All That is Wales
Page 28
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!
What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
What peace I feel begotten at that source!
When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
Time’s air is sparkling, dream is certainty –
Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.34
He is saved from this dangerous illusion of complete serene transcendence by the graveyard, which literally brings him back to earth, to the time-bound existence that links him to the bodies buried there.35 What ‘les délires des grandes profondeurs’ therefore seems to suggest, as used by Thomas, is how aware he was, after slipping the anchor of his Church, of the dangers of ‘the deeper fathoms’ that lured him away even from such tentative spiritual ‘certainties’ as had hitherto sustained him.
One of the most important countervailing forces at work within and upon him, he came to realise, was the strong tie of affection between him and his wife. It was living at Sarn Rhiw that helped him appreciate, for one final, conclusive time, how much he owed Elsie, and how deeply indebted he was to her quiet, self-effacing, cherishing, and nurturing love; to the steadying constancy of her fidelities. To him she was what Bradstreet was to Berryman; his Muse, the better angel of his nature, his guardian spirit, protecting him from himself. ‘I look out over the timeless sea’, he wrote:
over the head of one, calendar
to time’s passing, who is now open
at the last month, her hair wintry. (CLP, 71)
Even as he wrote this poem, he must have been painfully aware that the time remaining to them together would be very short. Elsie passed away in 1991, and with her passing, Sarn Rhiw came, for R.S., to assume one final complexion.
From the beginning, one of his images of the cottage had been that of a hermitage, with himself as hermit.36 ‘The poverty of the spirit must be extended to the flesh, too; books given away, furniture dispensed with; paintings that give colour to expanses of white wall, stored away in the loft’ (CLP, 64). After his wife’s death, he returned to this image with a haunting intensity, turning his bare, tiny bedroom into a monk’s cell:
Few possessions: a chair,
a table, a bed
to say my prayers by,
and, gathered from the shore,
the bone-like, crossed sticks
proving that nature
acknowledges the Crucifixion. (CLP, 246)
Back in 1967, he had congratulated his friend, Raymond Garlick, for adjusting to a small room whose window ‘opens on eternity’. ‘An eternity of what’, he’d mordantly added, ‘is the question’ (LRG, 70). Now his physically and emotionally straitened surroundings at Sarn y Plas prompted his imagination to range far and wide throughout the wide, diverse, world of the spirit, freed from any obligation to confine itself within the bounds of ‘his’ Church’s beliefs. The great poetry of his final years are a record of these speculative excursions. By now, he regarded himself as a thoroughly ‘retired Christian’, as he’d provocatively phrased it to Garlick on his departure from the Church in 1978 (LRG, 102). He had, we’ll remember, later glossed his remark by explaining that he couldn’t ‘bring myself to agree that Christianity is the only way, as so many dogmatists claim’. But he’d also admitted that ‘it is certainly one of the great ways and for one brought up in the European tradition, there is little point in turning to one of the other ways’. In moving from Aberdaron to Sarn Rhiw, he may have exchanged the grand body of the Church for a ‘cell’ but, for him as a poet at least, the view had improved as a result, and as a ‘pilgrim’ of the spirit, he was convinced his outlook had been immeasurably extended.
(Essay commissioned by R. S. Thomas Centre, Bangor University.)
Notes
1Jason Walford Davies (ed.), R. S. Thomas: Letters to Raymond Garlick, 1951–1999 (Llandysul: Gomer, 2009), p. 101. Hereafter LRG.
2Raymond Garlick, poet, critic and educationalist, was at this time experiencing a crisis of faith in the Catholic Church to which he had converted as an adult and about some of whose neglected Welsh martyrs he wrote some fine poems. The crisis eventually resulted in his leaving the Church.
3R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, 1988–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2004), p. 63. Hereafter CLP.
4Jason Walford Davies, trans., R. S. Thomas, Autobiographies: Y Llwybrau Gynt/ Former Paths; Hunanladdiad y Llenor/The Creative Writer’s Suicide; Neb/No-One; Blwyddyn yn Llŷn/A Year in Llŷn (London: Dent, 1997), 89. Hereafter A.
5Y Llan (7 Ionawr 1966), 5; and Y Llan (28 Ionawr 1966), 4.
6Y Llan (29 Ebrill 1966), 6–7.
7Y Llan (7 Mawrth 1966), 1.
8Y Llan (21 Mawrth 1966), 1.
9Y Llan (21 Mawrth 1966), 8.
10Y Llan (18 Chwefror 1972), 4.
11Y Llan (6 Mai 1972), 4.
12Y Llan (21 Ebrill 1967), 7–8.
13Y Llan (Mawrth 1969), 4.
14Y Llan (7 Mai 1965), 2.
15Y Llan (25 Mehefin 1965), 4.
16Y Llan (Ebrill 1966), 7.
17John Ormond, ‘Priest and Poet’, a transcript of his film for BBC TV, broadcast on 2 April 1972, Poetry Wales: Special R. S. Thomas Number (Spring 1972), 52–4.
18Sandra Anstey (ed.), R. S. Thomas: Selected Prose (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1983), p. 90.
19See, for instance, Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth: Christian Press, 1976); Stanley Romaino Hopper, R. Melvin Kaiser, and Tony Stoneburner (eds), The Way of Imagination: Religious Imagination as Theopoetics (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1992).
20George Steiner, Real Presences: Is there Anything in What we Say? (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. 228–9. Hereafter RP.
21‘Let me commend to your notice Tenebrae, Geoffrey Hill’s new book’, he wrote to Raymond Garlick at Christmas, 1978, the year of his retirement: ‘He is a fine poet, certainly the best now writing in English. I wish I wrote with his economy and intelligence’ (LRG, 110).
22Eleanor J. McNees, Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1992), p. 17. Hereafter EP.
23See the preceding chapter.
24See, for instance, ‘Time’s Changeling’, ch. 8 in M. Wynn Thomas, R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), pp. 193–218; Barbara Prys-Williams, ‘“A Consciousness in Search of its Own Truth”: Some Aspects of R. S. Thomas’s The Echoes Return Slow as Autobiography’, Welsh Writing in English, 2 (1996), 98–125.
25There is here an analogy with Henry Vaughan. It was after, and I suspect because of, his effective ‘expulsion’ from his beloved Church in the valley of the Usk by the militant Puritan ascendancy of the Cromwellian period that the Silurist turned to producing the two volumes of Silex Scintillans.
26‘Ascension Thursday’, in Joseph P. Clancy, trans., Saunders Lewis, Selected Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), p. 35. The poem infuses the wonders of a May morning with sacramental import: ‘Look at them, at the gold of the bloom and the laburnum./ The glowing surplice on the hawthorn’s shoulders/ The alert emerald of the grass, and the tranquil calves;// See the chestnut-tree’s candelabra alight’.
27The context is as follows: ‘A neighbouring vicar was here yesterday asking me to give a Lenten talk. Enid Pierce Roberts on March 1 on Dewi Sant. And I on the 18th. What would my title be? Ar ôl Dewi. I said.’ The Welsh phrase translates as ‘After Dewi’, but may be also understood as ‘Following Dewi’, where ‘following’ refers both to mere succession and to active discipleship. While ‘post Davidum wilderness’ builds on the former sense, the context alerts us to the second, which would obviously apply to the state of a Thomas who had refused to become lost, along with his Church, in a cultural and spiritual wilderness.
28In ‘Yr Hen Fam’ (previous chapter, I make extensive
reference to Thomas’s identification with Dewi Sant in the context of his disgust with the lack of Welshness of his supposedly disestablished Church.
29What follows draws in parts on materials of mine that have already appeared in print elsewhere.
30R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Dent, Phoenix, 1993), p. 460. Hereafter CP.
31The celebrated phrase is from Waldo Williams, ‘Pa Beth yw Dyn?’, in Dail Pren (Aberystwyth: Gwasg Aberystwyth, 1971), p. 67. It captures what it means to live consciously as part of a national collective of long, stubborn, persistence.
32Maria Jolas, trans., Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. xxxvi. Hereafter PS.
33John Berryman, ‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’, in Selected Poems, 1938–1968 (London: Faber, 1972), pp. 45–66, Stanza 33, 57.
34Paul Valéry, ‘Le Cimitière Marin’, translated by C. Day Lewis as ‘The Graveyard by the Sea’, http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/fr/valery.daylewis.html (accessed 30 September 2013). Towards the end of the poem, Valéry invokes the sea as ‘[la] grande mer de delires douée’ (‘mighty sea with … wild frenzies gifted’).
35In his early essay (1946) ‘Some Contemporary Scottish Writing’, Thomas enthuses over ‘Douglas Young’s magnificent rendering of Valéry’s “Le Cimitière Marin” and interestingly, at that point in his career, singles out not a passage about the sea but one about the cemetery in which the dead are interred: ‘But i’ their nicht, wechtit wi marble stane,/ A drowsie fowk, down at the tree ruits lain,/ hae sideit si you i slaw solemnitie’ (Anstey, Selected Prose, p. 30). He later included Young’s translation in his Penguin Book of Religious Verse.
36One of the many things he admired about his great hero, Saunders Lewis, was how in his later years he had become a ‘recluse … himself his hermitage’ (CP, 466).
9
VERNON WATKINS: TALIESIN IN GOWER
I have an interest to declare: Vernon Watkins has, on two occasions, been a very close neighbour of mine. His room was little distant from mine in 1966, the year in which I took up my first appointment as a very young, and very callow, Assistant Lecturer at University College of Swansea. It was the year before he was to pass away, in his early sixties, on a tennis court in distant Seattle: and in many ways his international reputation as a substantial poet, envied by his great friend Dylan Thomas, and admired by Yeats and Eliot, passed away with him. At Swansea his absent-mindedness became as much of a campus legend as his unselfconsciously bardic bearing. He was rumoured not only to wear his room key around his neck but to kneel down to open the door, because he couldn’t risk losing the key by removing it. And from his year’s residency as writer in the Department of English I warmly remember the occasion when, gentle, generous and courteous as ever, he accepted the invitation to come and talk, in a characteristically rapt and intense manner, to a very small group of us about his cherished acquaintance with Eliot and the insights that had given him into Four Quartets. In 1997 he again became my neighbour, after a fashion, when my wife and I moved to live in our present home, just three doors away from ‘Y Garth’, Watkins’s home on the magnificent dramatically striated limestone cliffs of south Gower. On my daily walks there I continue to sense his sinewy presence, long-striding across the cliffs, gazing seaward or beachcombing in stunning Three Cliffs bay; I hear his voice raised in argument with his great friend Dylan Thomas, or as he plays cricket boisterously with his children in the back garden.
This is unmistakably his patch; the native territory of his imagination. He is, in quite an important sense, a Gower poet. It was on those ‘curved cliffs’ that, during the Second World War, he felt it fitting to
remember the drowned,
To imagine them clearly for whom the sea no longer cares,
To deny the language of the thistle, to meet their foot-firm tread Across the dark-sown tares, (CP, 7)1
And it was on these cliff-tops he realised that ‘Art holds in wind the way the ravens build’ (CP, 183) and where he tried to mortise his vision if not in granite, like Whitman, then in Gower limestone:
Stand to time now, my Muse,
Unwavering, like this rock
The mated ravens use,
Building against the shock
Of dawn, a throne in the air
Above the labouring sea,
Yet fine as a child’s hair
Because great industry
Accomplishes no art
To match the widespread wing
Riding the heavens apart,
A lost, yet living thing. (CP, 182)
The beautiful Gower peninsula, sticking out its scrawny neck to the west of blitzed Swansea, was to him what Shoreham was to Samuel Palmer; or Cookham to Stanley Spencer – it was the visible form of his visionary imagination, where ‘All that I see with my sea-changed eyes is a vision too great for the brain’ (CP, 185). Here he loosened his ‘music to the listening, eavesdropping sea’. In his poetry he created a textual map of this soulscape, finding Yeatsian emblems everywhere – in the sudden autumn reappearance of Bishopston Stream where it trickled into Pwlldu; in the stories of smugglers in Hunt’s Bay, successfully evading the excise men; and in the Bristol Channel shipwrecks and the debris washed ashore. Everywhere he found dramatic symbolic expression of the timeless, eternal, dimension of the tempestuously changeful temporal order. It was there in the collision between ‘flying, flagellant waves’ and intransigent rock; it was there in Paviland Cave, where the oldest skeleton in Britain was discovered, reminder of the ancientness of this peninsula, some of whose earliest inhabitants were coeval with those who produced the great cave drawings of Europe; and it was there at incomparable Rhossili and Worm’s Head, where Gower, become ‘the world’s very verge’, turned into a finger of land pointed dramatically not only across the Atlantic towards America, but, for Watkins, into infinity itself:
Pushed out from the rocks, pushed far by old thought, long into night, into starlight, …
Rhossili! Spindle of the moon! Turning-place of winds, end of Earth, and of Gower! (CP, 119)
Watkins was nothing if not a visionary poet, keeping proud aloof company with those Immortals whom he regarded as the elect of the ages, those ‘poets, in whom truth lives’ – from Dante through Blake to Hölderlin and Heine and the other great German Romantics, and from the French Symbolists to George, Rilke – and, above all, the incomparable Yeats. In becoming a poet, Watkins chose to be reborn as Taliesin in Gower. For him, poetry had to be exalted, rapt, time-defying, fixated on eternity; rhythmically it had to be ritualistic, incantatory and consciousness-altering; sonically it had to become the echo-chamber of the Soul – a word Watkins was not shy of using; and, of course, the native language of soul poetry was symbolism, since he was convinced that the ultimate, eternal truths cannot be rationally known, they can only be imaginatively symbolised. And whereas Dylan Thomas, that serpent in Watkins’s bosom, was a Freudian symbolist, Watkins was incorrigibly Jungian, believing in the persistence, the recurrence, in every person’s unconscious, of archaic images embodying eternal, universal truths. Indeed, for all its emphasis on process, metamorphosis and allied forms of reproduction, Watkins’s poetry is essentially a sex-free zone. Which is, perhaps, one of its many significant limitations. Except when couched in the circumspect language of myth, there is no acknowledgement of the sexual dynamic of what Walt Whitman famously called ‘the procreant urge of the world’.
Contemporary with Watkins was another great Gower artist – the painter Ceri Richards, from Dunvant. He, too, was obsessed with the mysterious metamorphosis of forms that constituted the living universe; his great subject, too, was the Cycle of Life; he, too, was haunted by Jung’s disclosure of the ancient symbols of permanent truths lodged deep in every human psyche at every time and in every place.2 Early a friend of Dylan Thomas, like Watkins, Richards eventually became a close friend of Watkins too, and produced an important series of late images in homage to his work.3 As there were very deep a
ffinities between the creative imaginations of these two remarkable Gower artists, this essay will be punctuated by references to some of Richards’s most celebrated images.
Watkins’s poetry is sadly no longer highly rated by the cognoscenti. It’s as if he’d tried his very darnedest to be totally resistant to present-day taste. It may be possible to squeeze out some sympathy for him as a poet of his time – a Neo-Romantic, or New Apocalypse writer, say, who was totally unable to redeem himself by reinvention when the Movement swept all that old nonsense away, installing Larkin, Watkins’s one-time admirer, as its great poet. But there isn’t much I can do to make him look really respectable, let alone cool, from today’s streetwise, self-conscious, postmodernist, radically ironic and ruthlessly deconstructive point of view, when poets and poetry I very much like prefer to dress casual and serve verbal takeaways in disposable textual trays. In his white Druidic singing robes Watkins offers himself up as a lamb to the slaughter – and indeed, if his core innocence protects him from the obvious charge of pretentiousness, it is also provocative: it can bring out the devil in even a well-disposed reader such as myself.
Dylan Thomas remains far and away the best of Watkins’s critics, once necessary allowance has been made for the self-interested and self-serving nature of some of his remarks. Watkins was, Thomas cruelly but correctly noted, prone to ‘elongate a thin nothing; a long, grey, weeping sausage’; ‘All the words are lovely’, he remarked to Watkins of one poem,
but they seem so chosen, not struck out. I can see the sensitive picking of words, but none of the strong, inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event, a happening, an action perhaps, not a still life … They seem … to come out of the nostalgia of literature.4