Divorce

Divorce is a volume of poems by Charles Williams, published by Oxford University Press in 1920, when Williams was working as an editor at the Press and writing verse in the evenings. It is the third of his early collections, following The Silver Stair and Poems of Conformity. The book belongs to the years of Williams's courtship and early marriage to Florence Conway, and its title names the possibility his poems keep circling: the severing of love from the lover, of vision from daily life, of the self from the Beloved it has glimpsed.

The sequence is a work of romantic and devotional poetry, and it is among the earliest places where Williams's mature preoccupations take shape. He had been formed by the Anglo-Catholic tradition, by Dante, and by the English poets of courtly and metaphysical love, and in these poems he tests whether erotic devotion can be a road toward God or only a rival to him. The verse is dense, formal, and often difficult. Its speakers swing between rapture and desolation, between the conviction that the beloved is a doorway into glory and the suspicion that the doorway may close.

What the poems do, more than argue, is dramatize a conviction Williams would later call the way of affirmation: that the created and the human are not obstacles to the divine but its occasions, so long as love is honest about what it is and what it is for. Against that affirmation stands the pull of rejection, of withdrawal from the world's goods in the name of purity. The collection keeps both in view without resolving them, and its tension is the point. Love that refuses to look beyond itself curdles, and devotion that denies the body and the other person starves. The poems stage the moment of choice rather than announcing a doctrine.

The book has lasted chiefly as a record of Williams's apprenticeship. Readers of his later work, including the Arthurian cycles, the theological writing, and the novels that made him a member of the Inklings, will find here the first drafts of themes he never abandoned: romantic love as a school of charity, the danger of idolatry, the discipline of attention to another person. It has never been a widely read book, and it rewards readers who come to it for what it shows about how a distinctive Christian imagination was made.

Who should read this: readers of Williams who want to see where his thinking about love and holiness began, and students of early twentieth-century devotional poetry who can tolerate a demanding, sometimes opaque style. It is not an introduction to Williams, and anyone new to him is better served by He Came Down from Heaven or the later poetry before turning back to this early volume.