Christian Poems Research Articles

Анализ и перевод древнеанглийской поэмы Instructions for Christians в контексте христианской традиции

An Old English poem, preserved in a copy of the 12th century, Instructions for Chris­tians, consisting of 265 lines, is considered through the prism of the explication of the theme of moral instructions in the Old English tradition. The poem, along with other Old English sermons and Christian poems, represents the suggestion of moral rules regarding early Chris­tian life, being a set of orders for believers. This article provides the author's translation of the contexts of the poem Instructions for Christians. The problem of studying the phenomenon of instructions and the representation of the indisputable position of faith in the ancient culture of the Anglo-Saxons is posed. The overall goal and objectives of the study determine the com­plex nature of the traditional methods used for philological analysis of texts and the semiotic approach to texts. The analysis of the Old English text showed the interweaving of plots of the Old and New Testaments, reflecting opposing views on poverty and wealth, sacrifices, acts of gift and exchange. Issues related to the deeds of the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament Apostle Paul are highlighted in the context of the analyzed material. The work provides a list of variant addresses to God which are used in the poem, which indicates a de­veloped Christian tradition in the Old English period, and also notes the direct name of the devil, which is usually absent in the texts of this period.

The Poetics of Conversion: Theological Themes in the Poetry of W. H. Auden

Abstract: W. H. Auden's theological readings reveal an interest in the existential tradition of Christian thought. Aspects of his major poems For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (1944), The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947), and Horae Canonicae (1949–1952) reflect theological parallels between the poems and the thought of German theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich. Auden's explicitly Christian poems evince themes of Tillichian ontological theology as he explores the issues of self, displacement, anxiety, Kairos, and conversion—specifically through his focus on the Incarnation. At odds with secular existentialism, Auden suggests the problems of the modern individual are uniquely spiritual problems that are the result of displacement from God.

The Theological Importance of Prof. Uwe’s Christian Poems

Prof. Heinz-Uwe Haus is an internationally renowned director and is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on Bertolt Brecht. Besides his theatrical achievements, he proves to have a profound knowledge of Christian doctrines, which is significantly well portrayed in his Christian poems. His poetic lines unveil the essential spirit of the New Testament. In this paper, a few poems are chosen to illustrate his theological thoughts, which are intricately connected with the core value of the New Testament, including Jesus’ crucifixion, salvation, man’s real nature, fundamental faith, and so on.

『실낙원』의 남북한 번역 양상 연구 – 사탄의 재현을 중심으로 –

This study examines the translations of Paradise Lost translated in South and North Korea. Using Mona Baker’s Narrative Theory and Framing Concept and Kathryn Batchelor’s Paratext Concept as the theoretical basis, this study explores the representation of Satan in the source text and analyzes how its aspects were reframed in the South and North Korean translations’ paratext and main body. It specifically reviews the paratext’s preface and the commentary on the work, and it analyzes Satan’s appearance, action, and speech in the main body. The analysis shows that reframing took place mainly through selective appropriation and labelling during the translation process. In the paratext, the South Korean translation frames Paradise Lost as a Christian poem. The North Korean translation however transforms the source text into a radical political poem and reframes it as a communist narrative. Whereas the South Korean translation tends to weaken the positive narrative of Satan, the North Korean translation strengthens the positive narrative of Satan and relates it to the North Korean political narrative. The transformed Satan in the North Korean translation shares similarities with the role model of an autonomous communist common in the North Korean literature.

Political Form in Paul Celan

Paul Celan’s “Tenebrae” is a scandalous poem: it describes how “unity with the dying Jesus” (in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s words) is achieved by means of the Jewish experience of the concentration camps. In this paper, I provide a new interpretation of “Tenebrae” that breaks from the two traditional ways in which the poem has been viewed—on the one hand, as a Christian poem that suggests that Jesus, insofar as he suffers just like Jewish concentration camp victims do, can provide “hope and redemption for the faithful” (Gadamer), and, on the other hand, as an ironic criticism of this Christian idea. Rather, I suggest that “Tenebrae” is a modification of Christianity: preserving Christian belief about Jesus’s death, it destroys that belief, and does so for the sake of the defense against Christian persecution. Finally, I suggest that this view reveals the peculiar poetic form of “Tenebrae”—what I call “political form.”

박두진 기독교 시 연구 ― 시어를 통한 성 삼위일체를 중심으로

박두진 기독교 시 연구 ― 시어를 통한 성 삼위일체를 중심으로

Boredom and Modern Culture

Boredom and Modern Culture Nicholas E. Lombardo OP (bio) I. A Book About Nothing When j. k. huysmans published Against the Grain in 1884, he thought that he had been writing for ten people, that he had been “crafting a hermetic book, locked to idiots.”1 Instead, as he would declare twenty years later, “Against the Grain fell like a meteorite into the literary fairgrounds, and there was astonishment and fury.”2 To the envy of novelists everywhere, he was not exaggerating. Huysmans had not expected many readers for very good reason: Against the Grain is a book about nothing. Its only character is a jaded, misanthropic aristocrat who flees the world for a suburban hermit-age. The novel simply catalogs his eccentric attempts to escape the boredom of modern life, one after the other, in excruciating detail. He decorates his rooms with color schemes that work only at night, under artificial light; he buys a tortoise and encrusts its shell with gold and jewels; he collects odd and exotic flowers; he experiments with perfumes and fragrances; he mentally inventories his vast library; he spends an evening luxuriating in sexual memories, and then reads an early Christian poem in praise of consecrated chastity. But nothing works for long, and after destroying his health, he must move back to Paris. [End Page 36] Despite the absence of a plot, Against the Grain was a sensation throughout France and the rest of Europe. Many condemned it, others praised it, but it had struck a chord. The book became the bible of the Decadent movement, and it inspired Oscar Wilde to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. Evidently Huysmans was not the only person to find modern life boring, and his contemporaries found it refreshing, and even comforting, to read about someone confronting the problem head-on. II. The Phenomenology of Boredom Whatever the prevalence of boredom in the nineteenth century, it can only have increased. Today a book like Against the Grain would not stand out. Today we expect artists and writers to be preoccupied with themes of restlessness, dissatisfaction, and weariness. Our familiarity with boredom should give us pause. We often talk about boredom, but we rarely wonder about boredom. And yet, there is a lot to wonder about. “Why is it that no other species but man gets bored?” Walker Percy asks. “Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.”3 Boredom is a subtle emotional state, hard to pin down, and it eludes easy classification. Being bored is unpleasant, but not exactly painful, either. When we are bored, it is not that we feel any positive emotional distress; rather, nothing engages us about what we are doing. Our desires have nothing to latch on to, and we find ourselves itching for something, anything, that might grab our interest. Elizabeth Goodstein calls boredom “experience without qualities.”4 Leo Tolstoy calls it “the desire for desires.”5 A recent psychological study defines boredom in similar terms as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.”6 Feeling bored often involves feeling disgust for whatever is boring us. After eating too much good food, our pleasure and enjoyment turns to disgust. It becomes too much even to have the plate in front us. We push it away. In the same way, when we become bored of [End Page 37] something, we can feel almost physical revulsion. It becomes galling to have it in front of us. We push it away. Not coincidentally, Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, which centers on themes of boredom and alienation, is titled Nausea, and Sartre frequently describes his protagonist as being overcome with spontaneous feelings of disgust. Boredom can be mild, as when we become bored of playing cards, or when we turn off a movie because it has become boring. It can also be excruciating. Prisons typically reserve solitary confinement for the worst offenses because it is so boring. But whether boredom is mild or severe, if at all possible, we immediately seek escape by doing something else. The impetus for escape can be so powerful that we sometimes value boredom as a...

W. H. Auden’sFor The Time Being : Christian proof? Aesthetic possibility?

This article explores a noteworthy difference between Alan Jacobs’s interpretation of Auden’s oratorio and mine. Jacobs sees the oratorio as a Christian poem and proof of Auden’s Christianity—which coincides with Auden’s turn away from his Romantic roots. I interpret the piece as a sign of Auden’s continuing commitment to his Romantic inheritance and intent to serve as an aesthetic (not religious) hero, exploring the aesthetic possibilities to which his imagination is drawn. After delineating the problems each of us has in applying our respective claims, I explain mine as offering the more troublesome challenge of the two.

The Dream and the Cross

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in Old English and an example of the genre of dream poetry. While a complete text can be found in the 10th-century “Vercelli Book,” the poem is considerably older, and its oldest occurrence is carved (in runes) on the 7- to 8th-century Ruthwell Stone Cross. In this article, we present the work done in the framework of the “Visionary Cross” project, starting from the digitization of the Ruthwell Cross to the creation of a web-based digital edition of The Dream of the Rood , as it is carved on the Cross. The 3D data has been collected and processed with the explicit aim of creating a multimedia framework able to present the highly detailed digital model acquired with 3D scanning technology, together with the transcription and translation of the runes that can be found on its surface. The textual and spatial information are linked through a system of bidirectional links called Spots, which allow the users to navigate freely over the multimedia content, keeping the 3D and textual data synchronized. The present work discusses the different issues that arose during the work, from digitization and processing to the design of a tool for the integration of three-dimensional content in the context of the presentation on the web platform of heterogeneous multimedia data. We end with the difficulties involved in the creation of an XML encoding that could account for the necessities of the visualization system but remain within the scholarly encoding standards of the relevant disciplinary community.

Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint

Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint

A Study of Healing Shown in Korean Christian Poems

A Study of Healing Shown in Korean Christian Poems

Goldgyfan or Goldwlance: A Christian Apology for Beowulf and Treasure

Goldgyfan or Goldwlance: A Christian Apology for Beowulf and Treasure Joseph E. Marshall The debate as to what extent Beowulf is a Christian poem often centers on the poet’s struggle to understand and reconcile its obvious pagan elements with its religious values.1 One such area of concern is the hoard of references to treasure. While commentators have recognized the important presence of gift-exchange in Beowulf, they invariably disagree about what treasure represents and how it functions within the poem, especially in the final one third of the poem (lines 2200 to 3182) where Beowulf eagerly exchanges his life for the dragon’s buried treasure. A host of critics, including Kemp Malone, E. G. Stanley, Margaret Goldsmith, Eugene J. Crook, and Alan Bliss, question Beowulf’s motives for seeking the gold and conclude that he is guilty of avarice. Other critics, such as Willem Helder, Patricia Silber, Robert Creed, Henry Woolf, and Wade Tarzia, grapple with the dubious nature of the dragon’s hoard and offer a variety of explanations for its curse, plundering, and reburial. This article offers, in response to [End Page 1] critics’ accusations of avarice and their uncertainty about buried treasure, a renewed investigation of the Beowulf-poet’s distinction between distributed treasure and unused treasure, for the former seems to be a metonymy for lordship and the Christian ideal, while the latter seems to be a perversion of them both. Beginning in the early 1960s, commentators began to question Beowulf’s motives and behavior in the final section of the poem. One of the earliest critics to raise doubts was Malone, who despite proclaiming Beowulf “an ideal hero,” acknowledges that Beowulf seems particularly fond of the dragon’s hoard; for Malone, it symbolizes “the vanity of worldly goods.”2 Two years later Stanley proposed that Beowulf is guilty of “avarice” because he not only takes solace in the fact that he has acquired the hoard but also desires to see the hoard before he dies.3 The next, most prolific condemnations of Beowulf came from Goldsmith, who first raised concerns about Beowulf’s avarice in her article “The Christian Theme of Beowulf.” In her first examination into the allegorical meaning of the poem, she asserts that “young Beowulf was humble and not covetous,” for he “did not desire Grendel’s gold,” nor did he retain any “royal rewards he gained at Heorot.”4 The older Beowulf, she claims, becomes covetous. After quoting biblical passages, such as Matthew 6:19–21 and 1 Timothy 6:10,5 as well as examining Beowulf’s behavior, Goldsmith concludes that “Beowulf, like Hygelac before him, was tainted with the sins of the dragon, arrogance and love of treasure” and ultimately sacrifices his soul and the lives of the Geats “for the sake of the gold.”6 A few years later, Goldsmith once again concluded that Beowulf, “the deluded old man,” has bartered “his life for the gold, [as] he has committed the dire folly of buying what is worthless at the greatest price.” Goldsmith continues, “Beowulf, blinded by arrogance and desire for the treasure, exchanges the remainder of his length of days [End Page 2] for short-lived possession of the dragon’s gold.”7 The most comprehensive of Goldsmith’s attacks, however, appears in her book The Mode and Meaning of “Beowulf,” in which she sets out to prove that Beowulf is “lured as he nears death by the illusory solace of personal glory and great wealth.”8 Goldsmith’s conclusion, namely that Beowulf yields to the temptations of avarice, has convinced and invigorated even more scholars. Following Goldsmith’s example, Crook continued the assault on Beowulf’s character by reproving the king for his “cursed course of action” in fighting the dragon.9 To support his claim, Crook reintroduces the fact that Beowulf once refused treasure in Grendel’s mere and now eagerly seeks it in the dragon’s barrow. This change in behavior leads Crook to conclude that Wiglaf, not Beowulf, shows “the promise of Christian nobility in the rejection of the things of this world which are the roots of greed and corruption.” Besides the poem, Crook also cites passages from St. Gregory...

X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape (review)

Reviewed by: M. X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape Karen Coats Yeahpau, Thomas M. X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape. Candlewick, 2006231p ISBN 0-7636-2706-2$16.99 R* Gr. 10 up Mausape and his friends Brando, Hoss, and Maddog are X-Indians, a term Yeahpau coined to describe his experience of growing up as a member of "a race that was losing its culture and a generation that was losing its mind." In a series of interconnected short stories, Yeahpau traces the growth of these boys, from the loss of Mausape's grandfather to an encounter with the vicious Deer Lady, through their multileveled entanglements with tribal spirits and distilled ones, to their various ends—some successful, some violent, some mystical. The stories are compelling and disturbing, laced with the irony of living between two worlds, an experience [End Page 313] that Yeahpau captures with laconic intensity. Yeahpau's X-Indians have come to a point where their only language for the beauty and violence of the spirit world has been overwritten by the coarse banality of street slang; for instance, when Mausape's guardian angel is so overcome with desire for him that she falls to earth and assumes a sublimely perfect human form, his response is "She was Great-Spirit given, and Mausape knew he better hit that." Yeahpau is a master storyteller for his generation, showing with uncompromising force and edgy humor the fraught intersections between Kiowa tradition and a hard-driving adolescence and early adulthood steeped in a haze of anger, poverty, crime, sex, drugs, and alcohol. Even a hokey premise like putting Mr. Al Cohol on trial for crimes against the Indians and the X-Indians yields a gasp of insight when Cohol testifies to a grisly parody of the well-known Christian poem of solace, "Footprints." Tough and provocative yet laced with wicked humor, this is an honorable successor to Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in both candor and grace. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Trouble with Comfort: Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Leafy Emotion

The use of the leaf image in Christina Rossetti and John Ruskin is expressive of their different attitudes towards human emotion. Rossetti, viewing emotion as a barrier to religious salvation, projects feeling into the natural world and thus fails to contemplate nature closely, refusing its comfort and preferring to look towards God. Inability to see the natural world is a central concern of Ruskin's Modern Painters, and in Volume v his focus on the leaf, inter alia, serves to teach his readers how to look. Ruskin highlights how the leaf grows, lives, and then falls in a spiral, whose trajectory offers an ideal model of emotion. ********** This article emerged from thinking about two lines about falling leaves by Victorian writers: the first by Christina Rossetti, the second by John Ruskin. In her Christian poem 'A Better Resurrection' (1857) Rossetti writes: 'My life is in the falling leaf'; and in his study of aesthetics, Modern Painters, Ruskin writes that life is 'partly as the falling leaf'. (1) What does it mean for a life to be in or as a falling leaf? For both writers, the leaf image speaks to the experience of feeling as a human being, or what it means to be a human being. For Rossetti, this affective being is Christian, a subject position which for her involves erasing the worldly self to look forward to a potentially paradisial existence. Withdrawing her representation of feeling into the autumnal image of the falling leaf, she almost erases, or as Jerome McGann argues, 'extinguishes', affective experience, rendering her felt existence one that looks forward to death. (2) Rossetti effectively sublimates her felt experience in the falling leaf. Ruskin, however, is more optimistic, regarding his life as the falling leaf, a statement which I argue here is based more on the movement the leaf makes as it drops, as opposed to the process of dying that Rossetti sees in the falling leaf. The leaf captures felt existence for Ruskin in a manner that in part reflects his reading of Wordsworth's argument that we should seek to understand life through its emotional content: that our feelings about the material world signify what it means to be a human more than our physical relationship with the material world itself. This is not to argue that the action of the fallen leaf can be simply mapped onto an equivalent emotion, like depression (the leaf falls down, the narrator of the poem feels down); but that the movement a falling leaf makes provides a model of emotion for Ruskin. To model emotion on a falling leaf holds many parallels with current theories of emotion, particularly those forwarded by Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect. (3) Here Brennan argues that human emotion works by being broadcast into the air between people, moving back and forth and being reshaped as it travels. What Brennan means by this is that the emotions or affects of one person, and the improving or gloomy energies these affects involve, can enter into another person through the body and mind. Affects for Brennan are physiological, i.e. physical or material, sensations or energies that accompany judgements we make about situations or people. We project or transmit affects and then others are impressed or affected by them. The interpretation of such an impression will vary from person to person, Brennan argues: a negative affect, for example, such as anxiety, is received by a seriously depressed person in a way that differs greatly from its reception by a relaxed or contented person. The thoughts we attach to the affects we encounter remain our own, however, the product of a particular historical conjunction of our experiences and how we interpret such affects. This speaks to Ruskin, I think, because he wants to privilege a modern art that will represent the leaf so tenderly that the image of the leaf will itself transmit a certain kind of affect--a familial and domestic one--that will reassure and relieve the viewer. …

Bède et la tradition grammaticale latine

This article examines the orientation of the grammatical culture of Bede through his sources for the De arte metrica (DAM) and the De schematibus et tropis (DST). These treatises are not addressed to beginners, but aim at giving students a sophisticated Christian culture. From the grammarians of Antiquity Bede retains the initiation to a discerning and searching reading of the authors, far more than the theoretical definitions of the Artes. Which authors ? The poets, of course, but Christian poets, substituted for those of ancient Rome : these Christian poems, for which the DAM is the reader’s guide, are like a reflection of Holy Scripture. In passing from one treatise to the other the student crosses a decisive threshold both in his education and in the corpus of reference works. For the only true poetry is the word of God transmitted through Scripture « which we believe to be the intrinsic bearer of life everlasting »

Nochmals: Lactantius und Lucretius. Antilucrezisches im Epilog des lactanzischen Phoenix-Gedichts?

No other ancient author used Lucretius as intensively as the Christian Lactantius did. This has been widely examined for Lactantius' prose writings. But also in his elegy De ave Phoenice, the first Christian poem following classical poetic tradition, we find Lucretius' influence, especially in the epilogue (Phoen. 161–170), where the bird Phoenix appears as an allegory of the redeemed man. Here Lactantius converts Lucretius' famous equation (1, 1–3) ‘Venus=pleasure=living nature’ into its opposite: For Phoenix, death=pleasure =Venus, as he ‘gains eternal life by the good of death.’

Flashing Foil and Oozing Oil: Trinitarian Images in the First Quatrain of "God's Grandeur"

ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR AND IMMEDIATELY ACCESSIBLE CHRISTIAN POEMS in the English language launches its message with a pair of images that are immediately obscure. The apparently straightforward statement that opens Gerard Manley Hopkins' God's Grandeur reveals, like much of the sonnet's remainder, clear meaning in an instant and then further insight over time. However, the images that succeed that statement have long generated noisy confusion. A piece of foil, shaken by anonymous hands, produces flashes of light that sparkle forth like flames; oil oozes from something or crushing, likewise unnamed. Though the poem is otherwise complex yet remarkably lucid, these images have at times been interpreted as signs of intentional oddness or sheer sloppiness. It is difficult, though, to believe that a poet writing of bare soil and shod feet, the setting sun and a brooding dove--images that are immediately evocative--would have deliberately opened with obscure concepts. And we should not easily accept that a poet skillful enough to speak powerfully to the widest possible range of readers may have begun a poem carelessly only to complete it with obvious care. Our widespread confusion should not lead us to assume that Hopkins meant to be confusing, nor that it was his bad fortune to be confusing when he meant to be profound, but rather that we may lack a ready understanding of the Roman Catholic faith which inspired him to write. Any reader educated in the symbolism of Catholicism should be aware that flames and oil juxtaposed must refer to the Holy Spirit; a closer examination of the actions described in these lines reveals a detailed, multi-faceted description of the Trinity. Given the popularity of the poem, the inability of the critical public to come to modest agreement on its opening images is disturbing. Hopkins explained to Robert Bridges, his friend and correspondent, that the foil image was central, the poem written to expand upon it. His further, oft-quoted comment establishes that he developed this image with exquisite care, and gives us specific clues to his meaning that are too often ignored: 1 mean foil in its sense of leaf or tinsel....Shaken goldfoil gives off broad glares like sheet lightning and also, and this is true of nothing else, owing to its zigzag dints and creasings and network of small many cornered facets, a sort of fork lightning too.' He has not left us with explanations for the oozing oil, but we do know that an earlier version of the poem uses the word rather than crushed (2) both the original choice and the candidate ultimately selected are, once again, instructive. The two images, of foil with a sparkling shine and oil in a gradual ooze, are clearly linked, not only in their proximity but also in their poetics. Nonetheless many, failing to discern a substantial connection between the two, have looked elsewhere in the poem for help. Because the flamelike shining can be easily linked to the presumably electric charge in the first line, the oozing oil has been particularly subject to misinterpretation. It is often and accurately identified as oil pressed from an olive, but we have also seen a wide variety of theories suggesting that the oil may be petroleum in different states and conditions; everything from a hydraulic press to an oil lamp has been invoked. (3) Petroleum-based interpretations of the oozing oil often rely upon a linkage to the second quatrain, which is characterized by unpleasant images that recall human sinfulness. Thinking of the trod earth, some have pictured a foot stepping in a puddle of oil. (4) Thinking of man's smudge, some have imagined a thumb pressed in a drop of oil, and how this thumb might obscure one's vision. (5) Efforts to establish the closest relation to the second quatrain or even the sestet will lead us astray, because in every sense, the image of the oozing oil is linked far more closely to the earlier image of the shaken foil. …

Visionary Eschatology: Piers Plowman

In its later versions Piers Plowman is a long, complex poem of extraordinary formal, theological, and political complexity. It is one of the greatest Christian poems. Written in a period of unprecedented conflict in English polities, including the Church, it was passionately involved in exploring many of these conflicts while seeking to imagine projects of Reformation. The poem includes fascinating reflections on diverse eschatological traditions within the late medieval Church, including neo‐Joachite ones. Subjecting both the contemporary Church and such eschatologies to sustained critique, the author evolves a profoundly Christocentric vision in the light of which triumphant narratives of the Church would emerge as among the opiates threatening the Church at the poem's close.

Influencias judías en la literatura castellana medieval

This article is devoted to certain Jewish influences on Castilian medieval literature. Firstly, a brief typology of Jewish influences on Spanish literature is exposed; afterwards, the autor focuses on some specific aspects, such as the diffusion of Jewish Castilian medieval literature among Christian readers, Jewish influences on the crusade song Ay, Iherusalem , and finally, the use of some features of semitic poetry in Christian poems and metrical patterns of Christian poetry in Jewish poems.

Ambivalence in the Christian poetry of C.S. Lewis

This article examines the ambivalence expressed in certain of the explicitly Christian poems written by C.S. Lewis. As a writer his primary claim to fame is his Christian apologetics, in spite of the fact that he is well thought of in literary circles and produced several scholarly works. In the light of his considered Christian convictions, one would expect his poetry to voice a strong faith and confidence in God However, somewhat ironically, certain of his poems reflect his struggles and doubts concerning faith in an intensely personal register. Nevertheless, in spite of his ambivalent feelings towards God, he retains the certainty that God is able to transcend his human frailty and difficulties. The problem of faith is relevant in our own time, and it therefore seems fitting that we should examine certain of C.S. Lewis's poems in commemoration of the centenary year of his birth.