SPIRITS IN BONDAGE

a cycle of lyrics

C. S. LEWIS

Introduced by

Karen Swallow Prior

Lexham Press

Bellingham

Washington

mmxx

Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics

by C. S. Lewis

Copyright 2020 Lexham Press

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

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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”

Contents

Introduction by Karen Swallow Prior

Prologue

part i: the prison house

i Satan Speaks

ii French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux)

iii The Satyr

iv Victory

v Irish Nocturne

vi Spooks

vii Apology

viii Ode for New Year’s Day

ix Night

x To Sleep

xi In Prison

xii De Profundis

xiii Satan Speaks

xiv The Witch

xv Dungeon Grates

xvi The Philosopher

xvii The Ocean Strand

xviii Noon

xix Milton Read Again (In Surrey)

xx Sonnet

xxi The Autumn Morning

part ii: hesitation

xxii L’Apprenti Sorcier

xxiii Alexandrines

xxiv In Praise of Solid People

part iii: the escape

xxv Song of the Pilgrims

xxvi Song

xxvii The Ass

xxviii Ballade Mystique

xxix Night

xxx Oxford

xxxi Hymn (For Boys’ Voices)

xxxii “Our Daily Bread”

xxxiii How He Saw Angus the God

xxxiv The Roads

xxxv Hesperus

xxxvi The Star Bath

xxxvii Tu Ne Quaesieris

xxxviii Lullaby

xxxix World’s Desire

xl Death in Battle

INTRODUCTION

Karen Swallow Prior

Spirits 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 ...