Divorce
is Williams's third volume of
poems, his third published book. The title requires explanation
(especially as this book appeared three years after CW's marriage!).
He is not referring to
the dissolution of marriage bonds. Rather, he is referring to the
soul's divorce from body and from its earthly ties as death
approaches. Specifically, this book is dedicated to CW's father (“and
my other teachers”), as Walter Williams struggled with the onset of
blindness and physical decline. The first (long, complex) poem in the
book tells that CW's father “taught me all the good I knew / Ere
Love and I were met” (p. 7). His father taught him:
--the
terms of fate,
The
nature of the gods, the strait
Path
of the climbing mind,
The
freedom of the commonwealth,
The
laws of soul's and body's health,
The
commerce of mankind (p. 8)--
in
other words, pretty much the seeds of all of CW's distinctive
doctrines and themes. He taught him how to debate, how to doubt, how
to consider all sides of an argument:
I
will of doubt make such an art
That
no dismay shall move
Sufficient
bitterness of heart
For
unbelief in love (p. 49).
But
at the time of writing, this great teacher is failing:
Now,
now the work all men must do
Is
mightily begun in you...
Now,
now in you the great divorce
Begins...
Divorce,
sole healer of divorce...
Divorce,
itself for God and Lord
By
the profounder creeds adored.... (p. 9).
and
he goes on to associate this “Divorce,” death, that heals the
rift between body and spirit, between soul and God, with the Holy
Spirit. Vintage CW weirdness right there on page 9, in poem one.
Later,
in “Advent,” he writes that while Christ was incarnate on earth,
he was “from his heaven divorced” (p. 94), which seems to explain
away at least some of the weirdness.
There
are several major themes in this book: War, Romantic Theology, the
City, and True Myth.
—WAR—
Since
this book was published just after World War I, presumably composed
during the war--while CW stayed safely at home, thanks to poor
eyesight and a neurological disorder that caused shaking in his
hands, in mental and emotional agony over the friends who went to war
in his place and, he thought, died for him. This story is dramatized
in an amazing graphic novel, http://www.amazon.com/Heavens-War-Micah-Harris/dp/1582403309>Heaven's
War
,
that tells the story of how this substitution haunted Williams, and
how he later made a [fictional!] substitution of his own in exchange
for Lewis's life. I found this graphic novel very moving.
But
back to Divorce. After
the poem to his father, CW includes several war poems in the book.
They cover a wide range of topics and emotions surrounding war, loss,
and death. Mourning the loss of his friends. Praising death in a
strange Novalis-like kind of sehnsucht nach dem Tod
mood. Lamenting the
Schism. Layering historical and contemporary wars and
legends. Remembering conversations with his lost friends and watching
their “ghostly blood” run down on the London street and stain the
feet of pedestrians. Telescoping geography so he is drawn into the
killing fields of France with them.
The
six-part sequence “In Time of War” ends with this brief lyric
“For a Pietà”:
Sorrow
am I, though none has seen my tears.
To
me for comfort all men's childhood ran;
To
me men's dolour piously uprears
This
image, where I mourn, not men, but man.
I
am that which lives when in your darkest hour
Not
heroes only, but their hopes, have died.
I
am the desolation, and the power
Of
patience; I await what shall betide. (p. 19)
In
this difficult verse, I see CW's distinctive identification
of the Christian's life (and death) with the life and death of his
Lord dramatized yet again.
One
of my favorite poems in the collection is “In a Motor-bus,” in
which the bus turn into his coffin-- “Narrow and long my coffin is,
/ And driven lumberingly, / As I go onward through the dark / And
Death goes on with me” (P. 110). It's powerful and memorable, and
picks up on that theme of strange longing for Death. It's pretty much
just sheer terror in this poem, but the strong meter makes the poem
itself enjoyable.
—ROMANTIC
THEOLOGY—
,
in this
discussion of his principle themes, in http://iambicadmonit.blogspot.com/2012/06/cw-book-summary-1-silver-stair-1912.html>this
summary of his 1912 volume The
Silver Stair,
in my
report
on transcribing The
Chapel of the Thorn
at the Wade Center, and in several of my academic papers on CW. I
will continue to talk about this belief in future posts and papers.
In
brief, this is the doctrine that the romantic, sexual love of another
human can be used as a step towards loving God. In Divorce,
in the sonnet “For a Cathedral Door” (p. 71), Williams writes of
love that “I reach heaven by so pure a stair.” He takes this even
further in the same poem when he warns himself about the “dangerous”
truth that “Almost my love for me is church enough.” I have
written http://iambicadmonit.blogspot.com/2010/09/williams-as-medieval-myth-maker.html>elsewhere
about how CW seems to misapply this doctrine.
Anyway,
in Divorce, written
during the first few years of his (difficult, complex) marriage,
Williams is still using his wife's personality, love, and person as
the locus of his spirituality. In “To Michal: After a Vigil,” he
either equates her body with the elements of the Eucharist or claims
that her true nature is reveal by the light of the Elements—or
perhaps both (pp. 26-27). in “Politics,” he claims that truth is
“Taught, Fair, to all in deity, / And taught to me in you!” (p.
48)--he doesn't need God, he just needs Florence!--but forgive my
levity. He tells her in “After Marriage” that “The gospel your
bright forehead told” (p. 58), with an inversion of syntax that
needs unpacking; “your bright forehead [an anticipation of
Taliessin?] told me the gospel.”
In
“To Michal: On Disputing outside Church,” there is an
anticipation of his novel The
Greater Trumps.
That novel ends with what appears to be heresy. The saintly Sybil
says that a crazy lady thought Nancy was
“Messias.” “O!” Nancy's father exclaimed. “And is Nancy
Messias?” “Near enough,” Sybil answered. “There'll be pain
and heart-burning yet, but, for the moment, near enough.”
In other
words, in the action of the novel, the character Nancy has taken the
role of Christ. This “To Michal” poem ends:
thou
shalt feel
A day,
a sennight hence, what tempters fled
From
those hot prayers. Thy foot there crushed his head,
Smile
if the dragon's claw here tore thy heel. (p. 72).
Apparently
CW's wife Michal, too, is “Messias,” or at least “near enough.”
Near enough, indeed, that at the end of the next poem, “On leaving
Church”: “I rise, I genuflect, I turn / To breakfast, and to
you!” (p. 77)--not that he is bowing to her, but that his bowing to
Christ leads naturally into his relationship with her. That's
actually very lovely!
There's
more of this sort of thing, lots more. Michal seems to shift from
identification with Christ to identification with Mary in the
“Commentaries.”
—THE
CITY—
. Basically, CW used the image of an
orderly, harmonious city as an emblem for Heaven (that's an
oversimplification). This idea is being developed in
Divorce.
In “Ghosts,” he writes to those departed that:
Your heavenly
conversation turn
Some
while in aid of me,
That
I may now, in these dark ways,
Glimpse
of your city see. (p. 25).
In
“House-hunting” (p. 28-29), he turns the ordinary domestic
activity of looking for a new flat into an adventure “In the high
town which is eternity,” again mapping earthly life onto heavenly.
“Celestial Cities” (pp. 30-31) plays out the identification even
more clearly, and lays the groundwork for what Lewis would explore in
That Hideous Strength—the
idea that underneath or co-existing with the earthly, human “England”
is a heavenly, divine “Logres”--CW puts it like this: “...through
the streets of London / The streets of Sarras shine.”
—TRUE
MYTH—
. Several people talk about the idea in
this
article on C.S. Lewis.
—MISC—
There
are also hints of the later Arthurian poems in such pieces as
“Ballade of a Country Day,” (p. 20-21) in which all is well “If
Sarras be, if Sarras hold the Grail” (CW's slightly less catchy
version of Browning's “God's in His Heaven—All's right with the
world”). The “Chant Royal of Feet” (p. 107) foreshadows “A
Vision of the Empire” in its praise of body parts.
There
is a foreshadowing of All Hallows' Eve
in “Ghosts,” in which “I at the next corner met / With you
whom once I loved” (p. 24).
The
poem “Ballad of Material Things” suggests that the Devil fails
in his schemes because he is not incarnate—which led me to query
in the margin, “What about Merlin?”
In
addition to the title, there is one other moment that seems to have
influence C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce.
In “Dialogue between the Republic and the Apostasy,” The Voice
of the Republic says:
Chooses
he? I at ending shine, a God.
Refuses?
But a dream I pass away.
Accepts?
The heavens shall be his native sod.
Rejects?
He treads but clay. (p. 40).
There
are poems for and against Universalism (pp. 42, 44, expositions of
the Way of Exchange (p. 45)
In
the middle of the book are three “Experiments” with free verse
that don't sound like himself at all. In fact, they sound more like
MY poetry than his!
Very ood indeed.
