Stock Responses – Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis

1. The Poet

C.S. Lewis’ life can be divided into two periods: Aspiring Poet and Failed Poet. This might seem unfair, given the success he achieved in other areas of his life.

Professionally he was successful. He taught medieval literature at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. His lectures were popular and he was well respected by other academics. A professorship was created specifically for him at Cambridge, and Cambridge still has one of his books as recommended reading for any undergraduates of English.

On the side, he was a public figure who gave speaking tours and wrote best-selling books about Christianity. And for fun he wrote novels, first about space, then his children’s fantasy series. He was successful during his lifetime, and since then his popularity has grown in the latter two areas (and has held up well in the first).

But Poet was what he wanted to be as a boy, and what he aimed for as a young man. During his life he published two poetry books, neither of which is much read now. The first, Spirits in Bondage, is a collection of lyrical poems which he wrote as a teenage atheist during the First World War.

The second, Dymer, is an epic poem he worked on for a decade, publishing it in his late twenties. Almost 300 stanzas of rhyme royal, it’s a complicated mix of philosophical allegory, weaving in Norse legends, Plato, Freud and others. It received tolerably good reviews, but few people read it at the time, and fewer people read it now. Today only the Lewis uberfans bring it up, and not often. ^[1]

The failure of Dymer hurt Lewis, and after some internal wrestling he gave up his dream of being a Poet. Poetry’s loss was wardrobe-based fiction’s gain. But he didn’t stop writing poems. For the next thirty-five years he sent pieces to various magazines, often under pseudonyms. At the end of his life he began to gather these pieces together with a view to publishing them in a single collection. He died in 1963, and Poems was released the next year, the first of many posthumous Lewis books.

2. A Confession

“For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening -- any evening -- would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.”
C.S. Lewis, A Confession

Somewhere online there is a short video of a crowd, standing outside a ski chalet, watching an avalanche in the distance. Two young boys are getting nervous and look like they want to go back inside. Their dad is behind them, and he puts his hands on them to reassure them, and restrain them. The implication is “stay and watch, it will be ok.” As the avalanche comes closer and closer, a nervousness spreads amongst the crowd, a murmur of concern. Then something switches, the people panic and start to run for the safety of the chalet. Seeing the avalanche heading straight for them, the dad panics too. He pushes his sons and his wife out of the way to save himself and get inside.

No doubt this video was chosen by some algorithm to elicit disgust in the dad's cowardice. A man should protect his children, regardless of the risk to himself. People have an obligation to help the vulnerable, especially children, and especially their own children. In a split-second decision we still expect the dad to try to get his children to safety, even if it puts him in danger. You might say that this is innate, the natural response to a threat to a child. But it wasn't for the man in the video. His gut response was to save himself, and any desire to save his kids was crushed under his natural instinct for self preservation.

No, the rightness of a dad putting the lives of his children above his own is a taught response. Lewis would call it a Stock Response. A Stock Response is a way of acting, thinking or feeling which culture deems to be correct, and teaches to its members. This can range from trivial – the sleek figure of a horse is beautiful - to important - paternal sacrifice.

The most obvious illustration of a Stock Response in Lewis’ work comes in The Silver Chair, his second last Narnia story. The three main characters are being held in a castle belonging to some suspiciously friendly giants, when they discover that the venison pie they have been served is made from a talking stag, rather than a dumb animal.

“This discovery didn’t have exactly the same effect on all of them. Jill, who was new to that world, was sorry for the poor stag and thought it rotten of the giants to have killed him. Scrubb, who had been in that world before and had at least one Talking beast as his dear friend, felt horrified; as you might feel about a murder. But Puddleglum, who was Narnian born, was sick and faint, and felt as you would feel if you found you had eaten a baby.”

Their responses differ by how much time they have spent in Narnia, how long they have breathed its air and how well they have taken on its values. For Jill, the newcomer, eating the pie is a shame, but no big deal. For Puddleglum, who has lived Narnia’s values since birth, it’s abhorrent. These are not considered, well thought out responses, they are immediate and visceral. They are Stock Responses, and Puddleglum’s is the Stock Response of a Narnian.

In Narnia, where the rules are made up, we have a clear example. Any example from our world invites the objection that we are looking at a natural response, not a learned one. And this is true, at least in part. But there are lots of things in the world that are natural and part of what it means to be human, and still need to be learned. Left to ourselves we might come to understand these things, but it's much easier to be taught them.

If you have children (or if you've ever met a child), you'll know that they can be somewhat forthright with their opinions. If six year old Annabel asks for a kitten and is given a pair of socks she will let the whole world know of her disappointment. We expect this, and in the right circumstances it can be funny and endearing. But behaviour that's tolerable in a child is unpleasant in an adult, so we teach her to say thank you, even when she’s not impressed by the gift. We teach her to go through the motions of gratitude even when she does not feel thankful. Especially when she does not feel thankful. We teach her that she must go through the outward signs of gratitude whether or not she understands why.

If Annabel is feeling argumentative, she might ask if we are teaching her to lie. Surely her words should match her feelings? She doesn’t want the socks, and certainly doesn’t feel thankful for them. Why should she express gratitude where no gratitude exists?

Yes, words and feelings should align, but to answer a question with a question, why should the feelings lead? The appropriate response to being given a gift is gratitude, and if we don't have it, society should do its best to teach it to us. In Annabel’s case, she learns by doing. She says the words in the right place, and gradually over time she discovers that she means them. She plays the part until she realises she's no longer playing, but really is thankful. To quote the eminent Irish naturalist Stephen Maturin “the imitation begets the reality.”

When touching on this idea in prose Lewis reaches back to the classical world:

“Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. ...Plato before him said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.”

Rousseau said that education is to free us from the bonds of society. Lewis thinks that it’s to train people to feel the correct sentiment, to be loaded up with the right Stock Response. But what is the right response?

To be sure, every culture thinks that the sentiments they teach are the right ones. And there are many examples of cultures training people to feel things that we will find at best alien, at worst detestable. The Spartans ordered their society around the ability to fight, and so they thought it wise to sacrifice the individual for the collective. When a baby was born, it was presented to the family elders, and if they deemed it weak, it would be drowned.

From a young age girls and women were taught to show only emotions which benefited the collective. If the baby wasn't suitable, then its mother should not show any grief. Should not feel any grief. These were their values.

I don't know how successful this teaching was, how many of their mothers had to bite their lip as they watched their baby being taken away. But it would be wrong to assume that they all struggled. Many Spartan women would have felt the appropriate sentiments, what they had learned since childhood, and they would be proud of the part they played in their culture. After all, Sparta successfully transferred these values to generation after generation through centuries.

A culture maintains itself by passing its values from one generation to the next, and it's not enough to pass on these values as head knowledge. Memorising a set of Spartan rules will not make you a Spartan. To successfully maintain a culture, these values need to be felt. They need to be intuitive. They need to seem self-evident, not just reasonable.

This has for much of history been one of the primary purposes of art. Classical plays are not just there to entertain, but to show the audience that some standard of behaviour is good/bad, or desirable/undesirable. Every medieval altarpiece was painted to inspire reverence, the correct thing to feel when approaching the altar. These are the Stock Responses to be learned.

Even today, every movie we watch, or book we read, teaches us to feel a certain way. Someone brought up on a diet of 20th century Disney will have a different response to true love than someone who has only ever read Tom Wolff. Apocalypse Now and the Iliad will leave you feeling quite differently about war. It doesn’t matter if the movie is actively trying to teach us anything, or if we are actively trying to learn. It’s not a conversation between head and head, but between heart and heart. ^[2]

You may be able to think of many examples of Stock Responses from the past or present, from your culture or elsewhere. And some of these examples are good things for a society to teach, some are bad, and we may disagree about which is which. ^[3]

Lewis thought that this was not simply a cultural difference, but some Stock Responses really are right, and some really are wrong. Or perhaps not right and wrong, but better and worse. There are certain situations where certain feelings are normal, and this transcends our cultural differences. A mother should feel grief at the death of her baby, a father should feel protective of his children.

Please understand that ‘normal’ does not necessarily mean ‘common’. It may be that you live in Sparta, where mothers don’t feel grief for the loss of a child. Or in a place where there’s no shame in cowardice, or no disgust in eating talking animals. Lewis would say that this is a problem with where you live, and not with the idea of Stock Responses.

Lewis’ fear was that the right, good Stock Responses of civilisation were being dug out and demolished. A society which allows its Stock Responses to be undermined is doomed. Sociologist Phillip Rieff ^[4] calls these underminings Deathworks. A Deathwork is something that works against the cultural norms that make a society.

It doesn’t have to be a piece of art, but these form the best examples. Piss Christ by Antony Serrano, is a photo of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. It takes something that was made to be reverenced and mixes it with something unclean. As Rieff says, the sacramental has been made excremental. This says nothing about whether the piece is good art. A Deathwork can be an excellent piece of art. You might think Piss Christ is terrible kitsch, or deeply profound. It doesn’t matter. If it works against a society’s Stock Responses, to undermine and reprogramme them, it will eventually kill that culture.

Both Lewis and Rieff thought that what they were defending was more than just current western norms. Lewis saw enough common threads running through the great civilisations to think that some values are universal. He was defending Civilisation. Not Western Civilisation (in contrast to Eastern Civilisation), but Civilisation (in contrast to Barbarism). The Stock Responses that had been hard won by China, India, and particularly the west, were being dug away by Deathworks. For Lewis, the Deathworker-in-chief was T.S. Eliot.

In Lewis’ academic books, essays, letters and fiction there are arrows aimed at Eliot. ^[5] Eliot was a Modernist, so he avoided traditional rhyme and metre, and he didn’t reach for conventional metaphors. For example, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot describes an evening as “like a patient etherised upon a table.” Is this a good image of an evening? It’s bold, unusual, and it catches our attention. It’s a reaction against the stale cliches which Eliot felt had come to dominate poetry. But is it true? Does it show us something about evening-ness that we wouldn’t have thought ourselves, but recognise when we read it? Lewis didn’t think so.

“I don’t believe one person in a million, under any emotional stress, would see an evening like that. And even if they did, I believe that anything but the most sparing admission of such images is a dangerous game. To invite them, to recur willingly to them, to come to regard them as normal surely poisons us.”

Something as trivial as a bad image of an evening is poison to those who read it. It teaches us the wrong way to feel about an evening. It works death to the Stock Response.

Lewis has a better image:

To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

There’s something melancholy about an evening. Not sad exactly, but something of a departure, a quiet farewell to the day; it leaves us, we remain behind. Lewis’ image is better than Eliot’s.

Perhaps this seems trivial. One bad image won’t bring about the collapse of civilisation. If Eliot’s patient etherised upon a table is unhelpful, it’s not much more than a curiosity. But Lewis wants to fight for image after image, because the cumulative effect of lots of bad images is the collapse of civilisation. Not collapse in the sense that people will go back to living in caves, but in the sense that we will no longer like things that are likable, or hate things that are hateful. We will build ugly buildings, enjoy ugly art, and we will be the worse for it. We will take pleasure in despicable things. We will give up civilisation for barbarism.

Lewis has read the modernist poets, and he thinks their imagery is bad. He is prepared to give better ones, because he thinks the survival of civilisation depends on it.

A Confession

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening -- any evening -- would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;
Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.
I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things… peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.

3. Joys that Sting

Thus, what old poets told me about love
(Tristram’s obedience, Isoud’s sovereignty…)
Turns true in a dread mode I dreamed not of,
– What once I studied, now I learn to be;”
Old Poets Remembered, C.S. Lewis

A Confession is the first in a collection of 131 poems. It’s no surprise that a collection like this, written over 30 years, is disparate. There are poems which are playful and serious, childish and philosophical. But anyone who has read any Lewis will recognise his style pulsing through it.

The Lewis most people encounter is the bullish academic; jovial and completely confident in the rightness of his views. This is how he comes across in most of his work, and it’s that infectious joy that keeps him popular today. It’s rare that he bears his soul, rare that he shows any kind of introspection. The time that he does is after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman.

Lewis got married late in life, to a pushy American who travelled to Britain to meet him. It’s an age old story. Boy meets girl. Girl falls in love with boy, but boy doesn’t reciprocate. Boy marries girl for immigration purposes. As girl is dying of cancer, boy realises that he loves her. Girl makes a miraculous recovery, and the couple live happily ever after, for three years. Girl dies, and boy is broken hearted.

Four or five of the poems in this volume are about the death of his wife. In “Joys that Sting” he takes a line from John Donne as his starting point. Donne says that if his love dies, this will cause him to hate all women. But Lewis takes this for what it is – exaggerated melodrama which rings false. Lewis’ grief wasn’t a general loss held against all women, it’s razor specific. This person, at this time. He remembers life with his wife, the places they walked, the conversations, the jokes. These brought joy at the time, and looking back as a widower, they hurt. These are the joys that sting.

Long before he met his wife, Lewis observed that every marriage ends in tragedy. The best scenario is a long and happy life together. But even then, one partner will die, and the other will be left to mourn. The death of a spouse is a commonplace thing, happening thousands of times every day. And each instance is heart rending. Lewis is broken hearted, and unexceptional.

The commonplaceness, the lack of novelty makes this poem about grief a kind of Stock Response. Lewis doesn’t want to give us a lesson, and he’s not trying to teach us. Not deliberately anyway. But Donne has said something Lewis needs to correct: Donne’s model of grief is less helpful than Lewis’, so Lewis aims to replace it with a better one, and he does so by making us feel it.

It’s not that we are to copy his grief, but that we share it with him, and as we share it we practice our own grief. Whether we practice for the future, or relive existing pain, we’re being shaped ever so slightly by his model, because we do so within the bounds that he has set. In this case, the bounds are the mingling of joy and pain, and we move towards a Stock Response for grief.

It’s not enough to know this in our heads. For it to do us any good it needs to be felt. He is passing on what he has learned to feel, his Stock Response. Of course this isn’t unique to Lewis – every piece of art does this in some way, intentionally or unintentionally, for better or for worse. Even the main idea of the poem, that past joys now sting, isn’t new. Lewis took it from an old Greek poet. ^[6] He was rarely original. His worth comes in his distilling all the things he had read, and passing on the values that he thought were worth passing on. In Poems, he passes on good Stock Responses, and tries his best to inoculate us against Deathworks.

Joys That Sting

Oh doe not die, says Donne, for I shall hate
All women so. How false the sentence rings.
Women? But in a life made desolate
It is the joys once shared that have the stings.

To take the old walks alone, or not at all,
To order one pint where I ordered two,
To think of, and then not to make, the small
Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you);

To laugh (oh, one'll laugh), to talk upon
Themes that we talked upon when you were there,
To make some poor pretence of going on,
Be kind to one's old friends, and seem to care,

While no one (O God) through the years will say
The simplest, common word in just your way.