All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  That neat, pithy, phrase captures the very essence of R. S. Thomas’s profound objections to the reform of sacred texts being not only contemplated but actively pursued by his Church. Such seemed to him appallingly consistent with the reforms to the Eucharist, and all were symptomatic of the fatal misconception that the symbolic language of both ritual and text was a mere expendable form of expression rather than the very substance of religious experience and the sine qua non of the sacred. In Neb he gave measured expression to his objections. Referring to the new English translations he commented, speaking of himself in the third person:

  For good or ill, this was his mother tongue and the language he had to write his poetry in. He wasn’t content at all. He therefore clung to the King James Bible and to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, considering the language of both to be indescribably superior. (A, 88–9)

  The remark about the language of the Prayer Book and the Bible being ‘the language he had to write his poetry in’ is very revealing. It underscores the intimate connection R.S. saw between the ‘poetry’ of the religious texts and the religious poetry he himself wrote. ‘Poetry’ was, for him, a word subtle and capacious enough to comprehend both forms of spiritual expression. ‘Bishops were overawed by theologians’, he caustically noted of the modish contemporary craze for reform, before enquiring ‘What committee ever composed a poem?’ (CLP, 60).

  Some six years before R.S. retired, the distinguished film-maker John Ormond produced a documentary during which the poet shocked viewers by casually remarking that ‘Christ was a poet’. It was in the context of explaining that ‘poetry is religion, religion is poetry … the New Testament is a metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor’. The core of both poetry and Christianity, he added, ‘are imagination as far as I’m concerned’. And then he proceeded to make explicit, intimate, connection between ‘the ministry of the word and the ministry of the sacraments’:

  Well, word is metaphor, language is sacrament, sacrament is language, the combination is perfectly simple. In presenting the Bible to my congregation I am presenting imaginative interpretation of reality. In presenting the sacrament, administering the sacrament of bread and wine to the congregation I am again conveying, I’m using a means, a medium of contact with reality (in a slightly different medium from language).17

  Such thoughts had been haunting Thomas’s mind for some time – in reaction, perhaps, against his Church’s seemingly inexorable repudiation of the poetry of Bible and Prayer Book. As early as 1966, he was defiantly insisting that ‘Religion has to do first of all with vision, revelation, and these are best told in poetry’, and speaking of ‘the poetic nature’ of the ‘original [Christian] message, which allows itself to be interpreted and expressed in an infinite number of new ways’. ‘Jesus’, he bluntly continued,

  was a poet, and he changes and grows as each new epoch explores and develops the resources of that living poetry. In another sense, he is God’s metaphor, and speaks to us so … How can anyone who is not a poet ever fully understand the gospels in their accumulation of metaphor.

  And then he reached the very heart of his credo as poet and as Anglican priest: ‘how shall we attempt to describe or express ultimate reality except through metaphor or symbol?’18 Such sentiments seemed obvious to a Thomas steeped in the poetry of great English Romantics such as Blake and Coleridge, both of whom tended to equate poetry with pristine spiritual apprehension. And intriguingly, at the very time Thomas was making his controversial remarks, the kind of poetic favoured by Blake and Coleridge was being revisited, and reformulated under the title of ‘theopoetics’, by a number of intellectuals.19

  Of relevance in this connection is Thomas’s particular interest, a few years into his retirement, in the later writings of the remarkable polymath George Steiner, whose championing of the rich diversity of languages in his classic study of translation, After Babel, had naturally appealed to a champion of the Welsh language. In the aftermath of the crisis he’d experienced with his inexorably reforming Church, Thomas turned to another of Steiner’s books, Real Presences (1989), a study that includes one of the most pithy accounts of the theology of the deus absconditus that he was so preoccupied with in his poetry.20 But even more pertinent to Thomas’s condition was Steiner’s central insistence that ‘it is, I believe, poetry, art and music which relate us most directly to that in being which is not ours’ (RP, 226). ‘It is’, Steiner added,

  the enterprise and the privilege of the aesthetic to quicken into lit presence the continuum between temporality and eternity, between matter and spirit, between man and ‘the other.’ It is this common and exact sense that poiesis opens on to, is underwritten by, the religious and metaphysical. (RP, 227)

  In his unchurched state, this was the credo upon which Thomas depended.

  At the end of the talk in which he made his comments about Jesus the poet, R. S. Thomas quoted words by Geoffrey Hill, the contemporary poet he most admired not least because there were striking similarities between Hill’s obsessive preoccupation with the ‘fallen language’ of the present age and his own.21 And Hill is a poet prominently featured in a recent important study of Eucharistic Poetry by Eleanor McNees which reflects on the complexities – greatly exacerbated, of course, by modern linguistic studies stressing the closed, self-referential, purely artificial and conventional character of all signifying systems. Still, the human desire for divine verbal ‘presence’ is, she argues, evidenced in religious poetry’s core desire to ‘bridge the linguistic gap between the ordinary word and its extraordinary implications’.22 ‘The relentless paradox at the centre of Hill’s work’, she quotes E. D. Hirsch as piercingly observing, ‘is the sense of a linguistic responsibility to a reality that evades language’ (EP, 152). And she singles out a comment from Hill’s essay collection The Lords of Limit that has a direct bearing on R. S. Thomas’s profound anxiety about the heedless discarding by his Church of the traditional texts of Scripture and the Prayer Book: ‘If language is more than a vehicle for the transmission of axioms and concepts, rhythm is correspondingly more than a physiological motor or a paradise of dainty devices. It is capable of registering, mimetically, deep shocks of recognition’ (quoted in EP, 87). If R. S. Thomas’s Church itself was hell-bent, so to speak, on ridding itself of the poetry that alone endowed it with the sacred power to awaken in its faithful the ‘deep shocks of recognition’ of an ultimate, transcendent reality, then it was left to poetry, or so R. S. Thomas seems increasingly to have felt in his early retirement, to try to remedy that fateful deficit. But would he, as a poet, be up to the awesome demands of such an alternative post-retirement ‘calling’?

  * * *

  The works of his concluding decades seem to me dominated by the several rhetorical strategies he devised to deal with this late crisis. The first we might consider is his search for alternative liturgies – a rich symbolic vocabulary of religious ritual he could substitute for those hallowed rites of the Church of which he had effectively been deprived. It was an on-going, open-ended process of invention, and its ambiguous character was well caught in the title poem from his 1988 collection, Mass for Hard Times. This parodied both the ignorant modern worship of a debased version of ‘science’ and the sentimental platitudes of traditional Christian faith that had become manifestly untenable in the light of the disclosures of authentic scientific discoveries. The ritual obeisances both of the modern worship of a vulgar technologised science and of a Church barren of spiritual imagination were mercilessly exposed in this volume. But through the desolate debris of this modernity there shyly peeped sprigs of the growth of a new kind of sacramental experience. Thomas believed that in destroying the originating and sustaining poetry of its language of faith, the Church had abandoned the Gospel itself. Whereas in the old traditional forms of service, words had been mysteriously rooted in the Word, in the new reformed texts the debased words had become ‘the kiss of Judas/ that must betray [Christ]’ (CLP, 137). In response, Thomas proceeded to fashion his ow
n interim ‘Credo’ out of petitionary prayer:

  Almighty

  pseudonym, grant me at last,

  as the token of my belief,

  such ability to remain

  silent, as is the nearest to a reflection

  of your silence to which

  the human looking-glass may attain. (CLP, 137)

  Elsewhere in the same collection, Thomas found powerful ways of registering his indictment of a Church that, in supposedly privileging ‘plain talking’ had, in fact, embraced the modern, secular, reductive vision of human existence. This abdication of its core responsibility, he argued in ‘Christmas’, had turned that key sacramental festival into a parody of the poetry of incarnation. While ‘five hundred poets,’ pen in hand, awaited to record the miraculous event, the ‘poem passed them/ by on its way out/ into oblivion’, because ‘they had ceased to believe’. All that was left on the bare doorstep was the orphaned figure of ‘the sky-rhyming/ child to whom later/ on they would teach prose’ (CLP, 145). In ‘The God’, he contrasted the God of Theologians – whom he blamed, along with the scientists, for the devaluing and ultimate defacing of his Church’s sacred texts – with the God of Poets. For the former, the word was simply ‘an idea’ that they proceeded to embalm in ‘the long sentences/ of their chapters’, resulting in an arid ‘sacrament that,/ if not soon swallowed, sticks in the throat’ (CLP, 150). While for the latter, God was, he noted in an interlocking chain of luminous conceits reminiscent of George Herbert’s coruscating sonnet on ‘Prayer’,

  made of rhyme and metre,

  the ability to scan

  disordered lines; an imposed

  syntax; the word like a sword

  turning both ways

  to keep the gates of vocabulary. (CLP, 149)

  In a world such as he now faced, R.S. could naturally identify with the William Blake who, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, had found that since ‘heaven’ had been shanghaied by rational materialists, the only safe place left for a visionary poet was hell. ‘Questions to the Prophet’ are accordingly Thomas’s version of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, a kind of anti-liturgy fashioned out of an inverted litany of ‘perverse’ questions, such as ‘Where will the little child lead them/ who has not been there before?’ and ‘How shall the hare know it has not won, dying before the tortoise arrive?’ (CLP, 146). But there was also another William, apart from Blake, with whom he strongly identified in this hour of crisis – William Morgan, the renowned bishop who, in 1588, authored the first, majestically poetic, translation of the Bible into Welsh. Commemorating him in ‘RIP, 1588–1988’, Thomas begins by noting that the name of the place forever associated with Morgan’s great enterprise – Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant – can seem barbarically unpronounceable to fastidious English ears. The implication clearly is that such ears remain as deaf to the poetry of the place name as to the poetry of the great text Morgan produced. The analogy with the tone-deafness to poetry of the modern Church in Wales is unmistakeable. Morgan thus serves Thomas as another of his alter egos from the past of his Welsh Church.23 And so his poem naturally gravitates towards a preoccupation with his own current predicament – ‘Is an obsession with language/ an acknowledgement we are too late/ to save it?’ he wonders. ‘It has been infiltrated/ already by daub and symbol’ (CLP, 161).

  His elegy for Morgan ends with a strikingly apt trope for Thomas’s stance as a voluntarily defrocked priest. Speaking of Morgan’s great Bible of 1588 – whose language had for four centuries been as powerfully creative an influence on Welsh creative writing as had the resonant language of the King James Bible been on English writers – R.S. deplores the ‘hubris’ of a modernity that had reduced such miracles of sacred discourse to dust. ‘Out of breath/ with our hurry’, he caustically adds, ‘we dare not blow off’ the dust

  in a cloud, lest out

  of that cloud should

  be resurrected the one

  spoken figure we have grown

  too clever to believe in. (CLP, 161)

  Through the device of a pun – the antithesis of course of the plain speaking now favoured by his dis-graced Church – these lines conflate the poetry of Christ’s Resurrection with the resurrection of Poetry itself. The ‘spoken figure’ of whom the poem speaks is at once the figure of the Risen Christ, and also the ‘figure of speech’ itself – a speech that values the ‘figures’ (or tropes) out of which it is essentially fashioned.

  Mass for Hard Times even includes Thomas’s very own ‘Bleak Liturgies’, a savagely imagined commentary on a Church that, in rejecting the poetry of its faith had ejected the sacred itself. The opening rhetorical question implies that ‘in revising the language …/ we alter the doctrine’ (CLP, 183). Past witnesses had ‘commended their metaphors// to our notice’ as they departed this life, but ‘We devise/ an idiom more compatible with/ the furniture departments of our churches’ (CLP, 183). And so the poem proceeds through a series of cleansingly cynical apothegms: ‘Frowning/ upon divorce, they divorce/ art and religion’ (CLP, 183). Several of these epigrams are piercingly well phrased. The only Amens left to him, he desolatingly declares, ‘are rents in the worn fabric/ of meaning’ (CLP, 184); and he mocks the vulgar modern supposition that to grow up is

  to destroy

  childhood’s painting of one

  who was nothing but vocabulary’s

  shadow (CLP, 184–5)

  The Eucharist has been replaced by the Black Mass – ‘Crosses/ are mass-produced [the pun is arrestingly just] to be worn/ on punk chests’ (CLP, 185). And the new reformed Eucharist continues to disappoint him: ‘Instead/ of the bread the fraction/ of the language’ (CLP, 183). But so overladen with despair is his discourse in this poem that the poetry is frequently compressed into turgidity, and the bathetic prose he so derides and deplores seems to infiltrate even his highly charged repudiation of it. The poem thus unintentionally instances and even enacts the tragedy of the dispossession that it mourns.

  Given that Mass for Hard Times is repeatedly and elegiacally ghosted by concerns such as these – its poetry being what Freud would term a work of mourning for what Thomas has lost along with his Church – it is appropriate that it should include one poem specifically about retirement. And that poem – ‘Retired’ – reminds us that his alienated state could result in gains in imaginative originality and spiritual intensity that at times more than offset his losses. In being deprived of the traditional spiritual discipline of liturgical expression he was authorised to explore the sacramental potentialities of the natural world with a new creative freedom. He was now free to discover a new order of service, mediated not in church meetings and services but, for example, through encounters with the great overarching sky of stars,

  those nocturnal

  gatherings, whose luminaries

  fell silent millennia ago (CLP, 147)

  Some of the most powerful ‘liturgically inclined’ poems in this vein can be found in The Echoes Return Slow, sometimes appearing in a context revealing of the process of ‘translation’ involved each case. In one of the beautifully crafted prose poems in that volume, Thomas decries the modern fashion ‘for a revised liturgy, for bathetic renderings of the scriptures[.] The Cross always is avant-garde’ (CLP, 53). Then in the next passage of poetically condensed prose he approvingly notes that ‘one can celebrate the coming of three waves from afar, who fall down, offering their gifts to what they don’t understand’ (CLP, 54). Paired with this prose passage is a poem illustrative of the proposition just recorded, in which nature supplies what is missing in the revised Christmas liturgy of the modern Church and its infernal twin or shadow self, the heavily commercialised Christmas of the secular world. The natural world provides

  mistletoe

  water there is no kissing

  under, the soused holly

  of the wrack, and birds coming

  to the bird-table with

  no red on their breast.

  Although ‘All night it has snowed// foam on the
splintering/ beaches’, these drifts disappear at dawn, leaving sand as pristine clean as ‘young flesh/ in a green crib, product/ of an immaculate conception’ (CLP, 54). The translation of the banal staple emblems, products and accessories of a modern, largely secularised, ‘Church’ Christmas into the alternative liturgical terms provided by the natural world here results in a redemptive re-sacralisation of what has become a paganised religious festival. And it is poetry alone that has possessed the power to effect this miracle of transfiguration, not least through the reinvigoration of tired figures of speech.