R.S. Thomas
by Malcolm Hebron
English Association Bookmarks
No. 56
English Association Bookmarks Number 56
R.S. Thomas
by
Malcolm Hebron
Scope of Topic
This Bookmark provides an introduction to the poetry of R. S. Thomas, through a close
reading of four poems. The poems selected give some idea of the poet’s wide range of
concerns, and of his formal versatility and mastery of language.
Books to Read
Collected Poems 1945-1990 (London: J. M. Dent, 1993)
Selected Poems 1946-1968 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986)
Later Poems 1972-1982 (London: Macmillan, 1983)
Notes
R. S. Thomas was one of the great poets of the twentieth century. His Collected Poems
contains a wonderfully rich harvest of thoughts, encompassing bleak pastoral, religious
meditation, and reflections upon public issues. The voice in which these thoughts are pitched
is similarly wide in range, reaching from sober celebration to lament, from tender compassion
to bitterness and anger. This great variety of matter and manner grows from a distinct local
habitation: much of Thomas’s work, especially in the early books, is rooted in the remote
parishes in Wales where, as a priest, he ministered to small rural communities. Yet his
concerns are always universal, never narrow or parochial: like Hardy’s Wessex or Joyce’s
Dublin, R. S. Thomas’s farming landscape provides the stage on which is enacted the drama
of the human condition, man’s struggle with the soil which sustains him and his need for
fellowship, history and spiritual strength. Whatever voice is speaking to us in a particular
poem, it always records thoughts and feelings with precision and uncompromising honesty:
R. S. Thomas never flatters or ingratiates himself with the reader, nor does he take refuge in
easy sentiment. His verse has a powerful moral force which underlies its intellectual and
aesthetic sophistication.
Thomas’s relation to his country, Wales, is at the centre of his work. He was born in Cardiff in
1913 and, though his parents were not Welsh speakers, he soon learned the language, intent
on becoming not just a Welshman writing in English but truly Anglo-Welsh, immersed in both
cultures. When he started his ministry in Manafon, his command of Welsh enabled him to
communicate with the hill farmers who were his parishioners. But although he wrote some
prose, including an autobiohraphy Neb (no-one / anyone) in Welsh, Thomas composed his
poetry only in his mother tongue of English, the language for which he had a truly instinctive
feel. The resulting complex relation with Welshness is evident in all his writing: Thomas sees
the farm workers as tragically dispossessed of their cultural inheritance by a lack of
education, while he is aware of the irony that he, the ardent Welsh nationalist, articulates his
deepest thoughts in the language of the colonising English. Thomas’s religious vision, too, is
carved out of the brutal landscape, austere chapels and hill churches of Wales: it is
something tough and ancient, in harmony with the hostile weather and immense loneliness
which afflict the people whom his Church attempts to serve. Thomas also campaigned
publicly for Welsh national identity, and in several poems expresses intense indignation at the
damage wrought by English cultural imperialism. This is perhaps related to his deep horror of
many aspects of modernity: money, nuclear weapons, and the inexorable march of smug
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English Association Bookmarks Number 56
science are, like the English, forces which threaten to destroy traditional habits of thinking
and living.
1. Evans
Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle’s
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.
It was not the dark filling my eyes
And mouth appalled me; not even the drip
Of rain like blood from the one tree
Weather-tortured. It was the dark
Silting the veins of that sick man
I left stranded upon the vast
And lonely shore of his bleak bed.
An experience is conveyed here with luminous clarity.The poem makes a powerful impact on
a first reading: at once we understand the poet’s realisation both of how helpless Evans is,
and how far out of human reach. As in the poet’s more direct descriptions of Welsh peasants
and farmers, often represented by the composite figure of Iago Pytherch, there is a
recognition that other people, however much we observe them or sympathise with them, are
finally mysterious and unknowable.
The comforts of faith might be thought to provide a bridge between minister and Evans, and
to palliate the desolation of dying. Yet the poet is characteristically reticent here about the
supposed benefits of religion. He has presumably been visiting Evans as a priest, but there is
no pretence that his coming has brought particular solace, or that religion can provide an
escape from suffering. Refusing such tempting notions, the poem ends with an evocation of
enormous and unassuaged solitude. It compels us by its unsparing truth, and its direct and
forceful vision: the successive pictures, of the kitchen with its feeble comforts and the bare
nocturnal landscape, and the images of the twisted tree and the ‘vast and lonely shore’ of
Evans’s bed, all carry a great weight of meaning and feeling. These pictures, quietly
described, tell their own story, and the verse never needs to resort to rhetorical bombast to
be effective.
The ideas which the poem communicates arise naturally from the artistry of the verse. ‘Evans’
is arrestingly straightforward in construction: two verse paragraphs, and three sentences of
uncomplicated syntax take us on a train of thought.which does not pause to take a detour in
digression or further abstract analysis. For all this simplicity, there is never any feeling that
we are being given banal statements of the obvious. Meaning is invested in language of a
carefully wrought pitch and tone, giving profound thoughts a fitting music. Though not
written in traditional metrics or rhyme, the poem has an effective patterning of rhythm and
cadence. Double stresses, often at the end of lines (thick tide, hill ridge, bleak bed) establish
a ponderous movement, evoking the poet’s slow tread. This solemn atmosphere is further
established by line endings which hesitate between pause and continuity, by punctuation
within lines, and the unobtrusive sound patterning created by assonance (tide / night / eyes,
stark / dark / vast).
Together with sound, the poem’s language is similarly attuned to the subject matter. Like the
homestead and hillside it describes, the poem is gaunt and stark in its expression. There are
no adverbs, and the simple adjective-noun pairs (bare flight, black kettle, cold dark, etc.) give
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us the minimum we need to imagine the scene. Everything depends on preparing us for the
moving last lines, and making them a fit resting point for the whole poem. This is partly
achieved through restraint: the limited use of descriptive and figurative language earlier on
helps to give the ending its power. When we come to it, we sense the shift: for the first time
in the poem, there are two adjectives (vast and lonely) - an eruption of colour in this context
- and the thought deepens in pitch with the metaphorical richness of silted veins and the
distant shore of the bed. In a short space, we have moved from the conversational opening
(Evans? Yes…) and the simple description of the kitchen to the more emotionally intense
exterior scene; finally we arrive at the affecting imaginative sympathy of the concluding
image. In just a few lines, a whole emotional and intellectual journey has been traced.
There are still other details which stimulate enquiry. The image of the tree on the hill, for
example, dripping as if with blood, calls up associations with Christ’s Passion: here is another
lonely death on a hill, calling for compassion and contemplation. It is interesting to note that
R. S. Thomas again uses the word ‘appalled’ - perhaps chosen for its connotations of ‘pall’
and burial - in a much later poem, ‘Hill Christmas’. ‘They’ are the rural parishioners:
Their horizon contracted
to the one small, stone-riddled field
with its tree, where the weather was nailing
the appalled body that had not asked to be born.
These lines take us on to a consideration of R. S. Thomas’s religious poetry, which becomes
more prominent in his work from Pietà (1966) onwards. ‘Kneeling’ is from the next collection,
Not That He Brought Flowers (1968):
2.
Kneeling
Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great rôle. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.
About this kind of poem, there seems little to be said. In a language even more pared down
than in ‘Evans’, prayer is described as a silent, attentive stillness. Indeed, as he does
increasingly in his later verse, Thomas avoids the traditional props of poetry as if to direct our
attention solely to the kernel, to what is being uttered rather than the rhetoric of the
utterance. There is no hint of rhyme, the line breaks seem arbitrary, and the usual figures of
poetry are all but banished: ‘the air a staircase / For silence’ and, arguably, ‘Ringing’ are the
only places where metaphorical expression is allowed. There is an apt modesty in this: the
language, like the poet, declines to play a great rôle through being elaborately inventive. Like
much late Auden, it is poetry coming close to prose. Yet it is poetry nonetheless: we need the
line breaks and pauses to help us find the measured pace of thought which the subject
demands. In more specific ways, form is dexterously exploited: the word ‘staircase’ perhaps
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conjures up notions of transcendence, which the next line promptly deflates; the indented
‘Prompt me, God’ eloquently suggests by a space on the page the silence as the message
does not come.
As so often in Thomas, allusion and echo are present, while always falling naturally and
inconspicuously into place. ‘But not yet’ echoes St. Augustine’s famous ‘Lord, make me chaste
and continent - but not yet’, though it scarcely matters on a first reading if one picks this up
or not. Perhaps if we catch the allusion, we feel a dry wit in the texture, but what really
matters is that we are led gracefully to the crystalline aphorism of the last line. Wrongly
managed, this could read as a piece of exhibitionism, an epigram held out for applause. As it
is, it seems more a quiet admission of God’s distance and a discreet token of patience. The
poem does not seek to impress. Rather, it impresses itself on the memory by the beauty and
conviction of the thought, and the precisely phrased purity of its delivery.
‘The meaning is in the waiting’. God in R. S. Thomas’s poems is usually distant and difficult of
access. As he writes in ‘Via Negativa’, ‘Why no! I never thought other than / That God is that
great absence / In our lives, the empty silence / Within…’. In the collection, H’m (1972),
which ushers in many new departures in Thomas’s work, there are several short narratives in
which God appears as an angry and even violent figure. Elsewhere He has virtually
disappeared, driven out by man’s greed and selfishness: in ‘The Empty Church’ we are told
‘He will not come any more / / To our lure’. With disarming frankness, the poet describes a
harrier hawk ‘hovering over the incipient / scream, here a moment, then / not here, like my
belief in God’ (‘Moorland’).
When God is dimly perceived, it is often through suffering. God’s will evidently includes the
tribulations of humanity, a constant presence in Thomas’s work. He never promises that
religion will temper the brute realities of experience, or explain away the problems by which
man is formed. The poems which describe what one might call religious experiences portray
fleeting moments – a sunlit field, a stream - which suddenly call up a sense of the sources of
our being and the true destinations of the heart.
3. No Answer
But the chemicals in
My mind were not
Ready, so I let
Him go on, dissolving
The word on my
Tongue. Friend, I had said,
Life is too short for
Religion; it takes time
To prepare a sacrifice
For the God. Give yourself
To science that reveals
All, asking no pay
For it. Knowledge is power;
The old oracle
Has not changed. The nucleus
In the atom awaits
Our bidding. Come forth,
We cry, and the dust spreads
Its carpet. Over the creeds
And masterpieces our wheels go.
From the 1960s R. S. Thomas, through poetry and political protest, was warning of the
dangers of modern science and capitalism – to traditional farming and communities, to the
spirit of man, and, through the terror of nuclear war, to the planet itself. This poem, from
H’m, seems absolutely relevant almost thirty years after its publication: it speaks to us
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directly at a time when contemporary debates include the ethics of cloning and the dumbing
down of education and popular culture. In ‘No Answer’ Thomas seems to be adopting a
persona - modern man, rejecting the ineffable mystery of the Eucharist (‘dissolving the word
on my tongue’), and seeking salvation in science. There is a tension in the spare, rhythmically
broken language as - typically of Thomas’s work from the seventies - it mixes words and
phrases of religious connotation (revealed, Come forth) with a scientific idiom. There is a
bleak irony in the use of the phrase ‘Come forth’ - the words spoken by Christ to raise
Lazarus from the dead - to summon up the destructive powers of the atom. Hiroshima’s
mushroom cloud follows, in the picture of the dust spreading its carpet. Again, the last line
condenses both idea and feeling in a single dramatic and memorable statement.
4. A Marriage
We met
Under a shower
Of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love’s moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
‘Come,’ said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird’s grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.
This beautiful elegy is the last in the Collected Poems, and was written after the death of the
poet’s wife, Elsi. We can recognize in it the spare language which has characterized the other
pieces discussed; but in contrast to the sometimes terse, austere tone of those and other
poems, ‘A Marriage’ has a tender and uncomplicated lyrical feel. The short lines and tiered
layout, influenced by William Carlos Williams, make us read slowly, contemplating each
miniature picture as the poem unfolds. The layout also seems to arrange the poem in such a
way that the stressed words become less emphatic: instead of feeling that we are getting to
the end of a line or sentence, with its build-up to a heavy pause, we read constantly across
and down. Reading this poem is like watching a leaf slowly descending and settling on the
ground. This easy passage towards closure evokes the experience of the marriage, which, we
are told, lies beyond the scale and turbulence of ordinary human time. The ending, quiet as a
whisper with the unstressed endings - ‘Heavier than a feather’ - makes the death seem
utterly peaceful and calmly accepted, a long way from Evans’s lonely passion on the Golgotha
of the hilltop farm. There is no conventional romantic language or direct statement of the
poet’s feelings. Through music and imagery alone, one feels the poet’s abiding love.
Sentiment again is banned, to allow true emotion in.
A short selection can of course cover only a small part of a great poet’s range. We have not
had space, for example, to look at R. S. Thomas’s poems about Wales, or those inspired by
paintings, to name just two of the many strands of his work. His prose is important in its own
right, while a full account of Thomas’s creative life would also have to consider his activity in
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the public arena as protester and activist. It is important, too, to remember that the concerns
illustrated here were ongoing. In both the individual collections, and the selections, one poem
leads us on to another as the same topics recur, each time subjected to a different angle of
vision. The fables and gnomic lyrics of Later Poems read less like individual pieces than as
psalms or notebook entries, fragments of a continuing meditation. To read the Collected
Poems of R. S. Thomas is to be in the presence of one who spoke, with a masterly economy
of means, of the apprehensions of the twentieth century, and who unflinchingly confronted
the great questions which will haunt mankind in this and any future age.
Further Reading
R. S. Thomas, Selected Prose (Poetry Wales Press, 1983); Autobiographies, trans. Jason
Walford Davies (London: J. M. Dent, 1997). Critical Appreciation: Critical Writings on R. S.
Thomas, ed. Sandra Anstey (Poetry Wales Press, 1983). There is a book-length study, with
bibliography: Justin Wintle, Furious Interiors: Wales, R. S. Thomas and God (London: Harper
Collins, 1996).
© The English Association and Malcolm Hebron, 2007
R.S. Thomas by Malcolm Hebron is Number 56 in the Bookmark series, published by
The English Association
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