{"id":2845,"date":"2025-02-11T15:09:39","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T15:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2845"},"modified":"2025-02-11T15:10:30","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T15:10:30","slug":"c-s-lewis-poet-in-prose-a-passage-from-that-hideous-strength","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2845","title":{"rendered":"C S Lewis, poet in prose – a passage from That Hideous Strength"},"content":{"rendered":"

The only actual verse by C S Lewis that I\u2019ve read is what\u2019s quoted in Michael Ward\u2019s Planet Narnia<\/em>, where it didn\u2019t catch my imagination in the way Ward\u2019s discussion of Lewis\u2019s 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 \u2013 moments which feel as if a strong light of meanings beyond analytical formulation is shining through them. I\u2019m not talking here about allegorical meanings, though they\u2019re often present in and a part of them (to my mind often in a bald and awkward way).<\/p>\n

What I want to glance at here, though, is one of those marvellous descriptions of the descent of the planetary oy\u00e9resu in That Hideous Strength<\/em>: the approach and arrival of Perelandra. If you respond at all as I do, you\u2019ll 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:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Repetitions and other patterning devices contribute to the incantatory effect in a way that\u2019s sometimes very obvious, though never crude. They\u2019re 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. \u201cThrough the bare branches\u201d and \u201cacross the ground which was once more stiffening with frost\u201d parallel each other because each has a preposition followed by a noun phrase:<\/p>\n

……….<\/span>Through<\/strong> the<\/em> bare<\/span> branches<\/em>
\n……….<\/span>across<\/strong>\u00a0 the ground<\/em> which was once more stiffening with frost<\/span><\/p>\n

However, they\u2019re varied both by using different prepositions and by a change in the ordering of the noun and its descriptor \u2013 from adjective followed by noun in \u201cbare branches\u201d to noun followed by adjectival phrase in \u201cthe ground which was once more stiffening with frost\u201d. Such variation has the effect of keeping things fresh and sharp in our minds. There\u2019s an accompanying effect that I find potently involving, an effect of expansion<\/em>, both in that \u201cacross the ground\u201d involves a more sustained movement than \u201cthrough the bare branches\u201d\u00a0 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

As the description mounts in intensity the patterning of repetition with variation becomes even more obvious and more powerfully involving: \u201cLaden like heavy barges that\u201d, \u201claden so heavily you\u201d, \u201claden with ponderous fragrance of\u201d, each parallel phrase introducing a different kind of thought with \u201cthat\u201d, \u201cyou\u201d or \u201cof\u201d, and again with an effect of expansion as these thoughts unfold at greater and greater length:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s forehead.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 grounding and consolidating the unearthly apparition.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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: \u201cIt was fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light<\/em>\u201d; after it come the yet more physical sentences \u201cThey were blinded, scorched, deafened. They thought it would burn their bones.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m focusing here on the essentially poetic nature of the way this passage is written. I\u2019ll finish with saying that for me there\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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\u2019t seen other fans of Lewis\u2019s work talking about it (Ward probably does but it\u2019s too long since I read Planet Narnia<\/em> for me to remember).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The only actual verse by C S Lewis that I\u2019ve read is what\u2019s quoted in Michael Ward\u2019s Planet Narnia, where it didn\u2019t catch my imagination in the way Ward\u2019s discussion of Lewis\u2019s ideas did. However, I do think of Lewis as essentially a poet, concerned with crystallising states of being or strong emotions in scenes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[210],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c-s-lewis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2845"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2845"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2849,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2845\/revisions\/2849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}