Dymer

Before C.S. Lewis wrote Narnia or Mere Christianity, he wrote this: a dark, ambitious narrative poem about a man who murders his way out of paradise. Dymer is born into the Perfect City, a puritanical regime that has legislated emotion, coddled desire into docility, and called it civilization. When Dymer's long-repressed instincts finally erupt during a lecture, he kills a man and flees into wilderness, shedding the garments of societal expectation and discovering a brutal, beautiful freedom in nature. But freedom, Lewis knew, is not salvation. The poem traces Dymer's journey toward something more troubling than happiness: a confrontation with desire itself, with the monster that lives in every act of self-creation. Written when Lewis was a young, angry atheist, Dymer pulses with the same existential anguish that would later fuel his great apologetic works, now directed inward. This is not the gentle chronicler of Narnia speaking. This is Lewis before grace, wrestling with the darker angels of his own nature, and it's magnificent in ways his later work deliberately chose not to be.