Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics, by C.S. Lewis (A Review)

I quite enjoyed reading this little collection of early poems, although the poetry is merely decent bordering on bad. For instance, he uses the forced “the XXX green” (where XXX is a noun of something from Nature) about 10 times to end a rhyming line. Here’s the most cringe-worthy abuse of syntax: “His eyes stared into the eyes of me / And he kissed my hands of his courtesy.” The eyes of me, LOL.

There are some good passages though too. Here’s my favorite:

I lost my way in the pale starlight
And saw our planet, far and small,
Through endless depths of nothing fall
A lonely pin-prick spark of light,
Upon the wide, enfolding night,
With leagues on leagues of stars above it,
And powdered dust of stars below–

I like this passage because it reminds me to take CSL’s atheism at his word. CSL addresses God so many times in this work that one begins to suspect that he’s more theist than he cares to admit to himself. If you don’t believe God exists, then you shouldn’t be mad at him for being evil and cruel because he can’t be evil or cruel if he is non-existent. My interpretation is that at this stage of his life he is atheist intellectually, but theist emotionally. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. Nevertheless, it would be uncharitable to simply dismiss the young CSL as “not a real atheist,” as much as I would like to based on many of the confused ideas herein.

That’s the weirdest thing about this whole collection. It is coming on the heels of the horrors of the Great War, and yet Lewis blames a non-existent God for the cruel world rather than the humans who have demonstrably screwed it up. Likewise, he ascribes Beauty and value to “the escape” of his mythological contemplations but does not thereby acknowledge that this too is from Man if his premise of atheism is correct. If the young Lewis was confused about theism he was equally confused about atheism.

This collection is very much worth reading for Inklings fans. It provides first-hand insight into the musings of the atheist C.S. Lewis and the three-stage argument of the lyric cycle–from The Prison House of materialism to The Escape of faerie–is a fascinating early glimpse at the more mature ideas of the Inklings crew.

The ancient songs they wither as the grass
And waste as doth a garment waxen old,
All poets have been fools who thought to mould
A monument more durable than brass.

Archive.org has a scan of the book. You can find various HTML or ebook editions online, but the poetry formatting is generally crap.