Some of CS Lewis’s Meditation in a Toolshed woven into a poem

I was standing today in the toolshed,

The sun was shining outside,

And through the crack at the top of the door,

There came a beam of light.

From where I stood, that beam so bright,

With the motes of dust floating in it,

Was the most striking thing in the pitch black place,

As it streamed through the gloom at the side of my face,

I was seeing the beam not seeing things by it.

Then I moved and the beam fell onto my eyes,

And then in an instant the scene that I’d seen

Disappeared, though not without trace,

I saw no shed and above all no beam,

But instead, I saw things with it,

At the top of the door, as I’d not seen before,

Inside an irregular cranny,

Green leaves in the breeze on the branches of trees

And beyond that, far distant, the sun in the sky.

And in that moment I knew

Something new, and something wise,

About a particular point of view,

And how looking along a beam at the motes

And seeing by the beam in my eye,

Give two very different impressions, both of them possibly true. 

Yet it was not with Mathew 7:3

That I pondered on different ways that we see,

I thought of more recent thinking habits,

And how we seem frightened admitting

Our view is purely our own

And when we’re caught in the glare we stare

And freeze, blinking like so many rabbits,

For fear our peers will sneer and groan

And point out how it’s unfitting

For our sort to approve

Of this unscientific thinking,

We’ve grown scared of what we can’t ‘prove’

But what is specific to science

That has such faith and puts such reliance

On the outside perspective, alone?

For has science itself not shown

Or shed it’s brilliant light 

Changing the way we say what is known

By proving the particle and the wave

Are simultaneous ways to behave?