Love’s As Warm As Tears
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 (what all that is)
Our cross, and His.
~ C.S. Lewis
I reread an old favorite the other day (this poem) and decided to pass it along. Besides, I’m busy and should be doing other things besides blogging. Hopefully I can still pull together the “year in review.”
That’s a sweet poem. You’ll be flattered to hear that I had the impression you’d written it for the first couple stanzas…Wow…WOW.
I’m not too familiar with Lewis’ poetry.
Wow indeed, Ariel. I’m immensely flattered to have this poem briefly mistaken;y attributed to me. Lewis has some remarkable poems. I stumbled across this one in a collection of his passages entitle The Visionary Christian. As a rule I don’t go much for collections of vignettes, but this one has been nice because it has brought some of his more obscure writings to my attention.