by R. S. Thomas
end, yet the rules are built
on the impossibility of
its existence. It is
how you play, we cry, scanning
the future for an account
of our performance. But the rewards
are there even so, and history
festers with the numbers of the recipients
of them, the handsome, the fortunate,
the well-fed; those who cheated this
being when he was not looking.
Waiting
Face to face? Ah, no
God; such language falsifies
the relation. Nor side by side,
nor near you, nor anywhere
in time and space.
Say you were,
when I came, your name
vouching for you, ubiquitous
in its explanations. The
earth bore and they reaped:
God, they said, looking
in your direction. The wind
changed; over the drowned
body it was you
they spat at.
Young
I pronounced you. Older
I still do, but seldomer
now, leaning far out
over an immense depth, letting
your name go and waiting,
somewhere between faith and doubt,
for the echoes of its arrival.
Gone?
Will they say on some future
occasion, looking over the flogged acres
of ploughland: This was Prytherch country?
Nothing to show for it now: hedges
uprooted, walls gone, a mobile people
hurrying to and fro on their fast
tractors; a forest of aerials
as though an invading fleet invisibly
had come to anchor among these
financed hills. They copy the image
of themselves projected on their smooth
screens to the accompaniment of inane
music. They give grins and smiles
back in return for the money that is
spent on them. But where is the face
with the crazed eyes that through the unseen
drizzle of its tears looked out
on this land and found no beauty
in it, but accepted it, as a man
will who has needs in him that only
bare ground, black thorns and the sky’s
emptiness can fulfil?
The Empty Church
They laid this stone trap
for him, enticing him with candles,
as though he would come like some huge moth
out of the darkness to beat there.
Ah, he had burned himself
before in the human flame
and escaped, leaving the reason
torn. He will not come any more
to our lure. Why, then, do I kneel still
striking my prayers on a stone
heart? Is it in hope one
of them will ignite yet and throw
on its illumined walls the shadow
of someone greater than I can understand?
Album
My father is dead.
I who am look at him
who is not, as once he
went looking for me
in the woman who was.
There are pictures
of the two of them, no
need of a third, hand
in hand, hearts willing
to be one but not three.
What does it mean
life? I am here I am
there. Look ! Suddenly
the young tool in their hands
for hurting one another.
And the camera says:
Smile; there is no wound
time gives that is not bandaged
by time. And so they do the
three of them at me who weep.
In Great Waters
You are there also
at the foot of the precipice
of water that was too steep
for the drowned: their breath broke
and they fell. You have made an altar
out of the deck of the lost
trawler whose spars
are your cross. The sand crumbles
like bread; the wine is
the light quietly lying
in its own chalice. There is
a sacrament there more beauty
than terror whose ministrant
you are and the aisles are full
of the sea shapes coming to its celebration.
Travels
I travelled, learned new ways
to deceive, smiling not
frowning; kept my lips supple
with lies; learned to digest
malice, knowing it tribute
to my success. Is the world
large? Are there areas uncharted
by the imagination? Never betray
your knowledge of them. Came here,
followed the river upward
to its beginning in the Welsh
moorland, prepared to analyse
its contents; stared at the smooth pupil
of water that stared at me
back as absent-mindedly as a god
in contemplation of his own
navel; felt the coldness
of unplumbed depths I should have
stayed here to fathom; watched the running
away of the resources
of water to form those far
seas that men must endeavour
to navigate on their voyage home.
Perhaps
His intellect was the clear mirror
he looked in and saw the machinery of God
assemble itself? It was one that reflected
the emptiness that was where God
should have been. The mind’s tools had
no power convincingly to put him
together. Looking in that mirror was a journey
through hill mist where, the higher
one ascends, the poorer the visibility
becomes. It could have led to despair
but for the consciousness of a presence
behind him, whose breath clouding
that looking-glass proved that it was alive.
To learn to distrust the distrust
of feeling – this then was the next step
for the seeker? To suffer himself to be persuaded
of intentions in being other than the crossing
of a receding boundary which did not exist?
To yield to an unfelt pressure that, irresistible
in itself, had the character of everything
but coercion? To believe, looking up
into invisible eyes shielded against love’s
glare, in the ubiquity of a vast concern?
Roger Bacon
He had strange dreams
that were real
in which he saw God
showing him an aperture
of the horizon wherein
were flasks and test-tubes.
And the rainbow
ended there not in a pot
of gold, but in colours
that, dissected, had the ingredients of
the death ray.
Faces at the window
of his mind
had the false understanding
of flowers, but their eyes pointed
like arrows to
an imprisoning cell.
Yet
he dreamed on in curves
and equations
with the smell of saltpetre
in his nostrils, and saw the hole
in God’s side that is the wound
of knowledge and
thrust his hand in it and believed.
Emerging
Well, I said, better to wait
for him on some peninsula
of
the spirit. Surely for one
with patience he will happen by
once in a while. It was the heart
spoke. The mind, sceptical as always
of the anthropomorphisms
of the fancy, knew he must be put together
like a poem or a composition
in music, that what he conforms to
is art. A promontory is a bare
place; no God leans down
out of the air to take the hand
extended to him. The generations have
watched there
in vain. We are beginning to see
now it is matter is the scaffolding
of spirit; that the poem emerges
from morphemes and phonemes; that
as form in sculpture is the prisoner
of the hard rock, so in everyday life
it is the plain facts and natural happenings
that conceal God and reveal him to us
little by little under the mind’s tooling.
After Jericho
There is an aggression of fact
to be resisted successfully
only in verse, that fights language
with its own tools. Smile, poet,
among the ruins of a vocabulary
you blew your trumpet against.
It was a conscript army; your words,
every one of them, are volunteers.
Synopsis
Plato offered us little
the Aristotelians did not
take back. Later Spinoza
rationalised our approach;
we were taught that love
is an intellectual mode
of our being. Yet Hume questioned
the very existence of lover
or loved. The self he left us
with was what Kant
failed to transcend or Hegel
to dissolve: that grey subject
of dread that Søren Kierkegaard
depicted crossing its thousands
of fathoms; the beast that rages
through history; that presides smiling
at the councils of the positivists.
The White Tiger
It was beautiful as God
must be beautiful; glacial
eyes that had looked on
violence and come to terms
with it; a body too huge
and majestic for the cage in which
it had been put; up
and down in the shadow
of its own bulk it went,
lifting, as it turned,
the crumpled flower of its face
to look into my own
face without seeing me. It
was the colour of the moonlight
on snow and as quiet
as moonlight, but breathing
as you can imagine that
God breathes within the confines
of our definition of him, agonising
over immensities that will not return.
The Answer
Not darkness but twilight
in which even the best
of minds must make its way
now. And slowly the questions
occur, vague but formidable
for all that. We pass our hands
over their surface like blind
men, feeling for the mechanism
that will swing them aside. They
yield, but only to re-form
as new problems; and one
does not even do that
but towers immovable
before us.
Is there no way
other than thought of answering
its challenge? There is an anticipation
of it to the point of
dying. There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.
The Film of God
Sound, too? The recorder
that picks up everything picked
up nothing but the natural
background. What language
does the god speak? And the camera’s
lens, as sensitive to
an absence as to a presence,
saw what? What is the colour
of his thought?
It was blank, then,
the screen, as far as he
was concerned? It was a bare
landscape and harsh, and geological
its time. But the rock was
bright, the illuminated manuscript
of the lichen. And a shadow,
as we watched, fell, as though
of an unseen writer bending over
his work.
It was not cloud
because it was not cold,
and dark only from the candlepower
behind it. And we waited
for it to move, silently
as the spool turned, waited
for the figure that cast it
to come into view for us to
identify it, and it
didn’t and we are still waiting.
The Absence
It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism
of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews
at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resource have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?
Balance
No piracy, but there is a plank
to walk over seventy thousand fathoms,
as Kierkegaard would say, and far out
from the land. I have abandoned
my theories, the easier certainties
of belief. There are no handrails to
grasp. I stand and on either side
there is the haggard gallery
of the dead, those who in their day
walked here and fell. Above and
beyond there is the galaxies’
violence, the meaningless wastage
of force, the chaos the blond
hero’s leap over my head
brings him nearer to.
Is there a place
here for the spirit? Is there time
on this brief platform for anything
other than mind’s failure to explain itself?
Epiphany
Three kings? Not even one
any more. Royalty
has gone to ground, its journeyings
over. Who now will bring
gifts and to what place? In
the manger there are only the toys
and the tinsel. The child
has become a man. Far
off from his cross in the wrong
season he sits at table
with us with on his head
the fool’s cap of our paper money.
Pilgrimages
There is an island there is no going
to but in a small boat the way
the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned, munching the gravel
of its beaches. So I have gone
up the salt lane to the building
with the stone altar and the candles
gone out, and kneeled and lif
ted
my eyes to the furious gargoyle
of the owl that is like a god
gone small and resentful. There
is no body in the stained window
of the sky now. Am I too late?
Were they too late also, those
first pilgrims? He is such a fast
God, always before us and
leaving as we arrive.
There are those here
not given to prayer, whose office
is the blank sea that they say daily.
What they listen to is not
hymns but the slow chemistry of the soil
that turns saints’ bones to dust,
dust to an irritant of the nostril.
There is no time on this island.
The swinging pendulum of the tide
has no clock; the events
are dateless. These people are not
late or soon; they are just
here with only the one question
to ask, which life answers
by being in them. It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?
Jongkind
The Beach at Sainte-Adresse
An agreement between
land and sea, with both using
the same tone? But the boat,
motionless in the sand, refuses
to endorse it, remembering
the fury of the clawing
of white hands. However skilfully
the blue surface mirrors
the sky, to the boat it is
the glass lid of a coffin
within which by cold lips
the wooden carcases are mumbled.
Monet
Portrait of Madame Gaudibert
Waiting for the curtain
to rise on an audience
of one – her husband
who, knowledgeable about ships,
knew how to salvage
the ship-wrecked painter.
Comforting
to think how, for a moment
at least, Monet on even
keel paddled himself
on with strokes not
of an oar but
of a fast-dipping brush.
Manet
The Balcony
We watch them. They watch
