All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  So what, one might wonder, has all this controversy of the passing, and now long-past, day to do with Thomas as a poet? Well, by way of focused illustration, I suggest we revisit one of his poems, ‘A Line from St David’s’, in the light of these intense debates, and set the text alongside a hitherto unrecorded St David’s Day radio talk by R. S. Thomas networked by the BBC in 1969 and printed in Y Llan.14 It recalls his pilgrimage to St David’s, a spot once centrally situated, he points out, on the pilgrim route from Ireland and Scotland to Jerusalem but now, although by no means inaccessible, relegated to the margins of the busy world. He emphasises the dedicated, austere life of the Celtic saint and his brethren but then moves on, after meditating appreciatively on the sacred stillness and quietness even of the present-day St David’s, to recall Gerald the Welshman’s period of association with the church. Why single out Giraldus Cambrensis? Because he was for R.S. a culture hero, almost one might say an alter ego. How so? Because the Cambro-Norman Gerald, grandson of the legendary Welsh aristocratic beauty Nest and the local Norman warlord, had fought tenaciously, if unsuccessfully, for that very independence of the Welsh Church from the suzerainty of Canterbury that the Church in Wales had at long last achieved in the twentieth century. ‘In Wales, the church is now independent’, R. S. baldly emphasises, and for him that legitimises his church’s claim to be heir to an ancient national tradition.

  More of that later, but for now, let’s note that such an awareness of an inheritance of ancient beliefs, practices and customs is implicit in the poem R.S. had written several years earlier:

  the old currents are in the grass,

  Though rust has becalmed the plough.

  Somewhere a man sharpens a scythe;

  A child watches him from the brink

  Of his own speech15

  Concerned as it is to register brinkmanship, that last line is, of course, ambivalent in meaning. It could be referring to a small child’s imminent acquisition, as it crosses over into speech, of the ancient, invaluable, Welsh idiolect of north Pembrokeshire or of neighbouring Ceredigion, thus safeguarding its continuation. But also, and to the contrary, it could also be referring to an older child, already a monoglot English-speaker, who is thus excluded from the workman’s local Welsh-speaking world and doomed to the experience of personal loss and cultural rupture.

  R.S. ends his radio talk by suggesting that David is the perfect patron saint for Wales, because he represents the importance of little unregarded things and of little powerless people. I find it difficult to believe that at this point his text isn’t silently haunted by two of the most famous lines written by the legendary, saintly Waldo Williams, the great Welsh-language poet of St David’s and its Pembrokeshire whom R.S. knew personally and revered: ‘Daw dydd y bydd mawr y rhai bychain./ Daw dydd y bydd bach y rhai mawr’ (‘Come the day when the small will be great./ Come the day when the great will be small’). The lines occur in ‘Plentyn y Ddaear’ (‘The Child of the Earth’), a visionary poem about peaceful human fellowship eventually prevailing over the whole war-ravaged globe.16 As R. S. Thomas well knew, his own St David’s Day talk was to be broadcast in parallel, so to speak, with Neges Ewyllys Da – the annual St David’s Day message of Good Will broadcast by Welsh schoolchildren to the whole world. Indeed, there seems to be oblique mention of this in his radio talk, when he notes that ‘neges Cymru i’r byd’ (‘Wales’s message to the world’) is peace, in the spirit of its patron saint.

  Indeed, for Thomas, Dewi’s gospel, not least as mediated by Waldo and echoed in the St David’s Day message, vindicates and hallows his own vision of a Wales dedicated not only to peace but to pacifism. Like Waldo’s poem, both R.S.’s poem ‘A Line from St David’s’ and his radio talk seem to me to be composed in full awareness of the aggressive post-war ‘occupation’ of the cathedral’s surrounding area by the UK, US and European military, through the establishment of large bases crucial for the Cold War at Castle Martin and Tre-cwn. And so R.S., again closely paralleling Waldo’s poem, pointedly turns his back in his radio talk on the military banners displayed in so many Anglican cathedrals, including even the ‘disestablished’ St David’s. As he puts it in his radio address,

  Nid oes gennym ymerodraeth i’w amddiffyn, ac mor ychydig yw ein hanghenion. Felly, tangnefedd yw ein cri … Nid y baneri a’r catrawdau yn crogi mewn ysblander llipa, na’r to gemog a ddaeth â’r meddyliau hyn i mi, ond y rhedyn bach a dyfai o’r garreg.

  (We have no empire to defend, so little are our needs. So, peace is our cry … It was not the banners and the battalions [sic] hanging in limp magnificence, nor the bejewelled roof, that brought these thoughts to me, but the little fern that grew from the stones.)

  That last reference directly echoes the lines in his poem about ‘the wall lettuce in the crevices’, while the banners and roof both, of course, relate to the interior of the cathedral.

  There was, at the time, considerable feeling among the champions of Welsh and of Welshness within the Church, on this subject of its continuing alliance with what was perceived as the militaristic tradition of England and its state Church. For example, an eloquent letter appeared in Y Llan in 1968 from a group of young ordinands at the church hostel in Bangor. It protested against their Church’s treatment of Welsh, and particularly objected to the continuation in Wales of the English state Church’s practice of prominently parading a bellicose panoply of military banners – the Church militant in all too literal a sense.17 For these young priests, those banners are the unmistakeable signs of the survival of an English statist mentality amongst the hierarchy of the Church in Wales.

  Now, we know that R.S. was extremely touchy on this subject, not least because it re-activated his guilt, clearly recorded in Neb and The Echoes Return Slow, at his own perceived failure, as a young pacifist, to speak out against the Church’s support for the military during the Second World War.18 And this guilt erupted again during his time as vicar of Eglwys-Fach, where he found himself parish priest to an impressive squad of ex-military big-wigs. It’s therefore particularly relevant to note that both his radio talk and his poem were produced during his period at Eglwys-Fach (which he left in 1972).

  It’s not surprising, then, that in his talk R.S. specifically turns his back on conspicuous ecclesiastical displays of support for the military. Nor is it surprising, given such feelings as these about the Church establishment, that in his poem he should view the cathedral at St David’s only from a wary distance that allows him to continue to view it as a sacred space: ‘Here the cathedral’s bubble of stone/ Is still unpricked by the mind’s needle.’ The image of the fragile bubble underlines the precariousness of the cathedral’s claims to spiritual authority. Moreover, he can view the cathedral in this way only by setting it safely in the context of the anciently spiritual Pembrokeshire landscape. And the whole poem strongly implies that the safest guardian of Dewi’s spiritual values is not the institution of the Church but rather the land that remains Dewi’s land, despite the desecrations of the military. The true emblem of the spry saint is to be found, he concludes both in poem and in radio talk, not in the cathedral piously consecrated to the saint’s memory, but in the tiny ferns that grow from local rock:

  the wall lettuce in the crevices

  Is as green now as when Giraldus

  Altered the colour of his thought

  By drinking from the Welsh fountain

  Giraldus, it will be remembered, became more Welsh than Norman through his identification with St David’s.

  Let me reiterate: the poem pre-dates both the radio talk and the debates about St David’s in the columns of Y Llan by several years, so there can be no question of the former being influenced by the latter. But I do feel that, taken as a whole, they represent consistent, long-standing concerns R.S. and other Welsh Anglicans of his cultural persuasion had about the disestablished Church in Wales generally and about St David’s in particular.

  Consequently ‘A Line from St David’s’ can persuasively be read
as a verse letter intended to awaken his fellow Welsh, and particularly the members of his own ‘Welsh’ Church, to what was at risk at St David’s owing to the unenlightened and unreconstructed character of Wales’s soi-disant national Church. It can be understood as a rescue mission; an implicit attempt to recover for Wales and its true national Church a foundational place and figure that had, through the defection of the nation’s senior cathedral and its anglicised clergy, long fallen into the clutches of an invasive language and a foreign culture.

  There’s one little word in ‘A Line from St David’s’ that has always fascinated me, because it stands out from the rest of the text. I refer to the word ‘Plwmp’: ‘I came here by way of Plwmp’. Why that route? Why that word? There seems to me to be a note of defiance in its inclusion. After all, R.S. could have travelled to St David’s by any number of routes. But ‘by way of Plwmp’ it had to be, because ‘Plwmp’ is a word that can’t fail to sound vulgar and comical in English. Indeed a colleague of mine who visited the British Council offices in Malaysia just the other day actually found Plwmp singled out for mention in exactly such terms in a glossy brochure advertising the exotic culture of Wales. (Incidentally, that same brochure mentioned contemporary Wales’s passion not only for rugby but for ferret racing – clearly I’ve still got a lot to learn about my own country.) To any monoglot English reader, ‘Plwmp’ is, then, a signifier of the exotic, and that’s exactly how and why Thomas uses it. He uses it insidiously to smoke out prejudice and defiantly to reassert his right to use Welsh in any way, in any place, and in any context, he chooses, since it is the only rightful language of this particular neck of the woods. And, socially and culturally disempowered though Welsh might be – English-only though the road signs to St David’s at that time we should remember still were, and English-only though were the public notices throughout the cathedral itself – Welsh continues in the poem to prove uniquely empowering. How? Because it alone can authentically name this land into being and into shape and into identity. Had Waldo also not famously written in ‘Cymru a Chymraeg’ of his Pembrokeshire Preseli, ‘Dyma’r mynyddoedd. Ni fedr ond un iaith eu codi/ A’u rhoi yn eu rhyddid yn erbyn wybren cân’ (‘Here are the mountains. Only one language can raise them/ And set them in all their freedom against a sky of song’)?19

  R.S. might not then be able to reclaim the anglicised cathedral itself for his Wales and its Welsh. He could not restore Dewi’s Church to its true, ancient, self. But through his poetry he could and did relocate it in a genuinely Welsh, because thoroughly Welsh-speaking landscape. It is that word ‘Plwmp’ that is the key. Once used it magically opens the door to a hidden Wales – hidden because overwritten by English, as indeed threatens to happen in the poem, and thus suppressed. But stick with it and, as the poem proceeds to show, ‘Plwmp’ is the open sesame that opens our eyes to the sacred, secret magic of this landscape:

  As I came here by way of Plwmp,

  There were hawkweeds in the hedges;

  Nature had invested all her gold

  In the industry of the soil.

  There were larks, too, like a fresh chorus

  Of dew

  Had he come there by any way other than by way of Plwmp none of this, so the poem implies, would have been visible.20

  The truth is that R.S. is not really comfortable writing in the shadow of St David’s Cathedral. When it comes to celebrating Dewi as the founder of everything that R.S. believed was authentic and valuable in the modern Church in Wales, he is much more attracted and attuned to the legends attaching Dewi to another spot that bears his name, Llanddewi Brefi. As early as 1948 he was addressing a poem – only recently recovered and safely collected – to what was for him a credibly hallowed spot:

  One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,

  And buy a cottage and stand at the door

  In the long evenings, watching the moor21

  It is not a strong poem but in its very weakness lies an alternative eloquence. That weakness is its obvious derivativeness. To read the opening lines (above) is immediately to realise that what we have here is a Welshified version of Yeats’s celebrated ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, perhaps Welshified in part by the incorporation of echoes from Cynan’s popular lyric ‘Aberdaron’, which imagines a retirement retreat to a cottage faced by nothing but the wild waves of the sea. And that process of cultural translation seems to me very telling. It suggests that, for Thomas the young Welsh churchman, Dewi’s Llanddewi functions in much the same way as did Innisfree for the early Yeats: as the repository of yearning hope, of futile nostalgia. Already by 1948 it’s thus obvious that R.S. had serious doubts about the practical possibility of re-establishing the Church in Wales on sound Welsh footings; about authentically reconnecting it with the tradition of Dewi, and thus recalibrating it both spiritually and culturally; about recentring it at Llanddewibrefi.

  However, both in this poem and in ‘A Line from St David’s’ there is a determination of obstinate persistence in thus hoping. Because for R.S. it was this hope alone that could legitimise his Church’s otherwise suspect claim to be the authentic, ancient, Church of Wales – yr Hen Fam (‘the Old Mother’). Such a hope was, after all, his sole authority for dismissing that alternative designation of his Church by Welsh-speakers as yr Hen Estrones (‘the Old Foreigner’), the dismissive epithet scornfully applied to her throughout the nineteenth century by her great rival and enemy, the socially, culturally and politically ascendant Nonconformist denominations.

  At this point, then, we need to recall and understand what might be called the seminal Welsh Anglican myth of yr Hen Fam. It is as old as the establishment of the Anglican Church itself. And it was invoked by Glyn Simon in his inaugural 1968 address as Archbishop (considered above), challenging his Church to reconnect with the nation by recalling its ancient symbiotic connections with Welsh-language culture. Keenly aware of the stubborn addiction and adherence of the conservative Welsh gwerin to the Catholic Church they persisted in regarding as their very own, the Welsh Tudor bishops deliberately set out to destroy Welsh Catholicism’s claims to direct descent from the original Celtic Church. They did so by devising and aggressively articulating a counter-claim. According to this alternative account, it was Anglicanism, by reforming and purifying a profoundly corrupt ecclesiastical order, that had enabled Wales to reconnect with its early, pristine, ascetic spiritual past. So important a polemical tool indeed was this new myth in the Anglicans’ struggle for the popular Welsh mind during the Reformation that it was powerfully deployed by Bishop Richard Davies in his eloquent and seminal Epistle to the Welsh that prefaced the historic 1567 translation of the New Testament and Book of Common Prayer.

  That translation itself was the first proof of this new, suspect Church of England’s commitment to serve the spiritual needs of the Welsh people, which inescapably meant serving their language and culture. That Church’s next great contribution was, of course, the publication in 1588 of the first Welsh Bible, overseen by Bishop William Morgan. R.S. never ceased to be awed by the way he had shaken ‘The words from the great tree/ Of language’. Thereafter Welsh priests regularly continued to make seminal contributions to the maintenance and development of Welsh cultural identity throughout the subsequent centuries. Landmarks included Edmwnd Prys’s first Welsh hymnal, the Vicar Prichard’s popular homiletic verses, Canwyll y Cymry; Theophilus Evans’s Drych Y Prif Oesoedd, in its day a masterpiece of Welsh historiography; Ellis Wynne’s searing visionary satire Gweledigaetheu y Bardd Cwsg; the great eighteenth-century poems of the tragic priest Goronwy Owen; the landmark Sunday Schools of Gruffydd Jones, Vicar of Llanddowror, for the education of the Welsh peasantry; the heroic recovery by Evan Evans (Ieuan Brydydd Hir) of what survived in manuscript of the great Welsh bardic poetry of the earlier ages; and the collective work of cultural restoration accomplished by Yr Hen Bersoniaid Llengar, the old cultured parsons of the early nineteenth century.

  At least for the intellectual elite of the newly disestablished Ch
urch in Wales, an elite that included R. S. Thomas, it was this proud historical tradition of cultural ministry that entitled their Church to the honorific ‘Yr Hen Fam’, even while they conceded that that Church, particularly in its alien, anglicised, colonialist nineteenth-century form, could not fail also to be stigmatised as yr Hen Estrones. Indeed, they felt that it continued to reveal itself all too frequently in these foreign aspects even in its new, disestablished, independent form. But it was the enticing vision of the disestablished Church as now poised to fulfil its potential as yr Hen Fam that persuaded a handful of prominent Welsh writers and intellectuals to abandon their Nonconformist background, during the interwar years, and to convert to the Church in Wales. Among these were two of the nation’s most gifted poets, Gwenallt and Euros Bowen. The latter was to spend his life as a priest of the Church but the former was to become so disillusioned with the anglicised mentality of the disestablished Church that he eventually, and very publicly, reverted to the Welsh Presbyterianism of his childhood.22 R. S. Thomas’s own stormy relations with the Church in Wales need really to be placed in the context of the experiences of these key figures who were, of course, his exact contemporaries.

  What seems clear to me is that those very early years in Manafon, when he was enthusiastically learning Welsh and simultaneously acquiring a Welsh cultural outlook, were years during which he hopefully cultivated what was then no doubt his new perception of the Church as yr Hen Fam. And such a vision seems to me to be present, although hitherto undetected, as at least the subtext of one of his very finest early poems ‘Country Church (Manafon)’. All readers seem to be agreed as to the primary meaning of this poem. Very crudely summarised, it is a symbolic articulation of Thomas’s central dilemma of how to reconcile the spiritual truths of religion with the cruel realities of a Darwinian natural order. But no reader, as far as I am aware, has registered the possibility of a secondary meaning, related to Thomas’s awakening sense of the historical but threatened Welshness of his Church. Reading the poem in the light of my concerns in this discussion, what strikes me about it is how Thomas here chooses to see his church as, in what are perhaps the most beautiful and intense phrases in the poem, ‘built from the river stone/ Brittle with light’ (CP, 11). He elementalises it, making it seem a special outcrop, or stony excrescence, of the very landscape itself. This church is ‘native’ to its landscape: it is unmistakeably a Welsh church, a Llan rather than the routinely English parish church. Indeed, there is here no sense of this church being church of any parish – any more, of course, than in most of R.S.’s best poems, is there any sense of his being a parish priest.