by R. S. Thomas
Only for what the flat earth supplies;
His wisdom dwindled to a small gift
For handling stock, planting a few seeds
To ripen slowly in the warm breath
Of an old God to whom he never prays.
Moving through the fields, or still at home,
Dwarfed by his shadow on the bright wall,
His face is lit always from without,
The sun by day, the red fire at night;
Within is dark and bare, the grey ash
Is cold now, blow on it as you will.
In a Country Church
To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.
No Through Road
All in vain. I will cease now
My long absorption with the plough,
With the tame and the wild creatures
And man united with the earth.
I have failed after many seasons
To bring truth to birth,
And nature’s simple equations
In the mind’s precincts do not apply.
But where to turn? Earth endures
After the passing, necessary shame
Of winter, and the old lie
Of green places beckons me still
From the new world, ugly and evil,
That men pry for in truth’s name.
Border Blues
All along the border the winds blow
Eastward from Wales, and the rivers flow
Eastward from Wales with the roads and the railways,
Reversing the path of the old migrations.
And the winds say, It is April, bringing scents
Of dead heroes and dead saints.
But the rivers are surly with brown water
Running amok, and the men to tame them
Are walking the streets of a far town.
Spring is here and the birds are singing;
Spring is here and the bells are ringing
In country churches, but not for a bride.
The sexton breaks the unleavened earth
Over the grave.
Are there none to marry?
There is still an Olwen teasing a smile
Of bright flowers out of the grass,
Olwen in nylons. Quick, quick,
Marry her someone. But Arthur leers
And turns again to the cramped kitchen
Where the old mother sits with her sons and daughters
At the round table. Ysbaddaden Penkawr’s
Cunning was childish measured with hers.
*
I was going up the road and Beuno beside me
Talking in Latin and old Welsh,
When a volley of voices struck us; I turned,
But Beuno had vanished, and in his place
There stood the ladies from the council houses:
Blue eyes and Birmingham yellow
Hair, and the ritual murder of vowels.
Excuse me, I said, I have an appointment
On the high moors; it’s the first of May
And I must go the way of my fathers
Despite the loneli – you might say rudeness.
Sheep song round me in the strong light;
The ancient traffic of glad birds
Returning to breed in the green sphagnum –
What am I doing up here alone
But paying homage to a bleak, stone
Monument to an evicted people?
Go back, go back; from the rough heather
The grouse repels me, and with slow step
I turn to go, but down not back.
*
Eryr Pengwern, penngarn llwyt heno ...
We still come in by the Welsh gate, but it’s a long way
To Shrewsbury now from the Welsh border.
There’s the train, of course, but I like the ’buses;
We go each Christmas to the pantomime:
It was ‘The Babes’ this year, all about nature.
On the way back, when we reached the hills –
All black they were with a trimming of stars –
Some of the old ones got sentimental,
Singing Pantycelyn; but we soon drowned them;
It’s funny, these new tunes are easy to learn.
We reached home at last, but diawl ! I was tired.
And to think that my grand-dad walked it each year,
Scythe on shoulder to mow the hay,
And his own waiting when he got back.
*
Mi sydd fachgen ifanc, ffôl,
Yn byw yn ôl fy ffansi.
Riding on a tractor.
Whistling tunes
From the world’s dance-halls;
Dreaming of the girl, Ceridwen,
With the red lips,
And red nails.
Coming in late,
Rising early
To flog the carcase
Of the brute earth;
A lad of the ’fifties,
Gay, tough,
I sit, as my fathers have done,
In the back pews on Sundays
And have fun.
*
Going by the long way round the hedges;
Speaking to no one, looking north
At every corner, she comes from the wise man.
Five lengths of yarn from palm to elbow
Wound round the throat, then measured again
Till the yarn shrinks, a cure for jaundice.
Hush, not a word. When we’ve finished milking
And the stars are quiet, we’ll get out the car
And go to Llangurig; the mare’s bewitched
Down in the pasture, letting feg
Tarnish the mirror of bright grass.
*
Six drops in a bottle,
And an old rhyme
Scratched on a slate
With stone pencil:
Abracadabra,
Count three, count nine;
Bury it in your neighbour’s field
At bed-time.
*
As I was saying, I don’t hold with war
Myself, but when you join your unit
Send me some of your brass buttons
And I’ll have a shot at the old hare
In the top meadow, for the black cow
Is a pint short each morning now.
Be careful, mind where you’re going.
These headlights dazzle, their bright blade
Reaps us a rich harvest of shadow.
But when they have gone, it is darker still,
And the vixen moves under the hill
With a new boldness, fretting her lust
To rawness on the unchristened grass.
It’s easy to stray from the main road
And find yourself at the old domen.
I once heard footsteps in the leaves,
And saw men hiding behind the trunks
Of the trees. I never went there again,
Though that was at night, and the night is different.
The day divides us, but at night
We meet in the inn and warm our hearts
At the red beer with yarn and song;
Despite our speech we are not English,
And our wit is sharp as an axe yet,
Finding the bone beneath the skin
And the soft marrow in the bone.
We are not English ... Ni bydd diwedd
Byth ar sŵn y delyn aur.
Though the strings are broken, and time sets
The barbed wire in their place,
The tune endures; on the crac
ked screen
Of life our shadows are large still
In history’s fierce afterglow.
Temptation of a Poet
The temptation is to go back,
To make tryst with the pale ghost
Of an earlier self, to summon
To the mind’s hearth, as I would now,
You, Prytherch, there to renew
The lost poetry of our talk
Over the embers of that world
We built together; not built either,
But found lingering on the farm
As sun lingers about the corn
That in the stackyard makes its own light.
And if I yield and you come
As in the old days with nature’s
Lore green on your tongue,
Your coat a sack, pinned at the corners
With the rain’s drops, could the talk begin
Where it left off? Have I not been
Too long away? There is a flaw
In your first premise, or else the mind’s
Acid sours the soft light
That charmed me.
Prytherch, I am undone;
The past calls with the cool smell
Of autumn leaves, but the mind draws
Me onward blind with the world’s dust,
Seeking a spring that my heart fumbles.
Evans
Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle’s
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.
It was not the dark filling my eyes
And mouth appalled me; not even the drip
Of rain like blood from the one tree
Weather-tortured. It was the dark
Silting the veins of that sick man
I left stranded upon the vast
And lonely shore of his bleak bed.
On Hearing a Welshman Speak
And as he speaks time turns,
The swift years revolve
Backwards. There Goronwy comes
Again to his own shore.
Now in a mountain parish
The words leave the Book
To swarm in the honeyed mind
Of Morgan. Glyn Dŵr stands
And sees the flames fall back
Like waves from the charred timbers
Before taking his place
Behind the harp’s slack bars
From which the singer called him.
Look, in this resinous church,
As the long prayers are wound
Once more on the priest’s tongue,
Dafydd reproves his eyes’
Impetuous falconry
About the kneeling girl.
Stones to the walls fly back,
The gay manors are full
Of music; the poets return
To feed at the royal tables.
Who dreams of failure now
That the oak woods are loud
With the last hurrying feet
Seeking the English plain?
Chapel Deacon
Who put that crease in your soul,
Davies, ready this fine morning
For the staid chapel, where the Book’s frown
Sobers the sunlight? Who taught you to pray
And scheme at once, your eyes turning
Skyward, while your swift mind weighs
Your heifer’s chances in the next town’s
Fair on Thursday? Are your heart’s coals
Kindled for God, or is the burning
Of your lean cheeks because you sit
Too near that girl’s smouldering gaze?
Tell me, Davies, for the faint breeze
From heaven freshens and I roll in it,
Who taught you your deft poise?
Green Categories
You never heard of Kant, did you, Prytherch?
A strange man ! What would he have said
Of your life here, free from the remote
War of antinomies; free also
From mind’s uncertainty faced with a world
Of its own making?
Here all is sure;
Things exist rooted in the flesh,
Stone, tree and flower. Even while you sleep
In your low room, the dark moor exerts
Its pressure on the timbers. Space and time
Are not the mathematics that your will
Imposes, but a green calendar
Your heart observes; how else could you
Find your way home or know when to die
With the slow patience of the men who raised
This landmark in the moor’s deep tides?
His logic would have failed; your mind, too,
Exposed suddenly to the cold wind
Of genius, faltered. Yet at night together
In your small garden, fenced from the wild moor’s
Constant aggression, you could have been at one,
Sharing your faith over a star’s blue fire.
Age
Farmer, you were young once.
And she was there, waiting, the unique flower
That only you could find in the wild moor
Of your experience.
Gathered, she grew to the warm woman
Your hands had imagined
Fondling soil in the spring fields.
And she was fertile; four strong sons
Stood up like corn in June about you.
But, farmer, did you cherish, tend her
As your own flesh, this dry stalk
Where the past murmurs its sad tune?
Is this the harvest of your blithe sowing?
If you had spared from your long store
Of days lavished upon the land
But one for her where she lay fallow,
Drying, hardening, withering to waste.
But now – too late ! You’re an old tree,
Your roots groping in her in vain.
The Cat and the Sea
It is a matter of a black cat
On a bare cliff top in March
Whose eyes anticipate
The gorse petals;
The formal equation of
A domestic purr
With the cold interiors
Of the sea’s mirror.
Sailor Poet
His first ship; his last poem;
And between them what turbulent acres
Of sea or land with always the flesh ebbing
In slow waves over the salt bones.
But don’t be too hard; so to have written
Even in smoke on such fierce skies,
Or to have brought one poem safely to harbour
From such horizons is not now to be scorned.
The View from the Window
Like a painting it is set before one,
But less brittle, ageless; these colours
Are renewed daily with variations
Of light and distance that no painter
Achieves or suggests. Then there is movement,
Change, as slowly the cloud bruises
Are healed by sunlight, or snow caps
A black mood; but gold at evening
To cheer the heart. All through history
The great brush has not rested,
Nor the paint dried; yet what eye,
Looking coolly, or, as we now,
Through the tears’ lenses, ever saw
This work and it was not finished?
The Country Clergy
I see them working in old rectories
By the sun’s light, by candlelight,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew.
And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men’s hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.
Ap Huw’s Testament
There are four verses to put down
For the four people in my life,
Father, mother, wife
And the one child. Let me begin
With her of the immaculate brow
My wife; she loves me. I know how.
My mother gave me the breast’s milk
Generously, but grew mean after,
Envying me my detached laughter.
My father was a passionate man,
Wrecked after leaving the sea
In her love’s shallows. He grieves in me.
What shall I say of my boy,
Tall, fair? He is young yet;
Keep his feet free of the world’s net.
Death of a Poet
Laid now on his smooth bed
For the last time, watching dully
Through heavy eyelids the day’s colour
Widow the sky, what can he say
Worthy of record, the books all open,
Pens ready, the faces, sad,
Waiting gravely for the tired lips
To move once – what can he say?
His tongue wrestles to force one word
Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases
For the day’s news, just the one word ‘sorry’;
Sorry for the lies, for the long failure
In the poet’s war; that he preferred
The easier rhythms of the heart
To the mind’s scansion; that now he dies
Intestate, having nothing to leave
But a few songs, cold as stones
In the thin hands that asked for bread.
A Blackbird Singing
It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.
You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
