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Williams had a remarkable knack for seeing familiar facts or sayings in a completely new light. It is hoped that this comes out in some of the following quotations from his writings.
The devil, even if he is a fact, has been an indulgence;… while he exists, there is always something to which we can be superior.
One might think that the phrase of Lord Acton (that ‘it cannot really be held that
in Rome sixteen centuries after Christ men did not know that murder was wrong’) might
be held to apply [to the Inquisition]; it cannot be that men did not think such methods
doubtfully holy. It was not so. Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin;
it is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up
sap and produce the black fruits of hell. The peacock fans of holy and austere popes
drove the ashes of burning men over Christendom.
(The Descent of the Dove)
It is easier often to forgive than to be forgiven; yet it is fatal to be willing
to be forgiven by God and to be reluctant to be forgiven by men. To forgive and to
be forgiven are the two points of holy magnificence and holy modesty; round these
two centres the whole doctrine of largesse revolves.
(From a review in “Time and Tide”,
1941.)
(Of a seventeenth-century Scottish minister obliged to hear Anglican sermons)
It is
as pleasant as it is unusual to see thoroughly good people getting their deserts.
(James I)
Most men, when at last they see their desire
Fall to repentance – all have that chance.
(Judgment
at Chelmsford)
When the Jews came forth to accuse Messias
He answered them riddling, playing with
words,
Saying: ‘If Satan cast out Satan,
If hell be divided to ruin hell,
Tell me, can
Satan’s kingdom stand?’
Lord, let they children now let show
The answer the Jews seemed
not to know,
Losing their heads in their eager rage;
Now let they servants answer unchid:
‘Lord,
whoever supposed it did?
Let the angelic armies smile,
Seeing it topple all the while:
‘How
shall Satan’s kingdom stand?
Lord, it crashes on either hand,
And where is its substance
of delight?
The famous saying ‘God is love’, it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the ‘otherness’ and terror of God.
(Of Adam and Eve) They had what they wanted. That they did not like it when they
got it does not alter the fact that they certainly got it.
(He Came Down From Heaven)
[Job] plunges into a series of demands on and accusations of God which may be and indeed are epigrams of high intelligence, but are not noticeably patient.
The denial of the self has come, as is natural, to mean in general the making of the self thoroughly uncomfortable.
Are the riches of Catullus and Carnegie so unequal, though so different? Sooner or later, nearly everyone is surprised at some kind of rich man being damned.
The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church. The most he would do was to promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against it. It is about all that, looking back on the history of the Church, one can feel that they have not done.
(Reviewing a detective novel published by Cassell and Co.)
Messrs. Cassell, on the
jacket, ask ‘Why was Nahum afraid of life?’ I don’t understand. Aren’t Messrs. Cassell?
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Williams’s mature poetry, apart from his plays, is set against the background of the Arthurian legends, adapted for his own purposes. (For example, Arthur’s kingdom of Logres, and indeed most of Europe, are seen as part of the Byzantine Empire.) The main figure in most of the poems is Taliessin, a semi-legendary Welsh bard, here depicted as poet, councillor, soldier and commentator at the court of Arthur. To give a taste both of Williams’s style and of his “mythology”, here is his poem Taliessin’s Return to Logres.Taliessin has been to Byzantium, the seat of the Emperor; and the Emperor, said Williams “is God-in-operation or God-as-known-by-man”. Now he returns home, to join the new King, Arthur.
The seas were left behind;
in a harbour of Logres
lightly I came to land
under a roaring
wind
Strained were the golden sails,
the masts of the galley creaked
as it rode for
the Golden Horn
and I for the hills of Wales
In a train of golden cars
the Emperor
went above,
for over me in my riding
shot seven golden stars,
as if while the great
oaks stood,
straining, creaking around,
seven times the golden sickle
flashed in
the Druid wood.
Covered on my back,
untouched, my harp had hung;
its notes sprang
to sound
as I took the blindfold track,
the road that runs from tales,
through the
darkness where Circe’s son
sings to the truants of towns
in a forest of nightingales.
The beast ran in the wood
that had lost the man’s mind;
on a path harder than death
spectral shapes stood
propped against trees;
they gazed as I rode by;
fast after
me poured
the light of flooding seas.
But I was Druid-sprung;
I cast my heart in the
way;
all the Mercy I called
to give courage to my tongue.
As I came by Broceliande
a diagram played in the night,
where either the golden sickle
flashed, or a signalling
hand.
Away on the southern seas
was the creaking of the mast;
beyond the Roman road
was the creaking of the trees.
Beyond the farms and the fallows
the sickle of a golden
arm
that gathered fate in the forest
in a stretched palm caught the hallows
At the
falling of the first
chaos behind me checked;
at the falling of the second the wood
showed the worst;
at the falling of the third
I had come to the king’s camp;
the
harp on my back
syllabled the signal word.
I saw a Druid light
burn through the Druid
hills,
as the hooves of King Arthur’s horse
rounded me in the night.
I heard the
running of flame
faster than fast through Logres
into the camp by the hazels I Taliessin
came.