by R. S. Thomas
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life’s dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.
The Patriot
He had that rare gift that what he said,
Even the simplest statement, could inflame
The mind and heart of the hearer. Those, who saw
For the first time that small figure
With the Welsh words leaving his lips
As quietly as doves on an errand
Of peace-making, could not imagine
The fierceness of their huge entry
At the ear’s porch.
And when he wrote,
Drawing the ink from his own veins’
Blood and iron, the sentences
Opened again the concealed wounds
Of history in the comfortable flesh.
Looking at Sheep
Yes, I know. They are like primroses;
Their ears are the colour of the stems
Of primroses; and their eyes –
Two halves of a nut.
But images
Like this are for sheer fancy
To play with. Seeing how Wales fares
Now, I will attend rather
To things as they are: to green grass
That is not ours; to visitors
Buying us up. Thousands of mouths
Are emptying their waste speech
About us, and an Elsan culture
Threatens us.
What would they say
Who bled here, warriors
Of a free people? Savagely
On castles they were the sole cause
Of the sun still goes down red.
Rhodri
Rhodri Theophilus Owen,
Nothing Welsh but the name;
He moves in a landscape of dust
That is sourer than the smell
Of breweries. What are the moors
To him? Shadows of boredom
In the mind’s corners. He has six shirts
For the week-end and a pocketful
Of notes. Don’t mention roots
To Rhodri; his address
Is greater than the population
Of Dolfor, many times
Greater, and in that house
There are three Owens, none with a taste
For the homeland with its pints
Of rain water.
It is dry
Here, with the hard, dry
Urban heat, that is sickly
With girls. But Rhodri is cool;
From the shadow of his tree
Of manhood he watches them
Pass, or selects one
To make real the power of the pounds,
That in Wales would have gone rather
To patch up the family stocking,
Emblem of a nation’s despair.
Because
I praise you because
I envy your ability to
See these things: the blind hands
Of the aged combing sunlight
For pity; the starved fox and
The obese pet; the way the world
Digests itself and the thin flame
Scours. The youth enters
The brothel, and the girl enters
The nunnery, and a bell tolls.
Viruses invade the blood.
On the smudged empires the dust
Lies and in the libraries
Of the poets. The flowers wither
On love’s grave. This is what
Life is, and on it your eye
Sets tearless, and the dark
Is dear to you as the light.
Swifts
The swifts winnow the air.
It is pleasant at the end of the day
To watch them. I have shut the mind
On fools. The ’phone’s frenzy
Is over. There is only the swifts’
Restlessness in the sky
And their shrill squealing.
Sometimes they glide,
Or rip the silk of the wind
In passing. Unseen ribbons
Are trailing upon the air.
There is no solving the problem
They pose, that had millions of years
Behind it, when the first thinker
Looked at them.
Sometimes they meet
In the high air; what is engendered
At contact? I am learning to bring
Only my wonder to the contemplation
Of the geometry of their dark wings.
Rose Cottage
Rose Cottage, because it had
Roses. If all things were as
Simple! There was the place
With some score or so of
Houses, all of them red
Brick, with their names clear
To read; and this one, its gate
Mossed over, its roof rusty
With lichen. You chose it out
For its roses, and were not wrong.
It was registered in the heart
Of a nation, and so, sure
Of its being. All summer
It generated the warmth
Of its blooms, red lamps
To guide you. And if you came
Too late in the bleak cold
Of winter, there were the faces
At the window, English faces
With red cheeks, countering the thorns.
Hafod Lom
Hafod Lom, the poor holding:
I have become used to its
Beauty, the ornamentation
Of its bare walls with grey
And gold lichen; to its chimney
Tasselled with grasses. Outside
In the ruined orchard the leaves
Are richer than fruit; music
From a solitary robin plays
Like a small fountain. It is hard
To recall here the drabness
Of past lives, who wore their days
Raggedly, seeking meaning
In a lean rib. Imagine a child’s
Upbringing, who took for truth
That rough acreage the rain
Fenced; who sowed his dreams
Hopelessly in the wind blowing
Off bare plates. Yet often from such
Those men came, who, through windows
In the thick mist peering down
To the low country, saw learning
Ready to reap. Their long gnawing
At life’s crust gave them teeth
And a strong jaw and perseverance
For the mastication of the fact.
This To Do
I have this that I must do
One day: overdraw on my balance
Of air, and breaking the surface
Of water go down into the green
Darkness to search for the door
To myself in dumbness and blindness
And uproar of scared blood
At the eardrums. There are no signposts
There but bones of the dead
Conger, no light but the pale
Phosphorous, where the slow corpses
Swag. I must go down with the poor
Purse of my body and buy courage,
Paying for it with the coins of my breath.
Within Sound of the Sea
I have a desire to walk on the shore,
To visit the caged beast whose murmurings
Kept me awake. What does it mean
That I have the power to do this
All day long, if I wish to?
I know what thoughts will arise,
What questions. They have done so before,
Unanswered. It is in the freedom
To go or not to I exist;
To balance all the exhilaration
Of brisk moments upon the sand
With the knowledgeable hours that my books
Give me. Between
their pages
The beast sleeps and never looks out
Through the print’s bars. Have I been wise
In the past, letting my nostrils
Plan my day? That salt scrubbing
Left me unclean. Am I wise now,
With all this pain in the air,
To keep my room, reading perhaps
Of that Being whose will is our peace?
Pietà
Always the same hills
Crowd the horizon,
Remote witnesses
Of the still scene.
And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
Of a maid’s arms.
Amen
And God said: How do you know?
And I went out into the fields
At morning and it was true.
Nothing denied it, neither the bowed man
On his knees, nor the animals,
Nor the birds notched on the sky’s
Surface. His heart was broken
Far back, and the beasts yawned
Their boredom. Under the song
Of the larks, I heard the wheels turn
Rustily. But the scene held;
The cold landscape returned my stare;
There was no answer. Accept; accept.
And under the green capitals,
The molecules and the blood’s virus.
Gifts
From my father my strong heart,
My weak stomach.
From my mother the fear.
From my sad country the shame.
To my wife all I have
Saving only the love
That is not mine to give.
To my one son the hunger.
Kierkegaard
And beyond the window Denmark
Waited, but refused to adopt
This family that wore itself out
On its conscience, up and down
In the one room.
Meanwhile the acres
Of the imagination grew
Unhindered, though always they paused
At that labourer, the indictment
Of whose gesture was a warped
Crucifix upon a hill
In Jutland. The stern father
Looked at it and a hard tear
Formed, that the child’s frightened
Sympathy could not convert
To a plaything.
He lived on,
Søren, with the deed’s terrible lightning
About him, as though a bone
Had broken in the adored body
Of his God. The streets emptied
Of their people but for a girl
Already beginning to feel
The iron in her answering his magnet’s
Pull. Her hair was to be
The moonlight towards which he leaned
From darkness. The husband stared
Through life’s bars, venturing a hand
To pluck her from the shrill fire
Of his genius. The press sharpened
Its rapier; wounded, he crawled
To the monastery of his chaste thought
To offer up his crumpled amen.
For Instance
She gave me good food;
I accepted;
Sewed my clothes, buttons;
I was smart.
She warmed my bed;
Out of it my son stepped.
She was adjudged
Beautiful. I had grown
Used to it. She is dead
Now. Is it true
I loved her? That is how
I saw things. But not she.
For the Record
What was your war record, Prytherch?
I know: up and down the same field,
Following a horse; no oil for tractors;
Sniped at by rain, but never starving.
Did you listen to the reports
Of how heroes are fashioned and how killed?
Did you wait up late for the news?
Your world was the same world as before
Wars were contested, noisier only
Because of the echoes in the sky.
The blast worried your hair on its way to the hill;
The distances were a wound
Opened each night. Yet in your acres,
With no medals to be won,
You were on the old side of life,
Helping it in through the dark door
Of earth and beast, quietly repairing
The rents of history with your hands.
A Welshman at St James’ Park
I am invited to enter these gardens
As one of the public, and to conduct myself
In accordance with the regulations;
To keep off the grass and sample flowers
Without touching them; to admire birds
That have been seduced from wildness by
Bread they are pelted with.
I am not one
Of the public; I have come a long way
To realise it. Under the sun’s
Feathers are the sinews of stone,
The curved claws.
I think of a Welsh hill
That is without fencing, and the men,
Bosworth blind, who left the heather
And the high pastures of the heart. I fumble
In the pocket’s emptiness; my ticket
Was in two pieces. I kept half.
The Moor
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
There
They are those that life happens to.
They didn’t ask to be born
In those bleak farmsteads, but neither
Did they ask not. Life took the seed
And broadcast it upon the poor,
Rush-stricken soil, an experiment
In patience.
What is a man’s
Price? For promises of a break
In the clouds; for harvests that are not all
Wasted; for one animal born
Healthy, where seven have died,
He will kneel down and give thanks
In a chapel whose stones are wrenched
From the moorland.
I have watched them bent
For hours over their trade,
Speechless, and have held my tongue
From its question. It was not my part
To show them, like a meddler from the town,
Their picture, nor the audiences
That look at them in pity or pride.
The Belfry
I have seen it standing up grey,
Gaunt, as though no sunlight
Could ever thaw out the music
Of its great bell; terrible
In its own way, for religion
Is like that. There are times
When a black frost is upon
One’s whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.
But who is to know? Always,
Even in winter in the cold
Of a stone church, on his knees
Someone is praying, whose prayers fall
Steadily through the hard spell
Of weather that is between God
And himself.
Perhaps they are warm rain
That brings the sun and afterwards flowers
On the raw graves and throbbing of bells.
Aside
Take heart, Prytherch.
Over you the planets stand,
And have seen more ills than yours.
This canker was in the bone
Before man bent to his image
In the pool’s glass. Violence has been
And will be again. Between better
And worse is no bad place
For a labourer, whose lot is to seem
Stationary in traffic so fast.
Turn aside, I said; do not turn back.
There is no forward and no back
In the fields, only the year’s two
Solstices, and patience between.
The Visit
She was small;
Composed in her way
Like music. She sat
In the chair I had not
Offered, smiling at my left
Shoulder. I waited on
For the sentences her smile
Sugared.
That the tongue
Is a whip needed no
Proving. And yet her eye
Fondled me. It was clear
What anger brought her
To my door would not unleash
The coils. Instead she began
Rehearsing for her
Departure. As though ashamed
Of a long stay, she rose,
Touched the tips of my cold
Hand with hers and turned
To the closed door. I remember
Not opening it.
Exchange
She goes out.
I stay in.
Now we have been
So long together
There’s no need
To share silence;
The old bed
Remains made
For two; spirits
Mate apart
From the sad flesh,
Growing thinner
On time’s diet
Of be and gall.
Gospel Truth
Service
We stand looking at
Each other. I take the word ‘prayer’
And present it to them. I wait idly,
Wondering what their lips will
Make of it. But they hand back
Such presents. I am left alone
With no echoes to the amen
