Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis by Michael Ward

Author:Michael Ward [Ward, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Venus in Lewis’s Poetry

In Lewis’s poetry Venereal qualities are used only once for Christological purposes. We will examine that occurrence below, but first we must look at the earliest appearances of Venus in Lewis’s published verse where her qualities serve predominantly as symbols of God’s dwelling-place in paradise, rather than of God (or Christ) Himself.

When he wrote Spirits in Bondage Lewis was not quite sure whether he believed in God or not, but he believed in (or at any rate longed for) a state which, theologically speaking, he would have been hard pressed to differentiate from the heaven of theistic traditions. The volume contains several poems in which Venereal imagery is used to depict an ideal world beyond death. The most noteworthy are ‘The Philosopher,’ ‘Death in Battle,’ and ‘Hesperus.’

In ‘The Philosopher’ the poet enquires:

Who shall cross over for us the bridge of fears

And pass in to the country where the ancient Mothers dwell?29

And the answer is: not the old man, watery-eyed and full of leaden years, but the young man, ‘fresh and beautiful of show.’ It is he who shall ‘cross at last the shadowy bar / To where the ever-living are.’ And it would appear to be this same young man who finally makes that crossing in ‘Death in Battle’:

Open the gates for me,

Open the gates of the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,

In the sweet dim Isle of Apples over the wide seas breast,

Open the gates for me!30

Since stars are ‘isles’ in the poem ‘Song,’ this ‘Isle of Apples’ is presumably the same Hesperus that has already appeared in the poem of that name. There Lewis presents the same set of images: a western garden beyond the ocean and beyond fear, containing a sacred tree. ‘Hesperus’ does not actually mention that this is an apple-tree, but it is undoubtedly so, for this is an early manifestation of Lewis’s ‘Avalon-Hesperides-Western business.’31 Nearly thirty years later it was still featuring in his poetry. ‘The Landing’32 tells of the poet’s arrival at the garden of the Hesperides—with its ‘green hill,’ its ‘apple-gold’ headlands, its ‘gum-sweet wood’—and of his dismayed discovery that it is only an imitation: the real Hesperides lies even further to the west.

In his poetic search for the country of the ancient Mothers, Lewis was repeatedly misled by a false trail, that laid by the ‘bad Venus’ whom he had found in Spenser. Lewis calls her ‘Venus infernal’ and she makes three appearances in his poetry, first in ‘Wormwood’ (‘Venus infernal starving in the strength of fire’), second in ‘Infatuation’ (‘Venus infernal taught such voice and eyes / To bear themselves abroad for merchandise’), and third in ‘Lilith,’ a poem about Adam’s first wife.33 Under her spell Lewis found that ‘it was quite easy to think that one desired … the garden of Hesperus for the sake of his daughters.’34 But eventually he learnt, by means of ‘discreditable’ experience, that this was not the case. In other words, he discovered that sehnsucht was not a disguise of sexual desire.

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