Poems/Letters to Malcom
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
This Poem is found in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, a book by C.S. Lewis Chapter 13, page 93.
I’ve just found in an old note-book a poem, with no author’s name attached, which is rather relevant to something we were talking about a few weeks ago—I mean, the haunting fear that there is no one listening, and that what we call prayer is soliloquy: someone talking to himself. This writer takes the bull by the horns and says in effect: “Very well, suppose it is”, and gets a surprising result. Here is the poem:
The Poem
They tell me, Lord that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
Since but one voice is heard, it’s all a dream,
One talker aping two.
Sometimes it is, yet not as they
Conceive it. Rather, I
Seek in myself the things I hoped to say,
But lo!, my wells are dry.
Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
The listener’s role and through
My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew.
And thus you neither need reply
Nor can; thus, while we seem
Two talkers, thou are One forever, and I
No dreamer, but thy dream.
Comments (C.S. Lewis)
Dream makes it too like Pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the rhyme. But is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God. But the human petitioner does not therefore become a “dream”. As you said the other day,God and man cannot exclude one another, as man excludes man, at the point of junction, so to call it, between Creator and creature; the point where the mystery of creation—timeless for God, and incessant in time for us—is actually taking place.“God did (or said) it” and “I did (or said) it” can both be true.