Project Gutenberg's Spirits in Bondage, by (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis

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Title: Spirits in Bondage

Author: (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis

Posting Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #2003]
Release Date: December, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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SPIRITS IN BONDAGE

A CYCLE OF LYRICS

By Clive Hamilton [C. S. Lewis]

In Three Parts

I. The Prison House
II. Hesitation
III.The Escape

"The land where I shall never be
The love that I shall never see"

Historical Background

Published under the pseudonym, Clive Hamilton, Spirits in Bondage was C.
S. Lewis' first book. Released in 1919 by Heinemann, it was reprinted in
1984 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and included in Lewis' 1994 Collected
Poems. It is the first of Lewis' major published works to enter the
public domain in the United States. Readers should be aware that in
other countries it may still be under copyright protection.

Most of the poems appear to have been written between 1915 and 1918, a
period during which Lewis was a student under W. T. Kirkpatrick, a
military trainee at Oxford, and a soldier serving in the trenches of
World War I. Their outlook varies from Romantic expressions of love for
the beauty and simplicity of nature to cynical statements about the
presence of evil in this world. In a September 12, 1918 letter to his
friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis said that his book was, "mainly strung
around the idea that I mentioned to you before--that nature is wholly
diabolical & malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in
opposition to the cosmic arrangements." In his cynical poems, Lewis is
dealing with the same questions about evil in nature that Alfred Lord
Tennyson explored from a position of troubled faith in "In Memoriam A.
H." (Stanzas 54f). In a letter written perhaps to reassure his father,
Lewis claimed, "You know who the God I blaspheme is and that it is not
the God that you or I worship, or any other Christian."

Whatever Lewis believed at that time, the attitude in many of