All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  Novice Welsh-learner as he was when he composed this poem, R.S. couldn’t have failed to be fascinated by the name of his church – Manafon – and to notice its constituent elements: literally man (‘place’) and afon (‘river’). And so there’s a sense in which this poem is an onomastic poem – that is, a poem purporting to explain the name of a place and of that place’s church. In the process it highlights that this church is built not only near water but actually out of ‘river stone’ – the ancient Celtic linkage of water with the sacred is surely obvious.

  We know that it was by learning Welsh that R.S. became aware that one of his predecessors as rector of Manafon had been ‘Gwallter Mechain’, or Walter Davies, a celebrated member of that fraternity of Yr Hen Bersoniaid Llengar that has been mentioned already.23 R.S. refers to this in Neb, immediately adding that his excitement at discovering such a congenial pedigree was quickly tempered by the realisation that already by the early nineteenth century of Davies’s incumbency, the parish of Manafon had become predominantly English-speaking. One might, then, suggest that reinforcing the image of the thoroughly local, indigenous, elemental church at Manafon as increasingly threatened by its very own surroundings – ‘the brimming tides of fescue’ – is a sense of the Welshness of the Church as now being permanently and seriously at risk. And yet, hope defiantly counter-asserts, ‘It stands’; and the young Thomas can already be here seen as preparing to stand for a lifetime by this tenuous spiritual and cultural hope.

  Gwallter Mechain was to continue to fascinate the older Thomas as a point of reference and yardstick. When well into his seventies he dedicated a poem to him recently reprinted in Uncollected Poems. It makes it perfectly clear that Mechain was another of his intimate Welsh ecclesiastical kindred spirits: an alter ego. The poem specifically identifies the clerical Davies’s contribution, as scholar, pioneering eisteddfodwr and poet, to the survival of Welsh-language culture. He may have died legally intestate, but we are his fortunate cultural legatees, inheritors of his work

  to light Welsh

  confidently on its way backward

  to an impending future. (UP, 133)

  And Thomas’s strong, but desolate, identification with this spiritually and culturally emblematic figure representative of the tradition of the Church in Wales is evident in his description of Davies’s patient ministry of the word to a thankless people, involving

  weekly climb

  into the crow’s nest of his pulpit,

  telling them of the glimpsed land,

  trying to believe in it

  himself. The words digested

  the bell’s notes more easily

  than his intellect his doctrine. (UP, 133–4)

  It would be interesting to collect together the poems R.S. scattered in his collections over several decades paying tribute to some of the key figures from William Morgan to Gwenallt who had contributed so substantially to the establishing and maintenance of the tradition of the Church as yr Hen Fam. Included in this honourable lineage would be Ann Griffiths of Dolwar Fach. The blessed Ann, to whom R.S. addressed several memorable poems, is eligible for inclusion because until shortly after her brief lifetime the impassioned Methodism of her faith was still that of a reforming sect within the Anglican Church.

  R.S.’s fascination – or rather identification – with Ann Griffiths is a particularly telling product of the terminal phase of his alienation from his church. He was well aware of his belatedness in recognising the spiritual genius of one whose spirit had, after all, been near neighbour to him at Manafon, which was only fifteen miles distant from her Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa.

  Has she waited all these years

  for me to forget myself

  and do her homage? I begin

  now

  he wrote in his 1987 ‘Fugue’ in her memory: ‘Ann Thomas, Ann Griffiths’ (CP, 472). He thus pointedly addresses her first by her maiden name – which was ‘Thomas’, like his own.

  Two factors seem to have contributed to his full ‘discovery’ of her a decade or so earlier. One, the celebration in 1976 of the tercentenary of her birth.24 The other, the extraordinary public lecture in 1965, and subsequent 1972 essay, on her genius by R.S.’s great political and cultural hero, Saunders Lewis. Abhorring the embrace by Welsh Nonconformity of an Ann the chapels regarded as one of their own, soggy with sentimental intimacy with God, Lewis insisted instead that her true home was in the company of the great spiritually astringent mystics of the medieval Catholic tradition of Europe. R.S. takes his clue from his hero in focusing on the ecstatic sensual rapture of Ann’s vision of God. And there is, of course, a tragic aspect to his celebration in Ann, in the form of a spiritual epithalamium, of that intimate encounter with God that he himself had sought all his life but had been denied:

  Down this path she set off

  for the earlier dancing

  of the body; but under the myrtle

  the Bridegroom was waiting

  for her on her way home. (CP, 470)

  The allusion is to one of her greatest hymns.

  But Thomas’s underlying and unstated aim, it seems to me, is to celebrate Ann Griffiths as one of the great dissidents of the Anglican Church in Wales – like himself. Accordingly, he underlines the essential Welshness of her language and, by implication, her genius. She becomes for him the Muse of the Church in its benign form of yr Hen Fam, and that Church’s loss of sight of her – sadly instanced even by his younger self – is telling evidence of its alienation from the Welsh nation.

  R. S. Thomas’s conflicted relationship, both as poet and as priest, with the Church in Wales throughout his life invites extensive, sustained study way beyond the scope of this present discussion. There are so many aspects of it that intrigue me, such as that marked turn away from the Church and towards the ancient sacredness of the Llŷn landscape that followed, I feel, his slightly early retirement from the priesthood in 1978. This was a re-enactment, but forty years later and this time on a grand scale, of that turn we’ve already noticed, away from St David’s Cathedral and towards the surrounding countryside. Llŷn was for him, during those final decades, a bough, suspended between sea and sky, so that to live there was to dwell in an uncanny, liminal region. As for the cottage of Sarn y Plas, dating back to at least the eighteenth century, it too seemed crudely fashioned, like Manafon Church, out of water-washed boulders, so that its walls resounded, re-sounded, with the ancient music of the nearby sea. Interestingly enough, R.S. had anticipated such a structure as well, in his radio talk on St David’s a decade or so earlier, when he’d imagined the solitariness that had once characterised the precincts of the cathedral: ‘A chyda’r nos, s{n y môr, a’r muriau trwchus, fel esgyrn yng ngolau’r lloer’ (‘And by night, the sound of the sea, and the thick walls like bones in the light of the moon’).

  It was to Sarn y Plas (or Sarn Rhiw) that he removed with his wife upon his retirement from the Church in Wales, the Church he had for so long struggled to believe would allow him, by serving it, to serve his own nation as well. His concern, as priest in the Church in Wales, to serve his own nation permeates all of R.S.’s writing about his office. It makes itself apparent, for instance, in a poem like ‘Service’, a poem expressive of his chronic crisis of faith but also expressive of his chronic crisis of faith in his Church’s connection with Wales:

  I call on God

  In the after silence, and my shadow

  Wrestles with him upon a wall

  Of plaster, that has all the nation’s

  Hardness in it. (CP, 174)

  Bearing in mind confessions like this to the isolating nature of his cultural as well as spiritual obsessions, and recalling R.S.’s last and famous period of service as rector of remote Aberdaron, I find poignancy as well as comedy in a snippet of news I came across in Y Llan. It concerned the recent installation in the great historic church of Llanbadarn Fawr, on the outskirts of Aberystwyth, of a microphone to ensure that the congregation throughout the body of the church cou
ld hear and follow every moment of the service. Previous to its installation, parishioners seated in the more remote reaches of this substantial church used, it seems, to refer to those parts as ‘Aberdaron’.

  What an allegory this is of R.S.’s chill, distant, polar relationship to the ‘national’ Church in Wales he served so faithfully, according to his idiosyncratic lights, for most of his life as poet and priest. And in noting it, I recall a wonderful story about him that still circulates in the Aberdaron region, about how, on the very day of his retirement from the Church, he lit a great bonfire on the beach in which he burned his cassock.25 I do hope the story is true. Having been out in the cold all those many years he had been a priest in what he came to feel was still only the foreign Church of England in Wales, I feel he deserved to warm himself at the last. In one of his final interviews, R.S. even went on public record to confess, ‘I wouldn’t say that I’m an orthodox Christian at all’.26

  And yet … What I believe was my very last encounter with him, at a David Jones Conference held in Lampeter a year or so before his passing, terminated with his excusing himself and turning in early, to be certain of making morning communion the next day. And Aled Jones Williams, R.S.’s own parish priest at the time of his death, has movingly recorded how he was always able to intuit from the hands held out by parishioners to receive the bread and the communion cup how deep they were in faith. R. S. Thomas’s hands, he testifies, were always and unmistakeably those of a devout believer.27 Like some animal returning instinctively to a salt lick, then, R.S. seems to have found, to the very end, some specific, special spiritual nourishment in yr Hen Fam that his wounded soul needed and craved, and that was not, for him, available anywhere else.

  (Tucker Lecture Series 3, Trinity-St Davids, Lampeter [Lampeter: Trivium, 2013].)

  Notes

  1Y Llan (31 Mawrth 1972), 8, noticed the screening of Ormond’s film profile of R. S. Thomas, and singled out his comments on poetry and religion.

  2See his laconic account of the matter in Jason Walford Davies, trans., R. S. Thomas: Autobiographies (London: Dent, 1997), pp. 34–5: ‘His mother lost her parents when she was six years old and was brought up by an aunt and her husband, who was a parish priest. She was sent to a boarding school in England which had an ecclesiastical atmosphere, and as a result she had some attachment to the church. So when she saw that her son had no strong objection to the idea of being a candidate for Holy Orders she secretly rejoiced and persuaded her husband to agree to the idea. And the son accepted that he would have to start learning Greek and go on to university’.

  3The Welsh (Anglican) Church was disendowed and in effect disestablished by Act of Parliament in 1914, but the practical creation of a separate province of Wales within the Anglican communion was delayed until 1920 (31 March). See David Walker, A History of the Church in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976); Revd D. T. W. Price, A History of the Church in Wales in the Twentieth Century (Penarth: Church in Wales Publications, 1990). This development is placed in wider, comparative contexts in several studies by Keith Robbins: see England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church 1900–2000, Oxford History of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London and Rio de Janeiro: The Hambledon Press, 1993); ‘Establishing Disestablishment: Some Reflections on Wales and Scotland’, in Stewart J. Brown and George Newlands (eds), Scottish Christianity in the Modern World (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), pp. 231–54.

  4‘Pensiynau’, a letter in Y Llan (8 Mai 1970), 7, refers to the following clause in the Welsh Anglican statute book: ‘If a clergyman who is in receipt of a pension from the Representative Body … be sentenced to imprisonment … the pension forthwith shall cease to be payable.’

  5Quoted in Price, History, p. 12.

  6R.S. had come to know Glyn Simon when the latter was the young Warden of the Church Hostel in Bangor that was home to Thomas while studying at the University College for his undergraduate degree in Classics. ‘Although Glyn Simon was somewhat effeminate in his manner,’ R. S. later recalled, ‘he was firm enough in defence of his convictions’ (Autobiographies, p. 40). Reliable report suggests that Simon was unsympathetic to the Welsh language when first he took up his post, but experienced a kind of cultural conversion through his encounter with the Welsh-language students of his hostel. The broad parallels with R. S. Thomas’s experience at the very same time and in the very same location are intriguing and suggestive.

  7Y Llan (27 Medi 1968), 7–8, includes the full text of Glyn Simon’s inaugural address as Archbishop of Wales, that takes as theme the place of the Welsh language in the nation and in the Church. It takes its departure from a letter Simon had received from a monoglot English priest arguing that Welsh had no relevance to his experience and profession of faith. Simon responds by tracing the origins of the Church in Wales back to the pre-Augustine British (‘Celtic’) Church, and then tracking the cultural history of the Church’s subsequent development. He argues that the tragedy of the Church from the eighteenth to the twentieth century has been its steady alienation from the people it was supposed to serve. Drawing on Cranmer’s statement that ‘in these our doings’ (i.e. in establishing a Church of England) ‘we condemn no other nations, nor proscribe anything but for our own people only’, Simon argues that fidelity to Wales is perfectly consistent with committed participation in the worldwide communion of believers. In warning against an incipient form of cultural apartheid within the Church communion, he proceeds to criticise both such Welsh-speaking Church members as are intolerant of monoglot English-speakers and such of the latter as treat Welsh as marginal and irrelevant. Ending with a plea for mutual respect and conciliation, he uses key passages from T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Definition of Culture to advance a blueprint of a meaningfully bilingual and actively bicultural Church in Wales.

  8‘Golygyddol’, Y Llan (14 Mehefin 1974), 4.

  9Letter, Y Llan (26 Mai 1967), 7: ‘Yr Eglwys yng Nghymru yn rhoi cyfle i’w enllibwyr unwaith eto, “yr hen estrones.” Pa hawl sydd gennym i gyfrif ein hunain yn Fam Eglwys, neu yn hen Eglwys y Cymry, neu i gyfrif fod gennym gyfrifoldeb ysbrydol dros Gymru gyfan?’ (‘The Church in Wales once again providing its traducers with an opening, “the old foreigner”. What right have we to consider ourselves a Mother Church, or the Old Church of the Welsh, or to claim we have spiritual responsibility for the whole of Wales?’)

  10See the letter from Revd John Davies, Wrexham vicarage, concluding with the remark ‘Duw a’n gwaredo rhag colli ein ffordd fel Eglwys a throi’n gymdeithas diogelu iaith a dim mwy’ (‘God preserve us from losing our way as a Church and becoming a language-preservation society and no more’) (Y Llan, 9 Mehefin 1967, 6). The Revd Terry Thomas’s response to this in a subsequent number of Y Llan (16 Mehefin 1967, 7) is worth noting because it takes the form of a substantial quotation from The Theology of Culture by Paul Tillich, one of R. S. Thomas’s favourite theologians: ‘Every religious act, not only in organized religion, but also in the most intimate movement of the soul, is culturally formed. The fact that every act of man’s spiritual life is carried by language, spoken or silent, is proof enough for this assertion. For language is the basic cultural creation.’

  11Y Llan (9 Mehefin 1967), 6; Y Llan (2 Mehefin 1967), 8.

  12The reverberations of this episode rumbled on and on. At the National Eisteddfod in Barry in 1968, both Bedwyr Lewis Jones and T. I. Ellis delivered passionate lectures on the rich cultural legacy of the Church in Wales (Y Llan, 16 Awst 1968, 6).

  13The Revd Bowen proceeded first to define the aims of the new society and then to advertise a meeting on 30 June 1967 in Llanegwad formally to establish this new body (Y Llan, 21 Gorffennaf 1967, 6, 7). Subsequent issues of Y Llan carried notices about the development of this Cymdeithas.

  14‘Tŷ Ddewi’, Y Llan (28 Chwefror 1969), 7.

  15‘A Line from St David’s’, Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 123. Herea
fter CP. The poem was first published in The Bread of Truth (London: Hart-Davis, 1963).

  16Waldo Williams, Dail Pren (Aberystwyth: Gwasg Aberystwyth, 1956), p. 68.

  17Letter, Y Llan (10 Mai 1968), 6.

  18For a full account of these feelings and their implications for his poetry, see ‘The Leper of Abercuawg’, in M. Wynn Thomas, R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), pp. 147–70.

  19Dail Pren, p. 100.

  20Dr Jason Walford Davies has kindly drawn to my attention other possible implications of Thomas’s choice of ‘Plwmp’. The name is said to have derived from the English word ‘Pump’, and to refer specifically to the water pump in the village. As Dr Walford Davies has pointed out, the image of water recurs in Thomas’s poem: ‘Dewi/ The water-drinker’, ‘bubble’, ‘the Welsh fountain’, ‘sea’, ‘currents’. Furthermore, this imagery carries a strong political, as well as spiritual, charge, relating as it does to ‘Welsh water’ – a vexed resource, of course, in the context of twentieth-century Wales. And there is, moreover, more than a hint of ‘reverse colonisation’ in this relatively rare instance of adoption, and indeed absorption, by the Welsh language of an English word.