Review
R.S. Thomas Collected Poems
R.S. THOMAS
Collected Poems
J .M. Dent, £25.00
He is an icon now. How does one respond? There is no one to compare with R.S. Thomas, even remotely. In taking on the role of a prophet in the Old Testament mode he has become a thorn in our collective flesh, one we appear to find necessary, and however perversely, welcome. He speaks of his own marginalised state, perhaps disingenuously, for if his is a voice in the wilderness it is a voice which, at the same time, is strangely central, and one to which it behoves us to attend.
This handsome volume is impressive, awesome. It confronts us with a lifetime's struggle with language, meaning, purpose. Upwards of five hundred poems are collected here. There is a fearlessness about them, a formidable integrity. There is also, connected closely with that of God, or those gods he postulates, a ferocity that can appall. As R.S. Thomas asks of his deity in 'The Film of God’, I ask of him, bewildered and aghast.
What is the colour
of his thought?
In 'Wallace Stevens', he describes the wind that blows through the American poet's work as hailing "From mortuaries of the cold heart". The chill factor in R.S. Thomas is at least as strong. In reading and re-reading, despite my being surprised by sudden tendernesses I'd forgotten, as in 'The Evacuee' that "shy bird in the nest of welcome" who is taken to heart by "farm faces trying to be kind”, I keep coming back to a sense of terror, of dread, where the best that can be achieved is a grim endurance. No serious writer can evade the issues of existential angst, but the gods R.S. invents to account for the shadow, for the dark, and in which, it must be said, he seems to take a certain relish, operate rather as projections of the very worst aspects of a distinctly human nature. If God is in mankind as an image is in a mirror, this mirror tends to distort.
There is as much delicacy and transitory beauty in the poems as there is in life, but it is a beauty towards which, as we might expect, R.S. Thomas never allows truth to defer, and I have no quarrel with this. Nonetheless, for all the radiance of "the lit bush", the immanent spiritual intensity of the simple and generous air crumbling upon the worshipper in 'The Moor', as a form of natural sacrament, the half-hinted, half-hallucinated image of a fleeting Christ appearing as “golden fruit" on the winter tree of the cross, the god-in-charge I take away in my mind, and wish I didn't, remains a blend of laughing monster ('Rough') and malevolent sadist ('The Island').
Neither the poet nor the priest can be taken to task for reminding us of the dichotomy that exists between the old and the new dispensations, but, if accelerating out into the interstellar space of the mind on a quest for
Something to bring back to show
you have been there:
we find no "lock of God's hair", and no "photograph of the garden/ of the spirit", let us accept the absence and the silence for what it is, rather than an inimical atonality, peopled with theological video nasties. When, further, the mysterious Machine appears, mysterious because it seems not to be a straightforward symbol of the mechanistic/technological impulse in man, but something much more subtle and protean, "singing to itself/of money", horribly, in one of its forms, may we not be forgiven for pining for real earth under our fingernails, the graspable solidity of Prytherch's mangels to dock, a world accessible to the senses, one in which it is still physically possible to gob in the fire, should we so wish?
A poet who can conceive of gods of such arbitrary cruelty as those he depicts in 'Soliloquy' and 'Echoes' is patently unafraid of wrestling with the problem of evil. In regard to those "glacial eyes" of God as White Tiger, that "had looked on / violence and come to terms / with it", echoes of Blake function more as spectre than emanation, yet, born as they are of paradox and contradiction, the gods of the poet's imaginings can evoke our pity, as well as our awe and our revulsion. In 'God's Story' we find a perplexed inventor, as lonely as he is uncomprehending, seeking the truth of his own identity among “dumb cogs and tireless camshafts".
I looked again at the earlier poems, trying to see them anew. Impossible. They have become part of our seeing, have entered our culture. The Welsh hill country is there in stark clarity, as is the tactile presence of phlegm and spittle, muck and slurry. Equally, the poems which concern the matter of Wales and of Welshness remain provocatively relevant in their irony and their invective. Perhaps the vertiginous repulsion / fascination of the later poems could not have come about without that preliminary hard-core of rootedness in earth, those specifics of place, since, for matter to be recognised as the scaffolding of spirit, it must first be fully apprehended as matter in its own right. Yet, however foolish it may be to wish a poet other than he is while simultaneously praising his unique, idiosyncratic achievement, I. do feel, achingly, the lack of a loving immediacy in R.S. Thomas's work as a whole. 'Abercuawg' crystallizes the problem for me.We are told
An absence is how we become surer
of what we want.
The name 'Branwen' conjures up a splendid mythical past for the poet, a seductive heroic dream. He sees "the horses and the soil red / with their blood, and the trouble / in Ireland" but his enthusiasm for this visualisation of mingled violence and beauty apparently renders him less accessible to what is close to hand. He becomes repelled by the actual recoiling in distaste from an inoffensive child whose banality shatters the reverie. She may bear a grand name but is very much a part of the quotidian world, being "sticky / with sweets and snivel". "This is the name"; the poet laments, "not the thing that the name / stands for." The appropriateness of a Wallace Stevens caveat in his poem 'Esthetique du Mal' comes to mind here, "The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world." If the poet's contemplation of the ideal debars him from a loving regard for the human, and consequently, imperfect reality, the practice becomes dubious indeed. Yeats has warned us of the dangers involved in feeding the heart on fantasies.
Such misgivings apart, the full measure of R.S. Thomas's achievement and challenge becomes apparent with the appearance of this undoubted literary landmark. The climate of thought we enter and experience as we read him is stern and unflinching, "terrible in its way" as religion is, he told us, in 'The Belfry'. It is a climate that changes us, as being in the presence of greatness must.
Page(s) 50-52
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