by R. S. Thomas
And the world will grow to a few lean acres of grass,
And an orchard of stars in the night’s unscaleable boughs.
But see at the bare field’s edge, where he’ll surely pass,
An ash tree wantons with sensuous body and smooth,
Provocative limbs to play the whore to his youth,
Till hurled with hot haste into manhood he woos and weds
A wife half wild, half shy of the ancestral bed,
The crumbling house, and the whisperers on the stairs.
The Rising of Glyndwr
Thunder-browed and shaggy-throated
All the men were there,
And the women with the hair
That is the raven’s and the rook’s despair.
Winds awoke, and vixen-footed
Firelight prowled the glade;
The stars were hooded and the moon afraid
To vex the darkness with her yellow braid.
Then he spoke, and anger kindled
In each brooding eye;
Swords and spears accused the sky,
The woods resounded with a bitter cry.
Beasts gave tongue and barn-owls hooted,
Every branch grew loud
With the menace of that crowd.
That thronged the dark, huge as a thundercloud.
Man and Tree
Study this man; he is older than the tree
That lays its gnarled hand on his meagre shoulder,
And even as wrinkled, for the bladed wind
Ploughs up the surface, as the blood runs colder.
Look at his eyes, that are colourless as rain,
Yet hard and clear, knotted by years of pain.
Look at his locks, that the chill wind has left
With scant reluctance for the sun to bleach.
Notice his mouth and the dry, bird-like tongue,
That flutters and fails at the cracked door of his lips.
Dumb now and sapless? Yet this man can teach,
Even as an oak tree when its leaves are shed,
More in old silence than in youthful song.
Affinity
Consider this man in the field beneath,
Gaitered with mud, lost in his own breath,
Without joy, without sorrow,
Without children, without wife,
Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow,
A vague somnambulist; but hold your tears,
For his name also is written in the Book of Life.
Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers
That rot in your heart’s dust, and what have you to give
To enrich his spirit or the way he lives?
From the standpoint of education or caste or creed
Is there anything to show that your essential need
Is less than his, who has the world for church,
And stands bare-headed in the woods’ wide porch
Morning and evening to hear God’s choir
Scatter their praises? Don’t be taken in
By stinking garments or an aimless grin;
He also is human, and the same small star,
That lights you homeward, has inflamed his mind
With the old hunger, born of his kind.
The Mistress
See how earth claims him as he passes by,
Drawing him reluctant to her ample breast.
But why, when she suckled him, raised him high
In sun and shower, why did she dress
Green sap with sinew, fibre with thigh and thew?
Why has she thrust up through the hollow eye
Her tendril longing for the sky’s far blue?
How could she teach him, by intricate weaving
Of wind and air with the frail bones, craving
For flight and freedom, and suddenly sunder
Dreamer from dream in a mute surrender?
Memories of Yeats Whilst Travelling to Holyhead
How often he went on this journey, think of it, think of it:
The metrical train, the monosyllabic sea,
The listening hilltops, aloof and resentful of strangers.
Who would have refrained from addressing him here, not discerning
The embryonic poem still coiled in the ivory skull?
Boredom or closeness of age might have prompted, his learning
Concealed by his tweed and the azure, ecstatic tie;
But who would have sensed the disdain of his slow reply
Of polite acquiescence in their talk of the beautiful?
Who could have guessed the futility even of praising
Mountain and marsh and the delicate, flickering tree
To one long impervious and cold to the outward scene,
Heedless of nature’s baubles, lost in the amazing
And labyrinth paths of his own impenetrable mind?
But something in the hair’s fine silver, the breadth of brow,
Had kept me dumb, too shy of his scornful anger
To presume to pierce the dark, inscrutable glasses,
His first defence against a material world.
Yet alone with him in the indifferent compartment, hurled
Between the waves’ white audience, the earth’s dim screen,
In mutual silence closer than lover knit
I had known reality dwindle, the dream begin.
Country Church
(Manafon)
The church stands, built from the river stone,
Brittle with light, as though a breath could shatter
Its slender frame, or spill the limpid water,
Quiet as sunlight, cupped within the bone.
It stands yet. But though soft flowers break
In delicate waves round limbs the river fashioned
With so smooth care, no friendly God has cautioned
The brimming tides of fescue for its sake.
Peasant Greeting
No speech; the raised hand affirms
All that is left unsaid
By the mute tongue and the unmoistened lips:
The land’s patience and a tree’s
Knotted endurance and
The heart’s doubt whether to curse or bless,
All packed into a single gesture.
The knees crumble to the downward pull
Of the harsh earth, the eyes,
Fuddled with coldness, have no skill to smile.
Life’s bitter jest is hollow, mirthless he slips
To his long grave under the wave of wind,
That breaks continually on the brittle ear.
A Priest to His People
Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales,
With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females,
How I have hated you for your irreverence, your scorn even
Of the refinements of art and the mysteries of the Church,
I whose invective would spurt like a flame of fire
To be quenched always in the coldness of your stare.
Men of bone, wrenched from the bitter moorland,
Who have not yet shaken the moss from your savage skulls,
Or prayed the peat from your eyes,
Did you detect like an ewe or an ailing wether,
Driven into the undergrowth by the nagging flies,
My true heart wandering in a wood of lies?
You are curt and graceless, yet your sudden laughter
Is sharp and bright as a whipped pool,
When the wind strikes or the clouds are flying;
And all the devices of church and school
Have failed to cripple your unhallowed movements,
Or put a halter on your wild soul.
You are lean and spare, yet your strength is a mockery
Of the pale words in the black Book,
And why should you come like sparrows for prayer crumbs,
Whose hands can dabble in the world’s blood?
I have
taxed your ignorance of rhyme and sonnet,
Your want of deference to the painter’s skill,
But I know, as I listen, that your speech has in it
The source of all poetry, clear as a rill
Bubbling from your lips; and what brushwork could equal
The artistry of your dwelling on the bare hill?
You will forgive, then, my initial hatred,
My first intolerance of your uncouth ways,
You who are indifferent to all that I can offer,
Caring not whether I blame or praise.
With your pigs and your sheep and your sons and holly-cheeked daughters
You will still continue to unwind your days
In a crude tapestry under the jealous heavens
To affront, bewilder, yet compel my gaze.
On a Portrait of Joseph Hone by Augustus John
As though the brute eyes had seen
In the hushed meadows the weasel,
That would tear the soft down of the throat
And suck the veins dry
Of their glittering blood.
And the mouth formed to the cry,
That gushed from the cleft heart
And flowed coldly as spring water over
The stone lips.
Iago Prytherch
Ah, Iago, my friend, whom the ignorant people thought
The last of your kind, since all the wealth you brought
From the age of gold was the yellow dust on your shoes,
Spilled by the meadow flowers, if you should choose
To wrest your barns from the wind and the weather’s claws,
And break the hold of the moss on roof and gable;
If you can till your fields and stand to see
The world go by, a foolish tapestry
Scrawled by the times, and lead your mares to stable,
And dream your dream, and after the earth’s laws
Order your life and faith, then you shall be
The first man of the new community.
The Airy Tomb
Twm was a dunce at school, and was whipped and shaken
More than I care to say, but without avail,
For where one man can lead a horse to the pail
Twenty can’t make him drink what is not to his mind,
And books and sums were poison to Tomos, he was stone blind
To the print’s magic; yet his grass-green eye
Missed nor swoop nor swerve of the hawk’s wing
Past the high window, and the breeze could bring,
Above the babble of the room’s uproar,
Songs to his ear from the sun-dusted moor,
The grey curlew’s whistle and the shrill, far cry
Of circling buzzard ... This was Twm at school,
Subject to nothing but the sky and the wind’s rule.
And then at fourteen term ended and the lad was free.
Scatheless as when he entered, he could write and spell
No more than the clouds could or the dribbling rain,
That scrawled vague messages on the window pane.
And so he returned to the Bwlch to help his father
With the rough work of the farm, to ditch, and gather
The slick ewes from the hill: to milk the cow,
And coax the mare that dragged the discordant plough.
Stepping with one stride thus from boy to man,
His school books finished with, he now began
Learning what none could teach but the hill people
In that cold country, where grass and tree
Are a green heritage more rich and rare
Than a queen’s emerald or an untouched maid.
It were as well to bring the tup to the wild mare,
Or put the heron and the hen to couple,
As mate a stranger from the fat plain
With that gaunt wilderness, where snow is laid
Deadly as leprosy till the first of May,
And a man counts himself lucky if All Saints’ Day
Finds his oats hived in the tottering barn.
But Tomos took to the life like a hillman born;
His work was play after the dull school, and hands,
Shamed by the pen’s awkwardness, toyed with the fleece
Of ewe and wether; eyes found a new peace
Tracing the poems, which the rooks wrote in the sky.
So his shadow lengthened, and the years sped by
With the wind’s quickness; Twm had turned nineteen,
When his father sickened and at the week’s end died,
Leaving him heir to the lean patch of land,
Pinned to the hill-top, and the cloudy acres,
Kept as a sheep-walk. At his mother’s side
He stood in the graveyard, where the undertaker
Sprinkled earth rubble with a loud tattoo
On the cheap coffin; but his heart was hurt
By the gash in the ground, and too few, too few
Were the tears that he dropped for that lonely man
Beginning his journey to annihilation.
He had seen sheep rotting in the wind and sun,
And a hawk floating in a bubbling pool,
Its weedy entrails mocking the breast
Laced with bright water; but the dead and living
Moved hand in hand on the mountain crest
In the calm circle of taking and giving.
A wide sepulchre of brisk, blue air
Was the beasts’ portion, but a mortal’s lot
The boards’ strictness, and an ugly scar
On the earth’s surface, till the deliberate sod
Sealed off for ever the green land he trod.
But the swift grass, that covered the unsightly wound
In the prim churchyard, healed Tomos’ mind
Of its grave-sickness, and December shadows
Dwindled to nothingness in the spring meadows,
That were blowsy with orchis and the loose bog-cotton.
Then the sun strengthened and the hush of June
Settled like lichen on the thick-timbered house,
Where Twm and his mother ate face to face
At the bare table, and each tick of the clock
Was a nail knocked in the lid of the coffin
Of that pale, spent woman, who sat with death
Jogging her elbow through the hot, still days
Of July and August, or passed like a ghost
By the scurrying poultry – it was ever her boast
Not to stay one winter with the goodman cold
In his callous bed. Twm was bumpkin blind
To the vain hysteria of a woman’s mind,
And prated of sheep fairs, but the first frost came
To prove how ungarnished was the truth she told.
Can you picture Tomos now in the house alone,
The room silent, and the last mourner gone
Down the hill pathway? Did he sit by the flame
Of his turf fire and watch till dawn
The slow crumbling of the world he had known?
Did he rebuild out of the ragged embers
A new life, tempered to the sting of sorrow?
Twm went to bed and woke on the grey morrow
To the usual jobbery in sty and stable;
Cleaned out the cow-house, harnessed the mare,
And went prospecting with the keen ploughshare.
Yet sometimes the day was dark, and the clouds remembered,
Herded in the bare lanes of sky, the funeral rite,
And Tomos about the house or set at table
Was aware of something for which he had no name,
Though the one tree, which dripped through the winter night
With a clock’s constancy, tried hard to tell
The insensitive mind what the heart knew well.
But March squalls, making the windows rattle,
Blew great gaps in his thoughts, till Apri
l followed
With a new sweetness, that set the streams gossiping.
On Easter Day he heard the first warbler sing
In the quick ash by the door, and the snow made room
On the sharp turf for the first fumbling lamb.
Docking and grading now until after dark
In the green field or fold, there was too much work
For the mind to wander, though the robin wove
In the young hazel a sweet tale of love.
And what is love to an uncultured youth
In the desolate pastures, but the itch of cattle
At set times and seasons? Twm rarely went down
With his gay neighbours to the petticoat town
In a crook of the valley, and his mind was free
Of the dream pictures which lead to romance.
Hearts and arrows, scribbled at the lane’s entrance,
Were a meaningless symbol, as esoteric
As his school fractions: the one language he knew
Was the shrill scream in the dark, the shadow within the shadow,
The glimmer of flesh, deadly as mistletoe.
Of course there was talk in the parish, girls stood at their doors
In November evenings, their glances busy as moths
Round that far window; and some, whom passion made bolder
As the buds opened, lagged in the bottom meadow
And coughed and called. But never a voice replied
From that grim house, nailed to the mountain side,
For Tomos was up with the lambs, or stealthily hoarding
The last light from the sky in his soul’s crannies.
So the tongues still wagged, and Tomos became a story
To please a neighbour with, or raise the laughter
In the lewd tavern, for folk cannot abide
The inscrutable riddle, posed by their own kin.
And you, hypocrite reader, at ease in your chair,
Do not mock their conduct, for are you not also weary
Of this odd tale, preferring the usual climax?
He was not well-favoured, you think, nor gay, nor rich,
But surely it happened that one of those supple bitches
With the sly haunches angled him into her net
At the male season, or, what is perhaps more romantic,
Some lily-white maid, a clerk or a minister’s daughter,
With delicate hands, and eyes brittle as flowers
Or curved sea-shells, taught him the tender airs
