C. S. Lewis Remembered by Harry Lee Poe

Author:Harry Lee Poe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Array
Publisher: Zondervan

Medieval Dreamers — or Visionaries?

If Lewis’s letter was not going to give me the key to this dream vision, then it was clearly something that this graduate student was intended to tackle for himself, an appropriate responsibility for someone who had rejected spiritual and religious authority. So I pursued the quest of landscape mysteries with renewed zest and with greatly personal interest.

An early discovery was the fourteenth-century vision poem of The Pearl, arguably the most powerful religious poem in our language, perhaps in any language. (This work had been omitted from the Oxford syllabus, an error I have never been tempted to repeat in my own syllabi of medieval literature.) I felt a strange tremor of recognition when I read that the visionary poet, once he entered the paradisal place, the locus amoenus, had had a remarkably similar experience to my own. In quite untypical fashion for a medieval poem, the paradisal woodlands were bounded by distant mountains rather than a cozy enclosing wall. With a strange tremor of recognition I read that the further he trod into that paradisal land, the more overpowering “the strength of joy.” His progress, though far beyond mine, was stopped by a stream, which, as he is informed by his brilliant, marvelous mentor, the Pearl Maiden, he may not cross. Finally, in his attempt to be reunited with her before the time of his earthly summoning to that Paradise over the stream, he attempts to leap over it and is puffed back to earth again, much as I was. Like myself, he has no regrets; it is sufficient that such a place exists. He is sure that his marvelous experience has amounted to a veray avisioun, a significant dream (l.1185).

One other discovery enhanced my conviction that I was on the right track in seeing the connection between my particular experience and the medieval visions. I felt an odd kinship with John Lydgate when, in the concluding lines of his The Assembly of the Gods20 (early fifteenth century) he gives us some idea of the thought processes that inspire the creation of a dream allegory. When he woke up from his vision, he tells us, his body was shaking in fear from the sight he had seen, since he believed at first that it had all been true. Then after a while he began to feel it had just been “a fantasy & a thing of nought” and decided to ignore the whole matter. Then he changed his mind again and decided that since he could not really understand why he had been shown this vision, he ought to put the whole thing into writing; otherwise, he might well be accused of sloth, even though finally he could not be certain whether or not he had seen the vision with his own bodily eyes. What he seems to be saying is that if there is any chance that his vision was a valid one, he had a duty to give it to the world, whatever his doubts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.