Weekend Reads: A Ruth with rhythm

A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C.S. Lewis and Other Poems (Eerdmans, 2015) presents the first complete collection of verse by Joy Davidman, the American woman who married C.S. Lewis. Anyone who has seen the aging biopic Shadowlands will remember Davidman for her brassiness and her early death. But few will have experienced her literary gift firsthand.

Many readers of this new collection edited by Don W. King, which includes many poems from Davidman’s communist days, will take most interest in the slim section of 45 romantic sonnets at the book’s end. Davidman directs these sonnets toward Lewis, a man in whom she found an intellectual equal.

Lewis wanted to be a great poet. He entered the publishing world with a narrative poem called Dymer. But even if you’ve devoured his apologetic works and lost yourself in Narnia, you might not know his poetry any more than his wife’s.

A medievalist, Lewis balked at modernist forms pioneered by T.S. Eliot—though Eliot himself drew deeply from medieval poetry and like Lewis practiced Anglicanism. Poetry deals in images, but Lewis excelled in ideas. Poetry exposes the author. Lewis’s friends referred to his autobiography Surprised by Joy as “Suppressed by Jack.”

But in her poems, Davidman did not allow Lewis to retreat into ideas. “Love universal is love spread too thin / To keep a mortal warm,” she wrote. Lewis couldn’t study her affection like he did Eros in The Four Loves. She demanded that he participate.

Lewis is the crowned king of Christian quotability for his penetrating understanding of life in the abstract. But Davidman gives the reader her personal guts. Many of her sonnets directed at Lewis were written years before their marriage and designed to capture his heart. Her first sonnet reads:

Dear Jack: Here are some sonnets you may care to read … The verse may be a joke; the love is not.

But the verse, of course, is not a joke. There’s a reason Davidman won a poetry prize Sylvia Plath would have killed for and received a joint poetic honor with Robert Frost. The sonnets are at times uncomfortably erotic. Can this fiery woman really be talking about the oh-so-British brainiac Lewis we all love? They take us deeper into human desire than the self-protective would ever dare to go. It is no wonder Lewis’ Oxford friends disliked Davidman. To anyone hoping to maintain his reserve, this woman would be a holy terror. She didn’t give Lewis an idea; she gave him her heart. And for Lewis, a lover and scholar of poetry, it made the perfect gift.

In A Naked Tree, Davidman’s gift to Lewis becomes a gift to the reader. Her sonnets exalt a virtue many do not appreciate in a woman: earnest romantic pursuit. Davidman’s demeanor recoils at the idea that bravery is reserved for boys. She proves herself a Ruth with rhythm. Using tight and true lines, painfully personal, she wins the affection and protection of a man who held her at arm’s length for far too long. And for that, you love her.