The Assumption
by Charles Williams
Commemoration of St Lucian the Martyr of Antioch
Anno Domini 2025, October 15
With all arms bare to household toil
And a little child in hand,
The Mother of God goes on, goes on,
Beside her Peter, beside her John,
And chanting priest and singing bard,
And Michael the warrior for her guard,
She walks a fertile land.
She treads the ways of Sarras town [the land of the Grail]
As Nazareth she trod
She knows to mend, she knows to cook,
She knows on Lord Jesus’ face to look,
Before her feet the high kings ran,
She, the Maid, is the Mother of Man,
She is the Mother of God.
Sorrow and Labour and Delight
Go surely up with her.
Softly and gaily she goes on,
As when she did her sandals don,
As when she rinsed the cup and can [by implication, the Grail]
For blessed Joseph, a labouring man,
And God, a Carpenter.
*Originally published in Charles Williams, Poems of Conformity (London: Oxford University Press, 1917); reprinted in The Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams, eds. Grevel Lindop and John Matthews (Hannacroix, NY: Apocryphile Press, 2022), p. 162.
**“The Assumption” offers a deliberately working-class image of the Virgin, busy with “household toil,” caring for small children, cooking and mending, and doing the washing-up: rinsing “the cup and can” for Joseph, “a labouring man,” and for God. But she is “tread[ing] the ways of Sarras town”; Sarras is the land of the Grail: the Blessed Virgin is thus placed within the Arthurian myth, and the “cup and can” by implication become the Grail. ~Grevel Lindop, The Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams, p. 5
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