Imagining R.S. Thomas's Amen
Some artists are easy to love because they are loving, like Chaucer and Herbert. Some are easy to love because they are expansive and empathetic, finding nothing alien, like Homer and Shakespeare. Some are easy to love because they are language-changers, like Milton and Dylan Thomas, or because they are ironically self-aware, like Horace and Byron. And some we love because they are personally congenial, in temperament, cast of mind, or opinion, as I find Charlotte Mew and Auden. I have none of these reasons for loving the poetry of R.S. Thomas. He is fuelled by hostility more often than love, not strong on othering, not a brilliant maker, not conspicuously self-critical. His nationalism and Christianity I find unsympathetic. I would have stopped reading him had I not been Welsh and sometimes asked for an opinion of poets living and writing in Wales. Moreover, it's no good rejecting artists because you don't like acts of rejection. So I hope the response of a reluctant fan will be acceptable. Shakespeare knew it was better to have Cleopatra's praise sung by Enobarbus than always by Antony and Charmian.
Of course I admire the exceptional poems of love and celebration. I wish there were twenty poems like 'Song for Gwydion', with its bitter-sweet articulation of innocence, the loss of innocence, violence, and dying, in a loving language, "the soft flesh was forming / Quietly as snow", "from whose chill lips the water song had flown", and "the beautiful, blithe garland of stipples faded, as light shocked the brain". There are other loving poems I keep reading, like 'Pisces', 'The Village', and 'In a Country Church' but mostly they don't rise to passion, and any tendency to rapture is cooled by habitual constraints and austerities. Thomas's favourite figure must be litotes: 'He and She' moves from the excited "Thoughts mingling / were lit up, gold particles in the mind's stream" to the understated:
There were fathoms in her
too, and sometimes he crossed
them and landed and was not repulsed.
But understatement is most enjoyable when it is rare, when it seems to convey, not check, strong passion, when it makes you feel what Yeats images as "the beast stirring beneath". In Thomas it is too frequent, turning you off. It is significantly used in poems of love and praise, not in poems of hatred, contempt, scornful pity for the blind, the halt, and the maimed ways of the ordinary person or the archaically named 'peasant'. Understatement is the medium for Thomas's religious poetry and this I find the most enterprising aspect of his writing. His god's otherness is not put down, and his suspicion, hostility, and coldness come into their own.
Thomas's difficulty in reaching out to otherness makes his religious poetry remarkably different from the Christian imaginings of favourites like Donne, Crashaw, Herbert and Hopkins. Their submissions, tenderness, and raptures can excite and instruct the irreligious reader. If we do not believe in gods we can see prayer as a kind of poetry, and religious poetry imagines the self and relationship in theological and supernatural language. Thomas imagines his god as inclined to a lack of response, taciturn or silent, evasive and absent, just about imaginable. The feeling - short on and short of passion - is bitter, hostile, ironic, cold. Donne and Herbert and Hopkins articulate their best selves, or most condensed congenialities, as - acts of prayer and confession and bidding and magnification. Thomas may express his central or habitual self - who knows? It seems to be his habitual poetic persona, angry, denigrating, violent, chillingly candid. If he is not beguilingly self-ironic, he can be ironic about a god, seeing that god creating humanity as a penance, or finding in humanity a penance for creating it. The exceptions are dramatised and ironised: in that harsh poem 'The Minister' the words "Beloved, let us love one another" are blown away "by the unchristened wind", and "love's text... riddled" by buzzards' crying. What Herbert constantly imagined is imagined only in deconstruction. Hopkins's nature-ecstasy is present, "God is in the throat of a bird", but imagined by Ann and Pantycelyn, in the wild hare's heartbeat, but felt by Melangell. So the imaginings can be summarised in a flash, not enacted, embodied, or sustained. And they can be ironically dismissed, "Wales in fact is His peculiar home". All the lovely old floridity and fondness of religious language is set at a distance, inhibitedly and honestly. Thomas's images are stripped, the soul's in "its bone I tent", and cold, "refrigerating" and its lanuage “be-numbed" ('Formula'). His Christanity is set in the world of mathematics and science, co-habits with equations, is forced to wear the garb of machinery, lasers, silicon, in ways which deprecate science but use it also. How refreshingly deadly, how far removed from the cosy soothing voices of 'Thought for the Day', reconciling gods with war and science by refusing to contextualise them.
Thomas's god - often capitalised by the disguising routine of being placed as the first word in a line, “God, it is not your reflections / we seek” ('Cones'), or pluralised, “Gods are not put to death / any more” ('Coming') - is defined advantageously in scientific language, “Invisible as a mutation” ('Coming'). The traditional still centre, so dwelt on by T S. Eliot, is re-imaged
where love operates
on all those frequencies
that are set up by the spinning
of two minds… ('Coming')
Thomas's god is imagined in litotes, meiosis, occupation, and the topos of inexpressibility, not occasionally, as in Milton, but habitually. He is absent or angry, not occasionally, as in Hopkins, but almost always. He isn't loving, or comforting or close. If there is a flash of romantic feeling - as I was surprised to find there was, on a re-reading - it is craftily tentative, “think he still comes”, or displaced from tenor to vehicle, “taken / on trust like flowers in the / dark country towards which we go (‘Coming'). Telos is avoided, prayer metaphorised as “a rope / over an unfathomable / abyss, which goes on and on / never arriving. This is the voice of one being catechised, and a kind of answer is given
So that your Amen
is unsaid. Know, friend, the arrival
is the grace given to maintain
your balance... ('Revision')
For the atheist and the agnostic, the poetry is still a romanticising of faith. But it is probably as honest as Christian poetry can be, and fascinatingly reserved, of a piece with the rest of the work. If there were a god for now he'd be more like Thomas's than like Herbert's, unfortunately.
Page(s) 21-22
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