C.S. Lewis: A Single Author
(Published in the Winter 2001 issue of THE LAMP-POST.)

When C. S. Lewis was in his fifties he was apparently of two minds about his pre-Christian poetry. On one hand he seemed to disown the poems in Spirits in Bondage, and on the other hand he fondly owned them as long as he lived. We have both of these attitudes in his own handwriting.

On 14 January 1951 Lewis wrote to a highly literate American named William Kinter, "The only printed verse of mine outside of the Regress (and a very early volume wh. I don't want remembered) is a poem called Dymer..." Spirits in Bondage is the volume he didn't want remembered. (He continued, "also in Punch, over the signature N. W. (=Nat Whilk=O.E. nat hwylc) several short pieces wh. are chiefly experiments in internal rhyme and consonance -- not to be read unless you have strong metrical interests.")1

Spirits in Bondage was not often remembered, but in fact he did not mind when it was. On 29 October 1957 he wrote to me "Your thesis arrived yesterday and I read it at once. You are in the centre of the target everywhere. For one thing, you know my work better than anyone else I've met; certainly better than I do myself. (I've no recollection whatever of The World's Last Night and can't imagine what it was about!)."

That thesis was titled The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land (now included in Journey into Narnia), and it included comments upon four of Lewis's Spirits in Bondage poems: "Song," "Victory," "The Ocean Strand," and "Our Daily Bread."

"Song," appeared in Chapter Two, "Spoiled Goodness: Lewis's Concept of Nature" under the subheading "Rural Beauty." There Lewis read comments relating "Song," to The Magician's Nephew, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Lewis's introduction to D. E. Harding's The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

....the rich profuseness of nature is sensuously exaggerated in Lewis's description of the Wood between the Worlds in The Magician's Nephew:

You could almost feel the trees growing . . . a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive. . . . It was a rich place: as rich as plum-cake.2

Here Lewis is apparently reverting to "the older conception of Nature . . . tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine."3

In an early poem, Lewis once said,

Faeries must be in the woods
Or the satyrs' laughing broods--
Tritons in the summer sea,
Else how could the dead things be
Half so lovely as they are? . . . 4

Later, Lewis developed this idea in lively prose in his introduction to D. E.. Harding's The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. "We have emptied the baby out with the bath," he states. "In emptying out the dryads and the gods (which, admittedly, 'would not do' just as they stood) we appear to have thrown out the whole universe, ourselves included."5

According to Lewis, a dryad is the abbreviated symbol for all we know about trees. So is "mind or consciousness" a symbol for what we know about behavior. Rejection of these concepts occurs when the symbol is mistaken for the object.6

At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds, and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As those items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object.. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken (and in much the same way) when we attributed 'souls' or 'selves' or 'minds' to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees. Animism apparently begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications.7

In the section of Lion of Judah subtitled "The Corruption of Nature," Lewis read comments relating his poem "Victory" to Prince Caspian, The Ring of the Nibelung, and Mere Christianity:

In Prince Caspian a wise old dwarf informs the Prince of the harm done by evil King Miraz, who has trampled out the natural beauty of Narnia. He assures the Prince that what he had heard about Old Narnia is true. "It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts"; but the wicked king no longer allows them to be spoken of.8 This is the situation lamented by Lewis in an early lyric:

The faerie people from our woods are gone,
No Dryads have I found in all our trees.
No Triton blows his horn about our seas
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon.9

In The Silver Chair another witch has assumed power, this time by suppression of the glad natural order of the world beneath the surface of the earth, reminiscent of Wagner's Nibelheim.10 There she enchanted merry dwarfs from the deep land of Bism and brought them up near the surface of the earth to Shallowlands to work for her in a state of glum amnesia. She is planning a great invasion of Narnia. The idea of invasions and battles is basic to those books.

"Enemy-occupied territory--that is what this world is," Lewis plainly states in Mere Christianity.11 Yet he consciously avoids slipping into dualism, which he defines as "the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless War" (p. 33).

In the same section of Lion of Judah, Lewis read the following passage relating "The Ocean Strand" to Lewis's essay "Evil and Good," The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Norse mythology, and Dymer,

"If evil has the same kind of reality as good, the same autonomy and completeness, our allegiance to good becomes the arbitrarily chosen loyalty of a partisan."12 Lewis makes it clear in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that the power of evil is inferior to the power of good. The power of good is that of the great King:

"He's the King. He's the Lord of the whole wood, but not often here, you understand. Never in my time or my father's time. But the word has reached us that he has come back. He is in Narnia at this moment. He'll settle the White Queen all right. . . ."
"She won"t turn him into stone too?" said Edmund.
". . . Turn him into stone? If she can stand on her two feet and look him in the face it'll be the most she can do and more than I expect of her" (pp. 63-64).

The return of spring in this book is one of the many reflections of Norse mythology in the Narnian series. This source was one of the strongest influences upon Lewis's early years. In his long poem Dymer he writes:

And from the distant corner of day's birth
He heard clear trumpets blowing and bells ring,
A noise of great good coming into earth
And such a music as the dumb would sing
If Balder had led back the blameless spring
With victory, with the voice of charging spears,
And in white lands long-lost Saturnian years.13

So it is that the return of summer brings inexpressible joy to Narnia, and, the wintry witch having been defeated, "Summer is queen, Summer is queen in all the happy land."14

Finally, in Chapter Four, "Possible Gods and Goddesses:Lewis's Concept of Man" in the section subtitled "Heroism and Hierarchy," Lewis read the following:

Thirty-three years before the publication of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis published a poem titled "Our Daily Bread," which includes these stanzas anticipating the story of Reepicheep:

Often me too the Living voices call
In many a vulgar and habitual place,
I catch a sight of lands beyond the wall,
I see a strange god's face.

And some day this will work upon me so
I shall arise and leave both friends and home
And over many lands a pilgrim go
Through alien woods and foam,

Seeking the last steep edges of the earth
Whence I may leap into the gulf of light
Wherein, before my narrowing Self had birth,
Part of me lived aright.15

If Lewis had not concurred with the way I made use of these four poems, he would almost surely have said so. He did that regarding his poem "Under Sentence," which I had quoted from The Spectator, (September 7,1945).. He responded with the following caveat:

There is one place (pp. 93, 94) where, tho' I am sure you are not misunderstanding, you express yourself in a way wh. might make it seem to the reader that you were. It sounds as if you thought I was talking primarily about animals in that poem, where as you know I'm using the animals to suggest country humans like Johnson & Cobbett Of course it involves sympathy for the animals, wh, is your point. But most readers will misunderstand if you give them the slightest chance. (It's like driving cattle; if there's an open getaway anywhere in the road, they'll got into it!)

My 1957 comments about four of the poems in Spirits in Bondage are a minor feature of Lion of Judah, and in themselves they are of little interest. But they cast significant light on Lewis's 1957 view of his 1921 poems as a permanent part of his literary corpus.

But secondly, you (alone of the critics I've met) realize the connection, or even the unity, of all the books--scholarly, fantastic, theological--and make me appear a single author, not a man who impersonates half a dozen authors, whch is what I seem to most. This wins really very high marks indeed.... If you understand me so well you will understand other authors too & I hope we shall have some really useful critical works from your hand.
With thanks & good wishes,
C. S. Lewis

Although in his prime C. S. Lewis was a far different person from the youthful author of Spirits in Bondage, his own words assure us that his work is all of one piece. He is a single author.

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(click on the footnote number to return to the paragraph containing that footnote)

1 This unpublished letter is located in the Marion E. Wade Center.

2 New York: Harper, 1952, p. 12.

3 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), p. 4.

4 Clive Hamilton [C.S. Lewis], "Song," Spirits in Bondage (London: William Heinemann, 1919), p. 73.

5 New York: Harper, 1952, p. 12.

6 Ibid., p. 12.

7 Ibid., p. 10.

8 Prince Caspian (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 41-42.

9 Hamilton [Lewis], "Victory," Spirits in Bondage, p. 16.

10 Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung (New York: Garden City, 1939), p.. 38.

11 New York: Macmillan, 1952, p. 36.

12 "Evil and God," Spectator, CLXVI (February 7, 1941), 141.

13 Clive Hamilton [C.S. Lewis], Dymer (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1926), p. 105..

14 Lewis, "The Ocean Strand," Spirits in Bondage, p. 46.

15 Spirits in Bondage, pp. 86-87.

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