Joy

The author of my newly acquired book about C.S. Lewis keeps quoting from his poems. It has been a very long time since I opened Poems, collected and edited by Walter Hooper. In the chapter I'm reading today this one came up:

THE DAY WITH A WHITE MARK (1949)

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness: Was it an elf in the blood? or a bird in the brain? or even part Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave Of a journeying angel's transit roaring over and through my heart?

My garden's spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden; The plann'd and unplann'd miseries deepen; the knots draw tight. Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season. It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.

Yet I—I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of My day was like a peacock's chest. In at each sense there stole Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there, And shining roots worked visibly far down below one's feet, So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale, Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling Of glee, as kindly animals talk in a children's tale.

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes? No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.