To Charles Williams

On this day in 1945, C. S. Lewis' friend, fellow Inkling and author, Charles Williams, died suddenly at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford.

TO  CHARLES  WILLIAMS

Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard

To see plainly or record truly. The new light imposes change,

Re-adjusts all a life-landscape as it thrusts down its probe from the sky,

To create shadows, to reveal waters, to erect hills and deepen glens.

The slant alters. I can't see the old contours. It's a larger world

Than I once thought it. I wince, caught in the bleak air that blows on the ridge.

Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning? Or the cold of spring?

A hard question and worth talking a whole night on.

But with whom? Of whom now can I ask guidance? With what friend concerning your death

Is it worth while to exchange thoughts unless—oh unless it were you?

CS Lewis

Poems (Bles 1964)