The Poems of R.S. Thomas

This article was originally published at The Master’s Artist.

It’s rather jarring to be reading poems about Welsh farmers and the Welsh landscape and come across one entitled “The Peasant.” Or find a rather unsympathetic and critical eye when you’re expecting something more akin to a romanticized view.

And yet, there is love here, and kindness, and an understanding of the people who populate these poems. There’s a kind of protective fierceness here, too, the shepherd watching over his flock even if the flock doesn’t realize it needs protecting.

I’ve been reading the Collected Poems 1945-1990 of R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Anglican clergyman, Welsh nationalist, neo-Luddite (he didn’t like any of the modern conveniences, like vacuum cleaners), and poet. I read a shorter, “everyday poems” version first, and then turned to the Collected Poems. Rarely have I been so moved by what at first glance seems more like pastoral poetry but soon becomes a kind of love song to rural life and its people. 

Thomas was born in Cardiff, Wales, and ordained in the Church in Wales. He married in 1940 and he and his wife Mildred had one son. He began publishing poetry in 1945, and achieved literary and critical notice with his fourth book, Song of the Year’s Turning, which included an introduction by poet John Betjeman, who would eventually become a poet laureate. Thomas was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1996 but the award went to Seamus Heaney. (Heaney would speak at Thomas’s funeral service in Westminster Abbey in 2000.)

Thomas’s love and regard for the people he ministered to have a kind of stark bleakness to them, but they are there nonetheless. Consider his poem “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 that 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.

This understanding of the reality of daily life extends to the group he knew especially well, because he was a member of it – the country clergy, quietly serving far from the excitement of the cities and the politics of the church. From “The Country Clergy, the poem that is likely my favorite in the whole collection:”

I see them working in old rectories

By the Sun’s light, by candlelight,

Venerable men, their black cloth

A little dusty, a little green

With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,

Ripening over so many prayers,

Toppled into the same grave

With oafs and yokels. 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.

Thomas writes of farming and the landscape; of Welsh history and the church. And individual people – men and women, old and young. Very little escapes his eye, or his heart.

He even writes of poets and poetry, and I can almost picture him imagining his own end in “Death of a Poet” that includes several subtle references to death in the first stanza:

Laid now on his smooth bed

For the last time, watching dully

Through heavy eyelids the day’s colour

Widow the sky, what can he say

Worthy of record, the books all open,

Pens ready, the faces, sad,

Waiting gravely for the tired lips

To move once – what can he say?

His tongue wrestles to force one word

Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases

For the day’s news, just the one word ‘sorry’;

Sorry for the lies, for the long failure

In the poet’s war; that he preferred

The easier rhythms of the heart

To the mind’s scansion; that he now dies

Intestate, having nothing to leave

But a few songs, cold as stones

In the thin hands that asked for bread.

Related:

The BBC obituary.

Top photograph: Welsh Lake by Patrick Garrington via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.