The Pattern in the Web

The Mythical Poetry of Charles Williams

Roma A. King, Jr.

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1990
• ISBN:
  9781612779263
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Charles Williams has achieved considerable reputation for his novels. He has been recognized as a brilliant theologian and a sensitive literary critic. But Williams himself wished most to be remembered as a poet, and trusted his future literary reputation to the two-volume series of poems on the Arthurian theme, Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars.Of the first volume Williams wrote: "The matter and the style require and reward attention. The poems do not so much tell a story or describe a process as express states or principles of experience. The names and incidents of the Arthurian myth are taken as starting-points for investigation and statement on common and profound experience." In this first full-length study of these poems, they receive, in both matter and style, the close attention that Williams requested.The emphasis in this study is on the quality of these poems as poetry and only secondarily upon their religious content. Although essentially Christian, they are placed within the context of the multifaceted, many-changing forms of recurring myths. Thus they represent one of the few attempts in the twentieth century to encapsulate and age-old and ever-recurring "pattern in the web" in a brilliant structure that is thoroughly modern.

1

The King Stood Crowned

The king stood crowned; around in the gate,

midnight striking, torches and fires

massing the colour, casting the metal,

furnace of jubilee, through time and town,

Logres heraldically flaunted the king’s state.

—”The Crowning of Arthur,” 1–5

The establishment of the kingdom is the subject of Taliessin through Logres, Although there is a skeletal thread of a story, the poetic sequence is less a retelling of the traditional myth than an interpretation of it. Taliessin, the poet, whom Williams calls “the imagination of this world,” is spokesman, but Williams’s concern is less for the individual, the single great man, poet or king, than for the society as an organic unit. Williams prefaces the work with a quotation from Dante’s De Monarchia, which in his translation reads: “The essence is created for the sake of the function and not the function for the sake of the essence.” That is, man exists for a designated work and not necessarily for the work that he may choose for himself. Behind this statement lies Williams’s concept not merely of a Christian society but of all meaningful societies. “The Coming of the Kingdom,” he writes, “in myth, in legend, in law, in history, in morals and metaphysics, has been the coming of a thing at once exclusive of all things and inclusive of everything. All the threads of the pattern have that nature, and the whole pattern is of the same nature” (HCD 134).

The word he uses to describe the pattern is co-inherence. He assumes that the whole cosmos is an organism in which all parts are interrelated, interdependent, co-inhering, matter and spirit, body and soul. His primary image is a web of intricate filaments all emanating from one creating and empowering Center. The parts are so related that the slightest vibration in one is felt throughout the whole, and a break in one is a break in the organism. Each filament exists for the web and not the web for the filament. In Williams’s version of the Arthurian myth, the web has been torn, material creation has been separated from its spiritual context—Logres from Carbonek, Arthur from Pelles, and both from the empire and Sarras, the archetypal City of which all earthly cities are images. The central theme is that wholeness can be restored only through the coming of the Holy Grail, in Williams’s Christian version, an image of Christ’s sacramental presence and power operative in creation; the healing of the Grail King, Pelles of the Grail Castle in Carbonek, who suffers from a “Dolorous Blow” (an image of man’s Fall); and the reunion of Arthur with Pelles, the reconciliation of matter with spirit. The action is a working out of that theme in Logres under King Arthur. The initial steps toward that end, a reassertion of the incarnational principle as the basis of all reality, are traced in the first five poems following the introductory “Prelude.”

Joe McClatchey, in a perceptive article, has called the “Prelude” a “lyric virtually informing all those to follow.” He continues: “With its three numbered sections of three stanzas of three lines each, it mathematically recalls the Trinity. Each section suggests one Person of the Trinity; the first the Father, the second the Son, and the third the Spirit” (VII 102).

The third section is especially interesting. The reference is actually to the spirit in a state of perversion. What might at first seem mere absence, the emphasis on monotheistic morality and incoherence, is precisely the point. The rejection of the co-inhering spirit and the intrusion of dualism have undermined the Christian empire and dissipated the “glory of substantial being.” There are echoes in the first stanza also of the first chapter of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was made flesh.” In the poem, the word of the emperor establishes the kingdom, and the “double-fledged Logos” becomes the intermediator of light. This would seem to identify the emperor with God, but Williams rejects that interpretation. The emperor is, literally, the historical figure; figuratively, he is an image of the earthly king, “God-in-operation, God-as-known-by man” (Notes). It is central to Williams’s understanding of the incarnational nature of creation that God manifest himself through his works. The empire is the earthly type of the Holy City, Sarras. Williams describes it as “(a) all Creation—with Logothetes and whatnot… , (b) Unfallen Man, (c) a proper social order, (d) the true physical body” (Notes). In short, it is a microcosm of the co-inherent web of all being. Sophia, its central city, is both a place and a quality, a center of worship and a spirit of holy wisdom. The word immaculate describes both the origin and the measure of Sophia’s song, which, conceived independently of man, remains a mystery of grace. Her wisdom, however, is mediated through various “gates” and “containers,” specifically Carbonek, the place of the Holy Grail; Camelot, the geographical location of King Arthur’s court; and Caucasia, the whole of natural creation. The gates and containers function much as the Sephiroth do in Cabalistic lore. The pirates are men in their state of incoherency after the Fall and before the pattern of Logres is imposed on them.

There follows a highly suggestive phrase: “geography breathing geometry.” Geography is the study of the physical surfaces of the world. Its aim is to map in realistic detail the outward appearance of things. It is concerned with the concrete and specific, not the abstract and general. Geometry, on the other hand, is precisely concerned with the abstract and general. Its purpose is to discover and depict diagrammatically constant identifying relationships between points, lines, and squares. Geography describes outward appearances; geometry seeks designs and patterns by which objects may be related on the basis of corresponding internal structures. The diagram, unlike the map, does not describe, say, a particular triangle, but diagrams that system of relationships among its parts by which all triangles may be identified. All triangles regardless of size or kind, for example, have three angles and three sides. A map will direct one to a known place. Geometry, and, particularly trigonometry, enables one to perceive from and within the known that which was previously unknown. The word breathing associated with the creation and the impartation of the Holy Spirit, suggests the organic relation, the identity of matter and spirit. “God,” Williams quotes Plato as saying, “always geometrizes.” That is, he works with correspondences, relationships, organic systems. Williams assumes that, on the basis of what man knows, he can reasonably infer that he is part of a larger system and that by geometrizing can discover the relation between the human below and the unknown above. It is the intent of all imaginative activity to discern that pattern of relationships: for the individuals with Logres; for Logres with Byzantium; for Byzantium with Sarras; and for all with God. Religion proposes to bring all men into a co-inhering relationship within the web. God geometrizes—and, says Williams, so did the Hebrew prophets: “The wheels and the eyes, and the spirit in the wheels, and their lifting up, have been subject to a good deal of gay humour, but they are a myth of a vital pattern of organisms” (HCD 40).

In the early days of Logres the “vital patterns” between macrocosm and microcosm were apparent: “The organic body sang together” (“The Vision of the Empire” 1). In the second section of the “Prelude,” however, “The blind rulers” prefer the “fallacy of rational virtue,” the wisdom of men, to the divine wisdom of Sophia. “The seals … were broken,” an obvious reference to chapters five through eight of the Book of Revelation in which the seven seals are opened and dire prophesies of war, pestilence, famine, earthquakes, death, and finally, apocalyptic judgment are foretold. The forces of evil are loosed in the aftermath, “the chairs of the Table reeled.” That is, the chairs-the knights who occupied them-are diverted from their intended function. Here, as in the Book of Revelation, judgment is tempered, however. In the midst of the seeming chaos, “Galahad quickened in the Mercy.” Galahad, according to Williams, is not Christ but that “in the human soul which finds Christ” (Essays 190); or, as he states in another place, he is man’s capacity for divine things. From the beginning, there was an empty chair, the Perilous Sell, which remained vacant at the table. It represented the place left empty by Judas at the time of his betrayal. It was, by divine edict, to remain unoccupied until one designated “in the Mercy,” the high prince Galahad, appeared to claim it. The plan for the redemption is simultaneous with the Fall, the two actions, at one in eternity, are necessarily experienced sequentially in time. “History began,” Williams says. Time is out of synchrony with eternity. Williams elaborates: “the Empire of the poem exists as the substance of the actual Empire, and (like Logres) is half withdrawn and half becomes history, because Logres has fallen, and our understanding has diminished” (Notes).

Both language and action of the last three lines of the second section have literary antecedents. The language is borrowed from the sixth chapter of Revelation; after the opening of the sixth seal, we are told, terrified men, from kings to bondsmen, “hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains, And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.” The action also parallels that of Adam and Eve who, after discovering they were naked, hid behind fig leaves and among trees.

Terror of the wrath is understandable, but in the “Prelude,” it is the “lord of charity” before whom men quail. Paradoxically as it may seem, the psychology is sound and the action consistent with Williams’s recognition of “vital patterns of organisms”: “the recognition of the good, everywhere and always, as good, … the importance of interchange, and a deliberate relation to the Centre” (HCD 39). Williams is speaking, of course, about good as a principle and not about good acts as distinguished from bad ones. Indeed, the men of Logres retained a residual desire for the good and an intuitive yearning for a relation with the Center, but in their fallen state they had lost the “good of intellect” and confused the good with its perversion. Their orientation is so awry that flashes of the emperor riding in the sky challenge their misconceptions and make disturbing demands on them. Even the lord of charity seems an ogre to them—their sense of goodness, and not wrath, invoking their worst terror. In the final section, Williams further develops a theme introduced earlier, “The Moslems stormed Byzantium.” This is at once a historical event (although chronologically inaccurate) and a symbol of a spiritual reality in the kingdom. When Williams speaks of Moslems (or of Jews or Greeks or any other racial group) he refers not to a country and a people, but to a system of belief, a way of apprehending reality. Here he has in mind both a non-Trinitarian monotheism and a gnostic heresy that spread from the East through the early Christian church. The Persians posited two antagonistic creative forces—Ormus, the evil, and Ahriaman, the good—that were in continuous conflict. Creation of earth and man (a mistake it was thought) had meant a plunge of spirit into matter, a condition that could be relieved only by freeing spirit once again of material contamination. Moslems, Williams observed, rejected the Incarnation and the potential redemption of matter, referring both to the Persian dualism and to Manichaeanism, a kindred Christian heresy that taught that evil resided in matter and flesh. The threat to the co-inherence of such belief knows no national barriers. The Moslem conquest of the empire was, therefore, both a military and a spiritual victory, spearheaded both from without and from within. The mamelukes (slaves) seized the countryside; the imams (spiritual leaders) captured Sophia. The inner life of the empire was undermined and the vision of organic unity eroded: “lost is the light on the hills of Caucasia, / glory of the Emperor, glory of substantial being” (26–27). The word lost is precise: lost and not extinguished. The map of the land had been altered, but the diagram remained. Geography, however, no longer openly breathed geometry.

One turns to the “Prelude” from the earlier poetry, even the relatively late Heroes and Kings (1930), with a sense of shock. The change is not only radical but has come swiftly. Taliessin through Logres appeared in 1938, but Ridler, whose introduction to The Image of the City is invaluable both for its information about the composition of the poems and for its critical insights, thinks that Williams was working on “Prelude” before September, 1934 (lxiii). It is not certain when he finished the poem, but clearly he revised it many times. At one time between 1933 and 1938, he wrote, “Pretty soon I shall abolish the Prelude altogether. Or else leave any odd stanzas I like with no care for any intellectual co-ordination” (Ridler lxiii).

As early as 1934, then, the great change in Williams’s style was already underway. His early book Poetry at Present (1930) is, in view of his later work, undistinguished and interesting primarily as an indication of the milieu out of which his new poetry emerged. The English Poetic Mind (1932) and Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind (1933) are seminal critical statements. Further, in 1932, Williams wrote an important essay on Hopkins as an introduction to the second edition of Hopkins’s poems. It is significant not only for its insight into Hopkins but also for what it tells us about Williams’s own concerns at the time. His emphases are more technical than ideological. He dwells perceptively on prosody, diction, rhythm, alliteration, and interior rhyme. Williams’s intense study of Hopkins, following his reading of Abercrombie’s The Epic and his essay on Yeats (in Poetry at Present) helped him identify some of his own problems. He was influenced by both Yeats and Hopkins, but it cannot be said that he came to imitate either poet. There are very few echoes, and those perhaps incidental, of either in the Taliessin poems. Ridler, for example, says, “He took from Hopkins, for one thing, a habit of rhythm, of breaking up a statement into short segments linked by rhyme and by paired stresses, which Hopkins had adapted from early English poetry” (lxi). She concludes, however, “I do not mean to suggest more than that Hopkins gave him a key to unlock resources which he already had. But something was needed to break the too-facile cadence of his earlier verse” (lxii).

Williams said that he was beginning to work out his new style in Windows of Night (1924) (which is obvious, for example, in a poem like “On Meeting Shakespeare”) and that he continued in Heroes and Kings, The real break came, however, in Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (1936), the play which he wrote for the Canterbury Festival. Perhaps the realization that he was writing lines to be spoken on stage to a live audience was an additional incentive to pursue his developing style and to achieve a rhythmic pattern and a colloquial diction consistent with his evolving objectives in the new poems. Whatever the stimulus, the results were little short of amazing. The new style was to be seen in all his subsequent poetry.

The nature of that change is suggested more specifically by comparing two passages from “Prelude,” one an earlier version (for which I am indebted to Ridler, lxiv) and the other from the poem finally published:

I have called to the dark to hide,

to the hills to cover me,

lest I should see in the starlight ride

the lord of charity:

Call on the hills to hide us

lest, men said in the City, the lord of charity

ride in the starlight, sole flash of the Emperor’s glory. (16–18)

Has Williams, as he threatened, abandoned care for intellectual coordination? I think not. Precisely the opposite has happened. The first version is personal and lyrical; the second, dramatic, a fact that not only objectifies and universalizes but intensifies the thought and emotion. In the first, the will seems to be doing the work of the imagination; the language is merely rhetorical. In the second, Williams has passionately apprehended the subject in relation to its poetic structure. In the passage there are syntactical groupings governed by thought and emotion rather than by an externally imposed prosody. By skillfully manipulating the rhythm, in the later version, the poet focuses attention on each unit separately without, at the same time, losing the sense of overall pattern that makes the part one with the whole. The monotonous rhythm, the obtrusive rhyme, the awkward syntax, and the rhetorical repetition are gone.

Williams had abandoned the traditional clichés, verbal and technical, to permit meaning in all its dimensions-intellectual, emotional, and sensuous—to emerge more precisely. Structure as something apart from meaning no longer predominates. The closely woven, dense texture of the lines, which demands the reader’s total concentration, signals the style that characterizes the Taliessin poems that were to follow.

The next five poems, composing the first stage in the building of Logres, recount the conquest of the land and the crowning of the king. There are one long and four shorter ones, in two of which Taliessin and two in which Arthur is the central figure. Vocation-the man for the work or the work for the man?—the theme of all five, is brought to focus in the last poem, “The Crowning of Arthur.” “The Return of Taliessin” comes first; “The Vision of the Empire” is second; and “The Calling of Arthur” follows. Events falling between the king’s calling and his crowning-the numerous encounters between Christian Briton and pagan enemy-are condensed into the single siege of Mount Badon. With the triumph of Mount Badon, the outlines of the vision take hold on unmade Logres, and the kingdom with the king’s crowning begins to be built.

One’s first impression of “Taliessin’s Return to Logres” is of speed and action. Taliessin “lightly” comes to land in the harbor of Logres “under a roaring wind” that strains the golden sails and causes the galley to creak. With equal urgency he rides off to the hills of Wales. The impression of speed is supported by the rapidly moving ...