NEW POETS OF RUM RAM RUF: C. S. Lewis

Having already discussed Poul Anderson, the Modern Revival’s most noteworthy early pulp poet, it only makes sense to now turn our sights on the Inklings, the two best-known “university” poets. And because most readers interested in such matters already know about Tolkien, let’s take the opportunity to give equal time to his friend and fellow Inkling, C. S. Lewis.

Now, full disclosure: I’ve published a lot about Lewis’s alliterative verse, so there’s quite a few paths this blog post could take. Issues of national identity and English nationalism, for instance, or Lewis’s infamous disdain for modernist poetics. Or we might mention his preference for formalist poetry, his Christian apologetics, or the religious aspects of his fantasy.

But if people “know” one thing about Lewis’s poetry, they know that it’s … well … not very good.

Now, that’s not my view, mind you, but even fans and scholars of Lewis tend to accept this assessment as the default consensus. Unfortunately, Lewis is probably himself responsible for the poor state of his poetic reputation. As some readers of Tales After Tolkien may already know, Lewis started his literary career as a poet. His first book, Spirits in Bondage (1919), did okay – it probably earned a boost from the “sympathetic young war veteran” factor – but the true work of his heart, Dymer, a book-length long poem in rime royal, met with a crushingly lukewarm reception upon its publication in 1926 … and I do mean “crushingly.” Critical and popular apathy absolutely shattered Lewis’s artistic ego. Rather than picking up the pieces and trying again, though, he decided – merely 27 years old – to vehemently denounce his own youthful ambition to become a great poet. Over the next four decades he would compose the occasional poem, but after the Dymer fiasco Lewis virtually ceased trying to publish his verse.

Many scholars see this renunciation of poetic fame as one of Lewis’s first truly adult decisions, his mature self-awareness about the limits of his own talent, and, to be fair, Lewis as poet does have several odd tics. Individual psychology barely matters to him, and his narrative verse – Dymer most especially – often betrays a ham-handed style of plotting. Likewise, it’s hard for contemporary readers to see his penchant for traditional forms and diction – including the use of apostrophes for elided syllables – as anything other than achingly old-fashioned.

Still, I’m reminded of an excellent book by Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter (2012). Partly thanks to Ezra Pound’s polemics, says Martin, literary modernism effectively managed to fix in our heads an image of “meter” as something stable, permanent, and ahistorical. However, the fact of the matter is that prosodists from 1860 through 1930 had a voracious appetite for debating metrical theory, so rather than envisioning meter as a set of shackles or a straightjacket from which a new poetics (as the modernists would claim) must set us free, Victorian and Edwardian prosodists were continually revising and challenging their core ideas on meter – and, thus, all the time subjecting their formal poetry to metrical innovation.

For now, I’ll resist the urge to wax eloquent on what Lewis thought of his modernist contemporaries. (Hint: his views are more nuanced than common descriptions like “reactionary” would have one believe). Yet he truly did love traditional forms and meters, and Martin’s argument helps us understand why so many current scholars view Lewis’s resolutely formal verse as backward-looking and old-fashioned: we’ve been collectively conditioned to view it through modernist goggles. Nonetheless, these goggles prevent most readers and scholars from seeing the sheer metrically inventiveness that Lewis can display from poem to poem, and nowhere are these blinders more obvious than in The Nameless Isle.

If you’ve not had the pleasure, The Nameless Isle (1930) is a 742-line alliterative fantasy romance about a mariner who shipwrecks onto an enchanted island; once there, he helps reconcile a married yet estranged sorceress and wizard. In the process he also encounters a mysterious dwarf, a beautiful damsel, and a magical flute. All in all, The Nameless Isle is a light-hearted, skillfully wrought long poem with serious themes, and although it has flown under the radar of most critics, it’s a masterful lesson on Lewis’s skills with metrical innovation.

For now, we’ll gloss over the basic experimentalism implied by Lewis’s decision to resurrect an archaic medieval verse form – remember, by 1930, good models of alliterative poetry in Modern English didn’t yet really exist. You only found good models by studying Old English poetry in its original language, but even here Lewis doesn’t follow his medieval predecessors slavishly; he adds his own twists. Many are too technical to describe in detail (I’ve written about them elsewhere), but, as a quick summary, three notable areas concern (1) Lewis’s strong penchant for double alliteration; (2) his greater willingness to use long dips; and (3) his elimination of a metrical license known as anacrusis that Old English poets deemed highly useful.

What I want to discuss, though, is a metrical innovation more accessible for general discussion, i.e., the part of The Nameless Isle I call “The Song of Hic and Illa.”

For some context, this song occurs immediately upon the wizard and sorceress’s marital reconciliation, and it’s meant as a love duet between them demonstrating the balance they’ve discovered between their respective magical purviews. The song owes its core theme to a book Lewis discovered just a year earlier, Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the Household (1854). Today, this long poem enjoys something of a double-edged reputation, especially among feminist critics, since The Angel in the Household helped solidify the Victorian ideology of separate spheres – i.e., women belong in the home, men in the workplace – but for Lewis, at least, who had newly converted to theism, Patmore’s poem was eye-opening. To him it revealed that a spiritual dimension could exist legitimately within marriage, one founded on mutual partnership between a husband and wife, and for a then-confirmed bachelor like Lewis, whose opinions on women were generally dismissive, The Angel in the Household represented a small step in the right direction.

Anyway, Lewis conveys his new opinion on marital equality through his innovations on Old English meter. Check out the following sample. Hic is Lewis’s name for his wizard (who allegorically represents the world of pure spirit), and illa is the name for his sorceress, who allegorically represents the material world.

HIC:       ‘My love’s laughter     is light falling

Through broad branches     in brown woodland,

On a cold fountain,     in a cave darkling,

A mild sparkling     in mossy gloom.’

ILLA:    ‘But my lord’s wisdom     is light breaking,

And sound shaking,    a sundered tomb.’ (lines 646–651, caesuras added)

As far as Old English metrics goes, nothing in “The Song” is outright unmetrical … but nowhere in Old English literature does Lewis’s particular style find an equivalent. In my selected passage, which is representative, there are 12 verses across six lines, and his Sievers types break down as follows:

A-types (SxSx): 0 / 12 (0%)

B-types (xSxS): 2 / 12 (16.7%)

C-types (xSSx): 10 / 12 (83.3%)

That’s a very unusual distribution pattern. In fact, it occurs nowhere in Old English poetry. Why does Lewis chose to go with such a predominance? Well, I can come up with a few guesses, but the key, I think, is balance. The clashing stresses of types C create a see-saw rhythm that denotes equality. When one foot rises, the other foot falls – and rinse, and repeat. Previously, the reason why the wizard and sorceress’s marriage had failed was because each had believed their own magical purview superior. Each had wanted to rule the island by granting dominion to either “spirit” or “matter.” No equal partnership, however, can persist when one party retains a belief in dominance and hierarchy. Balance is therefore key, and of Sievers’s five metrical types, type C is the most “balanced.”

Yet Lewis goes even further. In most Old English poetry, rhyme doesn’t appear as a structural device. Here, though, Lewis clearly does employ rhyme in a structural way. So let’s now turn to his two outlier B-types.

In my example, I’ve bolded Lewis’s masculine rhymes and underlined his feminine ones. In the former case, masculine rhymes require a matching set of final stressed syllables. That rules out type C, which ends on a trochaic constituent, so the only option left is the iambic-seeming type B. Conversely, feminine rhymes require a trochaic ending, and this is entirely appropriate for C-types. As a result, Lewis explicitly genders Old English poetics in a surprisingly but thematically significant way. Notably, he doesn’t limit masculine rhymes to his wizard or feminine rhymes to his sorceress. Both magical figures utilize both types of rhyme, just as each speaks with the same Sieversian patterns. Thus metrics reinforce the passage’s symbolic union between wizard and sorceress, wife and husband, matter and spirit.

Although “The Song of Hic and Illa” isn’t necessarily my favorite passage from The Nameless Isle – many of its more traditional alliterative passages are, in my view, far lovelier – I nevertheless find myself increasingly impressed with Lewis’s skill as a poet: his metrical boldness, his willingness to innovate.