R.S. Thomas

[Eudaimonia]

I was led to R.S. Thomas after reading much of Dylan Thomas's poetry -- I wanted to know more about Wales, and I wanted to know more about it through poetry. R.S. Thomas offers a far more bleaker portrayal of Wales, and is far more restrained in his language than Thomas; one can say that R.S. Thomas when compared to Dylan Thomas on the subject of Wales, is the same as William Blake is when compared to Wordsworth writing on London.

I think that R.S. Thomas is the only poet (despite being born in the modern age) of the post-modern age who wrote poetry which is timeless and beautifully honest and powerful. Perhaps it's a bit of a personal bias, but whenever I read most contemporary poetry, I find myself unmoved and unchallenged -- R.S. Thomas IS contemproray, he died in 2000 and continued publishing even in the 1990's. He was also a priest; his verse is not only about Wales, it's about the quest for God too, a very elusive one.

I don't know how many people have ever read his work, he is not that famous a poet, but I think he is a breath of fresh (if bleak) air in 'recent' poetry. Here are some of his poems.

Welsh Landscape

To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for instance,
The soft consonants
Strange to the ear.
There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon,
And thick ambush of shadows,
Hushed at the fields' corners.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.

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.

Poetry for Supper

'Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.'

'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem's making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.'
'You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don't happen.'
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

A Welsh Testament

All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter?
I spoke a tongue that was passed on
To me in the place I happened to be,
A place huddled between grey walls
Of cloud for at least half the year.
My word for heaven was not yours.
The word for hell had a sharp edge
Put on it by the hand of the wind
Honing, honing with a shrill sound
Day and night. Nothing that Glyn Dwr
Knew was armour against the rain's
Missiles. What was descent from him?

Even God had a Welsh name:
He spoke to him in the old language;
He was to have a peculiar care
For the Welsh people. History showed us
He was too big to be nailed to the wall
Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him
Between the boards of a black book.

Yet men sought us despite this.
My high cheek-bones, my length of skull
Drew them as to a rare portrait
By a dead master. I saw them stare
From their long cars, as I passed knee-deep
In ewes and wethers. I saw them stand
By the thorn hedges, watching me string
The far flocks on a shrill whistle.
And always there was their eyes; strong
Pressure on me: You are Welsh, they said;
Speak to us so; keep your fields free
Of the smell of petrol, the loud roar
Of hot tractors; we must have peace
And quietness.

Is a museum
Peace? I asked. Am I the keeper
Of the heart's relics, blowing the dust
In my own eyes? I am a man;
I never wanted the drab role
Life assigned me, an actor playing
To the past's audience upon a stage
Of earth and stone; the absurd label
Of birth, of race hanging askew
About my shoulders. I was in prison
Until you came; your voice was a key
Turning in the enormous lock
Of hopelessness. Did the door open
To let me out or yourselves in?

[margaine]

Thanks for this Eudaimonia. I have some Welsh ancestry and am always interested to learn about artists and writers that reference Welsh history and culture.

I like the one titled "Welsh Testament" - I think it is very interesting that the poem, though in English, seems to be about the Welsh language. There are so many languages on my list of languages I want to learn . . . maybe one day I will be able to learn Welsh.

Welcome to the forum, by the way. Feel free to introduce yourself up in our introductions thread. :)

[Eudaimonia]

Thanks for the welcome.

Yes, it is interesting that the poem is written in English; he actually spoke with a cut-glass Oxford accent as well, he only learned Welsh when he was about thirty years old and never wrote poetry in the language. The man was a bundle of self-made contradictions.

[onesavant]

He definitely paints an intense picture of Wales. I like the edge to these poems; he writes with a certain harshness that reflects the content of his poetry. The two lines that begin Welsh Testament stuck out in my mind:

To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood

[Eudaimonia]

Exactly: his writing is as rugged as the landscape he writes about. His poems about hill-farmers and his congregations especially (since he had three vicarages in his career as a priest) are portrayed in a very, very bleak manner. I'll give you a link to the poet himself reading that poem, from which you quoted those two lines, 'Welsh Landscape'.

YouTube - R.S.Thomas - Welsh Landscape (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb8mK3Ccsl0)

[neilgee]

I read some RS Thomas years ago because he's included in an excellent anthology just called Poetry 1900 to 1975 edited by George Macbeth which has a section on all the important poets of that period. Of the three Eudaimonia quotes only "Poetry for supper" is included in the book, so it was nice to read a couple of new ones, particularly Welsh Landscape. He wrote such atmospheric poetry. This is my favourite from the Macbeth collection:

Ninetieth Birthday

You go up the long track
That will take a car, but is best walked
On slow foot, noting the lichen
That writes history on the page
Of the grey rock. Trees are about you
At first, but yield to the green bracken,
The nightjars house: you can hear it spin
On warm evenings; it is still now
In the noonday heat, only the lesser
Voices sound, blue-fly and gnat
And the stream's whisper. As the road climbs,
You will pause for breath and the far sea's
Signal will flash, till you turn again
To the steep track, buttressed with cloud.

And there at the top that old woman,
Born almost a century back
In that stone farm, awaits your coming;
Waits for the news of the lost village
She thinks she knows, a place that exists
In her memory only.
You bring her greeting
And praise for having lasted so long
With time's knife shaving the bone.
Yet no bridge joins her own
World with yours, all you can do
Is lean kindly across the abyss
To hear words that were once wise.

[Eudaimonia]

I read that poem before - I love it. The "With time's knife shaving the bone" is typical R.S. Thomas. I bought his autobiography before buying his collected poems -- not a wise thing really, better to read the poet's work than to read about his life first -- and I finished the autobiography; it's hilarious and touching, and I recommend it to anyone who is fascinated by the poet or likes his poetry. I'm only a third of the way through his collected poems - I find it hard to read too many of his poems in a short span of time, not because I find them unpenetrable, but on the contrary, their penetrating desolation and bleakness means that one has to give himself a breather.

[onesavant]

YouTube - R.S.Thomas - Welsh Landscape (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb8mK3Ccsl0)

That is a good reading by him of "Welsh Landscape." I'd venture to say it is even more intense than how I read the poem. He really portrays the bleakness and desolation in his voice, and he reads it with an element of longing also. It seems to me he is longing for what Wales was, trapped in the past, and not accepting the present. He shows it well in these three lines:

There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,

The black and white pictures in the video go along perfectly with the poem.

[Eudaimonia]

Yes, I agree with you. He was a man very much against modern ameneties and appliances, and part of the present and the future was modernity. He was often noted as being full of contradictions on the subject of Wales: he hated the 'English invaders' shall we say, their effects that is, and would often pretend to have no knowledge of the English language when English tourists asked him for directions! But he also spoke English with a cut-glass upper class accent, and also had the same 'coldness' about him, in the way that he kept distant from the majority of people, which was a trait shared with the British upper classes. But he also criticized the Welsh heavily, particulary those who had no knowledge of the Welsh language. The only major work he wrote in Welsh was his autobiography (one of them), called "Neb" meaning 'no-one', and it was written in the third person (sense of detachment again).

His bird-imagery (he was a keen bird-watcher) tells me that what he longs for is Nature: Wales was just the place that he happened to be in I think, and he made it the sole focus of his struggle, if one were to leave aside his quest for God. Each of his poems is loaded with a certain kind of power that is to be neccessarily found in someone full of conflict. Though I love the pastoral poetry of someone like Dylan Thomas for the joy it gives me, I love R.S.'s pastoral poetry (for it is literally about sheep-farmers) for its provokation -- it lulls you away from the 'common life' in an other way.

I delight in reading what poets thought about other poets, R.S. Thomas's thoughts about most other poets are humorous:

"Ted Hughes, he thought, had more power and passion than he had (he considered his own poems 'much of a muchness'), but Sylvia Plath was 'an example of female hysteria'. Disliked the idea of meeting other poets. 'So awkward having to say you don't like their poetry."

"Dylan he thought a disastrous influence on his contemporaries" (yet he also said that he would have liked to written 'Fern Hill' himself, and one of the few personal items found in his cottage after his death was the poem "Do not go gentle into that good night" hand-written by R.S. Thomas himself)

"As for Gerard Manley Hopkins and the sort of endearments he uses, it's almost as if he had a sexual relationship with God."

From "The Man Who Went Into The West: The Life of R.S. Thomas"

[Winifred]

Well, I didn't have to go too far to find out more about R S Thomas! I thought this poem needed to be here, too. Also, loved The Marriage, quoted above in Eudaimonia's first post.

A Peasant

Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind—
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind's attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed, even in death's confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.

by R S Thomas, from:
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/4810/