Region of the Summer Stars

The Region of the Summer Stars is a cycle of poems by Charles Williams, published by the Editions Poetry London in 1944, the year before his death. It is the second of his two Arthurian cycles, following Taliessin through Logres (1938), and the two were later gathered together with C. S. Lewis's commentary in Arthurian Torso. Williams wrote them while working as an editor at Oxford University Press, which had relocated from London to Oxford during the war, and the poems belong to the years when Britain was under bombardment and the idea of a civilization held together by something more than force seemed urgent and fragile.

The cycle follows Taliessin, the court poet of King Arthur, through a Britain that Williams calls Logres, a realm meant to be the earthly body of a Christian order. Logres is set against Byzantium, the seat of imperial form and of a vision of humanity as the image of God, and against the Empire's remote regions, where the Grail and the powers of the unseen press toward manifestation. Williams does not retell the legends so much as use them to explore doctrines he held to be central: the way of affirmation, in which created things, bodies and loves are received as true images of the divine; the principle of exchange, by which persons carry one another's burdens; and the co-inherence of all things in Christ. The poems are dense, allusive and compressed, working by symbol and by a deliberately difficult syntax that asks the reader to slow down. The figure of Taliessin is the poet as a kind of priest of the images, and the poems repeatedly ask what it means to see ordinary reality as already shaped by grace.

The cycle has continued to matter because it is one of the few serious attempts in the twentieth century to write theology as epic poetry, and because it gives imaginative flesh to ideas that Williams worked out in prose in books such as He Came Down from Heaven and The Figure of Beatrice. Readers of Lewis and Tolkien have long recognized Williams as the third member of the Inklings whose work most resists easy summary, and this cycle is where his thought is most concentrated. It rewards patience, and it gives a vocabulary for thinking about substitution, love and the sanctity of the material world that readers often find nowhere else.

Who should read this: Readers who already know Williams's novels or his theological prose, or who enjoy demanding modernist verse and are willing to read slowly with a commentary at hand, will find a great deal here. It is not for someone looking for a straightforward Arthurian narrative, a devotional text that yields its meaning on first reading, or an easy introduction to Williams; those readers should begin with The Descent of the Dove or one of the novels.