R. S. Thomas (1913 – 2000)
Published as R S Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican Clergyman, noted for his nationalism and spirituality.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.
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."
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.
The darkness
is the deepening shadow
of your presence; the silence a
process in the metabolism
of the being of love.
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.
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".
I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.
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 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.
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.
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."
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.
It was not
I who lived, but life rather
that lived me.
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.
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.