On February 10, 1938, The Oxford Magazine published this poem by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had a lifelong desire to be a poet. Yet, as his career and fame grew, it was never to be realized. Still, he periodically would try his hand at the craft. This poem is one of his more successful.
Chanson D’Adventure
I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear
‘This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.
‘Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.
‘This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.
‘This summer will not lead you round and back
To autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.
‘Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
The gates of good adventure swing apart.
‘This time, this time, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.’
I said, ‘This might prove truer than a bird can know;
And yet your singing will not make it so.’
Kathryn Lindskoog, in an essay published in 1998, offers this by way of commentary:
“Chanson D’Aventure” is not the most memorable of Lewis’s poems, but it is a skillful lyric and uniquely appropriate for his memorial stone at Magdalen College. It not only hints at his fondness for Addison’s Walk, but subtly expresses what lies at the heart of his life and all his writing. Couplets and brevity are especially appropriate in a poem using the imagery of birdsong, and especially practical on a memorial stone.
The poem is Lewis’s intellectual response to spring. It is essentially about his longing for Joy and, ultimately, all human longing for heaven. It is about our natural desire to escape from human mortality and futility, from the cycle of life and death, and from the mutability of all earthly joys. It is about the endless summer that can exist only outside nature as we know it, if at all. And it is also about epistemology.
Lewis’s title “Chanson D’Aventure” refers to the medieval tradition of a noble quest or adventure undertaken in the spring in a spirit of valor and optimism. In medieval thought, two kinds of adventure focusing on the Ultimate were (in literature) the knightly quest for the Holy Grail, and (in life) pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint. . . . In both quests, the journeyer risked his or her life in hopes of attaining the ultimate divine gift. Thus the poem is about a birdsong encouraging a veteran traveller who has been disappointed in all his or her previous quests. (Lewis was repeatedly disappointed in his early searches for Joy, just as John was repeatedly disappointed in his search for the Western Island in The Pilgrim’s Regress.) Lewis’s choice of title shows the importance of line 10, “The gates of good adventure swing apart.”
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