Reviews
R.S. THOMAS: Mass For Hard Times
R.S. THOMAS
Mass For Hard Times
Bloodaxe, £6.95
R.S. Thomas's title echoes that of Dickens's 1854 novel, Hard Times, but the poet's satire goes much deeper than the novelist's. While condemning the dehumanization of the factory system and mocking the factual obsession of manic Utilitarianism, Dickens fell far short of condemning capitalism outright. This R.S. Thomas does with a passionate intensity; moreover, he provides a devastating satire of our age's obsession with scientific 'progress' and the concomitant decline of belief in spiritual realities. The Dickensian allusion makes clear, though, the link R.S. makes between our present degenerate state and the mass urbanization and industrialization which took place in the early nineteenth century. It is no surprise then that the poet Blake, with his utterly unorthodox spirituality and his fulminating anger against the 'satanic mills', is a significant presence and inspiration in the work. As in Blake, it is the world of Nature, the few parts of it still untouched by Man, which provides most of the positive images in this sombre collection.
The volume continues the search for the hidden God which has been the dominant theme of R.S.'s recent work. In this context, the comment by the critic Bernard O'Donoghue quoted on the back cover seems to me slightly odd: O'Donoghue calls R.S. "the most resolute religious poet in English this century." Surely that should. Read "irresolute"? One of the most striking images in this collection is the Cross,"our signpost, arms / pointing in opposite directions" ('The Word') suggesting the continued questioning, the awareness of all the contradictions inherent in Christianity, expressed in the Eliot-like paradoxes of 'Mass for Hard Times' itself. And yet belief is often affirmed, angrily declared against the odds, in the face of Man the scientist, the "inventor of things more intricate / than the snowflake." ('Mass for Hard Times'). Christ hangs there still: at times, the "imperishable / scarecrow, recipient of our casts-off" ('The Word'), at times flashing upon the spiritual eye "with all / the unexpectedness of his body's/lightning,"('Retired') Yet Man, the surgeon, the astronaut, the physicist, the genetic engineer, has "grown / too clever to believe in" him ('R.I.P').
The vocabulary of the collection is a striking amalgam of the scientific and the liturgical: "genes", "bequerels", and "electrons" mingle with the "kyrie", "gloria", and "credo." At the heart of the vision is the confrontation between the crucified Christ and "the lubricated / changeling of the machine," ('Bleak Liturgies'). R.S, continues to re-write Yeats, substituting the Machine for Yeats' "rough beast","slouching towards Bethlehem to be born." ('The Second Coming')
R.S. refers often to his beloved birds' voices; his own poetic voice is by now as distinctive as a blackbird's or, given the bleak auguries made here, an owl's. There are characteristic touches, such as the deft use of the unexpected, metaphorical possessive: "vocabulary's shadow”, "the electron's confinement", "thought's apple", "soul's tissue", "the imagination's barbed wire." The very rhythm, as well as the diction and imagery, creates a feeling of inevitability, despite the unusual combinations, which I take to be the mark of a great poet.
Like many great poets, R.S. successfully assimilates his influences. I've already mentioned some of the English and Irish poets present here, but there are, of course, Welsh echoes, too. The end of 'Not Blonde':
poppies
that were being hawked in aid
of casualties of the next war.
recalls the similarly Pacifist beginning of to Gwenallt's 'Rhydcymerau':
Plannwyd egin coed y trydydd rhyfel
Ar dir Esgeir-ceir a meysydd Tir-bach
Ger Rhydcymerau.(Near Rhydcymerau,
On the land of Esgeir-ceir and the fields of Tir-bach,
They have planted the saplings to be trees of the third war.)
(trans. T. Conran)
'RI.P. 1588-1988' is about William Morgan and his translation of the Bible into Welsh; interestingly, his work is seen in terms of fishing:
angling for the right word.
We are inheritors
of his catch. He invested
his haul, so readers to comeshould live off the interest.
Imagine his delight
in striking those Welsh nouns,as they rose from the shadows,
that are alive as ever
stippling the book's page.
And yet this celebration becomes tainted with doubt:
Is an obsession with language
an acknowledgment we are too late
to save it?
a doubt which grows from despair over the future of the language to an all-pervasive hopelessness:
In the beginning
was the word. What
word? At the end
is the dust. We know
what dust; the dust
that the bone comes to,
that is the fall-out
from our hubris...
The poem ends with a tentative hope that a figure may leap up, resurrected, from that dust, and yet we "have grown / too clever to believe in" him. The poem seems to ex-exemplify R.S.'s own lament towards the end of his autobiography, Neb (1985):
Dyma R.S. tua diwedd ei oes yn gorfod brwydro'n erbyn temtasiwn pob hen wr, sef anobaith.
( Here is R.S. towards the end of his life having to battle against the temptation of every old man, namely despair.) (my translation)
In the same work, R.S. asserts "Roedd y wlad yn anhepgor i'w ffydd" (The countryside was essential to his faith). Several poems in the collection show this relish for nature's beauty, a spiritual relish which is markedly Romantic in tone. Both Wordsworth and the early Yeats are to be heard echoing in R.S.'s unmistakable voice at the close of 'Afon Rhiw':
Questioned, the trout had confessed
I was indistinguishable
from a tree, roots in darkness
my head in the clouds...
Elsewhere, the delicacy of birdsong, birds' feathers and flight are incandescent compensations for man's multiple corruptions; the bird's song might just be the voice of God, but this possibility seems more and more unlikely: "there is a / word missing from the dawn chorus." ('Mass for Hard Times')
As in Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium', men try to rival Nature's beauty with their ingenuity:
Our scientists
immaculately dressed not
conceived, preached to us
from their space-stations, calling us
to consider the clockwork birds
and fabricated lilies, how they
also, as they were conditioned to
do, were neither toiling nor spinning.
('Eschatology')
Opposed to such machines, symbols of man’s hubris, is the Biblical "lily-flower" of the poem 'Retired', next to which the speaker takes his place, "believing / with Blake when God comes / he comes sometimes way / of the nostril." This poem also, knowledges the possible charge of misanthropy which might easily be brought against these poems. The olfactory image here is particularly Swiftian:
My failure, perhaps,
was to have had no sense of smell
for the holiness suspiring from forked human.
And yet there are moments of human tenderness, too. 'A Marriage' seems to be a celebration of R.S.'s wife, M.E. Eldridge, whose memory the book is dedicated. The poem is delicate and beautiful, chronicling, an old man's incredulity at the speed of time passing: "fifty years" as "love's moment". The poem ends, characteristically, with a eulogy of the beloved's bird-like grace, even dying.
The volume combines the acutely person and detailed with the incomprehensive immensities of space and time. God is the being who straddles these poles, "coming at us / like light itself, now / in waves from great distance, / now in the intimacy of corpuscles." ('1') It is the philosophers Kierkegaard and Heidegger who point the way to this revelation. Plato, Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas also haunt these poem R.S.'s poetry asks the same fundamental questions as did the philosophers, and offers some equally discomfiting answers.
At the close of Neb, R.S. speaks of experiencing "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears", quoting the last line of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode' (but in Welsh translation). It is "the meanest flower that blows" that can give rise to such thoughts in Wordsworth; in R.S. it is, he tells us, listening to the eternal sounds of the waves breaking on the beach in Porth Neigwl and then hearing on the radio of yet another instance of man's folly or brutality. Mass for Hard Times articulates "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears", expressing a tortured, dualistic vision, with an occasional glimpse of hope, Christ's "body's lightning" or Blake’s "lily-flower." Ultimately, though, like all great poetry, it is itself an affirmation, a demonstration of what the human spirit and the imagination, eschewing materialism, can achieve.
Page(s) 48-50
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