How is it that a new telling of a story dating back sixteen centuries is garnering such attention these days? Forget asking how it is possible. How is it even conceivable that a story told as a poem is lighting up the Internet? It may just be that the author is on to something.
The Story
Malcolm Guite is, according to his Wikipedia entry, a poet, a singer-songwriter, an Anglican priest, and an academic. The pipe-smoking man of letters has nearly two hundred thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel, which is quite something, since his videos are mostly about the true, the good, and the beautiful, a trinity we seem committed to doing our dead level best to live without these days. In what will be an epic retelling of the King Arthur story in four volumes, an Arthuriad, Guite has set about to bring the tales of valor into the modern world, and in the first volume, Galahad and the Grail, he launches his epic in a way sure to seize and hold the attention of all readers.
 |
| malcolmguite.com |
My wife and I both love Vergil's Aeneid, the Latin epic poem of the first century B.C. that tells the tale of Aeneas, the refugee from the Trojan War who labors against gods and men to found a new home in Italy for his fellow Trojans. Part of what we love about it and a key feature we try each year to help our high school Latin students discover and love with us is the story, and in Vergil it is a rollicking, good one. Too often the academic study of literature in school settings kills our joy of reading. No author crafted a story merely as an exercise to demonstrate alliteration or allusion. While we touch on such things only insofar as they illuminate the story, it is the story itself that matters, and it is in storytelling that Guite excels.
In her foreward, Susanna Clarke writes of this first volume, "It is full of jewel-like colours. The knights and ladies pass from the emerald-green of woods to the peridot-green of meadows, from grey-walled hermit's cells to the white walls of castles and abbeys, from yellow strand to sparkling blue sea. The whole poem has the mesmerising brilliance of the little paintings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts -- and that is before we even get to all the banners and heraldry." A good story is not merely a series of actions, although there are great and powerful actions throughout Guite's poem. Yet think of the films that have moved you the most. Quite often it was because, in addition to the actions, the activities of the characters, the scenes were filmed in a particular way. You don't think about lighting and camera angles and costuming while watching the film, but they work together to create a feeling, and Guite is master of all of it, from portraying the actions of the characters, such as
But Lionel was like one possessed
by hatred and disdain,
and rode his charger at Sir Bors
and smote him down with heavy force
and trampled him beneath his horse --
he fainted with the pain.
Book Two, Stave V, 323-328
to showing us the setting of it all, as in this scene.
At length they saw her place of prayer
built up from mossy stone --
the holy hermit's humble cell
where she had long been wont to dwell
with garden green and deep clear well,
guarded by many a prayer and spell.
Yet in her vigils in that vale
she never prayed alone.
Book Three, Stave I, 226-233
The Poetry
Malcolm Guite is also the musical director of this epic story, for he has chosen to sing it in ballad stanza. Many of us think of ballad strictly hewing to the form of something like "Sir Patrick Spens," with its stanzas of a four-foot line, followed by a three, then a four, and then a three, and in a rhyme scheme of A-B-C-B.
The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
"O whar will I get a guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?"
What Malcolm Guite has done in his Galahad and the Grail is to expand that and play with it. Consider these three consecutive bits from Book Two, Stave IV.
They saw within the glade a cell
all roughly hewn of stone --
the cell maybe of some recluse
who lived and prayed alone.
These lines, 92-95, follow the Patrick Spens model with the A-B-C-B rhyme scheme.
But ere the two knights could dismount,
they heard a sudden sound
of bridle reins all ringing out
and hoofbeats on the ground.
Lines 96-99 maintain the Patrick Spens meter. The rhyme scheme, however, borders on A-A-A-A, but for the final consonant sound of "t" in lines 96 and 98 and the final consonant sound of "d" in 97 and 99 leading it toward A-B-A-B.
And even as a hermitess
stepped out to greet them there,
a third knight rode into the glade
and cried out, bold and unafraid:
"No man rides past me here!" (lines 100-104)
These last five lines expand the form and call to mind Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius."
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and West and South and North,
To summon his array. (lines 3-6)
The rhythms rise and fall to support and add atmosphere to the story, and with such variations he is able to create genuine music and not a monotonous soundtrack. And as for the rhymes, let us say a bit more about the sonorous versus the monotonous.
In Book Two, Stave VI, lines 174-179, we find this.
And lo! as he sank back in pain
the chapel filled with light.
Lancelot saw a shimmering door
which he had not perceived before,
and as he gazed in fear and awe
it opened on the night.
Alexander Pope was famous for his tightly controlled iambic couplets, which I love, and he rarely admitted any metrical substitutions. Milton, on the other hand, did, and this leant variety to his basically iambic meter much as spondaic substitutions allowed the music to swell and fade in Homer’s and Vergil’s dactylic verse.
The third line of the stanza above opens with a trochee, which Guite not infrequently employs, but the truly interesting part is the anapest of “…mering door,” whose rhythm beautifully captures the movement of the light-filled door.
Yet even more fascinating is his rhyming of “awe” with “door” and “before.” I doubt many would have thought of a rhyme like this, but pay attention to the position of your lips as you say each of those words aloud slowly. You will notice that your mouth forms the same way for each word. They are rhymes, but not as one might expect.
The Faith
In Appendix A, Malcolm Guite tells us how he came to love the legends of Arthur from the telling of his mother when he was a boy. He writes that the stories that first moved him "were not some sanitised Hollywood version, but the real thing: haunting, numinous, continuously suggestive of the holy and beautiful reality of God and His saints and angels shimmering through the fabric of the stories of the knights with all their aspirations and all their human flaws. At the heart of those early versions of the stories is the Holy Grail itself: the presence of Christ and His gospel, moving as an unbearably beautiful light through the mists and magic of pre-Christian Celtic Britain, drawing even the wizards and faery folk towards Himself, baptising the imagination of our ancestors, fulfilling and disclosing the true meaning of our earliest stories."
As with the rising and falling rhythms of this poem and the variegated landscapes he describes, Malcolm Guite weaves both bold and subtle Christian elements throughout the work. There are hints toward biblical stories that will only be grasped by those who know the Scriptures, there are references to key moments in the liturgical year and to various aspects of orthodox Christian theology, and there are appearances of Jesus Christ Himself as He actively takes part in this story of kings and knights and maidens. It is possible that in a world that seems ever more biblically illiterate, such Christian elements may be jarring to some. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not known quite what to do with the divine in their most common form of storytelling, the cinematic film. There are, of course, depictions of the Norse gods in the Marvel Comics movies, but these are superheroes at best, and there is certainly nothing in those films of the haunting and the numinous that formed the fabric of the Arthurian tales. Other movies set in the ancient world are largely content to ignore the gods entirely, which is akin to operating a school with blank-faced clocks and books without a table of contents because you have chosen to pretend that numbers do not exist. Guite is not so pretentious as to pretend such things, but, as one who painstakingly restores masterworks of art, he gives us back a mythical reality filled with Christ and His "unbearably beautiful light."
Awakening Remembrance
How, then, is it possible for a book like this to be garnering so much praise and attention and, by all indications in reviews and fan sites, actual reading of the thing in an age in which evidence and anecdotes suggest that we do not read serious literature and would be incapable of doing so even if we desired to do it? In Appendix A, Malcolm Guite explains how, when at Cambridge he rediscovered the original sources, he "became aware of how so many modern versions of them seemed to marginalise or even erase the deep Christian impluse that had formed their original telling, and as a poet I longed to restore that lost element in the hope that a new telling might baptise the imagination of the growing generation brought up in a secular world, trapped in 'the immanent frame' and deprived of their inheritance in the gospel." As I said at the beginning, the author is on to something. He has sensed that in our dehumanized and dehumanizing world there is still a flicker of light, a trickle of living water beneath the surface of our lives, and rather than wring his hands and decry our sad state, he has simply lit his pipe and set to work in order to present the true, the good, and the beautiful. In the preface to his 1881 translation of Thucydides, Benjamin Jowett wrote, "[I]f Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions..., like the distant remembrance of youth before the delighted eyes of mankind." Guite does this with his Galahad and the Grail, and people are eagerly responding because they are finding what they did not realize was missing.
Fantastic review!
ReplyDelete