“You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” C. S. Lewis to Walter Hooper—reported in Hooper’s preface to the Lewis collection Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), v.
Such a tapestry his mind could weave;
He gave us Puddleglum and Reepicheep!
Yet there were two things he could not conceive:
A book too long, a pot of tea too deep.
He plumbed the deepest caves of human thought;
He climbed the peaks of poetry and song,
Yet never could he find that God had wrought
A cup of tea too large, a book too long.
Each day would dawn to the same set of plans:
Chapel, breakfast, and then what comes next?
The endless quest to satisfy the man’s
Voracious appetite for tea and text.
He gave his time, his energy, his love
To pupils, letters, books, and family,
To friends, chores, God—and the fulfillment of
His endless appetite for text and tea.
Donald T. Williams, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College, has been slanderously identified as the author of The Devil’s Dictionary of the Christian Faith (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2008), a charge which he neither confirms nor denies. He is certainly the author of a dozen other books including Ninety-Five These for a New Reformation: A Road Map for Post-Evangelical Christianity (Semper Reformanda Publications, 2021), a serious book about theology which also keeps Screwtape up at night.
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Citation Information
Donald T. Williams. “C.S. Lewis: A Life.” An Unexpected Journal 1, no. 4. (Advent 2018): 57.
Direct Link: https://anunexpectedjournal.com/c-s-lewis-a-life/
Credits:
This new poem is scheduled to appear in the second edition of Stars Through the Clouds: The Collected Poetry of Donald T. Williams (Lynchburg: Lantern Hollow Press, 2018), currently in preparation. It is used here by permission.
