This morning, our dawn service opened with this C.S. Lewis poem, and the the second service closed with the same poem. It’s a wonderful reflection on the resurrection, and illustrates how Lewis could think of the gospel as a true myth. Here he couches the news of the resurrection in the cadences of myth — addressing the angelic powers, pointing to the defeated Satan, calling the dead to dance and all of creation to awake and “Rise and romp and ramp”. Finally suffering humans are directed to Christ as the one who has taken on their plight and has now overcome death. The poem in published in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950-1963 (HarperSan Francisco, 2007), p. 955

I’ve added notes on some of the words and ideas.

Lords coëval ¹ with creation,
Seraph, Cherub, Throne and Power,
Princedom, Virtue, Domination,
Hail the long-awaited hour!
Bruised in head, with broken pinion²,
Trembling for his old dominion,
See the ancient dragon³ cower!
For the Prince of Heaven has risen,
Victor, from his shattered prison.

Loudly roaring from the regions
Where no sunbeam e’er was shed,
Rise and dance, ye ransomed legions
Of the cold and countless dead!
Gates of adamant⁴ are broken,
Words of conquering power are spoken
Through the God who died and bled:
Hell lies vacant, spoiled and cheated,
By the Lord of life defeated.⁵

Bear, behemoth⁶, bustard⁷, camel,
Warthog, wombat, kangaroo⁸,
Insect, reptile, fish and mammal,
Tree, flower, grass, and lichen too,
Rise and romp and ramp, awaking,
For the age-old curse is breaking⁹.
All things shall be made anew;
Nature’s rich rejuvenation
Follows on Man’s liberation.¹⁰

Eve’s and Adam’s son and daughter,
Sinful, weary, twisted, mired,
Pale with terror, thinned with slaughter,
Robbed of all your hearts desired,
Look! Rejoice! One born of woman,
Flesh and blood and bones all human,
One who wept and could be tired,
Risen from vilest death, has given
All who will the hope of Heaven.

1. of the same age
2. wing
3. Satan see Rev. 12:9; 20:2
4. An unbreakable rock — from the greek word “untameable” (adamantos)
5. Helen Cooper who formerly help the same Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English in Cambridge as Lewis points out that this stanza presents the “harrowing of hell” in which it was believed that Christ went to hell and freed its prisoners — a dramatic representation of the gospel, though with no clear biblical basis.
6. A monstrous creature, see  Job 40:15–24, mentioned in Milton’s Paradise Lost (7.471) as one of the creatures of the sixth day of creation and perhaps Milton meant an elephant (
7. flightless bird
8. Cooper suggests that the challenge Lewis was meeting in this poem was to include the antipodean animals — I think he has largely chosen animals which are quirky in name and appearance
9. Cooper notes the parallel with scene in the Magicians Nephew in which the animals burst out of the ground at creation, it is also reminiscent of the breaking of the winter spell in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
10. Lewis knows that the redemption of humanity brings the freedom of all creation, see Rom 8:19–22