[references throughout to Collected Later Poems (1988-2000), Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland, 2004]
R.S. Thomas was a poet of the north of Wales, and he was also a priest who wrote religious verse. It is because he was a Christian priest who lived half of his life in my neck of the woods, that I have recently read his later poetry books, and that I have meant to devote an essay to those works. Books by someone who lived in north Wales and was a Christian would not usually detain me for those reasons alone, but it is because he wrote poetry of some value, that I want to discuss his work. It is the question of what precise value the poetry has that I want to answer.
To my taste, Thomas is a good poet, but not a great one. He is characterised above all by his loneliness, his coldness, his hardness of heart, or rather these things are the sense you get, of the man who wrote his poems. When he expressed himself in verse, he did so from a distance, and he described his own distance from the disappointing things he found around him, and the infinite emptiness he found within him. In the anthology British Poetry 1900-1975, George Macbeth published around ten of Thomas’ poems, alongside a picture of the man wearing a black priest’s robe and a white collar; in the photo, he is staring across a barren landscape, his hair thrown back by a cold wind, his cheeks hollow, his eyes narrowed. The poems are mercilessly pessimistic, without sentimentality or pity.
See for example the end of ‘To a Young Poet’, which he published when he was fifty years of age; when he refers to ‘her’ means the muse of poetry:
‘You are old now
As years reckon, but in that slower
World of the poet you are just coming
To sad manhood, knowing the smile
On her proud face is not for you.’
The atheistic era, or the era absent of meaning, the age of existentialism, is speaking through his work, and does so to the end of his life; but it associates itself with a faith in God which it was Thomas’ main intent to express or explain.
I must restrict myself to the works written between 1988 and 1995, when he was an old man, for this reason alone: I am not a scholar of the man’s life work, and I intend only to examine the final four books of poetry he published. He and I share some particular interests and accidental characteristics, so I lack objectivity and I also lack any fascination with him as a man, because we are perhaps sharing the same territory. Which is why looking at his poems qua poetry must be enough, for me.
His big Collected Poems 1945 to 1990 were for me, until recently, the only work it was necessary to refer to, when thinking of Thomas. When I used to work around the Lleyn Peninsula for the farmers there, I was often invited into the farm house to sit and to drink tea after work was finished, and I was sometimes offered something to eat, which I always refused; it is something which in my experience is very unusual outside of the Lleyn and west Wales, but predictably happens there. If I mentioned to my host that I read books and poetry, I would also mention Thomas. They always knew who I meant, and they might, with a hint of mockery, describe a strange and solitary man who could be encountered from time to time, going his own way, before he died in 2000.
Thomas had the church at Aberdaron until his retirement, and it’s possible to go there while spending the day on the beach at the seaside these days, since the church building is just below the hillside overlooking the sea, where you go through the storm walls and onto the sand. It was there, a few weeks ago, during a bit of wind and rain, that we went into the church and found his Collected Later Poems on sale in a side room of his old church where, naturally, he is still remembered.
I would not have bothered to write on Thomas, were it not for finding this book which collects his last books of poetry, written around the time his wife died and afterwards. People like to avoid their local environment when they, as I once did, set out to educate themselves and learn about the world outside their native ground. You should not be constantly lingering around your beginning, even if your end is in your beginning. And I would not study his work at all, if it were not that I wanted to know, whether or not this priest and Welsh nationalist had found any truth, made any discoveries. Did he make any discoveries, did he write them down? Did he find a style for writing about religious things? These are attractive things about a poet.
I wanted to know: Can he teach the poet anything? Can he teach the reader anything? Is it a pleasure to read his work, bearing in mind that we have some taste for what poetry should be? There are four books of poetry gathered together here. There are also a number of unpublished poems, edited by one of Thomas' relatives. The first of the books is an autobiography in verse and short prose poems, ‘The Echoes Return Slow’ (1988); then there is a work which meditates on historical developments before and after Christ, ‘Counterpoint’ (1990); and finally there are two short books of poems, released in 1992 and 1995. The Collected Later Poems brings these together in one volume.
Is it a pleasure to read Thomas’ work? Personally, I can’t answer this honestly without reference to the fact, that who he was and where he lived matter to me. It is typical of older men who write poetry, perhaps, that their life history matters to the person who reads them. Old men are not immediately interesting. Such poets have grown old and wise following a particular kind of life. Their wisdom is dependent on their previous life; it was gathered together by a particular man in a particular place. We have a different type of interest in a poem when we know that an old man wrote it, rather than a young one. To me, going to find his poems and spending some time with them is like preparing for a journey into the country, when you get your maps, compass, your wet weather gear, and books or websites which let you prepare.
Setting that personal aside interest aside, what I find is that Thomas does not astonish us with his use of the English line of verse. I think he had started using free verse decades before ‘The Echoes Return Slow’, and he does not take up a regular meter at any point in these last works. I trouble myself a little to find any music in his lines, but he does not seem to have had the skill or the inclination to make them interesting. The poems can easily be read as if they are unmetered prose, which is what I find myself doing with them. I take it for granted that he was too parsimonious to afford us any music.
Thomas wrote his poetry in grammatically conventional sentences. He clearly insisted that his meaning should be simple, and should be communicated in a direct way. He wrote while meaning to say something specific, and so as to let the reader know what it was. It has become commonplace for writers of verse to invoke mystery and depth by being mysterious and oblique with language; Thomas seems to have had no reason to be do this, because he considered his theme or his subject matter to be deep and mysterious enough. Frequently, he finishes poems with a conceit, or a witty observation; and I say this because it indicates something typical of a poet who favours rationalism and order. He created games with his poems, with what I would call ‘wit’; and there is a sardonic humour, a cleverness, so that he frequently finishes a poem with a novel pairing of two contrary ideas, something which is meant to impress the reader, even when the poem is concerned with profound and serious things. All of this is characteristic of metaphysical poetry, too, or poetry written as a strictly intellectual activity. This is exemplary:
Yet wisdom
is at our elbow, whispering,
as at his once: Progress
is not with the machine;
it is a turning aside,
a bending over a still pool,
where the bubbles arise
from unseen depths, as from truth
breathing, showing us by their roundness
the roundness of our world.
(from ‘Aside’, p. 158)
Using conceits or playing with serious matters, is a manner of allowing that one is not up to the task, has not actually resolved something. The poet steps away from the problem and smiles with regret at his failure. This kind of thing has an attraction, and was practiced by men like Donne and Pope; it is civilised and entertaining for the mind in its way; but it is also trifling. In Thomas' poetry it is not very successful, and rarely impressive. Nevertheless, it is an aspect of his poetry which we find everywhere in his work. It’s a sign of his intense literalness of mind, and his painstaking rationality. I will move on to the next question, which for me is more important: Can he teach the reader anything?
The simplicity and lucidity of his expression derives from a fundamentally rational mind obedient to logic. Such a mind lends itself to philosophical or theological poetry. Thomas’ verse is, for the most part, a description and an expression of his quarrelling and questioning with God and Christ. If one were to lay a bet, whether any randomly selected poem of his would turn out to be about or to God, the odds should be 2:1. What crucified his mind, and what turned him to the Cross as a problem, over and over again, was, that ‘God is love’. In the autobiographical poems, he sometimes says that his work as a priest left him examining and accounting for everything as if it were the work of love, since God is love. And his confrontation with God and with love, because it does become a confrontation by necessity with Thomas, resolves itself to this: where or how is there love in this world, this world riddled with the Furies, or in other words, with demonic evil?
Often it seems, he asserts: love will answer this question, and therefore, let us simply say it, as the only solution: love is something painful and hard. For instance this, which is a poem about the ghostly return of his departed wife:
“Not a word, not a sound,
As she goes her way,
But a scent lingering
Which is that of time immolating
Itself in love’s fire.”
(from ‘No Time’, p. 237)
Love is fire, which has to burn the common things, such as time.
I cannot see that this is an adequate explanation or description of our existence, or of the world God has made. Love comes to mean nothing, if it is harmful and punishing; what is it punishing for, unless there is some higher place to which to rise toward? And with the years, Thomas seems to have changed his view about the ultimate answers to the value of prayer, the way to God, the meaning of faith, the reason for pain and despair. In the last books, it becomes apparent that he had accepted silence and the non-thought typical of meditative and silent forms of prayer, because these, more than love, or beyond love, lead the individual to God. I believe that this approach to God and Christ, this ‘perennial philosophy’ method and approach, increased with the years, particularly or almost at the last moment.
This is from the autobiographical poem:
“At times
in the silence between
prayers, after the Amens
fade, at the world’s
centre, it is as though
love stands, renouncing itself.”
(p. 70)
I would say that, in the last books of poetry, there stands the eternal self, as well as, or instead of ‘love’, although the shift is subtle.
He himself explains in the autobiography, that he struggled to be a priest for various reasons, in that he found it hard to manage people who he often did not like, and he also struggled because he did not really understand what God intended to do when he became Christ and when he said that God is love. It seems that the highest point of his faith presented itself to him as a riddle which he himself did not understand. Love renounces itself.
Thomas was an admirer of Soren Kierkegaard, who was protestant, outside the church for the most part, and who had humour and an interest in paradoxes and problems. I think that Kierkegaard and Thomas were fully conscious and unwilling to say: I don’t understand. Rather, they had to understand. The notion that ‘love’ will take us to God does not make any practical sense, since love is the relationship of God to men, but it is also active and transient – whilst God is eternal and unmoving. It is for this reason that Thomas resolved his difficulties of the intellect, it seems to me, by finding a higher explanation for God’s relationship with man in the silent prayer. The prayer in which one aims to join with God, and to become your eternal self, as the Son of God.
‘You and I God – Yahweh,
The scientist’s yogi –
Youthful as tomorrow;
Yawing but never yielding
To my yearning all these years
For myself to become you.’
(from ‘Anybody’s Alphabet’, p. 296)
The autobiographical poem, which is a straightforward, almost naïve linear narrative of his life from childhood to the age of seventy-five, finishes with remarks about his wife and daughter, and the relation of love he has to them, but which adds something else:
“Both female. Both luring us on, staring crystal-eyed over their unstable fathoms. After a lifetime’s apprenticeship in navigating their surface, nothing to hope for but that for the love of both of them he would be forgiven.
--
..
‘Over love’s depths only the surface is wrinkled’.
(p. 72)
Love is here instrumental: it will lead to him being forgiven. He insists that love is underlying things; and yet to read his work is to find someone begging for understanding and clarity, something with which his intellect could work. It would be right, I think, to say that part of the solution was, to find silence and the quiet of the intellect in a disciplined approach of stillness. And note also how this, the end of the whole autobiography, makes light of love in a mere felicitous metaphor; he is not really a poet of love at all: he wants intellectual clarity.
It is clearly not the case, that Thomas found it easy to love anything; the descriptions of his parishioners, to the hill farmers who came to church, are without respect; and when he moved to the lowlands near Shropshire, he could not stop himself disliking the retired army officers and their proper and respectable families. And on the general level, observing the widespread atheism or indifference to Christ at the end of the twentieth century in Wales, he makes no bones about saying that the country is godless and doomed.
What interests him more, are things like this:
“Conversation, soliloquy,
silence – a descending or an ascending
scale? That you are there
to be found, the disciplines
agree. Anonymous presence
grant that, when I come
questioning, it is not with the dictionary
in one hand, the microscope in the other.”
(p. 69)
Silence, then; and an avoidance of technology and scientific instruments. About which, more later. He never seems to have doubted that God is. But he never allowed that he saw more than God’s shadow; he never saw God’s love, except as the idea that Christ was an offering, and that the world was first created by love. The passing shadow of a distant God is a repeated idea throughout the collection of his last books.
What can he teach the poet? I consider that what the poet needs to learn is, to find a subject, the biggest subject, and then to learn how to talk about it, by observing how others do it, or by making up a new way to do it. The poet should always be concerned with the entirety of existence, even if his entire world is only his country; and he should be concerned with how to express that adequately. As large as his imagination is, just so large must be the thematic content of his poetry.
Poetry is, in this respect, the direct antagonist of science, which is also concerned with universal things, the aspect of life which applies everywhere and at all times, and is expressed in the end, in the rational laws discovered by science. Thomas took an interest in science and in technology, and it is a strange unexpected feature of his late work, that he came out of his church, his cave beneath the hill or by the ocean, as it were, and had a look at what the world contemporary with himself was up to. He asserts over and over, that God has left the English and the Welsh, and that this has occurred in large part because of ‘the machine’, or science and technology. It is interesting looking back, after the rise of a very popular and harsh atheism which came in the 90s and early this century, to see Thomas engaging with mechanical atheistic indifference, as if it were a new thing: the scientists are killing God. They are bringing the valuable meaning of the world to its final end in the absurd and the nightmare, to the end of humanity.
His poems are riddled with ‘scientific’ references, more as a way of bringing his language up to date, than as an attempt to really win the battle for Christian faith in the land. Like this:
“We have over-furnished
our faith. Our churches
are as limousines in the procession
towards heaven. But the verities
remain: a de-nuclearised
cross, uncontaminated
by our coinage; the chalice’s
ichor; and one crumb of bread
on the tongue for the bird-like
intelligence to be made tame by.”
(p. 105)
Something else recurrent is the compulsion to think about the mirror, and a man looking at his image in the mirror; man objectifying himself is part and parcel of man as a machine. The self which you can observe in the mirror, the separate self, or even the self as a thing, if it is accepted truly as the self, is the guide leading to damnation and deception. And this is a rather profound observation. It indicates that Thomas saw the higher form of relationship to God in the mixing of the individual man with God, and with his eternal self, rather than with his technologically understood and usefully grasped public persona, his superficial secular mask, the thing you see in the mirror.
To this extent, he was providing a prophetic poetry to counteract, having become a hermit, the entirely wrong direction that his people were taking, because it was bringing about the destruction of man and his relationship with heaven. What he tried to do, in his isolation, was to set up the relation between a solitary man and God, as a start:
“The withholding
Even of a request
That he remark my
silence: that was prayer.
I waited upon
him as a mirror
in its anonymity
waits upon absence.
Time passed. Once
[..]
I rose brimming
towards him like the spring-tide.”
(p. 113)
He has determined that ‘the machine’ is the cause of our distance from God; he says this in a historical way, as if locating us, today, in a linear progression from the neolithic, through the early Church, to the medieval, and to the modern era, where Leonardo, who was capable of knowing and being with God, instead turned to working with machines, his mind confused with externalities and computing power; his reason replaced with a calculating machine. Such a rational and demonstrative man, saw the machine replace the divine and responsible power of man, as an external ersatz form of reason, and felt it as a deep personal injury. Why should the machine replace man's reasoning and his soul?
I might be mistaken, but I think that Paul de Man said of some of Keats’ poetry, that his poetry uttered, and meant to express, the entirety of existence; it expressed everything. That is what poetry really is, to my way of looking at it. Although ostensibly, superficially, a poem is describing a Grecian urn for instance, it is actually intended to say, for once and in one place, the words which bring together the mind and the reality of the world without any exclusion. The poem says everything. When the music ends, when the poem ends, sure, then the individual parts of the infinite world come back and recompose themselves into a meaningless spreading blob. But it is precisely because the world is infinite, that it can be simplified to a single point or a single poem. What Thomas had set out to do is that, and if he did not try to do so, then he was no poet.
To write about God is an easy way of trying to say everything, since God by force of logic, entails everything. It would be as easy as writing about the current state of the art in our gathering of all knowledge and science, and then to say: this fulfils the task of the poem. Likewise, a deep treatise of theology might claim to be about everything, and demand the rights of poetry. But this is not how it works, and writing about God does not mean writing poetry.
The notion that a poem can be about everything, depends on the notion that without a human being to witness it, without an individual conscious person who can be the ground and opening of existence, there can be nothing. Inherently, structurally, a man is in the position of God, if he is the centre of his own life. That is to say, the human heart and mind allow all things to exist, if the human heart and mind are aware of what being human means. And this is how a poem works: a man puts into words what is in his heart and mind in such a way, that it puts him, and his reader, at the dead centre of all things; which is where he belongs. It reminds the reader where he is, and who he is.
Thomas is a poet who late in life, as far as I can gather, and according to his own account, began to approach God in silence, with the silent prayer. I suppose he would have been content to say, that he never abandoned love as the meaning of life, insofar as a loving God created the world for us, and his son died for us; but that the questions which remain to be answered by God are so answered by the man who approaches God in silence. And that is something which takes the mind and heart back to what they are. In answer to the question, what can Thomas teach the poets? I should answer like this: he has tried to put into commonly used language, in a rational and expository way, the situation of a man who looks deeply into God and is not posturing or pretending to do so, and has set down the deep mystery of life, and told all of existence at once, in his poems.
He has tried this, and he had results. I doubt whether his way of doing it would be productive to others, or that it opens up the possibility of great poetry by others, if they were to try to emulate it. I think it is more a poetry of short meditations, small glimpses of ultimate reality, and that his work, like him, is isolated and finished in itself. He was not an experimenter whose writing can offer a way ahead for others. But perhaps he and I are too close in time and space, and I can’t get the whole picture for that reason.
I quote this at length, as an example of his late work, for anyone who might want to read more off the back of it.
‘Silence’
The relation between us was
silence; that and the feeling
of each one being watched
by the other: I by an
enormous pupil in a blank
face, he by one in a million
wanderers in the darkness
that was never a long way off
from his presence.
It had begun
by my talking all of the time
repeating the worn formulae
of the churches in the belief
that was prayer. Why does silence
suggest disapproval? The prattling
ceased, not suddenly but,
as flowers die off in a frost
my requests thinned. I contented
myself I was answering
his deafness with dumbness.’
And what about this, which is part of a meditative poem about Soren Kierkegaard:
‘Is prayer
not a glass that, beginning
in obscurity as his books
do, the longer we stare
into the clearer becomes
the reflection of a countenance
in it other than our own?’
(p. 221)
--
I have not set out to survey Thomas’s poetry as a whole, nor to exhaust everything which I find of interest in it. If I leaf through the late books, collected in this edition, I notice other remarks I could make, about his poems to and about God, and recurrent themes, and interpretations and explanations which I would like to offer. But this is not what I meant to do in this essay. However, it’s worth finally commenting on his relationship to European culture, because I want to stress, that when we say he was a man who confined himself to north west Wales, this is not strictly true. Like the other post-modernists of his era, of whom he was aware, he came to question whether words are not themselves the subject of all our enquiries, and he had clearly read and enjoyed Jorge Luis Borges. A true artist as well as a theologian, his first task was to wrestle with words and composition.
‘He withdrew into the wilderness
of the spirit. The true fast
was abstention from language.’
(from ‘Incarnations’, p. 239)
And let’s not forget, that at the age of eight-three, he was nominated for the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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