C. S. Lewis Daily
THE DAY WITH A WHITE MARK
All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness:
Was it elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part
Of the cloudy crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave
Of a journeying angel’s transit roaring over and over through my heart?
My garden’s spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden;
The plann’d and unplann’d miseries deepend; the knots draw tight.
Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.
It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers are only white.
Yet I—I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of
My day was like a peacock’s chest. In at each sense there stole
Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew
Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.
From Poems
Poems. Copyright © 1964 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Preface copyright © 1964 by Walter Hooper. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.