Lost but Found: The "Missing" Poems of C.S. Lewis's Spirits in Bondage

The status of the literary corpus of C. S. Lewis's prose has largely been resolved. While Walter Hooper's latest project, the collected letters, (1) will undoubtedly produce a number of heretofore unpublished letters, it is doubtful that any "new" essays or works of fiction will appear, particularly given the controversy provoked by Hooper's publication of The Dark Tower (1977). (2) At the same time, the status of Lewis's unpublished poetry remains unresolved. (3) Specifically, in the preface to the 1986 reprint of Lewis's Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919), Hooper reviewed the initial publication history of this volume, Lewis's first published work. He did this primarily by drawing on Warren Lewis's notes in "The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850-1930." Warren's careful assessment of the development of Spirits in Bondage includes reference to an early collection of poems titled "The Metrical Meditations of a Cod": It would be during this [Easter 1915] visit to Little Lea that Clive wrote the first poetry which he himself considered worthy of preservation so late as 1917. In the two years intervening between Easter 1915 and Easter 1917, he wrote fifty[-]two poems which he copied carefully into an old Malvern Upper Fifth Divinity note book, prefixing them with a chronological list of titles. The whole is entitled "The [M]etrical [M]editations of a Cod." ("LP" 4:306) (4) Hooper then noted that the "Metrical Meditations" were lost, perhaps, according to Warren, in a fire since "Jack himself burnt all documents therein transcribed [in "LP"], including his own diaries, in or soon after 1936" (xii). Accordingly, scholars of Lewis's poetry have assumed that the "Metrical Meditations" were destroyed. However, as I neared the end of research for C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Impulse of His Poetic Legacy, I came across a curious holograph notebook purported to be in the hand of Arthur Greeves, Lewis's lifelong friend to whom he had entrusted the "Metrical Meditations" at various times, particularly when Lewis was serving in France during World War I. (5) The title page of this notebook, "Early Poems," reads: "English Verses Made By--Clive Staples Lewis: --and Copied by His Friend--Joseph Arthur Greeves:--Belfast in the Year 1917." Fifty-two poems are listed in chronological order in the table of contents. (6) What caught my eye was the number fifty-two, since this is the identical number Warren refers to as having comprised "Metrical Meditations." I am now ready to argue that "Early Poems" is in fact a draft of the "lost" collection titled "Metrical Meditations." (7) This essay will review briefly the evidence for this contention, note the relationship between "Early Poems" (also, by association, "Metrical Meditations") and Spirits in Bondage, (8) and publish for the first time twenty-one heretofore unpublished poems found in "Early Poems." Lewis's letters indicate that Greeves was intimately involved in the development of his earliest lyrical poems. On 29 June 1915 Lewis wrote Greeves: "I am glad to hear that you are keeping up the 'illustrative' side of your art, and shall want you to do some for my lyric poems. You can begin a picture of my 'dream garden' where the 'West wind blows.' As directions I inform you it is 'girt about with mists,' and is in 'the shadowy country neither life nor sleep,' and is the home of 'faint dreams'" (CL 134). Undoubtedly Lewis was referring to passages in the heretofore unpublished poem "My Western Garden" that appears as the first poem in "Early Poems": I know a garden where the West-Winds blow; (9) Far hence it lies, and few there be that know, And few that tread the road that leads thereto. Its gladsome glades are girt about with mists, And o'er its sward a slumberous streamlet twists, Flowing like Lethe, soundless. [...] No chart will guide thee to that twilit land, Nor mariner hath reached that Ocean's strand, For space it knoweth not, nor Time's rough hand. …