<lewis' "a confession"> 2006-08-16.1:39 p.m. A Confession C.S. Lewis I am so coarse, the things the poets see Are obstinately invisible to me. For twenty years I've stared my level best To see if evening--any evening--would suggest A patient etherized upon a table; In vain. I simply wasn't able. To me each evening looked far more Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind. Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east Never, for me, resembled in the least A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker's nose; Waterfalls don't remind me of torn underclothes, Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I've never known The moon look like a hump-backed crone-- Rather, a prodigy, even now Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops' brow Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space. Never the white sun of the wintriest day Struck me as un crachat d'estaminet. I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom A primrose is a yellow primrose, one whose doom Keeps him forever in the list of dunces, Compelled to live on stock responses, Making the poor best that I can Of dull things...peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran, Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem, The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem. back /& forth /& frosting names are often sad