Spirits in Bondage & Modern Poetry: Guest Post by Sarina Louise

Today, I'm excited to welcome Sarina Louise to my blog! I first got to know her when we interacted after the publication of Voices of the Future: Stories of Adventure and Imagination, in which is published her beautiful story about a poet. Since then, I've read a good number of her poems, and I'm impressed by her skill and her passion and eager to have her thoughts on my blog today. You can find her online at https://sarinalouise.com/!

Spirits in Bondage & Modern Poetry by Sarina Louise

Can poets from history teach us something now, in the modern age?

I’m going to be honest and say that, as a poet, I actually tend more towards free verse poetry than poetry with traditional, classical rhyming schemes.

Sure, sometimes, I decide to challenge myself and write poetry within the constraints of a rhyme.

But often, I find that my poetry stems from places of deep emotion. Given this fact, I attempt to allow it the space it needs to breathe, to process, and to spill words onto the hidden corners of the Notes app in my phone.

However, earlier this year, I had the opportunity to have a short story of mine published in Voices of the Future: Stories of Adventure & Imagination through the Author Conservatory.

My main character? A British poet living in 1920s London.

Suddenly, my poetry was going to be published. Not only that, it had to be written from the perspective of a male, widowed poet living a hundred years ago. Meaning it couldn’t just be the musings of a female young adult from the 21st century.

A mentor recommended C.S. Lewis’s “Spirits in Bondage” as a place to start looking into classical poetry.

While I only read about half of the poems as part of my research before diving into the process of writing, editing, and publishing my short story, I found myself fascinated by a raw side of C.S. Lewis that I’d never seen before. Not the hopeful, gospel-driven prose and plot of his most famous work, The Chronicles of Narnia.

But, instead, the haunted scribblings of a man scarred by war.

Spirits in Bondage deals with the human experience at its darkest—dealing with the aftermath of Lewis’s own struggles as a young atheist after living through World War I.

It was, at times, hard to read. But the beauty of the prose was apparent, even as Lewis questioned what type of God would allow the darkness found in our world. And, through this first published work, I found inspiration that led to the creation of poems of my own, also written from the perspective of a man scarred by grief.

This experience was a poignant reminder that the past has much to offer us, both in the way of knowledge and also inspiration, and that we can truly learn so much from the ones who came before us as we learn to perfect our craft.