Poem of The Month: Love's as Warm as Tears By C.S. Lewis
What do you think is the meaning of this poem?
Love’s as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.
Love’s as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts—infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.
Love’s as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song hung in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering ‘Dare! Dare!’
To sap, to blood,
Telling ‘Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.’
Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.
C.S. Lewis had a rich religious life, and love and hope were major tropes in his writing. His concept of love is shown in this poem, with all its richness and textures, both the ecstatic and the harsh. His concepts were strongly influenced by his concept of the divine, paralleling the width and depth of God's love for his children. The strength in love was in his later years tested with his wife death from cancer, prompting his writing of "A Grief Observed, and penning:
"Where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him...but go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence." Certainly reflecting the toughness love brings at times.
Love reading C S Lewis. Thank you for sharing 🙏