The Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams

by Charles Williams

Williams wanted his Arthurian poem to be a universal not just a tale of early-Medieval heroics, but a poem that would use its narrative to portray the human condition, and the world, with the kind of completeness found in Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Charles Williams is perhaps the least well known of the Inklings, the writers’ group based in Oxford which included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. In making this collection of Williams’s major Arthurian poetry we have sought to make available again, after several years out of print, all his previously published verse on the abiding subject that dominated his work and life from the early 1900s to his death in 1945. The earliest work, published here for the first time since its original appearance in 1913, is the ‘Pageant Song of Gwent’, which shows Williams thinking about the Arthurian legends even this early. This, along with poems from Heroes and Kings (1930) and Three Plays (1931), comprises all of Williams’s early published work on the subject, and is followed by his mature work, contained in the two major sequences Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), which form the centre of this collection.

The volume includes an introduction by Grevel Lindop (biographer of Charles Williams) and an essay on Williams’s work by Arthurian scholar, John Matthews.

Genres: Poetry, Arthurian, Classics, Fiction, Fantasy

163 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: Charles Williams


Charles Walter Stansby Williams is probably best known, to those who have heard of him, as a leading member (albeit for a short time) of the Oxford literary group, the "Inklings", whose chief figures were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He was, however, a figure of enormous interest in his own right: a prolific author of plays, fantasy novels (strikingly different in kind from those of his friends), poetry, theology, biography and criticism. — the Charles Williams Society website

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have no idea what I just read. I really need an annotated copy of this, I think, something with footnotes and an introduction that contextualises it all. I find Tennyson opaque at times, but this was worse. And yet, still powerful -- there are some amazing lines, some which still ring in my head despite my lack of comprehension of the whole. It'll be worth looking at again, with some form of context to help me understand what Charles Williams was trying to do.

[Stephanie Fachiol · Rating 5 out of 5]

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. —1 Cor 12:12-13

Open up this book and the first thing you’ll see is a map of Europe with a woman superimposed upon it, like the echo of a palimpsest. The concept of the world as Cathedral, the Church as body, suffuse every poem. Early entries like “Mount Badon” and “The Crowning of Arthur” collapse time into one Mythic moment; in contrast, “Bors to Elayne: the Fish of Broceliande” or “Vision of Empire” divvy up the beloved—whether woman or empire—with excellent merisms. There are romantic poems (I love this interpretation of Elayne), villain monologues and heroic laments, the Gospel retold through the Zodiac an the founding myth of Rome, and other trippy stanzas.

Reading this, one should be prepared for dense “privatism” (as C.S. Lewis put it kindly) and nigh-inscrutable but symbolically loaded imagery. From the transmutation colors of the Philosopher’s Stone to the cosmological layers of Heaven, from Galahad to Christ, from lycanthropy and murderous unicorns to martyrs and angels, Williams weaves his interpretation of Arthuriana with threads from alchemy, myth, and Bible. This is the closest I have come to feeling poetry as true music: even when the words wash over you, there is a quality to the sound and resonance of them that penetrates past comprehensibility. In many ways, it reminded me of the masterwork “Book of the New Sun.”

The city and the light
lay beyond the Sun and beyond his dream,
nor could the weight of poetry sink so far
as the weight of glory
("The Calling of Taliessin")

In addition, there are simply cool narrative plot points about this interpretation: without spoiling too much, you have werewolf Lancelot, Merlin and his sister Brisen as symbolizing science and power even in their twin birth through parthenogenesis, a straight-up zombie apocalypse. All of these work together to herald a violent but total coming of grace like a convergence with the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

RIP, Charles Williams. RIP, Gene Wolfe. You would have been such good friends. We used to live in a symbol-rich world, in which the unfurling rose meant not only romance but gratitude, friendship, purity, and—in these poems—salvation. It is not that we now think of roses as parasite or alien or ugly; it is that we see them and do not think of them at all. For that reason, from time to time, it does the soul good to read a work like Williams’ or Wolfe’s, to remind us that we have eyes but do not see.

(I wish I could give this 4.5 stars, since I genuinely got a headache trying to make sense of this at times—but it is so beautiful and so layered that I cannot in good conscience say it deserves only 4 stars)

[Ian Mackay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and very demanding. But it can wash over you and enrich you like a huge wave. You just have to submit to its richness.

[Cheryl Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be re-reading these poems for a long time. They are dense and beautiful and I'm so glad I found them.

I love Charles Williams' novels and the wonderful blog about him and his work called "The Oddest Inkling."

I highly recommend this collection to anyone who loves Arthurian legend, beautiful- if challenging- poetry, and 20th century English literature.

[Dayna Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complicated, yet beautifully written selection of poetry by one of The Inklings. Arthurian legends told in poetry form; these are not the common legends that we are familiar with. This collection is challenging and requires research to understand, but it well worth the effort.