Collected Poems 1945-1990

by R. S. Thomas

  And the cobbled water (i)

  And the dogfish, spotted like God’s face (i)

  And the fly said: ‘Nothing (i)

  And the machines say, laughing (i)

  And the sea opens its bag (i)

  And the wars came and you still practised (i)

  And there was the serpent (i)

  And they come sailing (i)

  And to one God says: Come (i)

  As I had always known (i)

  As life improved, their poems (i)

  As they became (i)

  As though the brute eyes had seen (i)

  As we would always wish (i)

  At fifty he was still trying to deceive (i)

  At nine o’clock in the morning (i)

  At sixty there are still fables (i)

  At the dance of the dust (i)

  Baudelaire’s grave (i)

  Beasts rearing from green slime (i)

  Beautiful because (i)

  Because you had been in the dark wood (i)

  Being unwise enough to have married her (i)

  Blue sea: clouds coming up (i)

  But behind the flower (i)

  But not to concentrate (i)

  But the chemicals in (i)

  But the financiers will ask (i)

  But why a thousand? I ask (i)

  Can one make love (i)

  Cars pass him by; he’ll never own one (i)

  Casgob, it said, 2 (i)

  Catrin lives in a nice place (i)

  Cold sea, cold sky (i)

  Come to Wales (i)

  Coming home was to that (i)

  Consider this man in the field beneath (i)

  Convergences (i)

  Could I have loved this? (i)

  Dear friend unknown (i)

  Dear parents (i)

  Did I confuse the categories? (i)

  Did I see religion (i)

  Disgust tempered by an exquisite (i)

  Do not say, referring to the sun (i)

  Do the wheels praise (i)

  Do you want to know his name? (i)

  Dreams clustering thick on his sallow skull (i)

  Dropped without joy from the gaunt womb he lies (i)

  England, what have you done to make the speech (i)

  Evans? Yes, many a time (i)

  Evening. The wind rising (i)

  Face to face? Ah, no (i)

  Farmer, you were young once (i)

  Fifty-two years (i)

  Finally at the end of the day (i)

  For the first twenty years you are still growing (i)

  From my father my strong heart (i)

  full of the timeless faces (i)

  Gentlemen all (i)

  Given the boots (i)

  God looked at space and I appeared (i)

  God looked at the eagle that looked at (i)

  God woke, but the nightmare (i)

  Great in this (i)

  Grey waters, vast (i)

  Gruffudd Llwyd put into my head (i)

  Hafod Lom, the poor holding (i)

  He had strange dreams (i)

  He had that rare gift that what he said (i)

  He heard that there were other places (i)

  He is alone, it is Christmas (i)

  He kneeled down (i)

  He was far out from the shore (i)

  He was in the fields, when I set out (i)

  He wore no hat, but he produced, say (i)

  Heads bowed (i)

  Heaven affords (i)

  Her days are measured out in pails of water (i)

  Here are men (i)

  Here are mountains to ascend (i)

  Here I think of the centuries (i)

  Hers is the clean apron, good for fire (i)

  His first ship; his last poem (i)

  His intellect was the clear mirror (i)

  Homo sapiens to the Creator (i)

  How often he went on this journey, think of it, think of it (i)

  How old was he, when he asked (i)

  Hunger was loneliness, betrayed (i)

  I am a man now (i)

  I am, as you know, Walter Llywarch (i)

  I am going back now (i)

  I am invited to enter these gardens (i)

  I am my own (i)

  I am not from these parts (i)

  I am Prytherh. Forgive me. I don’t know (i)

  I am sending you this letter (i)

  I am the farmer, stripped of love (i)

  I asked for riches (i)

  I awoke. There was dew (i)

  I choose white, but with (i)

  I close my eyes (i)

  I dislike the convention (i)

  I don’t know, he said. I feel sorry (i)

  I engage with philosophy (i)

  I feel sometimes (i)

  I had forgotten (i)

  I had preferred Chaucer (i)

  I hardly knew him (i)

  I have a desire to walk on the shore (i)

  I have come to the borders (i)

  I have crawled out at last (i)

  I have looked long at this land (i)

  I have no name for today (i)

  I have seen it standing up grey (i)

  I have seen the sun break through (i)

  I have this that I must do (i)

  I imagine it, a land (i)

  I imagine it: Two people (i)

  I know that bush (i)

  I look up: you pass (i)

  I look. You look (i)

  I never told you this (i)

  I often call there (i)

  I praise you because/I envy (i)

  I praise you because/you are (i)

  I pray and incur (i)

  I rubbed it (i)

  I saw man staggering on his way (i)

  I see them working in old rectories (i)

  I switch on, tune in (i)

  I take their hands (i)

  I think he sits at that strange table (i)

  I think of the continent (i)

  I travelled, learned new ways (i)

  I want you to know how it was (i)

  I was no tree walking (i)

  I was not unhappy (i)

  I was Shakespeare’s man that time (i)

  I was the dweller in the long cave (i)

  I would have spared you this. Prytherch (i)

  Iago Prytherch, forgive my naming you 87

  Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed (i)

  If you had made it smaller (i)

  Improvisers, he thinks (i)

  In every corner (i)

  In front of the fire (i)

  In the hill country at the moor’s edge (i)

  In the morning among colonnades (i)

  In the silence (i)

  In this desert of language (i)

  In Wales there are jewels (i)

  In Wales there are/no crocodiles (i) (ii)

  In which period (i)

  Inviting them into a house (i)

  Is absence enough? (i)

  Is the night dark? His interiors (i)

  It appears before us (i)

  It came into being (i)

  It is a gesture against the wild (i)

  It is a matter of a black cat (i)

  It is alive. It is you (i)

  It is another country (i)

  It is beautiful and still (i)

  It is calm (i)

  It is not that he can’t speak (i)

  It is nowhere (i)

  It is said that he went gaily to that scaffold (i)

  It is the play of a being (i)

  It is the sort of country that (i)

  It is this great absence (i)

  It’s a long way off but inside it (i)

  It’s a population of trees (i)

  It seems wrong that out of this bird (i)

  It was a hand. God looked at it (i)

  It was a time when wise men (i)

  It was all arranged (i)

  It was beautiful as God (i)

  It was becaus
e there was nothing to do (i)

  It was like a church to me (i)

  It was never easy (i)

  It was perfect. He could do (i)

  It was the eloquence of the unsaid (i)

  It was the other way round (i)

  It was warm (i)

  It was your mother wanted you (i)

  It will always win (i)

  Job Davies, eighty-five (i)

  John One takes his place at the table (i)

  Laid now on his smooth bed (i)

  Last night the talk (i)

  Leave it, leave it – the hole under the door (i)

  Like a painting it is set before one (i)

  ‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural (i)

  Lived long; much fear, less (i)

  Llywelyn? Old hat (i)

  Look at this village boy, his head is stuffed (i)

  ‘Look up’ they said (i)

  Lord, I was not as most men (i)

  Made of tissue and H2O (i)

  Masters, you who would initiate (i)

  Meditating upon gold (i)

  Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales (i)

  Men who have hardly uncurled (i)

  Men, who in their day (i)

  Moments of great calm (i)

  Mostly it is a pale (i)

  Mostly it was wars (i)

  Move with the times? (i)

  Moving away is only to the boundaries (i)

  My father is dead (i)

  My garden is the wild (i)

  ‘My good fool’ he (i)

  My mother prayed that I should have the sweet tooth (i)

  Never known as anything (i)

  Nightingales crackled in the frost (i)

  Nineteen years now (i)

  No clouds overhead (i)

  No, I was not born (i)

  No one would know you had lived (i)

  No piracy, but there is a plank (i)

  No speech; the raised hand affirms (i)

  Not as in the old days I pray (i)

  Not British; certainly (i)

  Not caring about it (i)

  Not conscious (i)

  Not darkness but twilight (i)

  Not for long (i)

  Not international (i)

  Not part of the Health Service (i)

  Not that he brought flowers (i)

  Nothing is here (i)

  Of all things to remember (i) (ii)

  Often I try (i)

  Oh, I know it and don’t (i)

  Oh, I know it: the long story (i)

  On her unborn in the vast circle 3 (i)

  On New Year’s night after a party (i)

  one hand (i)

  One year for Llew the spear (i)

  Plato offered us little (i)

  Power, farmer? It was always yours (i)

  Prayers like gravel (i)

  Pretending he keeps (i)

  Prytherch, man, can you forgive (i)

  Rhodri Theophilus Owen (i)

  Rose Cottage, because it had (i)

  Ruminations, illuminations! (i)

  Say he is any man (i)

  Scarcely a street, too few houses (i)

  See how earth claims him as he passes by (i)

  She gave me good food (i)

  She goes out (i)

  She is young. Have I the right (i)

  She kept touching me (i)

  She should put off modesty (i)

  She was small (i)

  She woke up under a loose quilt (i)

  Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays (i)

  Simple in your designs (i)

  Skipper wouldn’t pay him off (i)

  So beautiful – God himself quailed (i)

  So God is born (i)

  So God spoke to her (i)

  So he said then: I will make the poem (i)

  So he took her – just like that (i)

  So life in the end (i)

  So the catechism begins (i)

  So the hair, too (i)

  So there was nothing? (i)

  So this was on the way (i)

  So we know (i)

  So you have to think (i)

  Some ask the world (i)

  Someone must have thought of putting me here (i)

  Something to bring back to show (i)

  Sometimes a shadow passed (i)

  Sometimes I go out with the small men (i)

  Somewhere beyond time’s (i)

  Sound, too? The recorder (i)

  Study this man; he is older than the tree (i)

  Suddenly after long silence (i)

  Summer is here (i)

  Take heart, Prytherch (i)

  Taking the next train (i)

  That man, Prytherch, with the torn cap (i)

  That they should not advance (i)

  That was before the Revolution (i)

  The book is as closed (i)

  The centuries were without (i)

  The church stands, built from the river stone (i)

  The day before (i)

  The decree went forth (i)

  The disingenuousness (i)

  The fifteenth passes (i)

  The first stood up and testified to Christ (i)

  The flies walk upon the roof top (i)

  The gyres revolve (i)

  The idiot goes round and around (i)

  The last quarter of the moon (i)

  The man weeps (i)

  The messenger is winged (i)

  The moon is born (i)

  The new explorers don’t go (i)

  The new year brings the old resolve (i)

  The old man comes out on the hill (i)

  The one thing they were not troubled (i)

  The paintings are under glass (i)

  The place, Hyddgen (i)

  The poem in the rock and (i)

  The priest picks his way (i)

  The prince walks upon the carpet (i)

  The queen sat on the throne of England (i)

  The salmon lying in the depths of Llyn Llifon (i)

  The sea’s skin is smooth (i)

  The seasons fly (i)

  The stillness of paintings (i)

  The swifts winnow the air (i)

  The telephone is the fruit (i)

  The temptation is to go back (i)

  The water is the same (i)

  The wheel revolves (i)

  Their souls are something smaller (i)

  Then there is the clock’s (i)

  There are four verses to put down (i)

  There are nights that are so still (i)

  There are places in Wales I don’t go (i)

  There are places where I have not been (i)

  There are places, where you might have been sent (i)

  There is a game I play (i)

  There he goes, tacking against the fields’ (i)

  There is a morning (i)

  There is an aggression of fact (i)

  There is an island there is no going (i)

  There was a face in chapel (i)

  There was a flower blowing (i)

  There was a frontier (i)

  There was Dai Puw. He was no good (i)

  There was part of the parish that few knew (i)

  There was that headland, asleep on the sea (i)

  There was this problem (i)

  They are those that life happens to (i)

  They are white moths (i)

  They brought no edifying (i)

  They came over the snow to the bread’s (i)

  They come in from the fields (i)

  They did it to me (i)

  They did not divine it, but (i)

  They laid this stone trap (i)

  They made the grey stone (i)

  They pass me with bland looks (i)

  They see you as they see you (i)

  They spoke to him in Hebrew and he understood (i)

  They stand about conversing (i)

  They wash their hands in it (i)

  They were irreplaceable and forge
ttable (i)

  This is pain’s landscape (i)

  This is the village (i)

  This is where he sought God (i)

  Though I describe it stone by stone the chapel (i)

  Three kings? Not even one (i)

  Thunder-browed and shaggy-throated (i)

  Times change (i)

  To be crucified (i)

  To live in Wales is to be conscious (i)

  To one kneeling down no word came (i)

  To the mature itch I lent my hand (i)

  Too far for you to see (i)

  Travelling towards the light (i)

  Trees, of course, silent attendants (i)

  Turning aside, never meeting (i)

  Twm was a dunce at school, and was whipped and shaken (i)

  Waiting for the curtain (i)

  Was here and was one person (i)

  Was she planned? (i)

  We began by being very close (i)

  We don’t like your white cottage (i)

  We live in our own small world (i)

  We met under a shower of bird-notes (i)

  ‘We sat under a tree (i)

  We stand looking at (i)

  We watch them. They watch (i)

  We were a people taut for war; the hills (i)

  Well, I said, better to wait (i)

  We’ve nothing vast to offer you, no deserts (i)

  What does he know? moving through the fields (i)

  What is Christmas without (i)

  What is this creature discarded (i)

  What is this? said God. The obstinacy (i)

  What is time? The man stands (i)

  What it means is (i)

  What made us think (i)

  What pardon for this, Lord? (i)

  What they are saying is (i)

  What time is it? (i)

  What was your war record, Prytherch? (i)

  Whatever you imagine (i)

  When he came in, she was there (i)

  When I close my eyes, I can see it (i)

  When I was a child and the soft flesh was forming (i)

  When I was young, when I was young! (i)

  ‘Where did the blood come from?’ (i)

  Where is our poetry (i)

  Where to turn without turning (i)

  Who can tell his years, for the winds have stretched (i)

  Who put me here? (i)

  Who put that crease in your soul (i)

  Who said to the trout (i)

  Who to believe? (i)

  ‘Why look at me like that?’ (i)

  Why must I write so? (i)

  Why no! I never thought other than (i)

  Will they say on some future (i)

  Windows in art (i)

  Winged life – why (i)

  With her fingers she turns paint (i)

  With the deterioration of sight (i)

  Withdrawing from the present (i)

  Yeats said that. Young (i)

  Yes, I know. They are like primroses (i)

  Yes, I know what he is like (i)

  Yes, that’s how I was (i)

  You are ill, Davies, ill in mind (i)

  You are there also (i)

  You ask me what it was like? (i)

  You ask why I don’t write (i)

  You can come in (i)