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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.
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