Spirits in Bondage

Lewis's first book, published by William Heinemann in London in 1919 under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton, when he was twenty and had returned to Oxford after his service in the First World War. It is a cycle of forty numbered lyrics and a prologue, arranged in three parts: The Prison House, Hesitation and The Escape. The poems belong to Lewis's years as an atheist: nature and its maker appear as indifferent or malign, while beauty, longing and an imagined world beyond the walls of matter offer the only escape. The darkest poems stand at the start and the volume grows more hopeful towards its close, ending with 'Death in Battle'. Many were written during or soon after the war, in which Lewis was wounded in 1918. The book made little stir, but it records the divided imagination that his later prose, from The Pilgrim's Regress to Surprised by Joy, describes from the far side of his conversion. It is in the public domain in the United States.