R. S. Thomas

Ronald Stuart Thomas (29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000), published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest who was noted for his Welsh nationalism, intense spirituality, and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales.

Quotes

I think that so much of our Christian beliefs … are an attempt to convey through language something which is unsayable.

The nearest we approach God…is as creative beings. The poet, by echoing the primary imagination, recreates. Through his work he forces those who read him to do the same, thus bringing them... nearer to the actual being of God as displayed in action.
- The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (1963), p. 8

Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. … My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth.
- R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet, BBC TV (2 April 1972)

Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being … ultimate reality is what we call God.
- R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet, BBC TV (2 April 1972)

On seeing his shadow fall on such ancient rocks, he had to question himself in a different context and ask the same old question as before, "Who am I?", and the answer now came more emphatically than ever before, "No-one."
But a no-one with a crown of light about his head. He would remember a verse from Pindar: "Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet."
- Neb [No-one] (1985)

You have to imagine
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.
- "The Echoes Return Slow" in The Echoes Return Slow (1988)

I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in
the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and
falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without
light
and companionless. And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.
- "The Other" in The Echoes Return Slow (1988)

Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.
- "Tidal" in Mass for Hard Times (1992), p. 43

Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
- Selected Prose (1995), p. 131

I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.
- "R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen." in The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)

I wouldn't say that I'm an orthodox Christian at all and the longer we live in the twentieth century the more fantastic discoveries are made, the more we hear what the universe is like I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my saviour and that sort of thing. I'm more interested in the extraordinary nature of God. If there is God, if there is deity, then He, even as the old hymn says, He moves in a mysterious way and I'm fascinated by that mystery and I've tried to write out of that experience of God, the fantastic side of God, the quarrel between the conception of God as a person, as having a human side, and the conception of God as being so extraordinary. … So these are still things that occupy me, and every now and again, if you're lucky, you're able to make a poem out of this conception of God … so I suppose I'm trying to appeal to people to open their eyes and their minds to the extraordinary nature of God.
- "R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen" in The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)

True Christianity at its most profound is as good as you get. … I think I've been lucky in the period which I've lived through because obviously I would have been for the chop in earlier days. The Inquisition would have rooted me out; even in the 19th century I would probably have been had up by a Bishop and asked to change my views, or to keep them to myself etc.... I think that so much of our Christian beliefs … are an attempt to convey through language something which is unsayable.
- "R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen" in The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)

Poetry For Supper (1958)

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history’s overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

"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"
- "Poetry For Supper"

"Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
that goes like blood to the poems 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."
- "Poetry For Supper"

"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.
- "Poetry For Supper"

They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes: rather they wrote
On men's hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.
- "The Country Clergy"

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.
- "A Blackbird Singing"

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history’s overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.
- "A Blackbird Singing"

Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

Song at the Year's Turning : Poems, 1942-1954

He arose, pacing the floor
Strewn with books, his mind big with the poem
Soon to be born, his nerves tense to endure
The long torture of delayed birth.
- "A Person From Porlock"

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man's body.
- "In a Country Church"

I have been all men known to history,
Wondering at the world and at time passing;
I have seen evil, and the light blessing
Innocent love under a spring sky.
- "Taliesin 1952"

I have been Merlin wandering in the woods
Of a far country, where the winds waken
Unnatural voices, my mind broken
By a sudden acquaintance with man’s rage.
- "Taliesin 1952"

I have known exile and a wild passion
Of longing changing to a cold ache.
King, beggar and fool, I have been all by turns,
Knowing the body’s sweetness, the mind’s treason;
Taliesin still, I show you a new world, risen,
Stubborn with beauty, out of the heart’s need.
- "Taliesin 1952"

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
- "Children’s Song"

You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.
- "Children’s Song"

Tares (1961)

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow.
You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.

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?
- "A Welsh Testament"

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.
- "A Welsh Testament"

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.
- "A Welsh Testament"

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?
- "A Welsh Testament"

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow.
You can feel the place where the brains grow.
- "Here"

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.
- "Here"

There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.
- "Here"

Why, then, are my hands red
with the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?
- "Here"

Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as i say?
Does no God hear when I pray?
- "Here"

I have nowhere to go.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow.
- "Here"

It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.
- "Here"

The Bread of Truth (1963)

The deep spaces between stars,
Fathomless as the cold shadow
His mind cast.

The deep spaces between stars,
Fathomless as the cold shadow
His mind cast.
- "Wallace Stevens", p. 25

Pietá (1966)

She is young. Have I the right
Even to name her? Child,
It is not love I offer
Your quick limbs, your eyes;
Only the barren homage
Of an old man whom time
Crucifies.
- "The Dance"

Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

Deliver me from the long drought
of the mind. Let leaves
from the deciduous Cross
fall on us, washing
us clean, turning our autumn
to gold by the affluence of their fountain.
- "Prayer", p. 10

It is alive. It is you,
God. Looking out I can see
no death. The earth moves, the
sea moves, the wind goes
on its exuberant
journeys. Many creatures
reflect you, the flowers
your color, the tides the precision
of your calculations. There
is nothing too ample
for you to overflow, nothing
so small that your workmanship
is not revealed.
- "Alive", p. 51

The darkness
is the deepening shadow
of your presence; the silence a
process in the metabolism
of the being of love.
- "Alive", p. 51

Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
- "The Bright Field", p. 60

Frequencies (1978)

It was not
I who lived, but life rather
that lived me.

Sometimes a strange light
shines, purer than the moon,
casting no shadow, that is
the halo upon the bones
of the pioneers who died for truth.
- "Groping", p. 12

There was a larger pattern
we worked at: they on a big
loom, I with a small needle.
- "In Context", p. 13

A power guided my hand. If an invisible company
waited to see what I would do,
I in my own way asked for
direction, so we should journey together
a little nearer the accomplishment
of the design.
- "In Context"

It was not
I who lived, but life rather
that lived me.
- "In Context"

Is there a place
here for the spirit? Is there time
on this brief platform for anything
other than mind's failure to explain itself?
- "Balance", p. 49

Between Here and Now (1981)

Art is recuperation
from time. I lie back
convalescing upon the prospect
of a harvest already at hand.
- "Pissaro: Kitchen Garden, Trees in Bloom", p. 41

In the silence
that is his chosen medium
of communication and telling
others about it
in words. Is there no way
not to be the sport
of reason?
- "The New Mariner", p. 99

I had looked forward
to old age as a time
of quietness, a time to draw
my horizons about me,
to watch memories ripening
in the sunlight of a walled garden.
But there is the void
over my head and the distance
within that the tireless signals
come from. And astronaut
on impossible journeys
to the far side of the self
I return with messages
I cannot decipher.
- "The New Mariner", p. 99

Ah, what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am left alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What
to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?
- "Threshold", p. 110

Later Poems (1983)

What was the shell doing,
on the shore? An ear endlessly
drinking?

somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.
- "Prayer"

What was the shell doing,
on the shore? An ear endlessly
drinking?
What? Sound? Silence?
Which came first?
Listen.
- "Questions"

No Truce with the Furies (1995)

I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens
- "Homage to Wallace Stevens"

Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
At an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.
- "Homage to Wallace Stevens"

All art is anonymous.
- "Anybody's Alphabet"

Quotes about Thomas

Thomas finds the God of nature elusive, but when He reveals Himself, he does so through the natural world. ~ Daniel Westover

He was wonderful, very pure, very bitter but the bitterness was beautifully and very sparely rendered. He was completely authoritative, a very, very fine poet, completely off on his own, out of the loop but a real individual. It's not about being a major or minor poet. It's about getting a work absolutely right by your own standards and he did that wonderfully well.
- Al Alvarez, as quoted in "Wales loses its most sustained lyric voice" in The Guardian (27 September 2000)

His example reduces most modern verse to footling whimsy.
- Kingsley Amis, in 1956, as quoted in A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English (1983)

R. S. Thomas continues to articulate through his poetry questions that are inscribed on the heart of most Christian pilgrims in their search for meaning and truth. We search for God and feel Him near at hand, only then to blink and find Him gone. This poetry persuades us that we are not alone in this experience of faith — the poet has been there before us.
- Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales, as quoted in "RS Thomas centenary celebrated by Bangor Cathedral service" at BBC News (11 May 2013)

I am not notably frivolous, but whenever I read R. S. Thomas’s poetry, or his biography, I cannot help but reflect that, like the majority of mankind, I have spent most of my life chasing false gods.
- Theodore Dalrymple, in "A Man Out of Time : A life of poet R. S. Thomas entertains and illumines" in City Journal (6 November 2006)

Thomas is not a Wordsworthian poet, and his “nature” is not Wordsworth’s; it is history, rather than divinity, which he responds to most, in the bleak beauty of Wales. In Christian terms, Thomas is not a poet of the transfiguration, of the resurrection, of human holiness … He is a poet of the cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness.
- A. E. Dyson, in Yeats, Eliot, and R.S. Thomas : Riding the Echo (1981), p. 296

Thomas has been famously plain-spoken — within the prevailing unclearess. Every poem represents an act of will with which he tries to beat a path, to habituate the microbe, to define its Christian antecedents. It is a painstaking effort: he must find a language that is exact, spare, solid, disciplined yet resonant.
- John Pikoulis and Martin Roberts, in "R.S. Thomas's Existential Agony" in Poetrywales, Vol. 29, No. 1 (July 1993)

A recurrent theme in his poetry is that of God as a kind of joker — benign and malign by bewilderingly unpredictable turns. … Improving our understanding of temporal existence by distortion is exactly what, Thomas came to feel, the Surrealists did. That he saw their work as approximating that of the subtlest theologians is clear from the fine poem about Kierkegaard he included in his final volume, No Truce with the Furies, where Thomas's favorite theological thinker is characterized as "the first / of the Surrealists, picturing / our condition with the draughtsmanship / of a Dali".
- M. Wynn Thomas in "The fantastic side of God : R. S. Thomas and Jorge Luis Borges" in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature (January 2008)

RS Thomas is widely recognised as the major British religious poet of the later 20th Century. … His poems challenge, move and inspire readers throughout the world.
- Reverend Canon Robert Townsend, as quoted in "RS Thomas centenary celebrated by Bangor Cathedral service" at BBC News (11 May 2013)

Thomas offers a “sustained critique” not of Romanticism, but of a world that has “eroded away”— a world that has abandoned Romantic imagination. … Thomas intends to resist the anti-romantic Modern spirit. Moreover, as he struggles with his personal faith, the poet’s Romantic imagination defines his attempts to commune with God.
- Daniel Westover, in "A God of Grass and Pen : R.S. Thomas and the Romantic Imagination" in North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 3, 2 (Summer 2003)

In nature, it is divinity, rather than history, which Thomas responds to most. … Thomas finds the God of nature elusive, but when He reveals Himself, he does so through the natural world. God’s reflection, His shadow, and His echo exist in the Welsh hills. His influence there is both a presence and an absence (and, at times, an absence that is like a presence).
- Daniel Westover, in "A God of Grass and Pen : R.S. Thomas and the Romantic Imagination" in North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 3, 2 (Summer 2003)

Thomas continues to believe that somewhere beyond God’s metaphoric manifestations, somewhere beyond the questions and sufferings, there is an actual God — inexplicably, even intentionally absent — but real, and one day He may permanently end "the long drought of the mind."
- Daniel Westover, in "A God of Grass and Pen : R.S. Thomas and the Romantic Imagination" in North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 3, 2 (Summer 2003)

Another uncompromising poet whom Betjeman greatly admired was R. S. Thomas who has been described as the Solzhenitsyn of Wales "because he was a troubler of the Welsh conscience."
- A. N. Wilson in Betjeman : A Life (2006), p. 249

Thomas is the Solzhenitsyn of Wales; a writer of violent integrity, conscience-stricken at the state of his country, haunted still by the image of it he saw as a child.
- Award ceremony dedication (6 July 2000) published in "R.S. Thomas : A Tribute" in The Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorian (2000)

External links

Wikipedia

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R. S. Thomas