Friday, July 07, 2006

A Poem

I came across this poem by C.S. Lewis while checking out other blogs who had been talking about the very same thing I just posted. The poem is about those eternal moments or rather "Sudden Heaven" that one gets a glimpse of every once in a while in this life. It is the unexplainable Joy that cannot be relayed to others unless they too, have had the same experience. Lewis here attempts to explain the psychological aspect of what happens to a person when they experience such a phenomenon. What is most interesting about this poem however, is it was written while Lewis still considered himself an agnostic. Which probably made it even harder for him to place his finger on the cause of what had happened.
Now without further a due (sp?), here is the poem:

"The Day With A White Mark"

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous
happiness:
Was it an elf in the blood? or a bird in the brain? or even
part
Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted
wave
Of a journeying angel’s transit roaring over and through my heart?

My garden’s spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the
omens harden;
The plann’d and unplann’d miseries deepen; the knots
draw tight.
Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.
It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.

Yet I –I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of
My day was like a peacock’s chest. In at each sense there stole
Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew
Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there,
And shining roots worked visibly far down below one’s feet,
So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard
Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible
Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale,
Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling
Of glee, as kindly animals talk in a children’s tale.

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?
No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends
On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself
Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.


As a side note: if you wanted to check out the blog from whence this poem came here is the link.http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/middlebrow/archives/sudden-heaven/#more-151