Geoffrey Bache Smith. A Spring Harvest. 1918; Edited by J. R. R. Tolkien, Project Gutenberg, 2015.
C. S. Lewis. Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics. 1919; Project Gutenberg, 2013.
Trick question: What is the first book published by J. R. R. Tolkien? By 1918 Tolkien had published some essays and articles—and had already begun keeping notes on what would become Middle Earth. However, the first book he had published was not of his own writings, but a collection of poems by his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, who was killed in World War I.
Similarly, C. S. Lewis’s first book was a collection of his own poems, many inspired (or perhaps motivated is a better word) by his own experiences in the war. This was before his conversion to Christianity, but we already see things in his content that would appear in different ways in his later writings.
Bache’s A Spring Harvest contains a number of very good poems. This reviewer can see why someone would want to have these poems published. Today, Bache is more of a literary footnote for two reasons: (1) as already noted, he was a skilled writer associated with Tolkien, and (2) he was one of many “war poets” who was lost in the Great War. I confess that I only found out about him when I recently read A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.
A number of poems in Smith’s collection have Arthurian themes. It seems as though he was seeking noble character even in the horrors of war—a theme of that book just mentioned. Yes, The Lord of the Rings trilogy contains that, but so do many of the King Arthur stories.
One can see how poems like “Glastonbury” could appeal to a medievalist and fantasist like Tolkien. The actual style is very reminiscent of Tennyson. Indeed, many of his poems, both lyric and narrative sound like they could have been written by Tennyson or be taken from something like Idylls of the King.
Other lyrics such as “A Study” have echoes of Keats with their rich imagery and sensory appeal. Indeed, it has been said that Tennyson is the Victorian Keats. At the same time, the poems also suggest a longing for legendary times in the past. We can almost imagine Tolkien himself being inspired by lines from “The House of Eld”:
Now the old winds are wild about the house,
And the old ghosts cry to me from the air
Of a far isle set in the western sea,
And of the evening sunlight lingering there. (41)
One can almost imagine an elf or human bard singing of the Grey Havens or Numenor…
It does make one wonder what might have been if Smith had survived the war.
Lewis’s Spirits in Bondage has a different tone. Many of these are clearly war poems. There are bloody horrors in some of them, and many have a bitter tone. The first section is titled “The Prison House,” which perhaps alludes to a narrow trench but in many ways describes the whole fallen world.
The first poem in that section is “Satan Speaks.” There is a sense in many of the first poems that there could not be a God because a good God would not allow such evil happen, but there could be devils and bloody pagan gods like Baal and Molech because of what we see around us. His “De Profundis” ends with an appeal to God (if there is one): “Thou art not Lord while there are Men on earth.” (201) Bitter? Maybe, but also an honest reckoning of human nature.
If I were going to compare Lewis’s poems to anyone, it would probably be Longfellow. Yes, Longfellow was definitely more upbeat in most of his poetry, but he also was didactic, and so is Lewis. There is not just an image or a story, but there is a lesson in most of these poems.
The other thing that strikes the reader, especially in the third and final part entitled “The Escape,” there is much about looking or longing for some other world. Unlike Smith (or maybe Tolkien himself) it is not a longing for a legendary English heroic past, but a literal different world such as the one that we read about in fairy tales. The third section in particular, if it reads like any other poet, it is Yeats.
Lewis writes in “Hesitation”:
Out of the toiling sea arose
Many a face and form of those
Thin, elemental people dear
Who live beyond our heavy sphere.
And all at once from far and near,
They all held out their arms to me
Crying in their melody
“Leap in! Leap in and take thy fill
Of all the cosmic good and ill,
Be as the Living one that know
Enormous joy, enormous woe…(436)
This has echoes of Yeats’ “The Stolen Child”:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
As I read these poems I could not help but think that we consider Lewis an Englishman. He wrote in English and taught at Oxford and Cambridge. You cannot get more English than that. Yet he grew up in Northern Ireland. Many of his poems do suggest a Celtic sensibility, one that perhaps we see especially in his Narnia stories, as British as they may seem on the surface.
While these poems are instructive and were worth publishing, most are not as memorable as his prose. It is interesting to note that in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis notes that many mythologies, especially the Celtic and Norse, appealed to him; however; he describes the story of Jesus in the Gospels as a myth, but one that happens to be true. As Ecclesiastes 3:11, tells us, God has put eternity into man’s heart.
Because these books are of poems—lyrics and short narratives, and not novels or nonfiction—they do not take a long time to read. They are instructive certainly to give us an idea of where both Tolkien and Lewis came from, as well letting us meet Geoffrey Bache Smith and wonder about what we may have missed by his untimely death in battle.
N. B. The references to Lewis are Kindle locations, not page numbers.