"As the Ruin Falls"
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love—a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek—
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.
~C.S.Lewis, Poems, “As the Ruin Falls” (1st pub. 1964), pp. 109-110.
posted by Arevanye | permalink for this post |
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*copies, pastes in own journal* Wonderful selection, Arevanye.
I was just wondering what it would be like to have a poet for a husband...
*sighs, goes back to folding laundry*
Yes, it looks like Poems was published posthumously.
I think Lewis was a bit of a pessimist about his failings. One of the things I feel when I read this poem is his love for his wife, and the change that she must have brought so late to his life. And then he had to lose her so soon after he had found her. So sad. *sniffs* I just love this poem.
Doesn't every woman wish she had a poet for a boyfriend/husband/partner? Someone to make up beautiful stanzas describing her eyes or her lissome limbs? Or to say "everything you are was making My heart into a bridge by which I might get back From exile, and grow man."
Wow! Of course, that's usually in total opposition to the practicalities of everyday relationships: the necessity of putting food on the table, keeping the bill collectors at bay, and a non-leaking roof overhead.
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