Photograph: 'Beam' by Balthus Van Tassel (CC license)

The Shed was dark, and I inside it having closed the Door behind me — it was ungracious — I'll confide it was so Others wouldn’t mind me. (Though the Tool-shed seems pathetic as a choice aesthetic Diet, I'll take it — musty and arthritic though it be — for Peace and Quiet.) Standing on its End and leaning like a golden Spear laid by against a Wall, a Sunbeam streaming through the Tiles caught my Eye; I watched, while cloaked inside a corner Shadow, as the Sunbeam dialed piano Circles, like a Mourner waiting out a lonesome While. Hear it call — come, this is magic Bathing Water for our eyes! Look along it! Lovely, tragic Dances boil in the Skies Above us; Trees as Men are waving Us on, to swim the sun-wide Stream, From Shed and Shadows, lifting, saving: This is Sight along the Beam.

Photo: based on 'Knot' by Daniel Miller (CC License)

This is a poetic interpretation of an essay by C.S. Lewis titled ‘Meditations in a Toolshed’:

“I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through a crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

“Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”

Photographs are Beam by Balthus Van Tassel, and Knot by Daniel Miller (both CC-licensed).

Read more from The Blog, or from the series ‘Poetry’