by R. S. Thomas
Why must I write so?
I’m Welsh, see:
A real Cymro,
Peat in my veins.
I was born late;
She claimed me,
Brought me up nice,
No hardship;
Only the one loss,
I can’t speak my own
Language – Iesu,
All those good words;
And I outside them,
Picking up alms
From blonde strangers.
I don’t like their talk,
Their split vowels;
Names that are ghosts
From a green era.
I want my own
Speech, to be made
Free of its terms.
I want the right word
For the gut’s trouble,
When I see this land
With its farms empty
Of folk, and the stone
Manuscripts blurring
In wind and rain.
I want the town even,
The open door
Framing a slut,
So she can speak Welsh
And bear children
To accuse the womb
That bore me.
Afforestation
It’s a population of trees
Colonising the old
Haunts of men; I prefer,
Listening to their talk,
The bare language of grass
To what the woods say,
Standing in black crowds
Under the stars at night
Or in the sun’s way.
The grass feeds the sheep;
The sheep give the wool
For warm clothing, but these –?
I see the cheap times
Against which they grow:
Thin houses for dupes,
Pages of pale trash,
A world that has gone sour
With spruce. Cut them down,
They won’t take the weight
Of any of the strong bodies
For which the wind sighs.
The Survivors
I never told you this.
He told me about it often:
Seven days in an open boat – burned out,
No time to get food:
Biscuits and water and the unwanted sun,
With only the oars’ wing-beats for motion,
Labouring heavily towards land
That existed on a remembered chart,
Never on the horizon
Seven miles from the boat’s bow.
After two days song dried on their lips;
After four days speech.
On the fifth cracks began to appear
In the faces’ masks; salt scorched them.
They began to think about death,
Each man to himself, feeding it
On what the rest could not conceal.
The sea was as empty as the sky,
A vast disc under a dome
Of the same vastness, perilously blue.
But on the sixth day towards evening
A bird passed. No one slept that night;
The boat had become an ear
Straining for the desired thunder
Of the wrecked waves. It was dawn when it came,
Ominous as the big guns
Of enemy shores. The men cheered it.
From the swell’s rise one of them saw the ruins
Of all that sea, where a lean horseman
Rode towards them and with a rope
Galloped them up on to the curt sand.
The Garden
It is a gesture against the wild,
The ungovernable sea of grass;
A place to remember love in,
To be lonely for a while;
To forget the voices of children
Calling from a locked room;
To substitute for the care
Of one querulous human
Hundreds of dumb needs.
It is the old kingdom of man.
Answering to their names,
Out of the soil the buds come,
The silent detonations
Of power wielded without sin.
Tramp
A knock at the door
And he stands there,
A tramp with his can
Asking for tea,
Strong for a poor man
On his way – where?
He looks at his feet,
I look at the sky;
Over us the planes build
The shifting rafters
Of that new world
We have sworn by.
I sleep in my bed,
He sleeps in the old,
Dead leaves of a ditch.
My dreams are haunted;
Are his dreams rich?
If I wake early,
He wakes cold.
Welcome
You can come in.
You can come a long way;
We can’t stop you.
You can come up the roads
Or by railway;
You can land from the air.
You can walk this country
From end to end;
But you won’t be inside;
You must stop at the bar,
The old bar of speech.
We have learnt your own
Language, but don’t
Let it take you in;
It’s not what you mean,
It’s what you pay with
Everywhere you go,
Pleased at the price
In shop windows.
There is no way there;
Past town and factory
You must travel back
To the cold bud of water
In the hard rock.
Wallace Stevens
1
On New Year’s night after a party
His father lay down and made him
In the flesh of a girl out of Holland.
The baby was dropped at the first fall
Of the leaf, wanting the safe bough
He came from, and was for years dumb,
Mumbling the dry crust
Of poetry, until the teeth grew,
Ivory of a strange piano.
Yet it was not those that he played.
They were too white; he preferred black,
The deep spaces between stars,
Fathomless as the cold shadow
His mind cast. In the bleak autumn
Of real time here I remember
Without eloquence his birth.
2
How like him to bleed at last
Inwardly, but to the death,
Who all his life from the white page
Infected us chiefly with fear
Of the veins’ dryness. Words he shed
Were dry leaves of a dry mind,
Crackling as the wind blew
From mortuaries of the cold heart.
There was no spring in his world.
His one season was late fall;
The self ripe, but without taste.
Yet painfully on the poem’s crutch
He limped on, taking despair
As a new antidote for love.
Parent
So he took her – just like that,
In a moment of sunlight;
Her haired breast heaving against his,
Her voice fierce;
Her yellow teeth bared for the love bite.
And the warm day indifferent,
Not foreseeing the loading
Of that huge womb;
The seven against Thebes, the many
Against Troy, the whole earth
A confusion of persons,
Each with his grudge
Rooted in the enormous loins
Of the first parent.
A Country
At fifty he was still trying to deceive
Himself. He went out at night,
Imagining the dark count
ry
Between the border and the coast
Was still Wales; the old language
Came to him on the wind’s lips;
There were intimations of farms
Whose calendar was a green hill.
And yet under such skies the land
Had no more right to its name
Than a corpse had; self-given wounds
Wasted it. It lay like a bone
Thrown aside and of no use
For anything except shame to gnaw.
A Lecturer
A little man,
Sallow,
Keeping close to the wall
Of life; his quick smile
Of recognition a cure
For loneliness; he’ll take you
Any time on a tour
Of the Welsh language, its flowering
While yours was clay soil.
It seeds in him.
Fitfully,
As the mood blows, poetry
In this small plot
Of manhood opens
Its rich petals; the smell
Is familiar. Watch him,
As with short steps he goes.
Not dangerous?
He has been in gaol.
Strangers
We don’t like your white cottage.
We don’t like the way you live.
Their sins are venial, the folk
With green blouses you displace.
They have gone proudly away,
Leaving only the dry bed
Of footsteps where there was grass,
Or memory of a face
For ever setting within the glass
Of windows about the door.
You have not been here before.
You will offend with your speech
Winds that preferred hands
Wrung with despair, profound
Audiences of the dead.
The Untamed
My garden is the wild
Sea of the grass. Her garden
Shelters between walls.
The tide could break in;
I should be sorry for this.
There is peace there of a kind,
Though not the deep peace
Of wild places. Her care
For green life has enabled
The weak things to grow.
Despite my first love,
I take sometimes her hand,
Following strait paths
Between flowers, the nostril
Clogged with their thick scent.
The old softness of lawns
Persuading the slow foot
Leads to defection; the silence
Holds with its gloved hand
The wild hawk of the mind.
But not for long, windows,
Opening in the trees
Call the mind back
To its true eyrie; I stoop
Here only in play.
Movement
Move with the times?
I’ve done that all right:
In a few years
Buried a nation.
Words for the sweet tooth
Have gone sour.
Looking at them now,
None of those farms
In the high hills
Have bred children.
My poems were of old men;
The chimney corner
Is a poor place to sing
Reedy accompaniment
To the wheels’ rattle,
As life puts on speed.
The Boy’s Tale
Skipper wouldn’t pay him off,
Never married her;
Came home by Port Said
To a Welsh valley;
Took a girl from the tip,
Sheer coal dust
The blue in her veins.
Every time I go now
Through black sunlight,
I see her scratch his name
On the pane of her breath.
Caught him in her thin hair,
Couldn’t hold him –
Voices from the ports
Of the stars, pavilions
Of unstable water.
She went fishing in him;
I was the bait
That became cargo,
Shortening his trips,
Waiting on the bone’s wharf.
Her tongue ruled the tides.
Truth
He was in the fields, when I set out.
He was in the fields, when I came back.
In between, what long hours,
What centuries might have elapsed.
Did he look up? His arm half
Lifted was more to ward off
My foolishness. You will return,
He intimated; the heart’s roots
Are here under this black soil
I labour at. A change of wind
Can bring the smooth town to a stop;
The grass whispers beneath the flags;
Every right word on your tongue
Has a green taste. It is the mind
Calling you, eager to paint
Its distances; but the truth’s here,
Closer than the world will confess,
In this bare bone of life that I pick.
The Mill
I am going back now
Twenty years at least:
Hardly his wife’s place
In bed was cold, than
He was there instead
And would not be moved.
It seemed hard at first,
Those who had waited
For years on the one
Now had the other
Lying log heavy
And stiff in that room,
That smelled of death
Or mildew or both.
They just carried on;
Washed him and changed him,
He was one more beast
To be fed and watered
On that hill farm.
Why did they do it?
Was the meagre price
Such bones can command
In death’s market
Worth all their trouble?
Had a seed of love,
Left from the threshing,
Found a crack in their hearts?
I called of an evening,
Watched how the lamp
Explored the contours
Of his face’s map.
On the wall his shadow
Grew stern as he talked
Of the old exploits
With the plough and scythe.
I read him the psalms,
Said prayers and was still.
In the long silence
I heard in the drawers
The mice that rustled;
In the shallow grate
The small fire’s petals
Withered and fell.
Nine years in that bed
From season to season
The great frame rotted,
While the past’s slow stream,
Flowing through his head,
Kept the rusty mill
Of the mind turning –
It was I it ground.
Servant
You served me well, Prytherch.
From all my questionings and doubts;
From brief acceptance of the times’
Deities; from ache of the mind
Or body’s tyranny, I turned,
Often after a whole year,
Often twice in the same day,
To where you read in the slow book
Of the farm, turning the fields’ pages
So patiently, never tired
Of the land’s story; not just believing,
But proving in your bone and your blood
Its accuracy; willing to stand
Always aside from the main road,
Where life’s flashier illustrations
Were marginal.
Not that you gave
The whole answer. Is tru
th so bare,
So dark, so dumb, as on your hearth
And in your company I found it?
Is not the evolving print of the sky
To be read, too; the mineral
Of the mind worked? Is not truth choice,
With a clear eye and a free hand,
From life’s bounty?
Not choice for you,
But seed sown upon the thin
Soil of a heart, not rich, nor fertile,
Yet capable of the one crop,
Which is the bread of truth that I break.
Souillac: Le Sacrifice d’Abraham
And he grasps him by the hair
With innocent savagery.
And the son’s face is calm;
There is trust there.
And the beast looks on.
This is what art could do,
Interpreting faith
With serene chisel.
The resistant stone
Is quiet as our breath,
And is accepted.
The Figure
He was far out from the shore
Of his four hedges, marooned there
On the bare island of himself.
I watched him from the main road
Over the currents of a sea
Shallow enough for me to cross,
Had I the time, the will – what was it
Kept me? It could have been a part
Of the strange calling I followed,
Wading closer to have found
The dark wrack of his thoughts lifting
And falling round the thick skull;
To have known the colour of his eyes,
Their mitigation of his parched
And waste presence.
Were there questions
My lips hardly would have dared
To frame, put there by his own
Brutally at the cold bar
Of reason, where he was arraigned?
On the Farm
There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.
There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.
There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.
And lastly there was the girl:
