Hello and welcome back to The Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is brought to you by a friend of mine, an author named S.D. Smith. Some of you may know him as Sam Smith.

He's the author of The Green Embers series, a best-selling middle-grade adventure saga, which has reached hundreds of thousands of readers and actually

even spent time as the number one best-selling audiobook in the world on Audible. So that's a pretty good

accomplishment. I visited Sam recently to do an interview with him for Forma magazine. We had some

microphones out and I figured, hey, you want to read a poem for the podcast? So he read one of his

favorite poems, and it is by C.S. Lewis. Most of you know C.S. Lewis as the author of books of fiction

like The Chronicles of Narnia or Paralandra and the Space Trilogy, books like that. And he, of course,

wrote many books of theology, including mere Christianity and the four loves and the problem of pain and, you know,

many others. But he also was a poet. He was a fairly prolific poet. He's not a well-known poet,

and he's probably not as good a poet as he is a prose writer. But one of Sam's very favorite poems

is the poem that you were about to hear by C.S. Lewis.

Have you not seen that in our days of any whose story, song, or art delights us. Our sincerest praise means when all said, you break my heart. My name is

S. D. Smith, and this is a poem by C.S. Lewis, and it's in the back of his book called Poems,

and it's in the epigrams and epitaphs section. I love it. It's short to the point. His high praise for his friend, Tolkien's stories was, I believe, here are joys

that pierce like swords, and there's a quality of all the art we love that has within it

quite a bit of pain.

And I think he expresses that well in this poem,

though he did not thank himself a great poet,

and many other people don't.

I love his poetry.

Here it is again.

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