The only actual verse by C S Lewis that I’ve read is what’s quoted in Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, where it didn’t catch my imagination in the way Ward’s discussion of Lewis’s ideas did. However, I do think of Lewis as essentially a poet, concerned with crystallising states of being or strong emotions in scenes or pictures that live in the timeless present of the lyrical imagination. There are many such moments in the Narnia books, of course – moments which feel as if a strong light of meanings beyond analytical formulation is shining through them. I’m not talking here about allegorical meanings, though they’re often present in and a part of them (to my mind often in a bald and awkward way).

What I want to glance at here, though, is one of those marvellous descriptions of the descent of the planetary oyéresu in That Hideous Strength: the approach and arrival of Perelandra. If you respond at all as I do, you’ll feel the first sentence I quote as mere setting up of the poetry that follows, when the writing takes on a hypnotic, incantatory, sensuous intensity that for me makes it utterly haunting:

Through the bare branches, across the ground which was once more stiffening with frost, a summer breeze was blowing into the room, but the breeze of such a summer as England never has. Laden like heavy barges that glide nearly gunwale under, laden so heavily you would have thought it could not move, laden with ponderous fragrance of night-scented flowers, sticky gums, groves that drop odours, and with cool savour of midnight fruit, it stirred the curtains, it lifted a letter that lay on the table, it lifted the hair which had a moment before been plastered on Merlin’s forehead. The room was rocking. They were afloat. A soft tingling and shivering as of foam and breaking bubbles ran over their flesh. Tears ran down Ransom’s cheeks. He alone knew from what seas and what islands that breeze blew. Merlin did not: but in him also the inconsolable wound with which man is born waked and ached at this touching. Low syllables of prehistoric Celtic self-pity murmured from his lips. These yearnings and fondlings were, however, only the forerunners of the goddess. As the whole of her virtue seized, focused and held that spot of the rolling earth in her long beam, something harder, shriller, more perilously ecstatic, came out of the centre of all the softness. Both the humans trembled – Merlin because he did not know what was coming, Ransom because he knew. And now it came. It was fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light: it was Charity, not as mortals imagine it, not even as it has been humanised for them since the Incarnation of the Word, but the translunary virtue, fallen upon them direct from the Third Heaven, unmitigated. They were blinded, scorched, deafened. They thought it would burn their bones. They could not bear that it should continue. They could not bear that it should cease. So Perelandra, triumphant among planets, whom men call Venus, came and was with them in the room.

Repetitions and other patterning devices contribute to the incantatory effect in a way that’s sometimes very obvious, though never crude. They’re already present in the first sentence, but they really take off in the second. The way the incantatory repetition involves constant variation gives the spell-weaving its potency. We see that already in the first sentence. “Through the bare branches” and “across the ground which was once more stiffening with frost” parallel each other because each has a preposition followed by a noun phrase:

……….Through the bare branches
……….across  the ground which was once more stiffening with frost

However, they’re varied both by using different prepositions and by a change in the ordering of the noun and its descriptor – from adjective followed by noun in “bare branches” to noun followed by adjectival phrase in “the ground which was once more stiffening with frost”. Such variation has the effect of keeping things fresh and sharp in our minds. There’s an accompanying effect that I find potently involving, an effect of expansion, both in that “across the ground” involves a more sustained movement than “through the bare branches”  and in the lengthening of the descriptive element from a monosyllable to an extended phrase. In fact Lewis is already writing with his imagination charged and alert to the maximum, instinctively working on many different levels at once. There’s a sense of mounting suspense as the as-yet-unspecified force comes closer and the effect of expansion intensifies the effect: whether Lewis consciously intended this or not, the very texture of the writing brings into play the fact that things seem to get bigger as they come closer.

As the description mounts in intensity the patterning of repetition with variation becomes even more obvious and more powerfully involving: “Laden like heavy barges that”, “laden so heavily you”, “laden with ponderous fragrance of”, each parallel phrase introducing a different kind of thought with “that”, “you” or “of”, and again with an effect of expansion as these thoughts unfold at greater and greater length:

Laden like heavy barges that glide nearly gunwale under, laden so heavily you would have thought it could not move, laden with ponderous fragrance of night-scented flowers, sticky gums, groves that drop odours, and with cool savour of midnight fruit, it stirred the curtains, it lifted a letter that lay on the table, it lifted the hair which had a moment before been plastered on Merlin’s forehead.

The change from this kind of lyrical, metaphorical evocation of intangible though sensuously suggested impressions to the precise and literal, almost cinematic details of the physical effect of this breeze from another world seems to me beautifully judged as a way of  grounding and consolidating the unearthly apparition.

It hardly needs saying that as well as being intensely sensuous, the writing is also intensely erotic, or begins by being so. We are encountering Venus, after all. What perhaps comes as a shock is the second half of the passage, after the yearnings and fondlings of sexual desire. Again, this shift from eros to Charity uses contrast to quicken and intensify our responses. It’s brilliantly original, astonishing and seizing our imaginations in the detail of its phrasing and in the sheer physicality with which it gives concrete force and immediacy to something we usually conceive in abstract terms. Before the abstract reflection, six trenchant strokes of description, each surprising in itself, are followed by the startling turn of the seventh: “It was fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light”; after it come the yet more physical sentences “They were blinded, scorched, deafened. They thought it would burn their bones.”

I’m focusing here on the essentially poetic nature of the way this passage is written. I’ll finish with saying that for me there’s a strong kinaesthetic pleasure in the dynamics of the sentences themselves, in the variety of their shaping and in the sense they give of a swiftly evolving series of revelations as they develop. I’ll leave aside the forces that seem to be moving below their surface and maybe come back to them another time. In a way I just want to put the passage out there because it means so much to me and I haven’t seen other fans of Lewis’s work talking about it (Ward probably does but it’s too long since I read Planet Narnia for me to remember).