Spirits in Bondage

C.S. Lewis

Description

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.

Sujets

• Christianity
• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683593713
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

SPIRITS IN BONDAGE
A CYCLE OF LYRICS
C. S. LEWIS
Introduced by
Karen Swallow Prior

L EXHAM P RESS
B ELLINGHAM
W ASHINGTON
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 [e-mail] .
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”
C ONTENTS

I NTRODUCTION BY K AREN S WALLOW P RIOR

P ROLOGUE

PART I: THE PRISON HOUSE
I
S ATAN S PEAKS
II
F RENCH N OCTURNE (M ONCHY -L E -P REUX )
III
T HE S ATYR
IV
V ICTORY
V
I RISH N OCTURNE
VI
S POOKS
VII
A POLOGY
VIII
O DE FOR N EW Y EAR’S D AY
IX
N IGHT
X
T O S LEEP
XI
I N P RISON
XII
D E P ROFUNDIS
XIII
S ATAN S PEAKS
XIV
T HE W ITCH
XV
D UNGEON G RATES
XVI
T HE P HILOSOPHER
XVII
T HE O CEAN S TRAND
XVIII
N OON
XIX
M ILTON R EAD A GAIN (I N S URREY )
XX
S ONNET
XXI
T HE A UTUMN M ORNING

PART II: HESITATION
XXII
L’A PPRENTI S ORCIER
XXIII
A LEXANDRINES
XXIV
I N P RAISE OF S OLID P EOPLE

PART III: THE ESCAPE
XXV
S ONG OF THE P ILGRIMS
XXVI
S ONG
XXVII
T HE A SS
XXVIII
B ALLADE M YSTIQUE
XXIX
N IGHT
XXX
O XFORD
XXXI
H YMN (F OR B OYS’ V OICES )
XXXII
“O UR D AILY B READ ”
XXXIII
H OW H E S AW A NGUS THE G OD
XXXIV
T HE R OADS
XXXV
H ESPERUS
XXXVI
T HE S TAR B ATH
XXXVII
T U N E Q UAESIERIS
XXXVIII
L ULLABY
XXXIX
W ORLD’S D ESIRE
XL
D EATH IN B ATTLE
INTRODUCTION
K AREN S WALLOW P RIOR
S pirits 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.