Joni Mitchell, Ballad Metre, and the Holy Grail: A Conversation with Malcolm Guite

A Conversation between Malcolm Guite & Sarah Emtage

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Nov 07, 2024

Malcolm Guite cherishes words. This is consistently displayed in his work as a poet, priest, singer-songwriter, and scholar. He has published eight collections of poetry and numerous other works reflecting on art, literature, and theology. His poem “Refugee” was chosen to be read at the Royal carol service at Westminster Abbey in 2022. During the pandemic, he began a popular Youtube series where he welcomes the viewer into his study to chat about books and the beauty, truth, and goodness found within them.

This conversation was conducted in anticipation of Guite’s forthcoming project, “Merlin’s Isle,” a retelling of the Arthurian legends in verse. The first volume, “Galahad and the Grail” is expected in the spring of 2026, followed by volumes 2-4 in 2027 and 2028.

He was interviewed by Sarah Emtage for Traces Journal via Zoom in August, 2024.

Sarah Emtage for Traces: How do you view your role as an artist alongside your relationship with God?

Malcolm Guite: It is important to me to know that I am a created being, a creature, a work of somebody else's authorship. I see my life itself as a kind of poem which God is still in the process of making and which I'm cooperating and collaborating with Him.

It follows that I'm made in the image of a maker, and as Tolkien says in the Mythopoeia poem, “We make still by the law in which we're made.” I see my own ‘creative’ faculties, such as they are, as some part of the image of God in me. The reason why I put the word ‘creative’ in inverted commas is simply that the kind and quality of God's creation is radically different from our own in that God creates everything ex nihilo. We have to receive something before we can create.

I dislike the word “original” in the sense of striving for originality. Nothing is original in the sense that we didn't originate anything. God originated everything. I inherit a language which is the work of hundreds of thousands of anonymous poets making words which are all metaphors, and then I receive a poetic tradition. I'm involved in a long conversation. I'm not claiming anything exclusive or definitive about it. I would ban the words exclusive and definitive from any sense of what creative writing is. It's never exclusive. It's always part of a tradition. It's never definitive. There is always more to be unravelled and opened out. I see my vocation as a writer as a calling by the God who made me to be this kind of person and make this kind of work.

Traces: Tell me more about your background in Canada. You were born in Nigeria and then your family moved to Canada. Is that correct?

MG: We were in Nigeria and then Zimbabwe. We left Zimbabwe rather hurriedly and ended up briefly in Cambridge, England. My dad got a job in Canada at McMaster University in '67, the centenary year of Canada, when I was nine years old. We sailed over on a ship and travelled up the St. Lawrence Seaway. From ‘67 through to ‘71 I lived in Hamilton. I went to a regular grade school and then junior high and was sort of becoming Canadian.

I listened to the Canadian classics: Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and The Band. But when I was fourteen my Dad sent me and my sister over to England and I became an English boarding school boy with a uniform, strict rules, and dorm inspections. It was not in the least congenial to me. I was very homesick and I didn't particularly like it, but the great thing was that I began to discover written poetry.

My mother recited a lot of poetry, but at school I discovered Keats, Shelly, and the great Romantics, and through them everybody else. It turned out that I was good at English. I couldn't believe that English was a subject because reading and writing were what I did for pleasure.

During term time I was an English schoolboy – buttoned up and deep into literature – and then I transformed on the plane mid-Atlantic and I became a Canadian teenager again – going to folk concerts,hanging out with my other long-haired friends, and grooving to Neil Young. It was a weird double life, but I liked both sides of it.Then in ‘77, I won a scholarship and got a place at Cambridge University. Before that it would have been an open question “Am I Canadian or am I British?” The combination of decent beer and an ancient university which could be enjoyed together made me realize I was British.

Traces: You mentioned many of your favourite Canadian musicians. Who are your favourite Canadian writers?

MG: When I was in grade school and junior high, one of the authors I enjoyed was Farley Mowat. Mowat wrote wonderful stories set in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland often about the schooners and the fishermen. I’ve always loved the sea and ships so I love those Farley Mowat books. I listened to Leonard Cohen as a songwriter but soon realized he was a poet and bought his poetry books as well. The main Canadian influence in my mid to late teens was more musical than literary, but the music was literary in its own way. Joni Mitchell is a great poet. In the 70s you could still go to folk cafes where everybody remembered the last time Neil or Joni played there.

In 2011, I met the Canadian singer-songwriter, Steve Bell, and we became mutual fans. I loved his singing and songwriting and he liked my poetry. We have had a long, rich collaboration which has brought me to Canada several times since.

Traces: It is interesting to consider how Canada and Britain have shaped you as an artist. As you are now creating your own Arthuriad, Merlin’s Isle, could you talk about what it means that the stories of King Arthur are called the Matter of Britain?

MG: I love the phrase: “The Matter of Britain.” It's a medieval phrase. It goes back to the idea that poets weren't supposed to be thinking of original things. They were supposed to be retelling the great stories in the most beautiful way possible. There were three matters or subject matters: the matter of Troy which included The Iliad and The Odyssey, the matter of Gaul with the extraordinary figure of Charlemagne, and the matter of Britain.

Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote about King Arthur in the Historia Regum Britanniae and claimed to be chronicling history. He was not a person of deep spiritual sensibility. Then other writers, including Robert de Boron and Chrétien de Troyes, introduce the theme of the Holy Grail which asks the question: What happens when the highest worldly standard, which was chivalry, comes against the radical inbreaking of grace and the kingdom of God represented by the Grail? The answer is that the worldly standard, great as it is, is not great enough. It needs to be let go. It's broken. Its flaws are exposed and then a new dispensation has to come, which is grounded in the Kingdom of God. Lancelot cannot achieve the Grail because his mind is divided. The Quest of the Grail asks what would happen if the consecration of the Eucharist suddenly arrived in the middle of the greatest of the secular courts. How would they cope? What flaws would it expose? What graces would it require? And that's obviously of interest to me both as a priest and a poet.

What happens when the highest worldly standard, which was chivalry, comes against the radical inbreaking of grace and the kingdom of God represented by the Grail? The answer is that the worldly standard, great as it is, is not great enough. It needs to be let go. It's broken.

Traces: What does it mean to you personally to be taking up this tale?

MG: It means a huge amount partly because I've known these stories since before I could read. My mother would tell me these stories. I had a little shield covered in cloth, my mother had knitted me chain mail out of silver-painted string, and I had a wooden sword for playing games in the garden.

I realized early that Lancelot was the kind of person who is captain of the rugby team and I knew I was never going to be that boy, but Galahad was somebody who heard the elfin voices, who went on these extraordinary quests, who could see and hear and feel more, and who had this particular calling to see and respond to the numinous. I always played at being Galahad rather Lancelot. When I first started to think I might be a poet, it was not entirely from my mind that I might one day write an Arthur poem. Around that time, I wrote some of T. H. White’s transformation scenes into Spencerian stanzas, particularly the one where Merlin and Arthur are turned into fish, so I was already trying it out.

My main problem was how to do it. I wanted to do it in poetry, but there was no example of long narrative poetry in the age in which I was living; though, I could see that high modernist poets had touched on it: Elliot's poem The Wasteland, David Jones, and Charles Williams. Jones and Williams are high modernists not writing for the general reader. They're writing poetry consisting almost entirely of a network of hidden illusions, and they're bristling with footnotes. For a long time, I thought that was the only way you could go forward because I was living after these people, but at the same time, that's not how I wanted to tell the story. So, I decided,“this is a thing I'll do when I can work out the form.”

In the meantime, I wrote my big book on Coleridge, and was deeply immersed in the way Coleridge completely transforms the ballad form; even then, I wasn't seeing the obvious. It wasn't until Rabbit Room wrote to me, and said, “look, we're doing this book called The Lost Tales of Galahad. Would you like to write a Galahad story?” that something clicked. The day the email arrived I was going to fill out a tax return form, so obviously, I was desperate to procrastinate. But I became completely absorbed. In two days I wrote Galahad and the Naiad.

By the time I’d finished it, I realized I’d found my form. On the one hand, the ballad allows for all kinds of poetic effects and it can be allusive to many other works, but on the other hand, it has a good thumping metre, making ita page-turner. I had dreams already, which I've not given up, that as well as existing as a book and an audiobook, this poem could become a series of live performances. The ballad is incredibly good for that.

Traces: Can you talk a bit more about the ballad as a poetic form?

MG: Well, there's a thing called the common ballad metre. Ballads were originally sung or chanted, and they were widespread throughout the British Isles. Essentially, in a pre-literate age, it was a way of telling a memorable story. It found a form which was usually a four-line verse with an abcb rhyme pattern, and which alternated four and three stresses per line. So you've got four lines in a traditional ballad with only two rhymes, though sometimes you had internal rhymes. Within those stresses, you have a lot of freedom. Just think of the opening of “The Ancient Mariner,” where Coleridge is adapting a ballad form:

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.

See, that's the shorter line.

By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

No rhyme there.

Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

So it's actually quite easy to write. Now, of course, people elaborated on it, and often, wrote all kinds of internal rhymes.

The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din.

You see where the un-rhymed line has an internal rhyme? Coleridge takes that four-line, two-rhyme, strongly metered thing and opens it up, and sometimes puts in a whole series of three or four internally rhyming lines before you get the payoff of the final rhyme.

Traces: What sets your retelling apart from past retellings of the Arthuriad? How do you think this story continues to speak to our present age?

MG: Every retelling has to be faithful to the story, but every retelling is necessarily and rightly of its own time. We bring different questions, expectations, and needs to the story, and if the story is a great myth then it speaks to those questions, expectations, and needs. That's what great myth does. It's why we still tell these stories.

When T. S. Elliot wrote The Wasteland, it was because he felt the image of a land that had suddenly gone to waste spoke to him of the awful situation after the devastation of the First World War and the Spanish flu, which killed millions, and destroyed all the hopes of progress. This image of a desolate land was important to him. He's writing a poem about the anomy, disconnection, and malaise of that immediate postwar period.

My mother first told me the story [of the wasteland], of the dolorous blow, of the utter devastation that Balin caused and how he must ride through the land and [witness it.] People curse him as he goes past, he sees the fish dead in the rivers, and he sees the crops rotting in the ground. I remember my mom telling me this story when I was about eight, and I said, “That's awful! How could there ever be a world in which one man could cause so much devastation?” And my mother said to me, “Well, we live in a world like that.” She was telling me this in the 60s. The threat of nuclear annihilation was present. She was saying, “you live in a dangerous world.” What everybody does counts for everybody else.

So that's what it meant to me as I was growing up. But by the time I came to write my Arthuriad, I had another sense of what the wasteland (from the Arthur stories) reveals, namely, the brutal view of the world that results from our society’s pure materialism. No longer is [our experience] full of life and beauty and love, it's just an agglomeration of stuff. It's a phenomenon we may broadly call reductivism, which is the consequence of the Enlightenment.

We are just beginning to experience a rebellion against that. We need to re-enter the enchantment of the world. In my telling of the wasteland, I imagine what it would be like if knights who lived in the kind of world that Owen Barfield describes as original participation, for whom every wind was the Breath of God, were plunged into the modern reductive view where any truth or meaning is private and subjective, and all we see is islanded in the isolated concavity of our skulls. Supposing they went from that living participative view for a moment into our worldview, they would be utterly devastated. Of course, they would call it the wasteland. It's a parable for me now of what we lost in the Enlightenment and modernism, and how it can be restored.

Joni Mitchell, Ballad Metre, and the Holy Grail: A Conversation with Malcolm Guite

A Conversation between Malcolm Guite & Sarah Emtage

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