A Closed Letter to Andrea Charicoryides Surnamed Polygrapheus, Logothete of the Theme of Geodesia in the Empire, Bard of the Court of Camelot, Malleus Malitiarium, Inclinga Sum Sometimes Known as Charles Williams

A Closed Letter to Andrea Charicoryides Surnamed Polygrapheus, Logothete of the Theme of Geodesia in the Empire, Bard of the Court of Camelot, Malleus Malitiarium, Inclinga Sum Sometimes Known as Charles Williams is an eight-stanza poem written by J.R.R. Tolkien possibly in November 1943. It was first published in 1978 in The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends on pages 123-6. The poem expresses Tolkien's admiration for Charles Williams, but also difficulty with his works. The typescript with the only title of the poem is kept in the Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College in Illinois.

In 2024, the poem was republished in September as entry 174 in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Poem excerpts

First stanza

Our dear Charles Williams many guises shows:
the novelist comes first. I find his prose
obscure at times. Not easily it flows;
too often are his lights held up in brackets.
Yet error, should he spot it, he'll attack its
sources and head, exposing ramps and rackets,
the torturous byways of the wicked heart
and intellect corrupt. Yea, many a dart
he crosses with the fiery ones! The art
of minor fiends and major he reveals —
when Charles is on his trail the devil squeals,
for cloven feet have vulnerable heels.

Third stanza

Geography indeed! Here he again
exerts a subtle mind and labouring pen.
Geodesy say rather; for many a 'fen'
he wrote, and chapters bogged in tangled rhymes,
and has survived Europa's lands and climes,
dividing her from P'o-L'u's crawling slimes,
to her diving buttocks, breast, and head
(to say no fouler thing), where I instead,
dull-eyed, can only see a watershed,
a plain, an island, or a mountain-chain.
In that gynecomorphical terrain
History and Myth are ravelled in a skein
of endless interchange. I do not hope
to understand the deeds of king or pope,
wizard or emperor; beyond my scope
is that dark flux of symbol and event,
where fable, faith, and faërie are blent
with half-guessed meanings to some great intent
I cannot grasp. For Mount Elburz to me
is but a high peak far beyond the sea
(and high and far I'd ever have it be).

Last stanza

…
when tea is brewing or the glasses tinkling,
then of your meaning often I've an inkling,
your virtues and your wisdom glimpse. Your laugh
in my heart echoes, when with you I quaff
the pint that goes down quicker than a half,
because you're near. So, heed me not! I swear
when you with tattered papers take the chair
and read (for hours maybe), I would be there.
And ever when in state you sit again
and to your car imperial give rein,
I'll trundle, grumbling, squeaking, in the train
of the great rolling wheels of Charles' Wain.