Jerry Root - Splendour in the Dark: C. S. Lewiss Dymer in His Life and Work

Hansen Lectureship Series

Includes Dymer: Wade Annotated Edition
Annotations by David C. Downing

InterVarsity Press
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2020 by The Marion E. Wade Center

Dymer 1926 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd, published under license from The C.S. Lewis Company Ltd.

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Cover design and image composite: David Fassett
Cover image of C.S. Lewis (ca. 1918) used by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL.
Images: paper texture Katsumi Murouchi / Moment Collection / Getty Images
grunge paper texture hudiemm / E+ / Getty Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-5529-2 (digital)

ISBN 978-0-8308-5375-5 (print)

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

TO MY BROTHER JIMMY ROOT,

WHO AS A TEACHER AND COACH

HAS INVESTED HIS LIFE IN A GENERATION

OF YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN IN SCHOOLS IN

BOTH WATTS AND PALMDALE, CALIFORNIA.

HIS LIFE IS AN INSPIRATION TO ME.

It seemed to be the low voice of the world
Brooding alone beneath the strength of things,
Murmuring of days and nights and years unfurled
Forever, and the unwearied joy that brings
Out of old fields the flowers of unborn springs,
Out of old wars and cities burned with wrong,
A splendour in the dark, a tale, a song.

Annotations by
David C. Downing

David C. Downing

C . S. LEWISS FIRST AND ONLY book-length narrative poem Dymer (originally published in 1926) was not a literary success. But it is a fascinating failure. Published five years before Lewiss conversion to Christianity in 1931, the poem is a promising bit of apprentice work for a young writer who hadnt yet discovered which medium was best for what he wanted to sayor indeed what it was that he truly wanted to say.

In his preface to the 1950 edition of Dymer (later reprinted in Narrative Poems), Lewis explained the origins of Dymer and how it can best be understood:

What I found what simply came to me was the story of a man who, on some mysterious bride, begets a monster: which monster, as soon as it has killed its father, becomes a god. This story arrived, complete, in my mind somewhere about my seventeenth year. To the best of my knowledge I did not consciously or voluntarily invent it, nor was it, in the plain sense of that word, a dream. All I know about it is that there was a time when it was not there, and then presently a time when it was. Everyone may allegorize it or psychoanalyse it as he pleases: and if I did so myself my interpretations would have no more authority than anyone elses.

Clearly, Lewis in his early years wanted to create a modern myth, similar to those he admired in George MacDonald and Franz Kafka. Lewis realized that most myths evolve gradually, the work of many voices over many centuries. But he believed there were also modern mythmakers, writers who could create archetypal patterns of events that transcended their actual choice of words in telling a story.

Lewis wrote a prose version of Dymer in 19161917, which has not survived. In 1918 he tried retelling the story in verse, taking his poetic form from Shakespeares Venus and Adonis. In this version, the poem was called The Redemption of Ask, after the first man named Ask, the Adam character in Norse mythology. Finally in 1922 Lewis recast the story in rhyme royal, a stanza form invented by Chaucer. This poetic form consists in seven-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, with end-rhymes of ABABBCC. Lewis finished the poem in 1925, and it was published by J. M. Dent in 1926.

Lewis was hoping that Dymer would launch his career as a poet, but it received more negative reviews than positive, and it quickly sank into oblivion. By the mid-1920s, modernist poetry was in vogue, so that traditional, metered poetry had become pass, especially narrative poems. The poem itself is uneven, beginning with overly obvious satire on planned societies, then plunging into several obscure episodes involving dream-like settings, murky characterizations, and portentous symbols. Towards the end, the poem becomes obvious again in its overt rejection of magic and occultism.