-
The Grail Poetry of Charles Williams
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 25, Number 4, July 1956
- pp. 484-493
- Article
- Additional Information
The Grail Poetry of Charles Williams Ic. P. Crowley Charles Williams, Anglican layman, editor of the Oxford Press and lecturer at Oxford University , was a man of varied talents who illuminated any subject he touched, and whose interests ranged through history, witchcraft, literary criticism, theology, biography and drama. Best known for his extraordinary novels, Williams has not fared so well with his poetry which has been, for the most part, neglected by critics and ignored by the general reading public . This is a pity because among the several books of verse which he published over the years are two slim volumes containing some of the most fascinating poetry written in our time. The volumes of which I write, Taliessin through Logres (1938), and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), contain his Grail poems, a reworking of the theme of the Holy Grail into a poetic myth of nnusual wisdom and contemporary significance.' It is a unique handling, a fresh vision, of an old subject-matter which has been almost completely neglected in English literature. The neglect of the Grail actually began with Malory. It may be observed in the use he made of the source from which he drew his inspiration for Le Morte d'Arthur (La Queste del Saint Graal, c. 1200) , in the way he watered down its theological significance and made it subordinate to the chivalric material? Following Malory, the Grail as a literary subject dropped almost completely from sight for over three hundred years.s It was not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century that it became popuJar again. When the revival came the Grail was treated as vagnely as in Malory, amounting at the most to a symbol of moral values, a vagne mysterious ideal. In the period of its greatest popularity, the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, in the work of Tennyson, Morris, Westwood and the American, Robinson, the Grail symbolized contemporary morals which had been cut off from 484 GRAIL POETRY OF CHARLES WILLIAMS 485 their old roots in the traditional dogmas of Christianity. Consequently, with men writing in this new tradition, the treatments of the Grail were ethical in character rather than theological. It is safe to say that never during aU the years that followed the introduction of the Grail to England did it symbolize the theological dogma which it had once represented on the Continent before Malory took it over. Williams was personally aroused by the Victorian failure to appreciate the mystical meaning of the Grail as it had been understood in the Middle Ages when the symbol suggested Christ in all His significance for man.' He was convinced that if the mediaeval relevance of the Grail had been recognized it would have possessed those infinite theological and metaphysical overtones that would have made it a vital poetic image. In his own precise use, the Grail is a symbol of the exact relationship which man may have to Christ. He tells us about this in "The Figure of Arthur": Dante in a later century was to put the height of human beatitude in the understanding of the Incarnation; in a lesser but related method Angela of Foligno was to speak of knowing "how God comes into the Sacrament." To know these things is to be native to them; to live in the world where the Incarnation and the Sacrament (single or multiple) happen. It is more; it is, in some sense to live beyond them, or rather (since that might sound pro· fane) to be conscious of them as one is conscious of oneself, Christ-conscious instead of self-.conscious. The achievement of the Grail is the perfect fulfillment of this, the thing happening.' Williams believed in the Divinity of Christ. He believed, too, that the coinherence of Divinity established in the Incarnation was continued in the Eucharist-a fact which makes Christ still the central figure of history and the key to the ultimate meaning of life. "To know these mysteries is to be native to them, to live where they happen," says Williams . One lives where they happen through faith. But faith is only the first step in the ultimate transformation of the soul...