“Wormwood, immortal Satan, Ahriman, alone”


Talking Poetry with Nate and Zaklog the Great: C.S. Lewis’s “Wormwood. Watch here!
Thou only art alternative to God, oh, dark
And burning island among spirits, tenth hierarch,
Wormwood, immortal Satan, Ahriman, alone
Second to Him to whom no second else were known,
Being essential fire, sprung of His fire, but bound
Within the lightless furnace of thy Self, bricked round
To range in the reverberated heat from seven
Containing walls: hence power thou hast to rival heaven.
Therefore, except the temperance of the eternal love
Only thy absolute lust is worth the thinking of.
All else is weak disguising of the wishful heart,
All that seemed earth is Hell, or Heaven. God is: thou art:
The rest, illusion. How should man live save as glass
To let the white light without flame, the Father, pass
Unstained: or else—opaque, molten to thy desire,
Venus infernal starving in the strength of fire! 
Lord, open not too often my weak eyes to this.
—C. S. Lewis


Zaklog the Great reads “Wormwood” here.

For a complete list of my videos and podcasts, go here.

Comments

  1. whitewallFebruary 24, 2019 at 11:16 AM

    The Lady peering seductively over those glasses...Rachel, is that you?!

    Robert

    ReplyDelete
  2. Zaklog the GreatFebruary 24, 2019 at 2:08 PM

    Not a huge deal, but you left a time tag on the URL for the Wormwood video. Anyone following that link gets dropped into the video 8 seconds in. If you want to correct this, just delete the part which says &t=8s .

    Thanks again for joining us. I hope you had fun and you can join us again sometime.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Uncle BearFebruary 25, 2019 at 7:52 AM

    This and the Tolkien post with Fox Valley TV of the other day are both wonderful. Though they might not be as click generating as other stuff, the depth and layers of meaning you discuss are intellectually challenging. I have a scar from fencing, but it was a T-Post Driver as I drove t-posts to build fencing.....LOL

    ReplyDelete

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