Another interesting parallel between Spirits in Bondage and Lewis’s more general biography actually tied into Narnia, particularly The Magician’s Nephew. It is clear that Lewis did not consider his conversion grounds to discard the vividness of his earlier imagination. In fact, he mined his own unChristian period for Truth much like he did other non-christian authors.
Consider his description of the “Land of the Lotus” from “XXV. Song of the Pilgrims”:
Land of the Lotus fallen from the sun,
Land of the Lake from whence all rivers run,
Land where the hope of all our dreams is won!Shall we not somewhere see at close of day
The green walls of that country far away,
And hear the music of her fountains play?[…]
But we shall wake again in gardens bright
Of green and gold for infinite delight,
Sleeping beneath the solemn mountains white,
While from the flowery copses still unseen
Sing out the crooning birds that ne’er have been
Touched by the hand of winter frore and lean;
This compares very favorably to what Polly, Digory, and Fledge encounter in the quest for the golden apple at the end of The Magician’s Nephew . There, they find an isolated, magical garden set high on a huge green hill:
All round the top of the hill ran a high wall of green turf. Inside the wall, trees were growing. Their branches hung out over the wall: their leaves showed not only green but also blue and silver when the wind stirred them. When the travelers reached the top they walked nearly all the way round it before they found the gates: high gates of gold, fast shut, facing due east. […] [Digory] went in very solemnly, looking about him. Everything was very quiet inside. Even the fountain which rose near the middle of the garden made only the faintest sound. The lovely smell was all around him: it was a happy place but very serious. (157-58)
Many of the same specific elements are the same–the green walls, the fountains, the colors green and gold, the brilliant rivers (referenced just a few pages earlier in The Magician’s Nephew). Of course, the expression of the conception is separated by years, and so it isn’t an exact correspondence, but it is close enough to think that, perhaps, they are one and the same.
Perhaps what we’re seeing here is really Lewis’s fleshing out of the toy garden that his brother Warnie had brought into their nursery many years before. In Surprised by Joy, he described the feeling evoked by that “biscuit tin filled with moss” as similar to “Milton’s ‘enormous bliss’ of Eden” (16). That does seem to be what Lewis was attempted to capture in both his poem and his book. Without more specific context, we’ll probably never know for sure.
Mere Lewis 