cry out to the Thing that is guiding
The years? Shall it hear if we call it? Or hearing reck of our pain?
Shall a man then pray to the whirlwind, or reason his cause with the thunder?
Shall the winds of the North give an ear to his pleading, or pity his woe?
Even so! Our desire is as nought, to the years and their Master: but under
Their heals we are crushed and forever unmoved on their journey they go.

For we — we are pitiless too…
From “New Year’s Eve”(CP 58)

Spirits in Bondage (1919): first published work — age 21

At age 20, recovering from shrapnel wounds in the trenches, CS Lewis wrote this, in his first published work: a cycle of war poems which express deep anger and pain towards God:

Deluded, thwarted, striving elf
That through the window of my self
As through a dark glass scarce can see
A warped and masked reality

Dymer (1926) — age 28

CS Lewis’ 2nd book, Dymer (1926), published under a pseudonym so his former WWI buddies wouldn’t call him “Lewis the bloody poet.” It was a flop, selling less than 2000 copies. Yet these two 1st editions — -which I had the privilege to fondle this week at the Wade Research Lib. at Wheaton College — -now sell for over 12K (British ed. on right) and 1k (American ed. on left). Dymer is the clearest pic. we have of Lewis as an atheist. A brilliant read.

At age 26, CS Lewis was teaching at Oxford, and had written nothing about the horrors he saw in WW I. He has therefore been accused of repressing his most painful war memories. But when we open Dymer (1926), his longest poem, we read page after page of gruesome battle scenes like this:

Half-way to midnight, suddenly, from dreaming
He woke wide into present horror, screaming.

For he dreamt of being in the arms
Of his beloved and in quiet places;
But all at once it filled with night alarms
And rapping guns: and men with splintered faces,
— No eyes, no nose, all red — -were running races
With worms along the floor (5.6).

CS Lewis worked on Dymer (1926) for almost 10 years, hoping it would establish him as a great English poet. But it was a flop and barely read.Yet Dymer is a fascinating portrait of Lewis’ struggle with romantic and sexual fantasies, and a God he believed was utterly indifferent to human suffering. Here Dymer wakes from a drug-induced dream about a mysterious girl he was desperately searching for:

Oh, I can see
Her red lips even now! Is it not wrong
That men’s delusions should be made so strong?

For listen, I was so besotted now
She made me think that I was somehow seeing
The very core of truth…I felt somehow,
Beyond all veils, the inward pulse of being.
Thought was enslaved, but oh, it felt like freeing
And draughts of larger air. It is too much!
Who can come through untainted from that touch?

There I was nearly wrecked. But mark the rest:
She went too fast. Soft to my arms she came.
The robe slipped from her shoulder. The smooth breast
Was bare against my own. She shone like flame
Before me in the dusk, all love, all shame — -
Faugh! — -and it was myself.

Age 29: Conversion

By age 29 CS Lewis felt that God had “checkmated” him, and describes himself as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He later felt amazed that God had accepted him “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape.” But Lewis never based decisions on feelings, and his logic had led him inexorably into the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet his heart took a while to catch up to his head, as can be seen in this 1929 poem:

“My heart is empty. All the fountains that should run
With longing, are in me
Dried up. In all my countryside there is not one
That drips to find the sea”

But he then he expresses confidence that God will “Desire for me what I cannot Desire.” And he ends the poem on perhaps the most striking metaphor he has composed:

“Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes
Still turning round the earth”
( CP 226).