An Introduction to the Poetry of Charles Williams Jennifer Woodruff Aitt Asbury Theological Seminary
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Inklings Forever Volume 7 A Collection of Essays Presented at the Seventh Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Article 31 Lewis & Friends 6-3-2010 Learning to Speak 'The onT gue of the Holy Ghost': An Introduction to the Poetry of Charles Williams Jennifer Woodruff aitT Asbury Theological Seminary Follow this and additional works at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Woodruff aitT , Jennifer (2010) "Learning to Speak 'The onT gue of the Holy Ghost': An Introduction to the Poetry of Charles Williams," Inklings Forever: Vol. 7 , Article 31. Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol7/iss1/31 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Pillars at Taylor University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Inklings Forever by an authorized editor of Pillars at Taylor University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INKLINGS FOREVER, Volume VII A Collection of Essays Presented at the Seventh FRANCES WHITE COLLOQUIUM on C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS Taylor University 2010 Upland, Indiana Learning to Speak „The Tongue of the Holy Ghost‟ An Introduction to the Poetry of Charles Williams Jennifer Woodruff Tait Woodruff Tait, Jennifer “Learning to Speak „The Tongue of the Holy Ghost‟: An Introduction to the Poetry of Charles Williams” Inklings Forever 7 (2010) www.taylor.edu/cslewis 1 “Learning to Speak „The Tongue of the Holy Ghost:‟ An Introduction to the Poetry of Charles Williams” Jennifer Woodruff Tait, Asbury Theological Seminary I would hazard a guess that most people coming to Williams find him by way of his prose— either his novels, which Sue has introduced to you, or his theological writings such as The Descent of the Dove, The Forgiveness of Sins, and He Came Down From Heaven. Certainly this was my own experience. I first read The Descent of the Dove in 1991, and then I was bowled over by The Greater Trumps when I picked it up in a bookstore in 1992. I am not sure I have gotten up yet. It is entirely possible that many of those who find Williams by way of his prose go on to his plays, several of which Woody has described. It is less likely, but still possible, that those who have encountered his prose will go on to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his Arthurian poetry cycle. If you have begun to experience Williams’ prose and plays, you already have some of the equipment necessary to attempt the poetry. You have some acquaintance with Williams’ dense, colorful and metaphoric style, which is, in the words of literary critic Charles Hefling, “an acquired taste” (Hefling 28). (I sometimes feel that reading Williams is like reading a stained glass window. Not looking at one, reading one!) You also have some idea of the theological and literary themes which reoccur constantly in Williams’ work. What I hope to do here is twofold. First, I want to give you just a few pieces of general advice as you sort through the Arthurian poems in Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars. Secondly, I want to talk to you briefly about one of Williams’ most accessible poems, “Bors to Elayne: On the King’s Coins.” By showing you some of these themes at work in that poem, my hope is that you will a) want to read more and b) have some idea of how to go about doing so. So—let us plunge headfirst into the “clotted glory.” The first thing which will help you make your way through Williams’ poetry is some familiarity with the legends of King Arthur and their literary interpretation throughout English history. I am not suggesting this has to begin as dissertation-level familiarity. I read Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars for the first time with no other background than the musical “Camelot,” and I not only survived, I was hooked. However, I would actually suggest more background than that— chiefly because “Camelot” and its main source, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, spend little time on the quest of the Holy Grail and much more time on the love story between Lancelot and Guinevere, and for Williams these proportions are exactly reversed. In White, though the quest for the Grail is described (and in that, at least, you will have more knowledge than I did from “Camelot” alone!), it functions as a tragic interruption to, and complication of, the love story (White, Once and Future King, 436-470; see also The Book of Merlyn, 167-176). But the Grail is, for Williams, central, and although the adulterous love story is an important sign of the corruptions creeping into Logres (more on Logres in a minute) it is for Williams a minor corollary to the main theme. Ideally the best preparation for Williams is to have read Malory’s Arthuriad, which remains the classic statement of the Arthurian legend and which informs Williams either as a fellow-traveler or as an antagonist at nearly every turn. In addition, Williams was closely acquainted with Tennyson’s nineteenth-century retelling of the legend, The Idylls of the King. I would not advise you not to read Malory—it is one of the great works of English prose and one which, until the last sixty years or so, most any educated person would have read in the course of their liberal arts education. I would also not advise you not to read Tennyson, But you might just want to start on Williams before you have finished all 700 pages of Malory and 250 pages of Tennyson. In that case, I would recommend you take a look at some works of literary criticism often published with Williams’ poetry under the unforgettable name 2 Arthurian Torso. The first is Williams’ prose explanation of the legend, “The Figure of Arthur,” which he died before completing (Williams and Lewis, 189-274). Unfortunately Williams stopped before he actually got to Malory, or Tennyson for that matter, but he spends quite some time on the general medieval context of the story and on Malory’s Welsh and French predecessors. While The Figure of Arthur suffers from Williams’ usual cryptic theological asides, it gives you some idea of the particular bees in Williams’ bonnet—chiefly the roles in the story of romantic love (which in Williams is treated much more broadly than by focusing on the love between Lancelot and Guinevere) and by the Eucharist via the Grail. The second helpful piece of literary criticism is C. S. Lewis’ commentary on Williams’ poetry, “Williams and the Arthuriad” (Williams and Lewis 277-384). This gives a helpful order for reading the poetry (Williams and Lewis 280) as well as commentary by Lewis on each poem. This commentary combines astute observations on Williams’ theological points and poetic devices with helpful connections to the sources of the Arthurian legend. Lewis does assume, and thinks that it is perfectly legitimate of Williams to assume, a fairly extensive background on the part of the reader. He compares Williams to T. S. Eliot in this: An example of difficulties arising from Unshared Background would be The Waste Land. If you have never read Dante or Shakespeare certain things in that poem will be obscure to you. But then, frankly, we ought to have read Dante and Shakespeare; or at least the poet has a right to address only those who have done so. And if the only result of a first reading of The Waste Land were to send you to Dante and Shakespeare, your time and money would have been very well spent. Similarly with Williams. He assumes that you know the Bible, Malory, and Wordsworth pretty well, and that you have at least some knowledge of Milton, Dante, Gibbon, the Mabinogion, and church history (Williams and Lewis 373). Finally, do not underestimate the introduction to this entire Arthurian conglomerate by Mary McDermott Shideler (Shideler 5-13) which is useful for a quick rundown of terms, names, and emphases—or indeed Williams’ own preface to The Region of the Summer Stars (Williams and Lewis 117-118), which is the clearest statement of the cycle’s plot Williams ever made. It also helps to know from the beginning that the cycle is largely written from the perspective of a minor character in Tennyson and in some of the Welsh Arthurian legends, the king’s poet Taliessin, who “as a child had been found floating in a coracle down the River Wye, and was adopted by a tribe of pagan Welshmen. They nurtured him to manhood when, hearing tales of the City and Empire of Byzantium, he set forth to find them” (Shideler 5.) So it is worth remembering that central to Williams’ re-telling is the figure of the poet, and that in many ways Taliessin serves as a stand-in for Williams—just as Stanhope may be a stand-in for Williams in Descent Into Hell. In addition to having some idea of the story of King Arthur, it also helps to have some idea of Williams’ particular theological emphases.1 (Woody and Sue have touched on a few of these already.) Chief among them, and never far from most discussions of Williams, is the idea of co-inherence and exchange. Hefling calls the word a “kind of Williams trademark,” and defines it—in relation to the Trinity—as the principle both of the incomprehensible mystery of the three personal Individualities who nevertheless exist as one God, and of the plain, if neglected truth that human being is being- from and being-in other persons.