1978 Emerging: a look at some of R. S. Thomas’ more recent poems

Lovers of the poetry of R. S. Thomas may have felt somewhat daunted by the publication of the collection entitled H’m in 1972. The elements of anger, pain and despair which have been present in his poetry through the years seemed at first sight to have become all-pervasive. There were poems in which God was presented as unremittingly cruel and hostile, others in which he seemed to stand with man impotent before the all-powerful Machine. Of course, there were exceptions to this prevailing mood; poems of pure affirmation like ‘The River’ and ‘The Kingdom’, poems of great subtlety and tenderness like ‘The Hearth’. Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression that the book conveyed was one of sadness, of an almost unrelieved blackness.

As life improved, their poems

Grew sadder and sadder …

With the narrowing of the poems’ mood, there seemed too to come a certain hardening of the style, as if the whole work was running into an impasse. It was a small fact, but indicative of the situation, that this was the slimmest of all the volumes which R. S. Thomas had published since Song at the Year’s Turning in 1955.

And then quite suddenly it was as though we had emerged from a long tunnel. The autumn of 1975 saw the publication of Laboratories of the Spirit, and the first poem of the new volume had as its title ‘Emerging’. It revealed a new awareness of the nature of prayer, a new awareness of man’s relationship with God. The hard uncomfortable questions which have always been there in R. S. Thomas’ poetry have not gone away. There is still at times the acute sense of the disharmony of things. But at the same time, in and through this very disharmony the poet has found new possibilities of affirmation. Beyond the darkness there is light. Absence long experienced can unexpectedly reveal itself as presence. And these affirmations carry all the more weight since they have emerged on the other side of despair.

It becomes clear in Laboratories of the Spirit that we are encountering a major religious poet, one who is rightly to be compared with the greatest of his predecessors, a George Herbert, a Gerard Manley Hopkins. Things are said in this book about man’s relationship with God with a directness and a power which are, I believe, unparalleled in recent poetry in English. And this new mood of affirmation carries with it a real if qualified acceptance of things, and reaches out to other areas of experience. It allows a more positive attitude towards the human condition in general, as in the last poem of this collection called simply ‘Good’. It makes room for a new willingness to accept the conditions of Welsh nationality, as in the poem ‘The Small Country’ in his book Frequencies (1978). It makes possible a more direct celebration of human affection, as we see in the title poem of the recent collection, The Way of It (1977). This has the effect of diversifying the poems both in content and in style, and gives a new sense of freedom to the poet’s writing.

But this new diversity is not the primary thing which we shall be concerned with here. Rather we shall seek to look into the major theme which runs through R. S. Thomas’ more recent writing, the theme of man before God, or better the theme of man in God, and God in man. And here already we have touched on one of the primary characteristics of this new period, the realization that man is not always over against God, battering at him from outside. Prayer is something more mysterious than this. The relationship between man and God is much closer, more intimate. It involves, as ‘Emerging’ itself declares, ‘the annihilation of difference, / the consciousness of myself in you, / of you in me …’.

The formulas are deceptively simple, but the difference is great. The processes by which this consciousness has been arrived at are not easy ones, but already in this poem, at the beginning of the book we get a glimpse of the extent of the change. Something of the cost of it appears in a poem called ‘Sea-Watching’ which is found at the end of the collection. It is a poem where it is helpful to remember the poet’s external situation. He lives at the end of the Lleyn peninsula, at the north-west extremity of Wales. It is well known that he is a keen amateur bird-watcher. But in the long hours spent on the headlands, it is the sea also that he considers,

Grey waters, vast

 as an area of prayer

that one enters. Daily

 over a period of years

I have let the eye rest on them.

What is he doing with this apparent waste of time? What is he expecting in this daily attention to the sea and the sky? Nothing seems to happen; the movement of the waves goes on inexorably, without meaning or direction. An occasional bird appears. Often it comes when one is not looking, when one is absent. Purpose escapes us, but still we must continue to look.

You must wear your eyes out,

as others their knees.

 I became the hermit

of the rocks, habited with the wind

and the mist. There were days,

so beautiful the emptiness

it might have filled,

 its absence

was as its presence; not to be told

any more, so single my mind

after its long fast,

 my watching from praying.

Watching the sea, praying, living one’s life; they have much in common. Gradually we find that we are learning to look. Through the long silence and the emptiness a presence makes itself known. ‘After its long fast’ from thoughts and explanations, from expectations and plans, the mind becomes single, the eye is enlightened, Watching becomes prayer. It is hardly necessary to comment on the intimate relationship between watching and praying, to be found in the Gospels, and developed especially in the Eastern Christian tradition, where nepsis, vigilance, alertness is considered one of the principal qualities of the monk. The ancient insight is here born again, and we discover that it involves a condition which demands attention as well as patience, a growing degree of objectivity, a capacity to look beyond our own desires and illusions to what is actually there, to what is given to us. It means being open to the unexpected.

This process is further illumined in a poem called ‘The Prayer’. Here again the writer reveals something about the necessity of persistence, but also about the need to be ready to discard old ways of approach. He speaks of the sense of constant failure, of a feeling of dryness and frustration at the silence and absence of God. He holds out his hands to receive God’s gifts. They remain empty.

 But the prayer formed:

Deliver me from the long drought

 of the mind. Let leaves

from the deciduous Cross

 fall on us, washing

us clean, turning our autumn

to gold by the affluence of their fountain.

Here the direct appeal for the drought to end is followed by the sudden overwhelming richness of the compound image, of the cross as a living tree, which is consequently a tree which sheds its leaves, which lives and dies and lives again. They are leaves which cleanse us and turn the iron of our autumn into the gold of fulfilment in the splendour of a divine generosity. There is here a combination of images, the cross, the tree of life with its leaves for healing, the fountains of living water which themselves cleanse and renew, images which seem to grow out of one another. This same combination is to be found in a different form at the central point in one of the finest poems to be written in the Welsh language in these last thirty years. Waldo Williams in ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ speaks of the liberation which comes after a crucial instant of understanding and recognition.

Great was the leaping of hearts after their chilly frost,

There were fountains breaking out towards heaven

And falling back, their tears like the leaves of a tree.

In a note to this poem, Waldo Williams reminds us explicitly of the leaves of the tree, in the Book of Revelation, which are given for the healing of the nations; and this phrase, ‘the leaves of the tree’, Dail Pren, is the title of his whole collection of poems. At the moment of recognition the heart’s frost breaks, the tears of life spring forth, tears alike of joy and of sorrow, and make fertile a barren land. This return of life and movement after long inner frost is the theme of one of the most powerful of R. S. Thomas’ earlier poems, ‘The Belfry’, which surely illuminates the present conjunction of imagery. In it we see a man praying through the winter in the cold of a stone church, whose persistent intercessions bring an end to the long frost.

Perhaps they are warm rain

That brings the sun and afterwards flowers

On the raw graves and throbbing of bells.

This is a moment of sudden change, and it comes unexpectedly; again a theme which recurs frequently in the Gospels. R. S. Thomas speaks of it in a poem called ‘Suddenly’, remarkable for the explicitness of its affirmation of the way in which man may look towards God and perceive his coming. As truth reveals itself to the thinker, as the scientist suddenly finds that the answers to his question ‘quietly emerge’, so the one we had known as absent, suddenly is there.

As I had always known

he would come, unannounced,

remarkable merely for the absence of clamour …

I looked at him, not with the eye

only, but with the whole

of my being, overflowing with

him as a chalice would with the sea …

It is not the eye alone which sees God. All of man must look towards him. But to say this does not exclude the activity of physical sight; quite the reverse. The eye no less than the mind or the imagination is inadequate to the vision of God. The created cannot apprehend the Creator. Yet the eye itself can be made clean, cleansed to perceive the light of God in and through the light of day.

The one who thus silently and suddenly makes himself known is to be found in many places. The church building itself, the scene of so many silent struggles, of so many weary defeats, wrestling with an absent God, is again filled with the light of his presence. In a poem, which even in this collection stands out with a singular serenity and beauty, the poet celebrates the little church, with the stream beside it, at Llananno in Powys. The light coming through the clear windows, the movement of the water outside, the contrast between the simplicity and plainness of the building itself and the rich carving of the fifteenth-century rood screen, all these have gone towards the making of this poem, in which the poet finds himself face to face with God, and looks towards him with eyes unsealed.

I keep my eyes

open and am not dazzled,

so delicately does the light enter

my soul from the serene presence

that waits for me till I come next.

But if God manifests himself in church, still more, for this poet, he will manifest himself in nature. This theme of the vision of God in nature has characterized R. S. Thomas’ writing throughout. But it is interesting to note that in this volume, one of the poems in which it is most clearly stated also makes use of unusually explicit references to the images of the Old and New Testament, as if there needed to be an interaction between these different areas of experience. It is in the light of the beauty we perceive in nature that we are to understand the biblical revelation. It is the images given to us in Scripture which allow us to make sense of the world around us.

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it. I realise now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

We step out from the insistent horizontal line which hurries us from past to future, and begin to be aware of the present moment as a moment which is touched by eternity and thus full of the riches of eternity. And we find that this eternal presence is not as we had thought something transitory. It is something which awaits us, which we find time and time again when we thought we had lost it; or better which is always there to disclose itself to us. This is the field full of treasure in the gospel parable; this is the pearl of great price, for which a man is willing to give all that he has. The memory of this is something which we have always known, which, the poet suggests in a poem called ‘That Place’, sustains us through the ‘dozen committees’ with which we occupy our lives. Even when under their pressure and the pressure of our daily activities, life becomes ‘small, grey’, full of ‘the smell of interiors’, we can still recall occasions when there have been these other epiphanies, when there has been ‘a resurrection of nature’, as the sun has broken through after storm, or when in the silence of an island the air itself has been ‘anointed’. We have seen something of an eternal beauty which always eludes us, yet always awaits us. Nature itself participates at such moments in the risen life, and imparts that resurrection to us. The air itself into which we emerge is anointed and anoints; for God the Spirit breathes in and through the very air which we breathe and which surrounds us on every side. The island is seen as a symbol of eternity, ringed with the bow which comes from the juncture of rain with sunshine and which announces God’s covenant with mankind and all creation.

This is a highly personal discovery; it pertains to man’s inner life, to the secret places of heart and mind. And yet as with everything that relates to prayer it has a universal import. The poet’s inner struggle, the priest’s inner struggle, is linked with the great struggle which has been and is going on in the whole of our Western world, perhaps in the whole of humanity …

Some have felt this time through which we are passing as a kind of collective entry into a night of faith, a time when all visible or tangible assurance of God’s presence is removed. Others have assumed simply that the day of Christ is over, the wheel has come full circle. If there is to be a religion of the future it will be something wholly new, which will require a completely new beginning. Here in this collection, R. S. Thomas, this most private of poets, makes a most public statement, taking up and responding to the vision of Yeats, the man who has influenced him perhaps more than any other twentieth-century poet. The poem in which he does this, ‘The Moon in Lleyn’, is placed almost at the centre of the book; it has naturally attracted the attention of reviewers and commentators, for it is clearly a major utterance.

The last quarter of the moon

of Jesus gives way

to the dark; the serpent

digests the egg.

The wheel has come full circle. Once again, the poet presents himself at prayer. But now all the things which lead man to conclude that religion has come to an end come forcefully before him. The elements of the tradition of faith and worship, the Bible, the sacraments, the prayers, the hymns, have all alike been gradually eroded, just as the sea has eaten away the land almost up to the walls of the church at Aberdaron. ‘Religion is over’, the age of Christendom is past. No one knows what will come next.

But a voice sounds

in my ear: Why so fast,

mortal? These very seas

are baptized. The parish

has a saint’s name time cannot

unfrock. In cities that

have outgrown their promise people

are becoming pilgrims

again, if not to this place,

then to the recreation of it

in their own spirits. You must remain

kneeling. Even as this moon

making its way through the earth’s

cumbersome shadow, prayer, too,

has its phases.

The Christian thing, he says, is not so easily disposed of. The apparent withdrawal of God is not lightly to be understood. There are other changes going on in the deeper reaches of our society which are leading men out on pilgrimage again, leading them on to rediscover the very places made holy by an earlier tradition, to find again their meaning and their power. ‘You must remain kneeling.’ It is one of the most forceful words to be addressed to the Church for a long time …

The article originally appeared in Theology 81 (683): 352–61. The full text can be found at <https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X7808100507>.