R. S. Thomas’s “Pilgrimages”
William V. Davis
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
— Geoffrey Chaucer
What hast thou, O my soul, with paradise?
.
.
.
Will we not find some headland consecrated
By aery apostles of terrene delight,
Will not our cult be founded on the waves,
Clear sapphire, cobalt, cyanine,
On triune azures, the impalpable
Mirrors unstill of the eternal change?
— Ezra Pound
And what does it come to, Pilgrim,
This walking to and fro on the earth, knowing
That nothing changes, or everything;
And only, to tell it, these sad marks,
Phrases half-parsed, ellipses and scratches across the dirt?
— Charles Wright
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Literally, pilgrimages are journeys to sacred places. Metaphorically, they are imaginative
journeys. But whether literal or imaginative, journeys are often undertaken as much for the sake
of the journey itself as they are for the destination sought; they are travels whose destinations,
even if they are to a sacred site, are simultaneously visionary excursions in search of sacred
sights or in search of insights.
In literature, such journeys have had a long history. Since at least the fourteenth century,
when Chaucer’s pilgrims set off to make their way to Canterbury, people have been making
pilgrimages, or imagining making them and recording or recounting them. And, in addition to
telling what they’ve literally sought, the things they’d planned to see or visit, they’ve also told
what they’ve thought—both about the journey itself and, through their conversations with other
pilgrims or with others they’ve met along the way—what the journey itself has generated in their
minds. And they’ve written it all down—where they went, what they saw and what they thought,
what they found, and how they felt about it, both at the time and afterwards. And, therefore,
historically—and increasingly so in more modern times—literary pilgrimages are often
conglomerations of what has been sought, thought and found, a kind of progress report as it were
on the travel itself, a report or a recounting that includes the geography, the topography, and at
least a mini essay on the literal, literary or epistemological ruminations that have been raised
along the way.
What then, we might ask, causes people to take a journey, make a pilgrimage? What,
literally, do they hope to see or find? Why do they want to take trips to somewhere not yet
known or not yet seen? Which end pulls the other? Do they want to go because they imagine that
there will be something there, something they will find or discover that they didn’t know;
something that, once seen or felt or experienced, will benefit them in some way, mentally,
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morally, or spiritually; something that will help them to better live their lives? Or are such
quests, often, only some sort of semi-aimless wandering, with the hope or expectation that, at the
end of them, there will be something tangible to show for the journey and the trouble; something
that can or will be recovered or realized—that the end will justify the means? Often, I suppose,
it’s hard to know for certain what the real answers are. People journey literally as they journey
mentally and, as often as not, they frequently end where they began. But, somewhat curiously
perhaps, and whatever else is the case, such journeys often seem to be the kinds of things that
people want to repeat. They want to go to places that they plan to revisit, either literally or
imaginatively.
These are the kinds of questions, concerns, and contemplations that, I take it, this
conference will attempt to answer, at least in part, and in rather various ways in term of our
various disciplines. Therefore, what I want to do today it to attempt to answer some of these
questions in a rather specific way, with respect to my specific discipline and in terms of a
specific person, and a specific text, and in terms of what Gruffudd has called the “geographical
imagination” (151) that is typical of the Welsh.
I want to talk about the Welsh poet-priest, R. S. Thomas, who died in the year 2000, at
the age of eighty-seven, his life filling most of the twentieth century. Thomas spent his priestly
life serving a series of small rural parishes far from the central cities. Indeed, he seemed to seek
out the out-of-the-way places, scarcely populated and peopled by parishioners who owed their
lives to the land. He rarely traveled outside of Wales and in his late years he lived and worked
almost exclusively in the north of the country in the Welsh-speaking communities on the Llŷn
peninsula, in and near Aberdaren, a small village at the very tip of the peninsula, where, two
miles offshore, lay the ancient site of spiritual pilgrimage known as Bardsey Island.
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Show maps and pictures of Bardsey Island
Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli in Welsh) is a small island two miles off the tip of the Llŷn
peninsula. Geologically, it belongs to the Pre-Cambrian era. It came into its present form about
8,000 years ago, after the glaciers receded and the sea levels stabilized. The island consists of
two rather distinct areas, connected by a narrow neck of land. On the north and east, facing the
mainland, is a knob of craggy rock; on the western and southern sides, and hidden from view
from the mainland, are the lowlands. “The settlement axis lies along the break of slope between
the mountain and the more manageable lowland.” It was here that the various religious sites and
subsequent churches were built. Here can be found “the remains of the Augustinian abbey tower
dominating the buildings at the northern end.” (Jones and Thomas, 11).
Bardsey Island, whose “history ascends to the grey dawn of antiquity,” (Jones, 354) was
known as the “Rome of Britain” and also as the “Gate of Paradise.” Three pilgrimages to
Bardsey where thought to be equivalent to one to Rome. According to tradition, twenty thousand
saints—twenty thousand pilgrims—lay buried on this holy island. In the 6th century a monastery
was founded there. Later, the Benedictines took possession of the island and then, in the 13th
century, the Augustinian order established a church there. Bardsey became the most famous of
the monastic establishments in Wales, and throughout the Middle Ages a steady stream of
pilgrims travelled over the hills of Wales to attempt the difficult crossing of the treacherous seas
between Abardaron and Bardsey Island (whose Cymric name means “the island of the currents”)
in a clatter of small boats to add their names to the lists of those who’d lived and died there.
Today, the journey is still a very difficult one and many pilgrims or simple tourists are frustrated
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by the tides and winds, which often make the trip to the island difficult, impracticable, or even
impossible; some (like myself) have tried repeatedly, but never managed to get there.1
R. S. Thomas had certainly been there often. Indeed, Bardsey must have been present in
his mind much of the time, since it was always in his sight, just across the estuary from his final
parish at Aberdaron, where his church was often almost literally washed by the waves of those
infamous currents lapping at its door.
.
I want to turn now to a consideration of Thomas’s poem “Pilgrimages,” a poem that
seems to me to do two things simultaneously: on the one hand, it gives a clear sense of the theme
of this conference since it explicitly charts a pilgrimage to a sacred place; on the other hand, in
addition to being one of Thomas’s finest poems, it is an excellent example of what might be
thought of as Thomas’s “environmental” or “topographical imagination” (Jarvis, 11, 23). In an
attempt to realize both of these things, I want to take us on a “footsteps journey” through the
poem (see Keirstead, 301). Such a journey, as Keirstead has described it, follows “another’s
footsteps, literally and literarily,” (289) at once acknowledging both the footsteps being followed
while simultaneously becoming acquittedly conscious of earlier pilgrims’ journeys over the same
territory.
Thus, such a journey is “inevitably one that is half created by the [initial] traveler”
(Keirstead, 301) — in our case by R. S. Thomas in his poem “Pilgrimages”—and half created by
the follower, the reader of Thomas’s poem, as he or she observes the “intersecting zones of
imagination and reality” (302) which encompasses and includes both the poem itself and the
destination that the poem takes us to, namely Bardsey Island. It is, however, worth bearing in
mind, as Keirstead acknowledges, that these kinds of “visitations—to text and to place” must be
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regarded as “highly complex experiement[s] in intertextuality and cross-genericism,” (302) and,
therefore, they should be considered as being somewhat akin to what Julia Kristeva has
described as “transpositions,” transpositions in which the “place” and the “object” are “never
single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural” (1984, 60).
This kind of complicity may make one feel like a “voyeur,” since, inevitably, “footsteps
double back on each other” (Keirstead 307). Indeed, literary pilgrimages inevitably involve the
vicarious experience of “visiting” a place by followed an earlier “traveler’s,” the writer’s,
“footsteps” and seeing it through his or her eyes. In retracing the writer’s journey, the reader
becomes a vicarious traveler, doubling back on the text’s “footsteps.” The reader, then, must
attempt to discover what that earlier traveler (the writer) found and described in and at the place
he “traveled” to, and he must then attempt to decipher what he himself has subsequently found
there, based on his own journey through the text in question. Finally, he must attempt to pass on
this information or knowledge to someone else, another potential “traveler”—another reader. In
this sense, readers become very special kinds of pilgrims and “travelers.”
Distribute copies of “Pilgrimages”
So, let’s take up R. S. Thomas’s pilgrimage, his “journey into the strangeness of the other
and of [ourselves]” (Kristeva, 1991, 182) — for his sake and our own.
“Pilgrimages” begins with a five and one half line sentence:
There is an island there is no going
to but in a small boat the way
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the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned, munching the gravel
of its beaches.
In short, the island is next to impossible to get to. Still, Thomas has been there, as the following
sentence tells us. But then, almost immediately, having found the candles on the altar burned out
and “no body in the stained window / of the sky,” Thomas wonders whether he has been too late
in starting his pilgrimage to this difficult destination. And then he wonders if the others, as far
back as “those / first pilgrims,” were also “too late,” since the God they sought there has always
been “such a fast / God, always before us and /leaving as we arrive.”
Then, after a transitional stanza about “those . . . / not given to prayer” and whose only
“office” is “the blank sea” and the “slow chemistry of the soil,” both of which turn pilgrims and
even “saints’ bones to dust,” Thomas turns back explicitly to the island he is focusing on. Indeed,
it is as if his eye has literally—punningly—landed, or re-landed, on the island (the eye land) and
this site, sight, and “landing” has stunned him into speech. He describes the island as timeless
and the events on it as “dateless,” both of which suggest something eternal, outside of time and
even (almost) outside of space as well. And so, here, the journey, the pilgrimage, has begun to
turn inward. People who make such pilgrimages, Thomas implies, are not “late or soon” and,
invariably, they have each come with their “one question” to ask. All of the quester’s questions,
Thomas realizes, are really the same question, the same question that he too has come to ask.
But, curiously, he gives what purports to be the answer to this question before he even asks it.
The answer precedes the question. The reason for this is that the answer is provided by life itself.
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That is, it is something that is already in the questioner, and in the question. This, Thomas seems
to suggest, is the only answer that pilgrims throughout the ages have received—whether or not it
ever was, or is, a satisfactory answer. But then he insists further, asserting his own individual
identity and authority both in terms of the question and in terms of the anticipated answer. He
says, “It is I / who ask.” And then the poem abruptly ends—with the question that anticipates the
answer:
Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?
Here the poem ends. The vagueries of the answer preceding this final question remain
vague and since they are self-directed and self-reflexive they no doubt have little, or any,
relevance to or for anyone other than R. S. Thomas, any other pilgrim on this, or any, pilgrimage
or path or to this, or any other particular place, since ultimately one must always answer his own
questions. And God is, to use Thomas’s word, “inexplicable.” And if finding God was the goal
of the journey, and if that goal has been frustrated, what then of the journey itself, the
pilgrimage? Is any journey, finally, capable of being fully explained, interpreted, or accounted
for? What Thomas seems to be suggesting is that the essence of a pilgrimage, the essence of all
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such difficult journeys, is ultimately inward rather than outward. Therefore, it is not, has not
been, and cannot be, a journey to, or even toward, some exterior site, but, rather, it is inevitably a
journey to or toward some sense of something interior—an insight. And such an insight need not
be based primarily on any particular destination or location but, rather, it may be only an
assertion of the significance of the journey itself, for its own sake—an affirmation of a faith in
the quest undertaken, in and for itself alone. And if the journey is to a sacred place, and if it is an
attempt to find something of the divine there, then such a journey may be, finally, something
very similar to what Emerson called a “sacred affirmative” (2)—even if R. S. Thomas would call
it inexplicable.
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Preacher,” The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine. January
1880. 1-13.
Gruffudd, Pyrs. “Prospects of Wales: Contested Geographical Imaginations.” In Ralph Fever and
Andrew Thompson, eds., Nation, Identity and Social Theory: Perspectives from Wales.
Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1999. (149-167)
Jarvis, Matthew. Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry: Writing Wales in English.
Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2008.
Jones, G. Hartwell. Celtic Britain and the Pilgrim Movement. London: The Honourable Society
of Cymmrodorion, 1912.
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Jones, Peter Hope and R. S. Thomas. Between Sea & Sky: Images of Bardsey. Llandysul,
Ceredigion, Wales: Gomer P, 1998.
Keirstead, Christopher M. “Convoluted Paths: Mapping Genre in Contemporary Footsteps
Travel Writing.” Genre, 46: 3 (Fall 2013). 285-315.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetry Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York; Columbia U
P, 1984.
_____. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Rondiez. New York: Columbia U P, 1991.
Lewis, Eiluned and Peter. The Land of Wales. London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 1949.
1
Something of the difficulty in getting to Bardsey is indicated by Jones: “A traveler from the North, on arriving at
Clynnog, was obliged to face the steep pass of Yr Eifel, above Nant Gwyrtheyrn. His perseverance was rewarded,
however, and his labour crowned by the prospect of food and shelter at the hospice on the crest of the hill, where he
probably halted before entering on the last stage of fifteen miles to Aberdaron. As he pursued his route through
Lleyn [another spelling of Lŷyn] a well paved road, the track of which is still visible, was at his service. Those who
came from the South passed the church of Abererch, popularly supposed to indicate the resting-place of pilgrims
who died on the way to Bardsey. Resuming his journey, the pilgrim plodded along the winding coast, passed by
Saint Tudwal’s Island, next, the ill-omened shore of Port Nigel [known as “The Mouth of Hell” and the place where
R. S. Thomas lived after he retired from the ministry] and negotiated the steep side of Mynydd Rhiw.” (365)