Silver Stair

The Silver Stair is Charles Williams's first book of verse, a sequence of devotional love poems published in London in 1912 by Herbert & Daniel. Williams was then in his mid-twenties, working at the Oxford University Press and attending evening classes at the University of London. He had also fallen intensely in love with Florence Conway, whom he would marry in 1917 and who is the sequence's occasion and its unnamed beloved. The poems belong to a minor English tradition of religious love lyric, and they are early work by a writer who would later become one of the Inklings' circle, a novelist, playwright, and theologian of romantic love.

The sequence climbs, as its title promises, by stages. Williams takes the language of courtly and Petrarchan devotion, the lover as servant and the lady as an object of reverence, and uses it with a seriousness that is closer to prayer than to flirtation. The beloved is the way by which the lover comes to apprehend something beyond her. Love is not a rival to devotion but an approach to it, and the lover's fidelity, humility, and sense of unworthiness are rehearsed as spiritual disciplines. The poems are formal, lyrical, and somewhat Pre-Raphaelite in diction. Their intensity of feeling is held within regular forms, so that ardor is made to discipline itself.

The sequence matters mainly because it records the first form of an idea Williams spent the rest of his life developing: that the experience of romantic love, honored rather than despised or merely indulged, can be a genuine way of knowing divine love. In later years he called this the Way of Affirmation, and he worked it out in He Came Down from Heaven, The Figure of Beatrice, and the Arthurian poems. The Silver Stair shows the instinct before the doctrine, and it is the earliest evidence that his theology grew out of lived feeling rather than abstract argument. Readers who know the mature Williams will find here the seed of themes that later became far more complex and strange.

Who should read this: readers of Williams who want to see where his thought on romantic love and devotion began, and students of early twentieth-century English religious verse. It will suit those who enjoy formal, slightly archaic lyric poetry and can read youthful work generously. It is not for readers seeking Williams's developed theology or the imaginative power of his later poetry and novels, and it is not an easy entry point for anyone new to him; begin instead with The Figure of Beatrice or Descent into Hell.