by R. S. Thomas
Of the mild evening outside your room.
A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history’s overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.
Poetry for Supper
‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.’
‘Natural, hell ! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.’
‘You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.’
‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.
Iago Prytherch
Iago Prytherch, forgive my naming you.
You are so far in your small fields
From the world’s eye, sharpening your blade
On a cloud’s edge, no one will tell you
How I made fun of you, or pitied either
Your long soliloquies, crouched at your slow
And patient surgery under the faint
November rays of the sun’s lamp.
Made fun of you? That was their graceless
Accusation, because I took
Your rags for theme, because I showed them
Your thought’s bareness; science and art,
The mind’s furniture, having no chance
To install themselves, because of the great
Draught of nature sweeping the skull.
Fun? Pity? No word can describe
My true feelings. I passed and saw you
Labouring there, your dark figure
Marring the simple geometry
Of the square fields with its gaunt question.
My poems were made in its long shadow
Falling coldly across the page.
Power
Power, farmer? It was always yours.
Not the new physics’ terrible threat
To the world’s axle, nor the mind’s subtler
Manipulation of our debt
To nature; but an old gift
For weathering the slow recoil
Of empires with a tree’s patience,
Rooted in the dark soil.
On a Line in Sandburg
‘Where did the blood come from?
Before I bit, before I sucked
The red meat, the blood was there
Nourishing sweetly the roots of hair.’
‘The blood came from your mother
By way of the long gut-cord;
You were the pain in her side;
You were born on a blood-dark tide.’
‘My mother also was young
Once, but her cheeks were red
Even then. From its hidden source
The hot blood ran on its old course.
Where did the blood come from?’
Meet the Family
John One takes his place at the table,
He is the first part of the fable;
His eyes are dry as a dead leaf.
Look on him and learn grief.
John Two stands in the door
Dumb; you have seen that face before
Leaning out of the dark past,
Tortured in thought’s bitter blast.
John Three is still outside
Drooling where the daylight died
On the wet stones; his hands are crossed
In mourning for a playmate lost.
John All and his lean wife,
Whose forced complicity gave life
To each loathed foetus, stare from the wall,
Dead not absent. The night falls.
Expatriates
Not British; certainly
Not English. Welsh
With all the associations,
Black hair and black heart
Under a smooth skin,
Sallow as vellum; sharp
Of bone and wit that is turned
As a knife against us.
Four centuries now
We have been leaving
The hills and the high moors
For the jewelled pavements
Easing our veins of their dark peat
By slow transfusions.
In the drab streets
That never knew
The cold stream’s sibilants
Our tongues are coated with
A dustier speech.
With the year’s passing
We have forgotten
The far lakes,
Aled and Eiddwen, whose blue litmus
Alone could detect
The mind’s acid.
Absolution
Prytherch, man, can you forgive
From your stone altar on which the light’s
Bread is broken at dusk and dawn
One who strafed you with thin scorn
From the cheap gallery of his mind?
It was you who were right the whole time;
Right in this that the day’s end
Finds you still in the same field
In which you started, your soul made strong
By the earth’s incense, the wind’s song.
While I have worn my soul bare
On the world’s roads, seeking what lay
Too close for the mind’s lenses to see,
And come now with the first stars
Big on my lids westward to find
With the slow lifting up of your hand
No welcome, only forgiveness.
Bread
Hunger was loneliness, betrayed
By the pitiless candour of the stars’
Talk, in an old byre he prayed
Not for food; to pray was to know
Waking from a dark dream to find
The white loaf on the white snow;
Not for warmth, warmth brought the rain’s
Blurring of the essential point
Of ice probing his raw pain.
He prayed for love, love that would share
His rags’ secret; rising he broke
Like sun crumbling the gold air
The live bread for the starved folk.
Farm Wife
Hers is the clean apron, good for fire
Or lamp to embroider, as we talk slowly
In the long kitchen, while the white dough
Turns to pastry in the great oven,
Sweetly and surely as hay making
In a June meadow; hers are the hands,
Humble with milking, but still now
In her wide lap as though they heard
A quiet music, hers being the voice
That coaxes time back to the shadows
In the room’s corners. O, hers is all
This strong body, the safe island
Where men may come, sons and lovers,
Daring the cold seas of her eyes.
Epitaph
The poem in the rock and
The poem in the mind
Are not one.
It was in dying
I tried to make them so.
The Dark Well
They see you as they see you,
A poor farmer with no name,
Ploughing cloudward, sowing the wind
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With squalls of gulls at the day’s end.
To me you are Prytherch, the man
Who more than all directed my slow
Charity where there was need.
There are two hungers, hunger for bread
And hunger of the uncouth soul
For the light’s grace. I have seen both,
And chosen for an indulgent world’s
Ear the story of one whose hands
Have bruised themselves on the locked doors
Of life; whose heart, fuller than mine
Of gulped tears, is the dark well
From which to draw, drop after drop,
The terrible poetry of his kind.
To the Farmer
And the wars came and you still practised
Your crude obstetrics with flocks and herds.
You went out early under a dawn sky,
Savage with blood, and turned the patience
Of your deep eyes earthward. The crops grew,
Nursed by your hands, to be mown later
By the hot sickle of flame: no tears
Thawed your bleak face with their salt current.
Instead you waited till the ground was cool,
The enemy gone, and led your cattle
To the black fields, where slow but surely
Green blades were brandished, the old triumph
Of nature over the brief violence
Of man. You will not do so again.
Walter Llywarch
I am, as you know, Walter Llywarch,
Born in Wales of approved parents,
Well goitred, round in the bum,
Sure prey of the slow virus
Bred in quarries of grey rain.
Born in autumn at the right time
For hearing stories from the cracked lips
Of old folk dreaming of summer,
I piled them on to the bare hearth
Of my own fancy to make a blaze
To warm myself, but achieved only
The smoke’s acid that brings the smart
Of false tears into the eyes.
Months of fog, months of drizzle;
Thought wrapped in the grey cocoon
Of race, of place, awaiting the sun’s
Coming, but when the sun came,
Touching the hills with a hot hand,
Wings were spread only to fly
Round and round in a cramped cage
Or beat in vain at the sky’s window.
School in the week, on Sunday chapel:
Tales of a land fairer than this
Were not so tall, for others had proved it
Without the grave’s passport, they sent
The fruit home for ourselves to taste.
Walter Llywarch – the words were a name
On a lost letter that never came
For one who waited in the long queue
Of life that wound through a Welsh valley.
I took instead, as others had done
Before, a wife from the back pews
In chapel, rather to share the rain
Of winter evenings, than to intrude
On her pale body; and yet we lay
For warmth together and laughed to hear
Each new child’s cry of despair.
The Conductor
Finally at the end of the day,
When the sun was buried and
There was no more to say,
He would lift idly his hand,
And softly the small stars’
Orchestra would begin
Playing over the first bars
Of the night’s overture.
He listened with the day’s breath
Bated, trying to be sure
That what he heard was at one
With his own score, that nothing,
No casual improvisation
Or sounding of a false chord,
Troubled the deep peace.
It was this way he adored
With a god’s ignorance of sin
The self he had composed.
The Parish
There was part of the parish that few knew.
They lived in houses on the main road
To God, as they thought, managing primly
The day’s dirt, bottling talk
Of birth and marriage in cold eyes;
Nothing to tell in their spick rooms’
Discipline how with its old violence
Grass raged under the floor.
But you knew it, farmer; your hand
Had felt its power, if not your heart
Its loveliness. Somewhere among
Its green aisles you had watched like me
The sharp tooth tearing its prey,
While a bird sang from a tall tree.
Genealogy
I was the dweller in the long cave
Of darkness, lining it with the forms
Of bulls. My hand matured early,
But turned to violence: I was the man
Watching later at the grim ford,
Armed with resentment; the quick stream
Remembers at sunset the raw crime.
The deed pursued me; I was the king
At the church keyhole, who saw death
Loping towards me. From that hour
I fought for right, with the proud chiefs
Setting my name to the broad treaties.
I marched to Bosworth with the Welsh lords
To victory, but regretted after
The white house at the wood’s heart.
I was the stranger in the new town,
Whose purse of tears was soon spent;
I filled it with a solider coin
At the dark sources. I stand now
In the hard light of the brief day
Without roots, but with many branches.
Anniversary
Nineteen years now
Under the same roof
Eating our bread,
Using the same air;
Sighing, if one sighs,
Meeting the other’s
Words with a look
That thaws suspicion.
Nineteen years now
Sharing life’s table,
And not to be first
To call the meal long
We balance it thoughtfully
On the tip of the tongue,
Careful to maintain
The strict palate.
Nineteen years now
Keeping simple house,
Opening the door
To friend and stranger;
Opening the womb
Softly to let enter
The one child
With his huge hunger.
The Musician
A memory of Kreisler once:
At some recital in this same city,
The seats all taken, I found myself pushed
On to the stage with a few others,
So near that I could see the toil
Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth
Fluttering under the fine skin
And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.
I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,
As we sat there or warmly applauded
This player who so beautifully suffered
For each of us upon his instrument.
So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:
The men standing by and that one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them the God listened.
Judgment Day
Yes, that’s how I was,
I know that face,
That bony figure
Without grace
Of flesh or limb;
In health happy,
Careless of the claim
Of the world’s sick
Or the world’s poor;
In pain craven –
Lord, breathe once more
On that sad mirror,
Let me be lost
In mist for ever
Rather than own
Such bleak reflections,
Let me go back
On my two knees
Slowly to undo
The knot of life
That was tied there.
Abersoch
There was that headland, asleep on the sea,
The air full of thunder and the far air
Brittle with lightning; there was that girl
Riding her cycle, hair at half-mast,
And the men smoking, the dinghies at rest
On the calm tide. There were people going
About their business, while the storm grew
Louder and nearer and did not break.
Why do I remember these few things,
That were rumours of life, not life itself
That was being lived fiercely, where the storm raged?
Was it just that the girl smiled,
Though not at me, and the men smoking
Had the look of those who have come safely home?
Ninetieth Birthday
You go up the long track
That will take a car, but is best walked
On slow foot, noting the lichen
That writes history on the page
Of the grey rock. Trees are about you
At first, but yield to the green bracken,
The nightjar’s house: you can hear it spin
On warm evenings; it is still now
In the noonday heat, only the lesser
Voices sound, blue-fly and gnat
And the stream’s whisper. As the road climbs,
You will pause for breath and the far sea’s
Signal will flash, till you turn again
To the steep track, buttressed with cloud.
And there at the top that old woman,
Born almost a century back
In that stone farm, awaits your coming;
Waits for the news of the lost village
She thinks she knows, a place that exists
In her memory only.
You bring her greeting
And praise for having lasted so long
With time’s knife shaving the bone.
