by R. S. Thomas
Of a true gallant?
No, no, you must face the fact
Of his long life alone in that crumbling house
With winds rending the joints, and the grey rain’s claws
Sharp in the thatch; of his work up on the moors
With the moon for candle, and the shrill rabble of stars
Crowding his shoulders. For Twm was true to his fate,
That wound solitary as a brook through the crimson heather,
Trodden only by sheep, where youth and age
Met in the circle of a buzzard’s flight
Round the blue axle of heaven; and a fortnight gone
Was the shy soul from the festering flesh and bone
When they found him there, entombed in the lucid weather.
Spring Equinox
Do not say, referring to the sun,
‘Its journey northward has begun,’
As though it were a bird, annually migrating,
That now returns to build in the rich trees
Its nest of golden grass. Do not belie
Its lusty health with words such as imply
A pallid invalid recuperating.
The age demands the facts, therefore be brief –
Others will sense the simile – and say:
‘We are turning towards the sun’s indifferent ray.’
The Welsh Hill Country
Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
Gnawing the skin from the small bones,
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,
Arranged romantically in the usual manner
On a bleak background of bald stone.
Too far for you to see
The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys,
The nettles growing through the cracked doors,
The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira,
There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight,
And the fields are reverting to the bare moor.
Too far, too far to see
The set of his eyes and the slow pthisis
Wasting his frame under the ripped coat,
There’s a man still farming at Ty’n-y-Fawnog,
Contributing grimly to the accepted pattern,
The embryo music dead in his throat.
Song for Gwydion
When I was a child and the soft flesh was forming
Quietly as snow on the bare boughs of bone,
My father brought me trout from the green river
From whose chill lips the water song had flown.
Dull grew their eyes, the beautiful, blithe garland
Of stipples faded, as light shocked the brain;
They were the first sweet sacrifice I tasted,
A young god, ignorant of the blood’s stain.
Maes-yr-Onnen
Though I describe it stone by stone, the chapel
Left stranded in the hurrying grass,
Painting faithfully the mossed tiles and the tree,
The one listener to the long homily
Of the ministering wind, and the dry, locked doors,
And the stale piety, mouldering within;
You cannot share with me that rarer air,
Blue as a flower and heady with the scent
Of the years past and others yet to be,
That brushed each window and outsoared the clouds’
Far foliage with its own high canopy.
You cannot hear as I, incredulous, heard
Up in the rafters, where the bell should ring,
The wild, sweet singing of Rhiannon’s birds.
The Old Language
England, what have you done to make the speech
My fathers used a stranger at my lips,
An offence to the ear, a shackle on the tongue
That would fit new thoughts to an abiding tune?
Answer me now. The workshop where they wrought
Stands idle, and thick dust covers their tools.
The blue metal of streams, the copper and gold
Seams in the wood are all unquarried; the leaves’
Intricate filigree falls, and who shall renew
Its brisk pattern? When spring wakens the hearts
Of the young children to sing, what song shall be theirs?
The Evacuee
She woke up under a loose quilt
Of leaf patterns, woven by the light
At the small window, busy with the boughs
Of a young cherry; but wearily she lay,
Waiting for the syren, slow to trust
Nature’s deceptive peace, and then afraid
Of the long silence, she would have crept
Uneasily from the bedroom with its frieze
Of fresh sunlight, had not a cock crowed,
Shattering the surface of that limpid pool
Of stillness, and before the ripples died
One by one in the field’s shallows,
The farm awoke with uninhibited din.
And now the noise and not the silence drew her
Down the bare stairs at great speed.
The sounds and voices were a rough sheet
Waiting to catch her, as though she leaped
From a scorched story of the charred past.
And there the table and the gallery
Of farm faces trying to be kind
Beckoned her nearer, and she sat down
Under an awning of salt hams.
And so she grew, a shy bird in the nest
Of welcome that was built about her,
Home now after so long away
In the flowerless streets of the drab town.
The men watched her busy with the hens,
The soft flesh ripening warm as corn
On the sticks of limbs, the grey eyes clear,
Rinsed with dew of their long dread.
The men watched her, and, nodding, smiled
With earth’s charity, patient and strong.
The Ancients of the World
The salmon lying in the depths of Llyn Llifon,
Secretly as a thought in a dark mind,
Is not so old as the owl of Cwm Cowlyd
Who tells her sorrow nightly on the wind.
The ousel singing in the woods of Cilgwri,
Tirelessly as a stream over the mossed stones,
Is not so old as the toad of Cors Fochno
Who feels the cold skin sagging round his bones.
The toad and the ousel and the stag of Rhedynfre,
That has cropped each leaf from the tree of life,
Are not so old as the owl of Cwm Cowlyd,
That the proud eagle would have to wife.
Depopulation of the Hills
Leave it, leave it – the hole under the door
Was a mouth through which the rough wind spoke
Ever more sharply; the dank hand
Of age was busy on the walls
Scrawling in blurred characters
Messages of hate and fear.
Leave it, leave it – the cold rain began
At summer end – there is no road
Over the bog, and winter comes
With mud above the axletree.
Leave it, leave it – the rain dripped
Day and night from the patched roof
Sagging beneath its load of sky.
Did the earth help them, time befriend
These last survivors? Did the spring grass
Heal winter’s ravages? The grass
Wrecked them in its draughty tides,
Grew from the chimney-stack like smoke,
Burned its way through the weak timbers.
That was nature’s jest, the sides
Of the old hulk cracked, but not with mirth.
The Gap in the Hedge
That man, Prytherch, with the torn cap,
I saw him often, framed in the gap
Between two hazels wi
th his sharp eyes,
Bright as thorns, watching the sunrise
Filling the valley with its pale yellow
Light, where the sheep and the lambs went haloed
With grey mist lifting from the dew.
Or was it a likeness that the twigs drew
With bold pencilling upon that bare
Piece of the sky? For he’s still there
At early morning, when the light is right
And I look up suddenly at a bird’s flight.
Cynddylan on a Tractor
Ah, you should see Cynddylan on a tractor.
Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil;
He’s a new man now, part of the machine,
His nerves of metal and his blood oil.
The clutch curses, but the gears obey
His least bidding, and lo, he’s away
Out of the farmyard, scattering hens.
Riding to work now as a great man should,
He is the knight at arms breaking the fields’
Mirror of silence, emptying the wood
Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays.
The sun comes over the tall trees
Kindling all the hedges, but not for him
Who runs his engine on a different fuel.
And all the birds are singing, bills wide in vain,
As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.
The Hill Farmer Speaks
I am the farmer, stripped of love
And thought and grace by the land’s hardness;
But what I am saying over the fields’
Desolate acres, rough with dew,
Is, Listen, listen, I am a man like you.
The wind goes over the hill pastures
Year after year, and the ewes starve,
Milkless, for want of the new grass.
And I starve, too, for something the spring
Can never foster in veins run dry.
The pig is a friend, the cattle’s breath
Mingles with mine in the still lanes;
I wear it willingly like a cloak
To shelter me from your curious gaze.
The hens go in and out at the door
From sun to shadow, as stray thoughts pass
Over the floor of my wide skull.
The dirt is under my cracked nails;
The tale of my life is smirched with dung;
The phlegm rattles. But what I am saying
Over the grasses rough with dew
Is, Listen, listen, I am a man like you.
The Tree
Owain Glyn Dŵr Speaks
Gruffudd Llwyd put into my head
The strange thought, singing of the dead
In awdl and cywydd to the harp,
As though he plucked with each string
The taut fibres of my being.
Accustomed to Iolo and his praise
Of Sycharth with its brown beer,
Meat from the chase, fish from the weir,
Its proud women sipping wine,
I had equated the glib bards
With flattery and the expected phrase,
Tedious concomitants of power.
But Gruffudd Llwyd with his theme
Of old princes in whose veins
Swelled the same blood that sweetened mine
Pierced my lethargy, I heard
Above the tuneful consonants
The sharp anguish, the despair
Of men beyond my smooth domain
Fretting under the barbed sting
Of English law, starving among
The sleek woods no longer theirs.
And I remembered that old nurse
Prating of omens in the sky
When I was born, the heavens inflamed
With meteors and the stars awry.
I shunned the thought, there was the claim
Of wife and young ones, my first care,
And Sycharth, too; I would dismiss
Gruffudd. But something in his song
Stopped me, held me; the bright harp
Was strung with fire, the music burned
All but the one green thought away.
The thought grew to a great tree
In the full spring time of the year;
The far tribes rallied to its green
Banner waving in the wind;
Its roots were nourished with their blood.
And days were fair under those boughs;
The dawn foray, the dusk carouse
Bred the stout limb and blither heart
That marked us of Llywelyn’s brood.
It was with us as with the great;
For one brief hour the summer came
To the tree’s branches and we heard
In the green shade Rhiannon’s birds
Singing tirelessly as the streams
That pluck glad tunes from the grey stones
Of Powys of the broken hills.
The music ceased, the obnoxious wind
And frost of autumn picked the leaves
One by one from the gaunt boughs;
They fell, some in a gold shower
About its roots, but some were hurled
Out of my sight, out of my power,
Over the face of the grim world.
It is winter still in the bare tree
That sprang from the seed which Gruffudd sowed
In my hot brain in the long nights
Of wine and music on the hearth
Of Sycharth of the open gates.
But here at its roots I watch and wait
For the new spring so long delayed;
And he who stands in the light above
And sets his ear to the scarred bole,
Shall hear me tell from the deep tomb
How sorrow may bud the tree with tears,
But only his blood can make it bloom.
Death of a Peasant
You remember Davies? He died, you know,
With his face to the wall, as the manner is
Of the poor peasant in his stone croft
On the Welsh hills. I recall the room
Under the slates, and the smirched snow
Of the wide bed in which he lay,
Lonely as an ewe that is sick to lamb
In the hard weather of mid-March.
I remember also the trapped wind
Tearing the curtains, and the wild light’s
Frequent hysteria upon the floor,
The bare floor without a rug
Or mat to soften the loud tread
Of neighbours crossing the uneasy boards
To peer at Davies with gruff words
Of meaningless comfort, before they turned
Heartless away from the stale smell
Of death in league with those dank walls.
The Unborn Daughter
On her unborn in the vast circle
Concentric with our finite lives;
On her unborn, her name uncurling
Like a young fern within the mind;
On her unclothed with flesh or beauty
In the womb’s darkness, I bestow
The formal influence of the will,
The wayward influence of the heart,
Weaving upon her fluid bones
The subtle fabric of her being,
Hair, hands and eyes, the body’s texture,
Shot with the glory of the soul.
Welsh History
We were a people taut for war; the hills
Were no harder, the thin grass
Clothed them more warmly than the coarse
Shirts our small bones.
We fought, and were always in retreat,
Like snow thawing upon the slopes
Of Mynydd Mawr; and yet the stranger
Never found our ultimate stand
In the thick woods, declaiming verse
To the sharp prompting of the harp.
Our kings died, or they were slain
By the old treachery at the ford.
Our bards perished, driven from the halls
Of nobles by the thorn and bramble.
We were a people bred on legends,
Warming our hands at the red past.
The great were ashamed of our loose rags
Clinging stubbornly to the proud tree
Of blood and birth, our lean bellies
And mud houses were a proof
Of our ineptitude for life.
We were a people wasting ourselves
In fruitless battles for our masters,
In lands to which we had no claim,
With men for whom we felt no hatred.
We were a people, and are so yet.
When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs
Under the table, or gnawing the bones
Of a dead culture, we will arise
And greet each other in a new dawn.
Welsh Landscape
To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went to the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for instance,
The soft consonants
Strange to the ear.
There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon,
And thick ambush of shadows,
Hushed at the fields’ corners.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.
Valediction
You failed me, farmer, I was afraid you would
The day I saw you loitering with the cows,
Yourself one of them but for the smile,
Vague as moonlight, cast upon your face
From some dim source, whose nature I mistook.
