Collected Poems 1945-1990

by R. S. Thomas

  of his own mind, and let himself

  down for the poetry stranded

  on the bare ledges.

  For some

  it is all darkness; for me, too,

  it is dark. But there are hands

  there I can take, voices to hear

  solider than the echoes

  without. And sometimes a strange light

  shines, purer than the moon,

  casting no shadow, that is

  the halo upon the bones

  of the pioneers who died for truth.

  In Context

  All my life I tried to believe

  in the importance of what Thomas

  should say now, do next.

  There was a context

  in which I lived; unseen forces

  acted upon me, or made their adjustments

  in turn. There was a larger pattern

  we worked at: they on a big

  loom, I with a small needle,

  drawing the thread

  through my mind, colouring it

  with my own thought.

  Yet a power guided

  my hand. If an invisible company

  waited to see what I would do,

  I in my own way asked for

  direction, so we should journey together

  a little nearer the accomplishment

  of the design.

  Impossible dreamer!

  All those years the demolition

  of the identity proceeded.

  Fast as the cells constituted

  themselves, they were replaced. It was not

  I who lived, but life rather

  that lived me. There was no developing

  structure. There were only the changes

  in the metabolism of a body

  greater than mine, and the dismantling

  by the self of a self it

  could not reassemble.

  The Woman

  So beautiful – God himself quailed

  at her approach: the long body curved

  like the horizon. Why had he made

  her so? How would it be, she said,

  leaning towards him, if, instead of

  quarrelling over it, we divided it

  between us? You can have all the credit

  for its invention, if you will leave the ordering

  of it to me. He looked into her

  eyes and saw far down the bones

  of the generations that would navigate

  by those great stars, but the pull of it

  was too much. Yes, he thought, give me their minds’

  tribute, and what they do with their bodies

  is not my concern. He put his hand in his side

  and drew out the thorn for the letting

  of the ordained blood and touched her with

  it. Go, he said. They shall come to you for ever

  with their desire, and you shall bleed for them in return.

  At It

  I think he sits at that strange table

  of Eddington’s, that is not a table

  at all, but nodes and molecules

  pushing against molecules

  and nodes; and he writes there

  in invisible handwriting the instructions

  the genes follow. I imagine his

  face that is more the face

  of a clock, and the time told by it

  is now, though Greece is referred

  to and Egypt and empires

  not yet begun.

  And I would have

  things to say to this God

  at the judgement, storming at him,

  as Job stormed, with the eloquence

  of the abused heart. But there will be

  no judgement other than the verdict

  of his calculations, that abstruse

  geometry that proceeds eternally

  in the silence beyond right and wrong.

  Play

  Your move I would have

  said, but he was not

  playing; my game a dilemma

  that was without horns.

  As though one can sit at table

  with God! His mind shines

  on the black and the white

  squares. We stake our all

  on the capture of the one

  queen, as though to hold life

  to ransom. He, if he plays, plays

  unconcernedly among the pawns.

  The Truce

  That they should not advance

  beyond certain limits left –

  accidentally? – undefined;

  and that compensation be paid

  by the other side. Meanwhile the

  peasant – There are no peasants

  in Wales, he said, holding

  his liquor as a gentleman

  should not – went up and down

  his acre, rejecting the pot

  of gold at the rainbow’s

  end in favour of earthier

  values: the subsidies gradually

  propagating themselves on the guilt

  of an urban class.

  Strenuous

  times! Never all day

  did the procession of popular

  images through the farm

  kitchens cease; it was tiring

  watching. Such truce as was

  called in the invisible

  warfare between bad and

  worse was where two half-truths

  faced one another over

  the body of an exhausted

  nation, each one waiting for

  the other to be proved wrong.

  Night Sky

  What they are saying is

  that there is life there, too:

  that the universe is the size it is

  to enable us to catch up.

  They have gone on from the human;

  that shining is a reflection

  of their intelligence. Godhead

  is the colonisation by mind

  of untenanted space. It is its own

  light, a statement beyond language

  of conceptual truth. Every night

  is a rinsing myself of the darkness

  that is in my veins. I let the stars inject me

  with fire, silent as it is far,

  but certain in its cauterising

  of my despair. I am a slow

  traveller, but there is more than time

  to arrive. Resting in the intervals

  of my breathing, I pick up the signals

  relayed to me from a periphery I comprehend.

  The Small Country

  Did I confuse the categories?

  Was I blind?

  Was I afraid of hubris

  in identifying this land

  with the kingdom? Those stories

  about the far journeys, when it was here

  at my door; the object

  of my contempt that became

  the toad with the jewel in its head!

  Was a population so small

  enough to be called, too many

  to be chosen? I called it

  an old man, ignoring the April

  message proclaiming: Behold,

  I make all things new.

  The dinosaurs have gone their way

  into the dark. The time-span

  of their human counterparts

  is shortened; everything

  on this shrinking planet favours the survival

  of the small people, whose horizons

  are large only because they are content to look at them

  from their own hills.

  I grow old,

  bending to enter the promised

  land that was here all the time,

  happy to eat the bread that was baked

  in the poets’ oven, breaking my speech

  from the perennial tree

  of my people and holding it in my blind hand.

  Henry James

  It was the eloq
uence of the unsaid

  thing, the nobility of the deed

  not performed. They looked sideways

  into each other’s eyes, met casually

  by intention. It was the significance

  of an absence, the deprecation

  of what was there, the failure

  to prove anything that proved his point.

  Richness is in the ability

  of poverty to conceal itself.

  After the curtains deliberately

  kept drawn, his phrases were servants moving

  silently about the great house of his prose

  letting in sunlight into the empty rooms.

  Hesitations

  I rubbed it

  and the spirit appeared

  (of history): What you will,

  it said. Die, I said.

  But it would not.

  Old gods are no good;

  they are smaller than

  they promise, or else they are large

  like mountains, leaning over

  the soul to admire themselves.

  I put the bone back

  in its place and went on

  with my journey. History

  went at my right side

  hungry for the horizon.

  Were there towns I came

  to? The sky over

  them was without expression.

  No God there. I would have

  passed on, but a music

  detained me in one of

  blood flowing, where two

  people side by side

  under the arc lamps

  lay, from one to the other.

  Bravo !

  Oh, I know it and don’t

  care. I know there is nothing in me

  but cells and chromosomes

  waiting to beget chromosomes

  and cells. You could take me to pieces

  and there would be no angel hard

  by, wringing its hands over

  the demolition of its temple.

  I accept I’m predictable,

  that of the thousands of choices

  open to me the computer can calculate

  the one I’ll make. There is a woman

  I know, who is the catalyst

  of my conversions, who is

  a mineral to dazzle. She will

  grow old and her lovers will not

  pardon her for it. I have made

  her songs in the laboratory

  of my understanding, explosives timed

  to go off in the blandness of time’s face.

  Pre-Cambrian

  Here I think of the centuries,

  six million of them, they say.

  Yesterday a fine rain fell;

  today the warmth has brought out the crowds.

  After Christ, what? The molecules

  are without redemption. My shadow

  sunning itself on this stone

  remembers the lava. Zeus looked down

  on a brave world, but there was

  no love there; the architecture

  of their temples was less permanent

  than these waves. Plato, Aristotle,

  all those who furrowed the calmness

  of their foreheads are responsible

  for the bomb. I am charmed here

  by the serenity of the reflections

  in the sea’s mirror. It is a window

  as well. What I need

  now is a faith to enable me to out-stare

  the grinning faces of the inmates of its asylum,

  the failed experiments God put away.

  Abercuawg

  Abercuawg! Where is it?

  Where is Abercuawg, that

  place where the cuckoos sing?

  I asked the professors.

  Lo, here, lo, there: on the banks

  of a river they explained

  how Cuawg had become Dulas.

  There was the mansion, Dolguog,

  not far off to confirm them. I

  looked at the surface of the water,

  but the place that I was seeking

  was not reflected therein.

  I looked as though through a clear

  window at pebbles that were the ruins

  of no building, with no birds tolling

  among them, as in the towers of the mind.

  An absence is how we become surer

  of what we want. Abercuawg

  is not here now, but there. And

  there is the indefinable point,

  the incarnation of a concept,

  the moment at which a little

  becomes a lot. I have listened

  to the word ‘Branwen’ and pictured

  the horses and the soil red

  with their blood, and the trouble

  in Ireland, and have opened

  my eyes on a child, sticky

  with sweets and snivel. And: ‘Not

  this,’ I have cried. ‘This is the name,

  not the thing that the name

  stands for.’ I have no faith

  that to put a name to

  a thing is to bring it

  before one. I am a seeker

  in time for that which is

  beyond time, that is everywhere

  and nowhere; no more before

  than after, yet always

  about to be; whose duration is

  of the mind, but free as

  Bergson would say of the mind’s

  degradation of the eternal.

  Dialectic

  They spoke to him in Hebrew and he understood

  them; in Latin and Italian and

  he understood them. Speech palled

  on them and they turned to the silence

  of their equations. But God listened to them

  as to a spider spinning its web

  from its entrails, the mind swinging

  to and fro over an abysm

  of blankness. They are speaking to me still,

  he decided, in the geometry

  I delight in, in the figures

  that beget more figures. I will answer

  them as of old with the infinity

  I feed on. If there were words once

  they could not understand, I will show

  them now space that is bounded

  but without end, time that is where

  they were or will be; the eternity

  that is here for me and for them

  there; the truth that with much labour

  is born with them and is to be

  sloughed off like some afterbirth of the spirit.

  Shadows

  I close my eyes.

  The darkness implies your presence,

  the shadow of your steep mind

  on my world. I shiver in it.

  It is not your light that

  can blind us; it is the splendour

  of your darkness.

  And so I listen

  instead and hear the language

  of silence, the sentence

  without an end. Is it I, then,

  who am being addressed? A God’s words

  are for their own sake; we hear

  at our peril. Many of us have gone

  mad in the mastering

  of your medium.

  I will open

  my eyes on a world where the problems

  remain but our doctrines

  protect us. The shadow of the bent cross

  is warmer than yours. I see how the sinners

  of history run in and out

  at its dark doors and are not confounded.

  The Signpost

  Casgob, it said, 2

  miles. But I never went

  there; left it like an ornament

  on the mind’s shelf, covered

  with the dust of

  its summers; a place on a diet

  of the echoes of stopped

  bells and children’s

  voices; white the archi
tecture

  of its clouds, stationary

  its sunlight. It was best

  so. I need a museum

  for storing the dream’s

  brittler particles in. Time

  is a main road, eternity

  the turning that we don’t take.

  Adjustments

  Never known as anything

  but an absence, I dare not name him

  as God. Yet the adjustments

  are made. There is an unseen

  power, whose sphere is the cell

  and the electron. We never catch

  him at work, but can only say,

  coming suddenly upon an amendment,

  that here he has been. To demolish

  a mountain you move it stone by stone

  like the Japanese. To make a new coat

  of an old, you add to it gradually

  thread by thread, so such change

  as occurs is more difficult to detect.

  Patiently with invisible structures

  he builds, and as patiently

  we must pray, surrendering the ordering

  of the ingredients to a wisdom that

  is beyond our own. We must change the mood

  to the passive. Let the deaf men

  be helped; in the silence that has come

  upon them, let some influence

  work so those closed porches

  be opened once more. Let the bomb

  swerve. Let the raised knife of the murderer

  be somehow deflected. There are no

  laws there other than the limits of

  our understanding. Remembering rock

  penetrated by the grass-blade, corrected

  by water, we must ask rather

  for the transformation of the will

  to evil, for more loving

  mutations, for the better ventilating

  of the atmosphere of the closed mind.

  The Game

  It is the play of a being

  who is not serious in

  his conclusions. Take this

  from that, he says, and there is everything

  left. Look over the edge

  of the universe and you see

  your own face staring

  at you back, as it does

  in a pool. And we are forced

  into the game, reluctant

  contestants; though the mathematicians

  are best at it. Never mind, they

  say, whether it is there

  or not, so long as our like

  can use it. And we are shattered

  by their deductions. There is

  a series that is without