All That is Wales
Page 27
In another significant pairing from The Echoes Return Slow, the prose fronts up to Thomas’s post-clerical status: ‘Let retirement be retirement indeed’, he exclaims as he contemplates avoiding a confrontation with the incoming changes to the liturgy of the Church. ‘But’, he adds, ‘the sea revises itself over and over. When he arose in the morning or looked at it at night, it was always a new version of it’ (CLP, 63). There are, then, revisions and revisions – or rather re-visions that are re-cognitions: new ways of viewing the wonders of a divine creation; new revelations of sacred presence. Such ways are akin not to the substitution of prose for poetry but rather to poetry’s inexhaustible powers of self-renewal. And this can find expression through its power of paradox – its ability for instance to suggest the power of silence through utterance. ‘I am left’, Thomas reflects in the poem that accompanies the above passage of prose and that allows its pregnant meanings to reach their full term, ‘with the look// on the sky I need not/ try turning into an expression’ (CLP, 63). Another pun, then, that leads into the reflection that he might after all have been led here – beyond the sheltering but also imprisoning world of his Church –
to repent of my sermons,
to erect silence’s stone over
my remains, and to learn
from the lichen’s slowness
at work something of the slowness
of the illumination of the self. (CLP, 63)
The erasures of language implicit in these images signify both the slow erosion of the ego-identity of mundane existential selfhood and the extinction of poetry – poetry empowered to imagine its own erasure and to identify the limits of its capacities. In text like this, Thomas seems to have been able, through naked exposure to the cosmos, to re-ground sacramental experience and expression in the eternal silence that underlies and underpins all the animation of life.
* * *
R. S. Thomas’s late works may, then, be understood as the vindication of poetry as a fons et origo of the human experience of the sacred in the wake of his Church’s repudiation of it. But there are other aspects too of his post-retirement writing that stemmed directly from his disillusionment with his Church. In rejecting the Prayer Book and the Holy Scriptures in their traditional, inherited, forms, the Church in Wales seemed to Thomas to have effectively disinherited itself spiritually and culturally by severing all links with its past. And his response took two forms in particular. First, he sought alternative means of reconnecting himself locally in Llŷn with the peninsula’s ancient history of religious belief and practice; and second, he set out to review the mysterious continuities in his own life between his present and past self. This last resulted in a series of strikingly original experiments in autobiography, including Neb, The Echoes Return Slow and Blwyddyn yn Llŷn.
The first two of these texts have already received extensive attention from me and others elsewhere, and therefore do not need to be revisited in detail here.24 But one very important feature of them remains to be briefly noticed. ‘For some there is no future but the one that is safeguarded by a return to the past’ (CLP, 45): the remark occurs at the point in The Echoes Return Slow where Thomas notices the uncanny similarity between the Llŷn peninsula he had reached in his old age and the environs of Holyhead where he’d grown up as a boy. The two locations were the same and yet different, so that for Thomas there was indeed re-vision in the air in Llŷn – the double vision caused by the intrusion of childhood recollections on to his perception of the peninsula in his old age.
In his last decades, Thomas’s fascination with such asymmetrical symmetries steadily grew. For him, they were the sites of telling slippages, instances of the unpredictable disruption of the flow of the space–time continuum that was the trace of the eruption of the metaphysical into an otherwise deterministically regulated physical universe. These locations could be found throughout the cosmos, from the immensities of space to the quarks and quirks of the sub-atomic level. And it was along similar fracture lines in human discourse that poetry and hence religion appeared – at those points of slippage in ordinary language use where the bland prose of our everyday life suddenly revealed its inadequacy to account for the whole of our existence. It was at exactly such mysterious points of hiatus that the Church had traditionally positioned itself – until, that is, it had lost its nerve, seeking refuge in everyday language and placing its trust in everyday experience. Now, in his retired, ‘extra-mural’, state R.S. suddenly discovered he could after all be redemptively reconnected to the sacred eccentricities of human being through immersion in the sacred landscape of Llŷn. Such spiritual encounters had been tragically denied to him during his last, increasingly disillusioned, years as a priest of the ‘reformed’ Church in Wales.
Thomas’s most powerful testament to these encounters is Blwyddyn yn Llŷn, a text that, in my opinion, has hitherto received insufficient attention. It includes some of the most ecstatic lyrical writing Thomas ever produced. And it also includes some of the darkest jeremiads of his whole career. It therefore registers the traces of a riven sensibility; of a fractured psyche. Like the episode of clinical depression of which Thomas had spoken in his remarkable confessional letter to Garlick, the symptoms inscribed in the rhythmical alternation between light and dark in this text are related to the trauma attendant upon his split from his Church. Taken at its face value, Blwyddyn yn Llŷn is a nature journal, lovingly tracing the cycle of the seasons on a peninsula suspended in time, like a great bough suspended between sea and sky and smothered with white flowers of cloud. As such, it is another example of Thomas’s attempt to substitute rituals of his own poetic devising for those he had lost in turning his back on his Church. In the absence of the great Church calendar of feasts and festivals, Thomas sets out to turn time sacred – that is, to invest its passage with meaningful spiritual pattern and order – by chronicling the monthly changes that constitute the mysterious rhythm of a natural year, with particularly loving attention to the constantly changing bird population.25
In a humorous aside in the text, Thomas indicates how, on leaving the Church, he has in effect gone native. Wryly noting how the cats from a neighbouring farm seem to seek out the garden of Sarn Rhiw for courting and mating he deplores their incestuous tendencies in tones of mock horror, professing comic outrage at their disregard for his status as retired priest (A, 23). It is a neat comic parable of his new status as ex-vicar now free to walk on the wild side. And walk there he joyously does, uninhibitedly indulging in what – with a frankness he had previously tended to avoid – he now openly labels as ‘nature mysticism’ (A, 19). The complex relationship between his present state and his past life as priest is interestingly revealed in several key passages in the text. April, he recalls, is the month of the Christian Easter when the Church overflowing with flowers reminds him – and here he quotes from a great sacramental poem by the Welsh Catholic Saunders Lewis – of ‘the Father kissing the Son in the white dew’ (A, 131).26 Then comes, he adds, ‘the moment of pure pleasure, when the sun strikes warm on some recess sheltered from the wind, and the willow warbler showers its silver note on you from the arbour above your head’. But next there is an abrupt alteration of tone, as Thomas now confesses with pain that ‘ever since the Church in Wales reformed the Liturgy, I cannot partake of the Sacrament’. The reason he gives has already been quoted above – since the priest now turns to face the congregation at the point of consecration of the wafer, the reformed service violates the mystery that is an inalienable aspect of divine worship.
Here, in miniature, we can see how the nature mysticism of Thomas’s last years, of which Blwyddyn yn Llŷn is the most lyrical record, was rooted in what he did not shrink from terming pain. And it is this psycho-spiritual pain that surfaces frequently as bitter anger – at the condition of Wales and the state of the modern – whenever he reluctantly forces himself in the text to turn from the natural to the human world. The serene, often rapturous, main text of his nature journal is punctuated by angr
y interjections and splenetic outbursts as he rails alike against the influx of heedlessly anglophone visitors into his peninsula and the apathy and docility displayed by its culturally servile inhabitants, deplores modern materialism, champions anti-nuclear activities, and struggles to organise environmental groups. Such causes and complaints as these had long antedated his departure from his Church, of course, but they are now imbued with a new intensity of anguish, occasioned, I would suggest, by his feeling that the Church in Wales itself has capitulated to these malign manifestations of modernity, leaving him spiritually unhoused and exposed.
A halfway house nevertheless seemed to suggest itself as refuge to him from time to time, alluded to in a strikingly enigmatic phrase in one of his letters to Garlick. We are living, he informed his friend, in a ‘post-Davidum wilderness’ (LRG, 112). What could this possibly mean?27 As I have endeavoured to explain at length in a ‘prequel’ to this present essay,28 throughout his long career in the clergy R.S. had entertained the increasingly faint hope that his disestablished Church would eventually come to admit its obligations to Wales by realising it was heir to the ‘indigenous’ Church of the nation – the Celtic Church of the early Christian centuries, whose semi-legendary ‘primate’ had been St David. In bleakly labelling the present age ‘post-Davidum’ he was thus acknowledging the final extinction of a hope that had sustained him as a priest from first virtually to last. Both before retirement and after he would nevertheless wistfully revert to his dream of a spiritual revival of the ‘Celtic’ spirit, but now without any of his early illusions of a rapprochement between it and the modern Church in Wales. As he confessed in The Echoes Return Slow, he sought out unfrequented churches well off the beaten track, ‘Celtic foundations down lanes that one entered with a lifting of the spirit’ (CLP, 53). These were comforting proof that God was not to be ‘worshipped only in cathedrals, where blood drips from regimental standards as from the crucified body of love’. In the stubborn integrity of their silent witness to the ancient past of Christian faith in Wales, such small, plain churches confirmed there was ‘no need for a revised liturgy, for bathetic renderings of the scriptures’. His journeys to such sites were for him the modern day equivalent of medieval pilgrimages through Llŷn to the holy island of Enlli (Bardsey), the fabled resting place of 20,000 saints.
These simple old churches also spoke to him of the many far older prompts to awe and reverence surrounding him in Llŷn, most notably the pre-Cambrian rocks of unimaginable age. Moving the mind to ‘vertigo … from the abyss of time’ (CLP, 55), these were already ‘immemorially old’ in the time of the great poet Dafydd Nanmor, who had commemorated them in a love poem from which Thomas never tired of repeating the celebrated couplet: ‘Mewn moled main a melyn/ Mae’n un lliw â’r maen yn Llŷn’ (‘In a fine kerchief of golden sheen/She’s of the same hue as the rock in Llŷn’) (A, 133). Dafydd Nanmor, he further recalled, antedated the dissolution of the monasteries, and so the poet would have been aware of monks – the spiritual descendants of the Celtic saints – residing on Enlli (Bardsey), directly opposite those ancient yellow rocks, at the very time he was composing his couplet. Such conjunctions resonantly confirmed Thomas in his belief that there had always been an intimate, indissoluble connection between poetry and the sacred.
* * *
But with the house of God now effectively closed to him, Thomas increasingly looked for sanctuary of a kind to the old cottage of Sarn Rhiw, the grace-and-favour retirement home of his wife and himself.29 Built, or rather quarried, from the ancient boulders of the Llŷn peninsula and dating back to at least the eighteenth century, the lowlying cottage cleaves to the contours of its landscape. It nestles self-protectively into a gentle, but exposed, slope above the dramatic shingle of Porth Neigwl, a bay whose shallows used to prove so treacherous in the days of sailing ships that the locals in this isolated spot acquired a reputation for being excellent wreckers. ‘I inhabit a house’, he could there write, ‘whose stone is the language of its builders.’30 For him, the massive boulders of Sarn Rhiw became psychically reassuring guarantors of the long-term survival of the language and faith of its builders. Thomas was deeply aware of ‘cadw tŷ mewn cwmwl tystion’,31 of keeping house in a mystic company at Sarn Rhiw: ‘In the fire/ Of an evening I catch faces/ Staring at me’, he wrote, recalling the impression of ‘Thin, boneless presences’ flitting through his room (CP, 460). He felt himself to be answerable to these companionable but exacting ghosts and wondered whether he would eventually be judged to have been equal to their implicit challenge.
For R. S. Thomas, Sarn Rhiw was much more than an old cottage. As Gaston Bachelard resonantly suggested in The Poetics of Space, poetry offers us abundant evidence that dwellings have the habit of inhabiting our imaginations, of becoming ‘the topography of our intimate being’.32 And it is by bearing this in mind that we may come to see how much Thomas’s cottage resembles a famous tower. The tower in question is that of his favourite poet, W. B. Yeats, through the magic medium of whose poetry the semi-derelict Norman tower he bought in Gort, in the far west of Ireland, and painstakingly restored was turned into a remarkable storehouse of emblems seminal to his extraordinary imaginative existence. For him, Thoor Ballylee, a multi-storied tower with a winding stair, represented the spirit’s ascent to exalted, esoteric knowledge, while in the stubborn persistence of its massive stone walls Yeats discerned signs of the stubborn endurance throughout the centuries of the superior, aristocratic Anglo-Norman cultural tradition of Ireland with which he was so anxious to associate his own thoroughly bourgeois family pedigree. Yeats thus turned his tower into a primary enabling myth of his mature poetry, and R. S. Thomas likewise turned Sarn Rhiw into one of the primary enabling myths of his own late, great period of spiritual search.
Very much against the odds – the Thomases had at first been resistant to the Keating sisters’ offer of refuge at Sarn y Plas – the move to a home ‘on a wooded slope above Porth Neigwl’ turned out to be profoundly auspicious:
The local stone is called dolerite, and a single small piece of it is surprisingly heavy. Some of the stones of the house itself are huge. How the builders managed to get them into place to begin with, no-one knows. They certainly had a talent that has by now disappeared. (A, 91)
How expressive of his own creative temperament that his home should have been made of volcanic rock that had hardened as it cooled. How reassuring that his spiritual fastness was itself fashioned out of the primordial rocks of a liminal peninsula whose landscape had from time immemorial been saturated with the sacred. Llŷn’s seascape, too, was charged with the numinous. ‘From this cottage’, he noted,
one can always hear the sound of the sea, as it is only about a hundred and fifty years away. And sometimes on a still night there comes a sudden tumult from the beach, as the surge from the far Atlantic reaches the end of its journey. (A, 91)
As he repeatedly emphasised in the poetry and prose of his final decades, it was the sea that, from boyhood to old age, had succoured his spiritual needs, repeatedly offering his soul mysterious passage. Not so much retired from his Church as, or so he felt, effectively expelled from it, Thomas turned repeatedly to the ocean for comfort.
A house, Bachelard observed, can serve humans as ‘an instrument with which to confront the cosmos’ (PS, 46). ‘A house that is as dynamic as this’, he writes elsewhere, ‘allows the poet to inhabit the universe. Or, to put it differently, the universe comes to inhabit his house’ (PS, 51). It is for precisely this quality that R.S. came most to appreciate Sarn y Plas. It literally ‘placed’ him in a special relationship to nature, and indeed to the whole cosmos. Thus, in Blwyddyn yn Llŷn/A Year in Llŷn, he recalls how on occasions the cottage seemed almost porous, as tiny bats (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) exercised their ancient right to zigzag at twilight through the house (A, 51). They entered, as they had done for at least three centuries, through the large central chimney.
And then there was light’s miraculous penetration of the co
ttage’s dark interiors. Every time R.S. saw its shaft strike a boulder that had for so long stood in place, he felt like a prisoner briefly released from the confines of his narrow cell (B, 17). Most importantly of all, for the son of a sailor who had been raised in Holyhead and had sea salt in his veins, the cottage ‘was a sounding-box in which the sea’s moods made themselves felt’ (A, 54). ‘The blessing of Sarn Rhiw’, he noted, ‘is that I can look out over Porth Neigwl and spy out what’s happening, what kind of weather it’s making and what is the state of the sea’ (A, 60). That very moment, he added, he had happened to look up and caught the plunge of a gannet just before it hit the water (A, 91). As a result, his late period is notable for its serial meditations on the great waters that, at Sarn Rhiw, constantly met his eyes and haunted his ears. ‘The sea at his window was a shallow sea; a thin counterpane over a buried cantref. There were deeper fathoms to plumb, “les délires des grandes profondeurs”, in which he was under compulsion to give away whatever assurances he possessed’ (CLP, 70).
The French phrase is worth exploring, because it leads us to the fear that was another facet of Thomas’s fascination with the sea. In stanza 33 of ‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’ – a poem known to Thomas – Berryman writes of ‘A delirium of the depths’,33 which commentators have traced to accounts by divers (such as Jacques Cousteau) of suffering from euphoria, and associated hallucination, which can sometimes be fatal. In the context of the poem, the phrase is used by Berryman to express his fear of fatal loss of contact with his own ‘reality principle’, the seventeenth-century American poet Ann Bradstreet. Thomas may have conflated this arresting image of the dangerously seductive power of the sea with the similar treatment of the ocean in one of his favourite French poems, Paul Valéry’s ‘Le Cimitière Marin’, where at the poem’s outset Valèry is hypnotised by the seascape he views from the seaside graveyard: