Uncovering CS Lewis's First Religious Poem

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction, it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn.

The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a long awhile ..... and, according to unpublished work by Starr, the handwriting dates the "Sweet Desire" manuscript to Feb. 1929 - Aug. 1930. In other words, pretty much exactly what my metrical analysis reveals.

Well, I contacted Charlie, and he couldn't have been nicer. Although he hasn't published anything on Lewis's conversion poetry, at least not yet -- he planned to present at a conference in 2020, but it was cancelled due to COVID, and he hasn't worked on his research since -- the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College currently categorizes Lewis's undated manuscripts according to the Lewis Handwriting Chart that he created. Right now, "Sweet Desire" is in a box labeled Feb. 1929 - Aug. 1930. 

So while I'll be the first person to publish on "Sweet Desire" as a conversion poem, it looks like we each independently discovered this little nugget. Still, it's pretty awesome that two scholars entirely unknown to one another managed to uncover the same date range for "Sweet Desire" by using entirely different methodologies. 

For those of you interested in the poem itself, here it is:

These faint wavering far-travell’d gleams
Coming from your country, fill me with care. That scent,
That sweet stabbing, as at the song of thrush,
That leap of the heart—too like they seem
To another air; unlike as well
So that I am dazed with doubt. As a dungeoned man
Who has heard the hinge on the hook turning
Often. Always that opened door
Let new tormentors in. If now at last
It open again, but outward, offering free way,
(His kind one come, with comfort) he
Yet shrinks, in his straw, struggling backward,
From his dear, from his door, into the dark’st corner,
Furthest from freedom. So fearing, I
Taste not but with trembling. I was tricked before.
All the heraldry of heaven, holy monsters,
With hazardous and dim half-likeness taunt
Long-haunted men. The like is not the same.
Always evil was an ape. I know.
Who passes to paradise, within that pure border
Finds there, refashioned, all that he fled from here.
And yet . . .

But what’s the use? For yield I must,
Though long delayed, at last must dare
To give over, to be eased of my iron casing,
Molten at thy melody, as men of snow
In the solar smile. Slow-paced I come,
Yielding by inches. And yet, oh Lord, and yet,
—Oh Lord, let not likeness fool me again.