Fun Friday: Poetry The Unicorn

Sharing an early poem, trying to capture desire

Not your standard unicorn (llamacorn?), but a lovely composition nonetheless by the Morris-influenced French painter Armand Point

I don’t know if this poem is actually any good, because I wanted it to be so, so much better. I don’t know why young people write poetry, but I do recognize the impulse, because I felt it strongly when I was young. Not being musical, I suppose whatever it was had to take the form of poetry. Most of it is meh, but that’s everyone’s poetry. 

But I will try to explain what inspired it. I learned to read early and I read lots of C.S. Lewis very young—not just Narnia but all of his major works–and I read him over and over and over. For a long time, I succeeded in not only reading nearly everything he’d ever written but also anything that was written about him as well. Sometime over the past thirty years, the trickle of Lewisian scholarship became a flood and now I am far behind the times. But I was a budding Lewis geek in those first generations of his fandom.

And one of his ideas which I encountered early—I believe in Surprised by Joy—stuck with me and resonated because it was what I had experienced as well. I mean the stab of Joy. Lewis describes it as an unbearable pain that was better and more desirable than any pleasure, one which turned all the goals of this life to dust. He tried to search for it and hold onto it, but discovered it vanished as soon as you tried to find it. It would come up behind you and stab you when you least expected it. Reading this was a revelation to me: “That’s what that is!” was my youthful response.  I just knew that experiencing it—and when I was young I experienced it often—brought about a kind of paralysis and then frustration because it ruined me for ordinary pursuits. Nothing came close to it. It was like Christ upending the tables of the money-changers–aside from anything else, it was a monstrous annoyance.