Sunday Sonnet

There is a series of five sonnets by Lewis, who is known more for his apologetics and popular theology. Lewis was very good at pastiche, and though aimed in his younger years to be a serious poet his ability to write prose rapidly and well led to his fame.

Writing novels was a way to survive during the depression: Robert Frost wrote the Claudius series and Dorothy Sayers the Wimsey murder mysteries. What they considered commercial, genre work, ironically, is better than most postmodern writing.

I.

You think that we who do not shout and shake
Our first at God when youth or bravery die
Have colder blood or hearts less apt to ache
Than yours who rail. I know you do. Yet why?

You have what sorrow always longs to find,
Someone to blame, some enemy in chief;
Anger’s the anesthetic of the mind,
It does men good, it fumes away their grief.

We feel the stroke like you; so far our fate
Is equal. After that, for us begin
Half-hopeless labours, learning not to hate,
And then to want, and then (perhaps) to win

A high, unearthly comfort, angel’s food,
That seems at first mockery to flesh and blood.

C.S. Lewis

Many people forget that Lewis was an officer during the first war, fought in the trenches, and cared for his brother officer's mother for much of this life. He knows about youth ruined by gas, artillery and machine gun. The hatred of the enemy, by the end of that war, was quite real, and that festered into revenge, nationalism, and revolution.

Of those, God was to blame for none.

Perhaps we should instead mistrust cheap propaganda.