R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (Writing Wales in English)

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Writing Wales in English

R. S. Thomas A Stylistic Biography

Daniel Westover

University of Wales Press

R. S. Thomas Writing Wales in English

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CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies General Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (CREW, Swansea University) This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, and, along with Gillian Clarke and Seamus Heaney, one of CREW’s Honorary Associates. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible. Other titles in the series

Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1) Barbara Â�Prys-Â�Williams, Â�Twentieth-Â�Century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1) Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8) Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7) Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7) Sarah Prescott, Â�Eighteenth-Â�Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (978-0-7083-2053-2) Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Â�Break-Â�Up of Britain (978-0-7083-2153-9) Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2) Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist? (978-0-7083-2217-8) Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0) M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (978-0-7083-2225-3) Linden Peach, The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (978-0-7083-2216-1)

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R. S. Thomas A Stylistic Biography Writing Wales in English

daniel westover

university of wales press cardiff 2011

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© Daniel Westover, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available form the British Library. ISBN 978-0-7083-2413-4 (hardback) 978-0-7083-2411-0 (paperback) e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2412-7 The right of Daniel Westover to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988

Typeset by Mark Heslington Ltd, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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For Mary, Eden and Branwen

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Contents

General Editor’s Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Abbreviations Introduction

xiii 1

1

Origins of a Style, 1936–1943

5

2

A Style Emerging, 1943–1955

34

3

A Style Defined, 1955–1972

67

4

A Style Developed, 1972–1988

115

5

A Style (Un)Refined, 1988–2000

148

Conclusion

170

Notes

172

Select Bibliography

202

Index

207

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General Editor ’s Preface

The aim of this series is to produce a body of scholarly and critical work that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. Drawing upon the expertise both of established specialists and of younger scholars, it will seek to take advantage of the concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies to promote a better understanding of the literature’s significance, viewed not only as an expression of Welsh culture but also as an instance of modern literatures in English worldwide. In addition, it will seek to make available the scholarly materials (such as bibliographies) necessary for this kind of advanced, informed study.

M. Wynn Thomas CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) Swansea University

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Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the generosity of a number of individuals and organizations. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Professor Tony Brown for his friendship, depth of knowledge, patience and advice. Tony was generous to me long before I came to study in Wales, and I am deeply grateful for his guidance. I would also like to thank Professor M. Wynn Thomas, general editor of this series, for his thoughtful attention to the manuscript. Professor Ian Gregson and Dr Paul Westover also read the manuscript and offered valuable advice. Many thanks are due to Sarah Lewis at the University of Wales Press for the commitment and expertise she has exhibited throughout the process of shepherding my work into print. I express deep gratitude to my friend and mentor, Dr John Wood, who many years ago introduced me to R. S. Thomas’s work, and who encouraged me in my inclination to pursue further studies in Wales. Thanks are also due to Morri Creech, who directed my graduate studies and spent many hours discussing prosody with me. I also wish to express my gratitude to other teachers who have inspired and encouraged me over the years: Sally Lake, Peter Makuck and the late Leslie Norris. The nature of this study necessitated the inclusion of longer poetry quotations than might normally be expected in a work of criticism. Grateful acknowledgement for permission to quote from the work of R. S. Thomas is due to Gwydion Thomas, Kunjana Thomas and Rhodri Thomas, and to Dr Suzanne Â�Fairless-Â�Aitken at Bloodaxe Books. The R. S. Thomas Study Centre at Bangor University provided access to a vast collection of research materials. The Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme (ORSAS) and an International Scholarship from Bangor University made it possible for me to study Â�full-Â�time in Wales. I am

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acknowledgements

indebted to colleagues who offered feedback and advice as I presented and discussed early material from this book at the Annual Conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English (Gregynog, Wales, 2004), and I wish to express thanks to both the Association for Welsh Writing in English (AWWE) and the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History (NAASWCH) for supporting and promoting valuable scholarship that continues to stimulate my own work. I would especially like to acknowledge my parents, Kim and Pam Westover, and my wife’s parents, Ron and Kay McCormick; their support has in no small way made this book possible. My deepest gratitude, as ever, is to my wife, Mary, for her advice, care and encouragement. Daniel Westover April 2011

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Abbreviations

A AL BHN BT Critical Writings EA Echoes to the Amen ERS F LP LS MHT

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R. S. Thomas: Autobiographies, ed. and trans. Jason Walford Davies (London: J. M. Dent, 1997) An Acre of Land (Newtown: Montgomeryshire Printing Co., 1952) Between Here and Now (London: Macmillan, 1981) The Bread of Truth (London: Â�Hart-Â�Davis, 1963) Critical Writings on R. S. Thomas, ed. Sandra Anstey (Bridgend: Seren, 1982) Experimenting with an Amen (London: Macmillan, 1986) Echoes to the Amen: Essays After R. S. Thomas, ed. Damian Walford Davies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003) The Echoes Return Slow (London: Macmillan, 1988) Frequencies (London: Macmillan, 1978) Later Poems, 1972–1982 (London: Macmillan, 1983) Laboratories of the Spirit (London: Macmillan, 1975) Mass for Hard Times (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992)

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xiv

abbreviations

Miraculous Simplicity Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas, ed. William V. Davis (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993) Not That He Brought Flowers (London: NBF Â�Hart-Â�Davis, 1968) No Truce With the Furies (Newcastle Upon Tyne: NTF Bloodaxe Books, 1995) Pietá (London: Â�Hart-Â�Davis, 1966) P The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty, ed. M. Page’s Drift Wynn Thomas (Bridgend: Seren, 1993) Poetry for Supper (London: Â�Hart-Â�Davis, 1958) PS The Stones of the Field (Carmarthen: Druid Press, SF 1946) R.S. Thomas: Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey SP (3rd edn; Bridgend: Seren, 1995) SYT Song at the Year’s Turning: Poems, 1942–1954 (London: Â�Hart-Â�Davis, 1955). Tares (London: Â�Hart-Â�Davis, 1961) T Welsh Airs (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987) WA WI The Way of It (Sunderland: Coelfrith Press, 1977) YO Young and Old (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972)

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I am receiving various essays + reviews. I see some people are still Â�nit-Â�picking about my Â�so-Â�called lack of form. I wish they’d catch up .â•‹.â•‹. To me form is something much more than the look of the poem on the page. Form is a wide subject that needs wider treatment. I haven’t come across any, which doesn’t mean there isn’t. R. S. Thomas: Letters to Raymond Garlick

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Introduction

In the spring 1972 issue of Poetry Wales, which is dedicated to the work of R. S. Thomas, Harri Webb declares Thomas to be ‘Prifardd [chief bard] of English-speaking Wales’, the ‘successor’ to Dylan Thomas.1 The landscape of R. S. Thomas’s Wales, Webb writes, is ‘a country in which it is necessary to be a man’ – a welcome contemporary counterbalance to the ‘too cosy’, childlike world of Milk Wood.2 More specifically, Webb responds to Thomas’s cultural geography of Wales: ‘physical beauties .â•‹.â•‹. in ironic contrast to the lives of the people who have to live in it’; ‘The countryman [who] must work hard incessantly’; ‘small seaside towns [which] are sucker traps for seedy tourists’; and ‘natives too harassed by their daily cares to take any account of their past glories or future possibilÂ� ities’.3 Unlike the romantic, nostalgic work of his namesake, R. S. Thomas’s poetry is ‘true to the facts’, reflecting ‘the weather of Wales today’; as a result, it ‘acquires a relevance that transcends purely literary merit’.4 Webb’s willingness to assign R. S. Thomas pre-eminence based on the apparent relevance and authenticity of his poetry is indicative of the degree to which Thomas’s socio-political stature has shaped discussions of his work.5 Feeling that his poetry ‘transcends purely literary merit’, critics have often focused on its extra-textual implications. This tendency is understandable, given the cultural position that Thomas consciously took in Wales, but it has meant that, ironically, even as the body of R. S. Thomas criticism has steadily grown, the poetry itself has increasingly been marginalized. Indeed, much writing has focused almost exclusively on the presumed personality of the poet, fashioning a cultural icon from the harsh, cloud-covered, tourist-infected Welsh soil of his early work. Such writing has created a critical context for Thomas’s poetry and

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2

r. s. thomas: a stylistic biography

has established his reputation, but it has also, with few exceptions, failed to engage with the styles and techniques of his poetry – its forms, registers, shapes and movements; in short, its prosody. One reason this matters so much is that in the absence of close reading, critics addressing the importÂ� ance, and indeed the quality, of the poetry have had little on which to base their claims. To quote M. Wynn Thomas slightly out of context: ‘Until his poetry is thus put to the test .â•‹.â•‹. there can be no knowing precisely how good it is, or what its strengths and weaknesses are.’6 Webb seems to take for granted the ‘literary merit’ of Thomas’s poetry, but nearly four decades later, we can no longer afford to do so. Gwyn Jones once suggested that Thomas might be ‘the finest, conscious craftsman writing verse in English today’.7 However, more recently, Robert Minhinnick has written that Thomas ‘has been consistently overrated as a writer’.8 Such differences of opinion are to be expected in critical discourse, but in both cases one feels a similar lack of corroborating demonstration. This is also true of Andrew Duncan’s writing, which falls back on stereotypical adjectives to describe R. S. Thomas – ‘gruff, grumpy, comminatory, patriarchal’ – and makes broad declarations, such as ‘[Thomas’s] poetry is all moulded by political beliefs’ and ‘his work, though highly controlled, is undistinguished in style’.9 Duncan offers nothing in support of these claims. In fact, his most interesting assertion is one that, ironically, applies to his own writing: ‘Thomas’s gales of disapproval assume authority.’10 Duncan draws from popular caricatures of R. S. Thomas and his work and announces them as true. He also trades in sweeping denunciation, an approach that does not help us to evaluate or comprehend Thomas’s poetry – or, for that matter, Thomas himself. Equally unhelpful, and perhaps more damaging, is criticism which heaps unqualified and unsupported approval on the poetry. One can celebrate R. S. Thomas as the pre-eminent religious poet of the modern age, or the greatest British poet since Wordsworth, or ‘Prifardd of Englishspeaking Wales’, or any number of the titles and accolades that critics have given him, but subject matter alone cannot make him great, just as celebrity cannot. In terms of literary history, what determines R. S. Thomas’s greatness, or lack of it, is his poetry. The primary purpose of this book, then, is to examine, and account for, the style and technique of the poems, and in so doing to evaluate existing critical positions. Extrinsic questions are of great consequence, but this study establishes their relationship to intrinsic questions, in particular questions of prosody. By prosody, one has in mind all aspects of style and technique by means of which R. S. Thomas influences and directs our experience when reading a


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introduction

3

given poem. As Harvey Gross writes, ‘prosody and its structures .â•‹.â•‹. articuÂ� late the movement of feeling in a poem, and render to our understanding meanings which are not paraphrasable’.11 Of course, that understanding is enriched by factors outside the literary text. A New Critical approach to Thomas’s work would be interesting but ultimately inadequate because it would ‘[exclude] any analysis of .â•‹.â•‹. conditions which make it possible for the text to exist’.12 Materials con-textual (biography, geography, cultural environment) and extra-textual (poetic and critical theory) elucidate the prosody, which does not develop in a vacuum. When considering the studies of R. S. Thomas to date, one finds that even the best have almost exclusively focused on ideas and themes. Thus we have many articles with titles like ‘R. S. Thomas and the Welsh hills’, ‘R. S. Thomas as priest-poet’, ‘R. S. Thomas and the hidden God’ and so on. In other words, much has been written to tell us what the poetry means, but little has been written that illuminates how it means by examining fundamental relationships between content and form. There are moments – a sentence here, a paragraph there – of stylistic discussion scattered throughout the criticism, and this book includes these moments as part of its own discussion. In recent years, there have also been a few critics who address Thomas’s style more specifically. M. Wynn Thomas, who calls attention to ‘the theology of Thomas’s style’, Damian Walford Davies, who examines Thomas’s various uses of puns, and David Lloyd, who explores Thomas’s formal responses to the American poet William Carlos Williams, are notable in this regard.13 However, there has been no extended study of any aspect of his prosody, and there has been nothing that attempts to account for his stylistic development. As a result, this book is necessarily a pioneering expedition, one that seeks to begin a conversation, not conclude it. It is also of necessity broad in scope since R. S. Thomas published poetry for over six decades and, within that time frame, evolved dramatically as a stylist. He began as a sub-Georgian imitator, writing derivative nature lyrics in the manner of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, yet he ended his career as a form-seeking experimentalist. This book chronicles that developmental journey, analysing Thomas’s various prosodies, including metrical, accentual, linear and visual forms. What becomes clear along this trajectory is that the poet’s stylistic destinÂ�ations more or less coincide with geographic ones: Chirk, Hanmer, Manafon, Eglwys-fach, Aberdaron, Rhiw. Indeed, one is continually aware that for R. S. Thomas there exists an integral relationship between prosody and place. Thus, each chapter discusses important stylistic developments in relationship to, and as products of, the environments in which they occur.


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4


Perhaps most significantly, Thomas’s geographic journey was accompanied by an increasingly introspective one. As a result, his distinctive prosodies are nearly always extensions of his psychological interior. Consequently, in terms of its genre, this book can be called an exercise in stylistic biography. It interests itself in the poetic life, yet its premise is that R. S. Thomas cannot be adequately understood through interviews or prose writings, politico-cultural agendas, or spiritual and philosophical ideologies. These have too often distracted from his craft when they should, in fact, encourage closer reading since prosody frequently reveals what has not been, indeed cannot be, articulated. This book asserts a priority: not to look at poetry, as many have, as a way of affirming existing notions about an iconic R. S. Thomas, but to come to terms with the tensions within him as they reveal themselves in the tensions – rhythmic, linguistic, structural – of the poetry itself. In this way the poems will remain, as they must, the primary focus. The poems, after all, are what we have.


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1 Origins of a Style, 1936–1943

The waters strive to wash away The frail path of her melody, This little bird across the lake That links her gentle soul with me. O wind and wave thou wilt not break, Uncouth and lusty as thou art, The light thread of this golden song That shines so deep into my heart.1

Hard as it may be to believe, these quatrains – with their easy rhymes, archaic diction and unvarying iambic tetrameter – are an early, untitled composition by R. S. Thomas. Sent to a publisher for consideration, they were rejected, and it is not hard to see why. In 1939, the likely year of submission (three years, it is worth noting, after the publication of Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse), the dust had long since gathered on the Georgians, the last group of poets to tolerate diminutive descriptions like ‘frail path’ and ‘little bird’, yet these were the very poets R. S. Thomas was imitating at the time.2 Even if these quatrains had been penned during the decade of Edward Marsh’s anthologies, they would not have been very impressive.3 The poem’s diction – the pronoun ‘thou’, the adjectives ‘uncouth’ and ‘lusty’, the use of poetic apostrophe (particularly with the accompanying ‘O’) – was outmoded by 1912, let alone 1939; adjective-noun pairings like ‘gentle soul’ and ‘golden song’ were long since clichés; and the predictable, but ultimately vacuous, last line would have caused almost any critic, seventeen years after the publication of The Waste Land, to cringe. As Thomas later became aware,

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You will take seriously those first affairs With young poems, but no attachments Formed then but come to shame you. (‘To A Young Poet’, BT, p. 11)

In truth, these 1939 quatrains represent a body of early work that the mature R. S. Thomas may have wished had never seen the light of day.4 However, the young Thomas sent his imitative quatrains into the world, and one is glad of it, for it would not do to begin a developmental study of his prosody by examining the relatively mature writing he produced in Manafon during the 1940s and 1950s even if critics have often painted that work, particularly those poems featuring Iago Prytherch, as the genesis of R. S. Thomas. For example, John Powell Ward begins his book-length, chronological study of Thomas’s career with a discussion of the ‘great many poems on the Welsh peasant and hill farmer’, even going so far as to call Song at the Year’s Turning (1955) Thomas’s ‘first book’.5 Ward’s treatment of Thomas’s poetry was pioneering, and it retains its relevance even in the face of newer scholarship, but his narrative does not begin at the beginning. While Song at the Year’s Turning was Thomas’s first volume to be published in London and, therefore, the first to exact attention from English critics, it was in reality his fourth published book.6 In fact, Thomas was publishing in respected journals as early as the late 1930s. His earliest offerings, to be sure, are derivative and unsophisticated when compared with poems written at Manafon, but that fact is itself important to an understanding of his work. For example, Dilys Rowe, in her review of The Stones of the Field (1946), shrewdly points out how ‘The poetry .â•‹.â•‹. in these days of head-long half-clothed rushes, comes decorously into print, poised and far advanced in a poet’s development’.7 Of course, with Thomas’s career now whole, one can see that The Stones of the Field was far from the apex of his progression, but Rowe was right: R. S. Thomas’s style had developed significantly by 1946. In analysing Thomas’s poetic development, one quickly becomes aware that the style of his poems was tied to the changing substance of his emotions. In fact, one does not need to read much R. S. Thomas to ascertain that the primary catalysts for his stylistic development were anxiety, resentment and a perpetual sense of instability, amounting to what we will call a ‘troubled muse’. ‘Hate takes a long time / To grow in’, he writes in Tares (1961), his first post-Manafon volume, ‘and mine / Has increased since birth’ (‘Those Others’, p. 31). These lines point to an inner conflict that has been a lifetime in the making. Tony Brown and M. Wynn Thomas write of ‘the tensions .â•‹.â•‹. that hurt R. S. Thomas into verse’.8


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origins of a style

7

Sources of ‘hurt’ and ‘hate’ evolved and expanded over the years, taking in a number of related issues, including an insecure sense of self, an antipathy to the dehumanizing modern world and a complex relationship with an impersonal God. But much of the conflict that ‘made’ R. S. Thomas was manifestly affecting him years before he arrived in Manafon, and it was also affecting his style. Manafon was his first stylistic destination, an important one, but one of many at which the poet arrived, and from which he would write, before eventually setting off again. By initially focusing on the years Thomas spent as a curate in the Englishspeaking border parishes of Chirk, Denbighshire (1936–40) and Hanmer, Flintshire (1940–2), one does not wish to understate the jolt Manafon and its resident hill farmers gave his sensibilities or the developments they prompted in the poetry. But something happened on the road to Manafon, something that, between 1939 and 1942, knocked the Georgianism out of R. S. Thomas and simultaneously ‘[created] a fundamental sense of insecurity and mistrust’ within him.9 That interim, neglected though it may be, is fruitful ground. The origins of R. S. Thomas the stylist, the prosodist, in short the poet of originality, are there for the finding.

Dew on the mushroom â•…â•… When I was a child, innocent plagiarist, there was dew on the early-morning mushroom, as there is not now. (ERS, p. 75)10

Reading R. S. Thomas, one comes to realize that a shadow of lost innocence casts itself on much of his writing. The childlike trust he placed in nature and in God felt the sting of war and the accompanying drone of modernity in the 1940s, and the resulting wounds never really healed. Indeed, much of his work can be seen as a search to re-establish that lost innocence and sense of unity, a longing for that which is simple and ultimately unselfconscious. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, Thomas was not yet weighed down by ‘the new world, ugly and evil’ (‘No Through Road’, SYT, p. 115). He was still ‘ignorant of the blood’s stain’ (‘Song for Gwydion’, AL, p. 9). Living in rural Wales, he avoided much of the shock of modernity of which Britain and its literary landscape felt the impact in the early part of the twentieth century. Writing of his youth and adolescence, Thomas


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8


points on several occasions to a particular experience – that of mushroom gathering – to symbolize what he saw as a purer time: One of the most enjoyable times of the year in Holyhead was the mushroompicking season .â•‹.â•‹. those early mornings were full of magic. Have you ever touched cold mushrooms, wet with dew, smelt their freshness, and tasted them? .â•‹.â•‹. They have a vaguely cheesy taste .â•‹.â•‹. which disappears in the frying-pan, no matter how careful you are.11

From an early age, Thomas found his inspiration in the natural world, and in both poetry and prose these dew-touched mushrooms are a microcosm of that world: fresh, ripe, unspoiled, but also vulnerable and elusive. Such ‘mornings full of magic’ bring to mind Hopkins’s ‘Goldengrove’ and Dylan Thomas’s ‘green and golden’ days. But golden groves ‘unleave’, and, as Dylan Thomas reminds us, ‘the sun .â•‹.â•‹. is young once only’.12 In this retrospective prose passage from The Echoes Return Slow (1988), R. S. Thomas articulates an inevitable loss. His innocence was to ‘disappear in the frying-pan’ of the 1940s. That final phrase – ‘no matter how careful you are’ – is significant. Thomas grew up away from industry and technology. He deliberately lived and worked in rural parishes rather than towns. But there was no avoiding modernity. Welcome or not, it would dry the magic from those cold mornings, and it would demand poetic expression. Thomas’s early style mimics writers whose work reflects a similar innocence. His early exposure to poetry was limited to F. T. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the obligatory Georgian verses he studied at school in Holyhead. For its part, The Golden Treasury, first published in 1861 and periodically updated in various editions, was an old-fasioned anthology even by the 1920s.13 It is not clear which edition R. S. Thomas would have encountered, but from 1909 to 1929 The Golden Treasury, no longer edited by Palgrave (who died in 1897), remained more or less unchanged in its various editions so that, for example, the only post-1900 poet to be included in the 1923 edition was Algernon Swinburne (1837– 1909), hardly a Modernist. Thus, while his familiarity with The Golden Treasury gave Thomas a solid background in accentual-syllabic prosody (Shakespeare, Milton and Keats were prominently featured in every edition), it also confined his exposure to the particular breed of poems favoured by Palgrave, who unabashedly excluded any poem that was ‘too long, unrhymed (or written in heroic couplets), narrative, descriptive, didactic, humorous, erotic, religious, occasional, or overly personal’.14 These exclusions limited the anthology to short songs and nature lyrics


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origins of a style

9

that, by the time R. S. Thomas was being influenced by them, should have seemed antiquated. In an audio recording, Thomas speaks about his introduction to poetry, and of his first attempts at writing it: In the late twenties, at a time when I should have been in touch with what Eliot, Joyce, and Pound were doing, I was receiving my ideas of poetry via Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and through such Georgian verse as was compulsory reading for my examinations in English. I was also a confirmed open-air nature lover so that such verses as I then achieved myself were almost bound to be about trees and fields and skies and seas. No bad thing if I had been familiar with the poets who knew how to deal maturely with such material .â•‹.â•‹. But my efforts were based on the weaker poems of Shelley and the more sugary ones of the Georgians.15

Thomas mentions the late 1920s but in fact his work of the late 1930s still reflects these outmoded influences. Not that he was unwilling to update his poetry – as he later phrased it, to ‘move with the times’ as ‘life puts on speed’ (‘Movement’, BT, p. 35) – but owing to a lack of stylistic models that could show him how to ‘deal maturely’ with his love of nature, Thomas’s poetry of the late 1930s, rather than moving with the style of the times, was still lagging behind it. Even when Thomas did become aware of Eliot, he was not yet ready to embrace the unfamiliar style and ideas. In a conversation with Molly Price-Owen, he reports: When I was a curate [at Chirk] the sort of people that represented the upper middle class .â•‹.â•‹. were beginning to talk about T. S. Eliot but sort of saying ‘I can’t make head or tail of him’, and this kind of thing and I suppose I was inclined to leave him there. It wasn’t until much later that I came to appreciate his vision.16

One should also point out that while he was a curate, Thomas was not in touch with literary circles, as he might have been had he been in London, and his degree was in classics (specifically Latin), not English. Indeed, the congested, stress-heavy quality of his early lines can in some measure be attributed to his extensive reading in ancient forms. Later on, in the 1940s, when Thomas was attempting to separate himself from his English, middle-class background, Eliot may have represented exactly that from which he was trying to distance himself. By that time Thomas was also engaging with what he saw as characteristically Welsh prosody and, as will be discussed in the next chapter, the influential work of Irish poets Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh. All of this took his work away from contemporary currents in English poetry.


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As we examine Thomas’s work of 1939, much of which is unpublished or uncollected, we find evidence of his outdated models. One poem of note – one of the six unpublished, untitled 1939 holograph poems held in the National Library of Wales – begins as follows: A blue snake in the valley ran The river down from Llyn-y-Fan, And rustled with the autumn breeze Among the braziers of the trees.

Apart from the presence of a Welsh place name, there is nothing here that is characteristic of the mature R. S. Thomas, and the verse is imitative. In fact, reading the second couplet, one cannot help but recall Pope’s mockery of clichéd technique: ‘Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze, / In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees’.17 And the influence of The Golden Treasury, particularly Shelley, is evident. The metre, with the exception of one incidental substitution in the first line, is a singing iambic tetrameter, the quatrain consisting of two exact-rhyme couplets. The adjectives dutifully fill out the syllable count, and every attempt at emotional colouring relies on nature: a running, rustling river; a rustling breeze in blazing trees. Everything rests comfortably on the surface; nothing is internalized. Shelley at his best was not similarly external, but he certainly could be at times. Here is a similar passage from Shelley, collected in The Golden Treasury: The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon’s transparent might.18

While the rhyme scheme here is slightly different, the tone, the easy rhymes, the ‘transparent’, surface-level nature description, the filled-in metre that strictly adheres to a syllable count, even the smooth enjambement between the third and fourth line, form the mould from which the Thomas quatrain is cast. The next stanza of Thomas’s poem, equally unremarkable in its own right, nevertheless proves interesting in a developmental context: The hills reached up and sometimes drew The clouds’ attention as they flew, And mushroom plentiful the sheep Grazed on the hillsides green and steep.

The iambic tetrameter is constant (the exception being a routine trochaic substitution in the first foot of the fourth line) and the chiming end-rhymes


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predictable. But such rhyme is appropriate to the poem’s world-view. In ‘Words and the Poet’ (1964), Thomas suggests that exact rhyme is ‘the sign of an ordered world of pattern into which things fall as inevitably and satisfactorily as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle’ (SP, pp. 53–4). While Thomas’s mature work reflects a world where life’s ‘puzzle’ cannot be neatly assembled, this poem reflects a world that is unthreatened. In fact, it is telling that those flocks perched on a green, idyllic hillside are compared to plentiful mushrooms, Thomas’s recurring symbol of innocence. Yet the poem, for all its formal stability, is not entirely without discord. The third and final stanza abruptly and unexpectedly changes the tone. But one came by and frowned to see How colourful the world would be; With horny hand he rubbed away My frail attempt to paint the day.

One should not make too much of this stanza, coming as it does almost as an afterthought. One could argue that the mysterious, rough hand that wipes out a potentially ideal world prefigures an enigmatic God who, in much later poems, intentionally seeds the world He creates with discord, germs and even brutality. But this connection is tenuous and premature. A better connection, considering the relationship Thomas is making between poetry and landscape painting, is with his poems from the 1950s and 1960s about Welsh landscapes, which often juxtapose ‘the golden landscape / of nature’ and ‘the twisted creatures / Crossing it’ (‘The Observer’, NBF, p. 11), and which reveal Thomas abandoning ‘a watercolour’s appeal / To the mass’ in favour of ‘the poem’s / Harsher conditions’ (‘Reservoirs’, NBF, p. 26). Perhaps, then, the most significant aspect of this element of discord is its early presence. Although docile in comparison with the chaotic poems that followed hard upon them, Thomas’s poems of the late 1930s do begin to reflect a hint of uneasiness, an awareness that the world is more than little birds and dew-misted mushrooms. The impact of that awareness on Thomas’s style, although slight at first, would grow exponentially over the course of the next few years. In his prose autobiography, Neb, R. S. Thomas writes of his years in Chirk: ‘It was here, for the first time, that he came face to face with the problem of pain’ (A, p. 43). In another of the 1939 holograph poems, also untitled, ‘the problem of pain’ finds expression as ‘the pale faces of / The poor, the weary, the outcast’, and the poem contrasts the ‘smooth grace’ of nature’s ‘slow water’ with the ‘dark waters’ of the city, which ‘may be / the


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ultimate deception’ to those who hear their ‘seductive’ song.19 Thomas, it would seem, was beginning to discover that nature imagery can be internalized, and that it can disturb. Tony Brown points out how Thomas’s unease ‘was to be expected: a young man, fresh from theoÂ�logical college and in an unfamiliar area, confronting for the first time the emotional and spiritual demands of ministering to ordinary parishioners’. Brown also points to other factors – including Thomas’s pacifism in the face of impending war (and his disillusionment that the Church in Wales would not condemn militarism) and a growing discontent with interÂ�national capitalism (an attitude partially influenced by his reading of Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury) – as being partially responsible for his unease. ‘Such conflicts in belief’, writes Brown, ‘must have caused the young curate to reflect deeply on the values of the Church in which he had just begun to serve and on the nature of his role within it’, and the resulting anxiety ‘ultimately amounted to what might, in existentialist terms, be defined as a sense of inauthenticity, the sense .â•‹.â•‹. of not being in secure possession of one’s own identity’.20 Barbara Prys-Williams is more blunt as she describes Thomas’s ‘weak and fitful sense of his own selfhood’ and ‘his inability to have any clear sense of who he is’.21 We can bring Thomas’s unease to our reading of ‘Cyclamen’, another of his 1939 poems. Like the holograph poems we have been discussing, ‘Cyclamen’ was sent to an editor for consideration, but, unlike those poems, ‘Cyclamen’ was accepted, by Seamus O’Sullivan, editor of The Dublin Magazine, whom Thomas had visited in Ireland the previous year. The poem was later collected in The Stones of the Field. They are white moths With wings Lifted Over a dark water In act to fly, Yet stayed By their frail images In its mahogany depths. (SF, p. 11)

At first glance, this is little more than an imagist poem that relies on a central metaphor, what amounts to, in Anstey’s words, ‘a cyclamen described as a white moth that is restrained from flying by its awareness of its own image in the water below’.22 Upon closer reading, however, the poem becomes decidedly more than this. It says much more, in fact, about the speaker than it does about its subject, for the speaker not only sees the cyclamen as moths but also personifies them, gives them emotion. That


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is, the cyclamen/moths are ‘stayed’ by the ‘frail images’ staring back at them from the ‘depths’ of the ‘dark water’ (one recalls the ‘dark waters’ from the earlier, untitled holograph poem). Each flower, then, is frozen not merely by ‘its awareness of its own image’ but also by a realization of its own frailty, and of course it is the speaker, the implied observer, who is experiencing this emotion, not the flowers themselves. Perhaps, knowing what we do of R. S. Thomas’s unease during this time, it is not such a bold leap to suggest that the poem reflects his own anxiety. Thomas’s ‘resort to the mirror for reassurance of identity at a time of self-alienation’ is ‘a motif that is revealingly recurrent throughout [his] work’.23 Years later he would write: ‘Certainly it has come to me many times with a catch in the breath that I don’t know who I am.’24 Even in Thomas’s earliest published work, elements of discord reflect his own disquiet. It is also important to note that Thomas began to look for formal structures that represent difficult feelings. ‘Cyclamen’, unlike most of Thomas’s early work, is written in free verse. It consists of one sentence, whose parts are broken into smaller breath units, many of which are preposÂ�itional phrases. These very short lines reinforce the idea of frailty; as soon as the reader encounters each single, tentative ‘snapshot’ of the scene, the image is replaced by another by means of a line break. In a sense, Thomas is flitting moth-like from image to image, and this happens within a poem that is itself a single moment. This kind of linear technique is rare in the early work, but Thomas increasingly turned to linear, rather than metrical, prosodies in his later work, that of the late 1950s and beyond. We can better understand this and other developments by examining more fully the poet’s responses to Georgianism. In general terms, it was the measured lyricism and bucolic imagery of Georgian poetry that charmed R. S. Thomas. There is no single Georgian poet who stands out as having expressly affected his style (unless one considers Edward Thomas as unambiguously Georgian, and R. S. Thomas always set him apart from his Georgian contemporaries).25 When Thomas, many years later, referred to their influence on his early work, he spoke of the Georgians collectively, painting them as models of sentimentality and general pleasantness. Indeed, what he seems to have responded to, and gleaned from Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro and others in the Edward Marsh circle, was a light, one-dimensional diction grounded in flowers, fields, trees and birds. There are certainly more meritorious aspects of Georgianism. The Georgians, for instance, predated the Imagists in their attempts to tear down late-Victorian aesthetic registers and intellectualism. They deserve more credit for


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initiating poetic realism than they have generally been given, especially where the Georgian soldier-poets begin to reflect the psychological impact of the First World War. But R. S. Thomas was not responding primarily to Georgianism’s realism; it was lyrical sweetness that appealed to him, an example of which is the poem ‘Wanderers’ by Walter de la Mare: Wide are the meadows of night, And daisies are shining there, Tossing their lovely dews, Lustrous and fair; And through these sweet fields go, Wanderers amid the stars – Venus, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. Tired in their silver, they move, And circling, whisper and say, Fair are the blossoming meads of delight Through which we stray.26

These ‘meadows of night’, ‘sweet fields’, ‘blossoming meads of delight’ and dew-covered daisies (not dissimilar to dew-covered mushrooms, perhaps) are exactly the kind of pleasant nature descriptions that R. S. Thomas imbibed from the Georgians and imitated in his early work. Here is another of the untitled 1939 holograph poems: Like slender waterweeds to my mind The poplars wave in the great wind, And shoals of fishes are the leaves Which the smooth, rain-blurred air receives Within the silken stream. The grottoed hills are chased and kissed By the low sky and the swirling mist, And under a bridge of amethyst Pale water lilies gleam.27

Thomas’s images – slender waterweeds, waving poplars, a silken stream, a swirling mist that kisses the hills – are akin to de la Mare’s sweet fields, shining daisies, lovely dews and blossoming meads of delight.28 Both poems embody the kind of stereotypical Georgian verses that John Press describes as ‘vapid musings about the English countryside’.29 The poems differ metrically, but their registers are remarkably similar. Both achieve


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a lyrical, relaxed tone through internal assonance and frequent combinations of the consonants ‘w’, ‘m’ and ‘s’. De la Mare’s lines ‘Wide are the meadows of night’ and ‘Wanderers amid the stars’ are echoed by Thomas’s ‘Like slender waterweeds to my mind’ and ‘Within the silken stream’. The consonants slide smoothly from the mouth, and repeated vowels tie words together: ‘wide’, ‘night’; ‘wanderers’, ‘stars’; ‘within’, ‘silken’. The most telling difference between the two poems is that Thomas’s was written approximately two decades later than de la Mare’s. Unsurprisingly, Thomas told Price-Owen: ‘Edward Thomas, possibly a bit of Walter de la Mare, that was the measure of my early attempts at writing poetry.’30 Thomas spoke of his early attraction to nature poetry in his preface to The Batsford Book of Country Verse (1961), an anthology that includes de la Mare, as well as many authors from The Golden Treasury: This anthology is mainly for young people. Perhaps it is a pity, then, that it is a selfish one; for in it I have included many of the pieces which I knew and loved as a boy, some of which I had by heart .â•‹.â•‹. Most young poets’ first attempts at verse have been based on some description of the natural world. But such times are passing, if they have not already passed. The environment of the majority of our population today is that of science, technology and industry .â•‹.â•‹. We know that the most important thing in life is, as Van Gogh said, to find something to love. And perhaps one of the wisest ways of setting about this is to begin with the near and familiar. It is in learning to love and cherish our own little tree, or field or brook that we become fitted for wider and deeper affections.31

The description of ‘our own little tree, or field or brook’ in the last sentence reminds one of that ‘little bird across the lake’ in Thomas’s 1939 quatrains, and one notes that the diminutive, especially in reference to the natural world, is a common feature of Georgian poetry. Reading the Batsford introduction, one senses why Georgian nature lyrics became Thomas’s models: he presumably saw in them the poetic expression of his own fondness for ‘the near and familiar’, a fondness that he clearly associated with his own boyhood. But one also sees the aforementioned shadow of lost innocence in the reflective, even wistful, line, ‘Such times are passing, if they have not already passed.’ The above passage also demonstrates Thomas’s retrospective awareness of how a love of local nature prepared him ‘for wider and deeper affections’. Although the manner in which Thomas used nature changed as an integral part of his developing style and his growth as a writer, he never abandoned the concrete, natural world. Nature played a crucial role not only in his mud-besmirched confrontations with Prytherch, but also in


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his socio-political poems, his inner pilgrimages of identity and his spiritual reachings into God-space. In a BBC radio broadcast aired near the end of his life, Thomas made a connection between his lifelong relationship with nature and the years he spent in Chirk: I’ve always been an open-air person, and although I began my curacy .â•‹.â•‹. on the Welsh border, fortunately it was quite close to the hills above Llangollen. And I used to wander, and that was the time when I was discovering Edward Thomas .â•‹.â•‹. I began to concentrate on the smaller life around me – the trees in the parsonage garden, which used to fill up with warblers on passage in September – and this interest in birds never deserted me.32

Here, one again notes the poet’s focus on ‘smaller life’ and the general pleasantnesses of nature. But one also notes that he associated those pleasantnesses with Edward Thomas, whose work he was discovering at the same time. This is not something to be glossed over; indeed, considering the frequency with which R. S. Thomas mentioned Edward Thomas as an important early influence, it is remarkable that critics, though presumably aware of the connection, have yet to explore its relevance in any detail. It is probable that a very simple matter first endeared Edward Thomas to R. S. Thomas: a shared love of birds. The above passage mentions birds, and in the radio broadcast from which it is taken, one that features R. S. Thomas reading some of his favourite poems, he selects Edward Thomas’s ‘The Unknown Bird’ as a personal favourite. In that poem, the speaker hears, but does not see, a mysterious bird (‘No one saw him: I alone could hear / though many listened .â•‹.â•‹. / He never came again’), and he is haunted by its song evermore.33 John Davies has shown that the birds of R. S. Thomas’s poetry are ‘ultimately elusive, passing through .â•‹.â•‹. mysteriously’.34 And this use of birds has its roots in the poet’s early responses to Edward Thomas. We see this influence in ‘Cynddylan on a Tractor’ (AL, p. 16), one of R. S. Thomas’s most anthologized early poems, in which Cynddylan roars by on his new machine, ‘emptying the wood / Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays’. The poem concludes with these lines: ‘And all the birds are singing, bills wide in vain, / As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.’ The resemblance of these lines to lines by Edward Thomas, from his poem ‘Good-Night’, is striking: I can hear no more those suburb nightingales; Thrushes and blackbirds sing in the gardens of the town In vain: the noise of man, beast, and machine prevails.35


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Whether or not R. S. Thomas consciously took the phrasing of birds singing ‘in vain’, or the idea of birdsong being drowned out by machine noise, from Edward Thomas, is impossible to say. The young R. S. Thomas did, however, by his own admission, consciously try to imitate Edward Thomas: In 1938 .â•‹.â•‹. under the influence of the beautiful and exciting country to the west he continued to write poetry .â•‹.â•‹. Edward Thomas was one of his favourites and because the latter had written about the countryside, the budding poet tried to imitate him. (A, pp. 44–5)

As Thomas tells Price-Owen, ‘Edward Thomas obviously as a writer about the countryside inspired me very much. I suppose a lot of my earlier attempts were really trying to describe the country in his terms.’36 But Edward Thomas – more generally introverted than his Georgian contemporaries, more genuinely seeing the world as ‘strange’ at times, and certainly more concerned with issues of identity – would eventually offer R. S. Thomas much more than nature lyrics. He would become a kindred spirit, a fellow stranger. As will become apparent, R. S. Thomas would eventually return to him as an example of the estranged, attracted by a voice with similar yearning, and in so doing, he would internalize much of the latter’s style as well. Lines like â•…â•… and in the birdless streets, Where the fan’s heart mechanically beats, no song falls, soothing, personal, sweet. (‘Rhondda’, AL, p. 24)

do not fully adopt Edward Thomas’s form, but they do assume his registers and subject matter, as do the following lines from ‘Enigma’: He cannot read the flower-printed book Of nature, nor distinguish the small songs The birds bring him, calling with wide bills, Out of the leaves and over the bare hills; (AL, p. 31)

In fact, even though An Acre of Land (1952) – the volume in which ‘Cynddylan on a Tractor’, ‘Rhondda’ and ‘Enigma’ are all found – takes its title from Siôn Tudur, a sixteenth-century poet, one might argue that the title is also derived from Edward Thomas: An acre of land between the shore and the hills, Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three, The lovely visible earth and sky and sea Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills.37


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All of these images – land, shore, hills, earth, sky, sea, birds, a tilling farmer – represent the poetic material of An Acre of Land. Edward Thomas’s ‘Good-Night’ resolves positively, with the speaker, in the face of nothing but ‘strangers’ eyes’, still finding solace in a ‘traveller’s goodnight’. But the speaker nevertheless remains a stranger in the town, an outsider there, and it is this idea that most closely connects the two Thomases: that of being perpetually homeless, of being estranged. Brown writes of ‘R.S. Thomas’s relation to the life in which he has found himself’, describing the poet as ‘detached .â•‹.â•‹. aware of himself as an outsider, deracinated, and seeking some sense of involvement in a way of life which would give him a sense of belonging .â•‹.â•‹. a sense of home’.38 With this in mind, another line from ‘Good-Night’ becomes significant: ‘The friendless town is friendly; homeless, I am not lost’. One cannot help but notice the similarity, in both rhythm and register, to the last lines of R. S. Thomas’s ‘Out of the Hills’, the first poem of The Stones of the Field: ‘Be then his fingerpost / Homeward. The earth is patient; he is not lost.’ Apart from the similarities of tone, register, even a semicolon preceding the last declaration of each poem, the idea of ‘home’ and its relationship to being ‘lost’ is extremely important to both poets. R. S. Thomas’s line break emphasizes that idea: ‘Be then his fingerpost / Homeward.’ Each poet deals with that relationship differently, however. For Edward Thomas, ‘home’ is an internal feeling that is not place specific. For R. S. Thomas, ‘home’ is likewise an internal, or even imagined, ideal, but it is always tied to place. Where the speaker of ‘Good-Night’ can find ‘home’ in a friendless town, the farmer in ‘Out of the Hills’ is ‘undone’ in the town, finding his ‘home’ only when he returns to the hills. Yet despite this difference, both posts tend to write from the point of view of an observing outsider. In fact, M. Wynn Thomas has shown that ‘Out of the Hills’ gains its authenticity by being written from a ‘foreign’ perspective.39 This is R. S. Thomas’s opening statement, as it were, the first poem of his first book, and it places him outside of his Welsh surroundings, as other, as homeless. It thus places him, once again, in the company of Edward Thomas. The above examples all date from the Manafon period, and it was not until R. S. Thomas reached Eglwys-fach in 1954 that he began to respond to Edward Thomas most fully. There are, however, two reasons for discussing the later Thomas in the context of Thomas’s stylistic origins. The first and most obvious reason has been mentioned: it was during these formative years that R. S. Thomas was discovering Edward Thomas, internalizing his work. The second and more important reason is that R. S. Thomas was about to be uprooted by conflict. In the wake of war, his troubled muse


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would look to his earlier namesake for a style of poetry that could bridge the gap between an over-simple lyricism and a more authentic, conflictdriven expressiveness. Years later, R. S. Thomas would write: During the period of [Edward Thomas’s] formation as a poet, most contemÂ� porary verse was .â•‹.â•‹. Georgian in tone. This was prior to the great upheaval of the First World War. Much of the poets’ subject matter was taken from the world of the country-side, where the motor had hardly intruded. From one point of view, this atmosphere was congenial to Thomas. It left his world of lanes and downs and country folk undisturbed. But this is to ignore the approaching change in the whole fabric of English life. The attitude of the last two centuries to poetry was about to be proved inadequate to the new situÂ�ation. The easy, glib rhythms, the complacent sweetness, the eloquent phrasing – all these were rejected and held up to obloquy.40

It is true that Edward Thomas’s poetry bridged the gap between ‘complacent sweetness’ and a modern consciousness, but this quotation says as much about R. S. Thomas as it does about the earlier writer. When R. S. Thomas, later in the same passage, wrote that ‘[Edward Thomas’s] new prose rhythms and plain language offered a breakthrough from the dead end of Georgian verse’, he was certainly writing about what Thomas’s style did for English-language poetry as a whole, but he was also revealing what it did for him personally.41 Edward Thomas was not, however, the only writer to affect R. S. Thomas during his years at Chirk; he also drew inspiration from the prose works of Fiona Macleod (William Sharp) and the early poetry of W. B. Yeats. These authors ‘came to represent exactly the life that he would love to live’ (A, p. 45), and the young curate soon ‘dreamed of breaking away and .â•‹.â•‹. living in a cottage on water and crust’.42 Thomas also began to associate their imagery with a Celtic lifestyle, ‘a simple peasant culture where identity .â•‹.â•‹. was unproblematic, growing from a rich imaginative heritage, rooted in a particular place’.43 Macleod’s descriptions of brittle cottages, wet peat fields and windswept Scottish moors seduced the young R. S. Thomas (he used the phrase ‘lost my head completely’), as did the wattle-house of Innisfree, the ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and King Fergus’s Celtic shores.44 MacLeod and Yeats articulated Thomas’s romantic impulses, and because those articulations were grounded in Celtic lands, they resonated with his growing attraction to what was becoming his vision of a Celtic Wales: simple, rural, rooted in the living traditions of the past, connected to his dreams. Yet the seeds of R. S. Thomas’s imaginative vision of Wales seem to have been planted even earlier. One of his earliest memories, as told in


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his autobiography, was of standing on a Liverpool beach with his father during the First World War: How does memory work? It keeps hold of some things, while letting other things go into oblivion. It is one thing that remains. One day on the beach at Hoylake his father directed his attention to a row of mountains far away over the sea to the west. ‘That’s Wales,’ he said, in English. (A, p. 28)

As M. Wynn Thomas points out, the above passage ‘emblematizes what might lightly be characterized as [Thomas’s] Liverpool complex: his lifelong sense of being internally exiled from his own country and its ancient aboriginal culture. It conveys his lifelong frustrated yearning to return “home” from that exile.’45 This desire for ‘home’, and its relationship to being an ‘exile’, once again accounts for R. S. Thomas’s sustained response to Edward Thomas.46 But Thomas’s Liverpool experience was also the beginning of his seeing Wales as something looming, distant, majestic, ‘ancient’ and ‘aboriginal’, something always just out of reach. He would eventually call that vision ‘the true Wales of my imagination’ (A, p. 10). Thomas’s search for a Celtic way of life also led him beyond the borders of Wales. In 1937, he visited the Scottish highlands with his fiancée, the artist Mildred Eldridge, in search of Macleod’s peat fields and moors. But Thomas was disappointed on this trip, unable to find the Celtic Eden for which he searched: ‘He had been completely disillusioned. He did not get one glimpse of Fiona Macleod’s magical land’ (A, p. 47). Still, ‘the dreams did not cease to be’ (A, p. 47), and he made a visit to Ireland the following year, where he met Seamus O’Sullivan, editor of The Dublin Magazine. Then he continued west to Galway where, for the first time, he felt he had discovered a version of the sought-for Celtic magic. In Thomas’s words, ‘This was the country of which Yeats had sung, a land of common folk, their language Irish and their ways traditionally Celtic’ (A, pp. 47–8). Indeed, it was Yeats’s poetry, not Macleod’s prose, that triggered a stylistic response in R. S. Thomas. As Brown has observed, critics often point to W. B. Yeats (invariably in a list with Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot) as a poet who intrigued and influenced R. S. Thomas, but the nature of that influence has yet to be examined in any detail.47 While this chapter will not fully rectify that problem, it will at least attempt to show how Thomas’s stylistic response to Yeats stems from his attraction to depictions of a Celtic Ireland, the very Ireland he found on his 1938 trip. In fact it is not surprising, given the poet’s emotional response to that trip, that it was to Seamus O’Sullivan that he sent ‘The Bat’, an early lyric that, despite


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its short length and seeming simplicity, is actually one of Thomas’s more stylistically Yeatsian poems. Although published in the same issue of The Dublin Magazine as ‘Cyclamen’, which was later collected in The Stones of the Field, ‘The Bat’ was never collected. The day is done, the swallow moon Skims the pale waters of the sky, And under the blossom of sunset cloud Is hidden from the eye. And now when every spectral hour Is mindful of the ancient wars A withered leaf comes fluttering forth To hunt the insect stars.48

Like ‘Cyclamen’, this poem works around a central metaphor. Whereas, in the previous poem, the cyclamen were described as moths, in this poem a bat is described as ‘a withered leaf’. Or perhaps it is a leaf blowing into starlight that is being described as a bat emerging for a hunt (the poem’s personification is symmetrical if read in this way; that is, the moon in the first stanza is a swallow skimming, and the leaf in the second stanza is a bat hunting). But the poem’s ambiguity aside, it is its style that brings Yeats to mind. The ballad stanzas – with their alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines and their abcb rhyme schemes – are frequently used in Yeats’s early poems, such as ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’ and ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan’. The use of the uncommon adjective ‘spectral’ reminds one of ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’: ‘and is that spectral image / The man that Lapo and Guido knew?’49 And an old, ‘withered leaf’ that ‘flutters forth’ perhaps brings to mind the refrain line of ‘The Madness of King Goll’: ‘They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old’.50 Both the register and imagery of ‘The Bat’ recall several poems in Yeats’s The Rose (1893), and Thomas’s attraction to that volume is not at all surprising when one considers its myth-saturated, self-conscious Celticness. The lines ‘the swallow moon / Skims the pale waters of the sky’ remind one of ‘the sparrow in the eaves / The brilliant moon and all the milky sky’ , ‘white birds .â•‹.â•‹. hung low on the rim of the sky’ and, especially, ‘the pale waters in their wintry race, / under the passing stars, foam of the sky’.51 One also wonders whether Thomas’s choice to end the poem with an image of the stars is not inspired by Yeats, whose early lyrics often end in the same way. For example, Yeats concludes ‘When You Are Old’ with ‘a crowd of stars’ and ends ‘Who Goes With Fergus?’ with the image


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of ‘dishevelled, wandering stars’.52 R. S. Thomas would most famously use the image of stars as the final image of ‘A Peasant’, which concludes with Iago Prytherch ‘Enduring like a tree under the curious stars’ (SF, p. 14). While this adjective, ‘curious’, has been interpreted in different ways, its most basic meaning – ‘intrigued’ or ‘interested’ – is, suggestively, the exact opposite of Yeats’s choice of adjective in ‘A Dream of Death’, where a woman dies in an unknown land and ‘the peasants’ leave her to the ‘indifferent stars’.53 However, what is perhaps most Yeatsian about ‘The Bat’ is the way nature is once again tied to what might be called ‘Celtic Romanticism’ – an ardour for aboriginal antiquity that increasingly pulled Thomas westward in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One notices that such references in ‘The Bat’ are also tied to warfare and to the west, to ‘the ancient wars’ at ‘sunset’ and the ghostly, ‘spectral’ reminiscence of past battles, images reinforced by the verb ‘hunt’. Thomas used comparable imagery in an autobiographical prose passage in which he described train journeys taken years earlier: During my period in theological college in Llandaff, I used to travel home on the train from Cardiff .â•‹.â•‹. Westwards the sky would be ablaze, reminding one of the battles of the past. Against that radiance the hills rose dark and threatening as if full of armed men waiting for a chance to attack. To the west, therefore, there was a romantic, dangerous, mysterious land. (A, p. 10)

The young R. S. Thomas would soon change his tune about battle being something romantic, and he would admit the innocence (and futility) of his earlier views in what might be seen as delayed self-mockery. These very images of battle and sky, described elsewhere as ‘the spilled blood / That went to the making of the wild sky’, eventually become part of Thomas’s awareness that ‘spectral hours’ are, in part because of his countrymen’s indifference to them, full of nothing but ‘sham ghosts’ (‘Welsh Landscape’, AL, p. 26). But this would constitute only one aspect of Thomas’s extremely complex feelings towards Wales and the Welsh people, and in any case was still years away. In the late 1930s, R. S. Thomas ‘would [continue to] gaze hopelessly at [the Welsh hills]’ (A, p. 49), and his romantic visions were not yet soured by war’s non-romantic realities, or by what he perceived as the indifference of his countrymen to preserving Wales’s Celtic past as something beyond a tourist attraction. Ironically, Thomas’s early imaginings were themselves based to a degree on tourist perceptions and colonial stereotypes.54 But his English upbringing had not placed him in a position to know this. Yeats was immediately attractive because the Irish poet, in


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Thomas’s own words, ‘echoed the hiraeth for the west that he was experiencing at the time’ (A, p. 45). In fact, it was on a similar train journey to the one described above – a journey described in ‘Memories of Yeats Whilst Travelling to Holyhead’ (SF, p. 22) – that Thomas ‘was supposedly to meet his alter ego, W. B. Yeats; and it was out of those hills that his Muse was to appear’.55 The above example demonstrates that Thomas’s early attraction to Yeats led him to absorb much of the register and diction of The Rose and, in ‘The Bat’, Yeats’s metrics. But his stylistic debt to the Irishman was not principally a metrical one. Yeats was one of the great masters of metrics and the conjunction of lines. He explored the potential of traditional forms and expanded the capacities of metrical prosody, but Yeats at his most innovative still remained an accentual-syllabic poet. This is by no means a weakness in his work, but it is worth mentioning because the same cannot be said for R. S. Thomas, who, by the time he was discovering Yeats, was already on the verge of discarding metre. While his sub-Shelleyan songs, his sub-Georgian nature musings and a few sub-Yeatsian lyrics like ‘The Bat’ were largely accentual-syllabic poems, composed of iambic stanzas with little variation, Thomas was, by the 1940s, moving towards the accentual prosody that would become the strength of his Manafon style. A good example of this prosody is the poem ‘Hiraeth’: My dark thought upon that day That brought me from Arfon’s bay, From the low shores of Malldraeth and its sand, Far inland, far inland. For I remember now at the growth of night The great hills and the yellow light Stroking to softness the harsh sweep Of limb and shoulder above the quiet deep. And in the glitter of stars. shoal upon shoal, Thicker than bubbles in Ceridwen’s bowl, The running of the sea under the wind, Rough with silver, comes before my mind. Autumn shakes out the thistle’s curse On the grey air, and my leafless house, Picked clean by frost and rain, Cowers naked upon the plain;


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But there Caergybi, Aberffraw And holy Llanddwyn are wearing now, Like the rich cloak of old royalty, The wild purple of the sea. (SF, p. 34)

While syllable count varies substantially from line to line, each line of ‘Hiraeth’ has four accented syllables; the accents, however, do not fall consistently upon the same syllable in each line. For example, the syllable count in the first stanza, from line to line, is 7, 7, 10 and 6, respectively. In line 1, the second, third, fifth and seventh syllables are accented, but in line 4, the first, second, fourth and fifth syllables are accented. Similar variations, of both syllable count and placement of accent, continue throughout the entire poem. The poem can be called Yeatsian in its subject matter, its diction, its register and its longing, but not in its metre. Stylistically, then, this is where the two poets part ways, and the divide would widen as R. S. Thomas further loosened his lines in the 1950s, then widen still more as he embraced non-metrical, linear prosodies in the 1960s and 1970s. Even The Tower (1928), arguably Yeats’s most experimental work, is largely a collection of accentual-syllabic pentameter, tetrameter and ballad stanzas, all quite dissimilar to R. S. Thomas’s loosened, stress-heavy, accentual stanzas of the 1940s. Therefore, Jeremy Hooker’s assertion that Iago Prytherch gave Thomas a ‘[plodding] .â•‹.â•‹. down-to-earth’ escape, a ‘linguistic .â•‹.â•‹. liberation’ from a very Yeatsian style is correct only to the degree that Prytherch reflects Thomas’s movement away from a Yeatsian diction and register.56 Thomas never had to struggle to break free of the metrical influence of Yeats in the same way that, for example, Vernon Watkins did. ‘Hiraeth’ also reveals a decided, self-conscious Celticness. Beginning with the title, the poet attempts to make ‘Hiraeth’ a ‘Welsh’ poem by infusing it with Welsh place names and a sense of Welsh history. For example, the comparison of the sea with ‘Ceridwen’s bowl’ is an attempt to bring Welsh legend into the poem.57 While Jason Walford Davies argues convincingly that the poem reveals Thomas’s increasing debt to the Welsh-language poetic tradition, most of the poetry’s ‘Welsh’ qualities are somewhat affected in this early period.58 Thematically, poems like ‘Hiraeth’ are likely to owe something to Yeats’s frequent allusions to Irish myth. We should, in fact, distinguish between Thomas’s stylistic responses to Yeats and his thematic responses, the latter of which continue throughout his career. In 1946, Keidrych Rhys sent a questionnaire to a group of Welsh writers, and in response to the question ‘For whom do you write?’ Thomas began by quoting a Yeats’s ‘The Fisherman’:


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All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped ’twould be To write for my own race And the reality.59

And in response to the question, ‘What is your opinion of the relationship between Literature and Society?’ Thomas began his answer with ‘Yeats’s gyres’.60 In fact, R. S. Thomas would continue to use Yeats as a sounding board, alluding to him and even naming him in poems. Two examples are ‘The Moon in Lleyn’ (LS, p. 30), where the speaker says, ‘it is easy to believe Yeats was right’, and ‘Waiting’ (BHN, p. 83), which begins, ‘Yeats said that’. There are also less overt responses; gyres, cones, moon phases and cyclical journeys all recur in the late poetry. We can further understand this connection by examining the imagined meeting between Yeats and Thomas in ‘Memories of Yeats Whilst Travelling to Holyhead’. Gazing out of the train window, the speaker of the poem sees the Welsh hills as ‘aloof’ and ‘resentful of strangers’, and this is significant because, as we have discussed, Thomas himself felt like a stranger in his native country. Writing about this poem, M. Wynn Thomas identifies a similarity between Thomas’s journey, his searching for ‘insider knowledge’ of Wales, and the journey of Yeats, who became a nationalist poet ‘by dreaming his perverse dreams of belonging’.61 While the poem’s prosody is not Yeatsian, the evident connection between the poets is important: That train on which R. S. met Yeats was therefore the appropriate trope for representing both their conditions – figures permanently in transit, personalities actually constituted of psychic passage, poets all of whose poems were transitional, and individuals who were endlessly travelling towards the endlessly deferred ‘home’.62

It is, therefore, also here, on this very journey, that Thomas’s response to W. B. Yeats crosses tracks with his response to Edward Thomas. Indeed, the last line of the poem, ‘I had known reality dwindle, the dream begin’, gives us a clue as to where Thomas will begin to search for that ‘home’: in the internal, rather than the external, world. The poem depicts Yeats as one ‘impervious and cold to the outward scene’, ‘heedless of nature’s baubles’. External nature does not seduce or inspire him; instead, the poetry comes from ‘the labyrinth paths’ within. This observation of an imagined Yeats is in fact a revelation of Thomas’s own development. By the time he wrote the poem he had already begun to move away from derivative nature lyrics and into the complex, shifting depths of his own interiors. ‘Memories of


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Yeats While Travelling to Holyhead’ can be seen as an elegy for Yeats (who died in 1939), but the poem is also, perhaps unconsciously, an elegy for Thomas’s younger self and for those innocent lyrics he was leaving behind. It is a poem of transition, of movement, of being between two states, estranged from both of them. Meanwhile, R.S. Thomas continued to look to the west – a west imaginatively coloured by Shelley, English Georgianism, Edward Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Fiona Macleod, but not (yet) principally by Wales. Thomas did not yet have any kind of nationalist agenda (though the eventual development of that agenda did evolve from early visions of romantic community). Knowing this, one is not wholly surprised to learn that R. S. Thomas, the future Welsh nationalist, contemplated a move to Ireland in 1941. One recalls that he had been extremely moved by his journey to Galway a few years earlier, where he experienced ‘the country of which Yeats had sung, a land of common folk, their language Irish and their ways traditionally Celtic’ (A, pp. 47–8). This was the very communal life for which Thomas longed, and he had not found it in Wales. Contemplating this move, he wrote to Seamus O’Sullivan. The response came in September 1941: From anything I have been able to learn about the present situation of the Protestant Church in Ireland, I am strongly of the opinion that it would be extremely unwise for you to make any change at the moment. A great many of the churches throughout Ireland – both in city and country districts – have been shut .â•‹.â•‹. I am sorry that I cannot give you more heartening news, but I think you would really be well-advised to retain your present position for the time being.

And then the last sentence of the letter: ‘You would, I fear, find that you would be more of an exile in the West of Ireland than in Wales.’63 The letter from Thomas to O’Sullivan does not survive, but presumably the young curate of Hanmer had implied to O’Sullivan that he felt an exile in his own country. In essence, Thomas was living in, but finding himself perpetually outside of, a ‘real’ Wales. He was what Grahame Davies has called a ‘resident alien’.64 Despite his birth and upbringing, he was effectively an Englishman looking at Wales from the outside, writing with ‘materials drawn from the English repertoire of images of Wales’.65 Indeed, before his move to Manafon in 1942, Thomas was writing from a position scarcely within Wales at all: both Chirk and Hanmer are only just within the Welsh border, hence the significance of his looking westwards from Hanmer into Wales, from a point of view effectively outside it.66 However, the unrest of the early 1940s was to change R. S. Thomas. As Hooker has observed, he would (like Yeats before him) refashion himself


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– or at least begin the process of refashioning himself – as a nationalist poet. He would recast himself not only as a Welshman, but also as a Welsh poet capable of speaking to Wales from within, as a member of its historical community.67 In other words, in the discord of war, and then in its aftermath, Thomas would look to Wales specifically, rather than Celticness generally, for inspiration. The displaced curate would not leave Wales after all, but would instead construct a Welsh foundation upon which to build both an identity for himself and, as will become clear, a corresponding direction for his poetry. In Neb, Thomas retrospectively describes not only his early, ‘unreal dreams’ but also the ‘shattering’ of those dreams, which allowed a more ‘modern’ style to ‘break through to his inner world’ (A, pp. 44–5). While it was not the sole cause of that shattering and breaking, war administered the initial blows. Witnessing German bombing raids and a burning Merseyside, and then huddling under the stairs with his wife in a makeshift shelter, the shocked poet began to realize that the sweet lyrics he had been imitating were an inadequate representation of his world, and he found new forms that reflected asymmetry, chaos and clamour.68 Put simply, the foundation of R. S. Thomas’s poetry was changing, and this because the poet’s own foundation was being ‘rocked .â•‹.â•‹. to its white root’ (‘Propaganda’, SF, p. 14).

The storm’s hysteria Wandering, wandering, hoping to find The ring of mushrooms with the wet rind, Cold to the touch, but bright with dew, A green asylum from time’s range. And finding instead the harsh ways Of the ruinous wind and the clawed rain; The storm’s hysteria in the bush; The wild creatures and their pain. ‘Song’ (AL, p. 27)

In this poem, R. S. Thomas employs the flexible, four-stress line we saw in ‘Hiraeth’, a line that can adapt to accommodate its subject matter. The repetition of ‘wandering’ in the first line produces a walking rhythm of subsequent dactyls; commas slow the line, prolonging the wandering. This halting rhythm is more appropriate to the poem’s tone of lamentation than


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an iambic line (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’) could be. One also notes that Thomas does not use consistent end-rhyme. The first quatrain opens with a couplet but does not close with one, and the second quatrain uses an alternating rhyme scheme (abcb); this lack of a clear pattern imports a sense of uneasiness and defies expectation. But the most striking technique in the poem, that which most patently demonstrates a development from the style of the 1939 poems, is the way Thomas phrases the lines, using stress to highlight individual words and set up a thematic contrast between the stanzas. In the first stanza, stressed syllables fall on adjectives that refer, again, to those idyllic, dewy mushrooms and the past innocence they represent: ‘wet’, ‘cold’, ‘bright’, ‘green’; the properties of those mushrooms leap from the stanza. And yet, ironically, they do so only to assert their absence. The magical world they represent has been swept off in the ‘storm’s hysteria’, replaced by what is ultimately a world of pain. Indeed, in the second stanza, Thomas groups his stresses to accentuate abrasiveness: ‘harsh ways’, ‘ruinous wind’, ‘clawed rain’. The poem formally illustrates a harsh awakening.69 To illustrate further this awakening, it is rewarding to reach back and compare Thomas’s 1939 quatrains with a group of five poems that appeared in Keidrych Rhys’s Wales in 1943, the first poems (apart from some early student pieces) that Thomas published in his native country.70 By 1943, the ‘Uncouth and lusty’ waves, the image of which is masked by outdated adjectives, have given way, in ‘The Labourer’, to ‘the brown bilge of earth’, the colour and texture of which – due in large part to the plosive ‘b’, but also owing to the combination of the liquid ‘l’ and palatal ‘g’ in ‘bilge’ – retain the properties of fluidity, but are now visually and aurally tangible as well. Likewise, the ‘golden song’ of 1939, with its long, sonorous ‘o’ vowels, has yielded, in the 1943 poem ‘Frost’, to ‘the white cataract of song, / Pent up behind the stony tongue’; this latter ‘song’ has been given teeth by crisp dentals and velars, which, in Thomas’s words, ‘arrest .â•‹.â•‹. the movement of a line’ to mirror the poem’s subject: a hard, icy winter.71 One also notes that both ‘songs’ are given colours, but unlike ‘white .â•‹.â•‹. song’, ‘golden song’ cannot rise above the haze of cliché. Nor does it have the metaphorical properties of ‘cataract’, which, in addition to a waterfall or deluge, can of course denote an impairing opacity of the eye. If read in this way, the ‘cataract of song’, rather than demonstrating the song’s waterfall fluidity, actually obscures its melody so that when the song is ‘Pent up behind the stony tongue’ thematically, it is also pent up formally; moreover, that initial spondee, ‘pent up’, momentarily freezes the thematic song within the poetic structure. Thus, even as he impedes the


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thematic ‘song’, Thomas augments the song that is the poem itself. In this marriage of form and content, the ‘cataract’ is both fluid and obscure; the poem’s irony, and its measure of success, is that it stutters into song. Thomas’s developing diction and improving imagistic facility were accompanied by a marked metrical progression. More and more, we find a largely accentual poetry of syllabic variance. Here, for example, is the beginning of another of the 1943 poems, ‘The Labourer’:72 Who can tell his years, for the winds have stretched So tight the skin on the bare racks of bone That his face is smooth, inscrutable as stone?

The specifics of what might be called Thomas’s ‘Manafon style’ – his tendency, for example, to use his flexible, accentual prosody to place stressed syllables together in clusters (for instance, ‘bare racks of bone’) and to arrange his stresses so that they coincide with palpable elements from the setting (‘winds’, ‘skin’, ‘bone’, ‘face’, ‘stone’) – are treated in the next chapter. At present, it is worth noting that instead of filling out traditional forms with ‘a pedantic adherence to syllabic balance’, as Anstey describes, Thomas begins to use form as a means of directing the reader’s temporal experience of a poem, in this case by manipulating accents atop a loose iambic frame.73 The first line begins with a headless iamb, which makes the first three ‘feet’ read quickly before the reader runs into a medial caesura.74 The effect of this is that the reader is no sooner introduced to the labourer than he or she must immediately pause to consider ‘his years’. This reflective pause is extended by the anapest immediately following the caesura; the consecutive unstressed syllables lengthen the pause, obliging the reader to wait for the next stress. The line ends by re-establishing an iambic rhythm, and the subsequent metrically regular lines present a succession of developmental images that keep the reader’s attention where it has been placed: on the labourer. This is no coincidence. The poem is less about a labourer than it is about seeing a labourer, considering him, not averting our eyes from him. Through prosody, Thomas directs our eyes, requiring us to ‘consider this man in the field beneath’.75 One might also, in looking at these opening lines of ‘The Labourer’, point out how the initial spondee in line 2 ‘tightens’ the skin, and how the pyrrhic-spondee phrasing of ‘on the bare racks’ heightens that effect while simultaneously emphasizing the labourer’s ‘inscrutable’ nature, which ironically defies the charge we are given to observe him. But the point is, simply, that where, in 1939, the poem’s metre seemed fixed and arbitrary, its relation to content superficial, Thomas had, by 1943, begun to unify form and content, which are, as he explains in his introduction


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to his selection of Wordsworth’s poetry, ‘as inseparable as body and soul in a human being’.76 He had also become aware of poetry as a means of communication, controlled by the operations of prosody. Thomas’s poems of the early to mid-1940s reflect the frenetic world he was forced to confront. It has become a common view that R. S. Thomas did not feel threatened by technology until he reached Manafon, where tractors, harvesters and other innovations had begun to reduce the need for hands-on labour. For example, Grahame Davies writes: ‘Modernity began to disturb [Thomas’s] world only in the late 1940s and early 1950s when mechanization started to affect the farmers in his mountain parishes.’77 This is simply not the case. R. S. Thomas was forced to build a bomb shelter under his stairs in 1940. Modernity clearly affected him then, and it also affected his style. His wartime poems have been examined by M. Wynn Thomas, who writes of a poetry that ‘frequently comes from an imagination fearfully alerted by war to the ferocities of existence’, and who points out how ‘the Behemoth images he used were very much part of the vocabulary of psychic stress during the Second World War’.78 What deserves further discussion is how Thomas’s responses to the storms of war helped eradicate the ‘innocent plagiarist’ of Chirk and contributed to the emergence of the more inventive poet of Manafon. The majority of these war poems were discarded from Song at the Year’s Turning, and one must acknowledge that ‘by omitting them Thomas presumably meant to indicate .â•‹.â•‹. that the early growing points of his distinctive, authentic talent lay elsewhere’.79 But these poems amount to more than juvenile throwaways. They are the stylistic equivalent of those German bombs. One notices, for example, the sonic impact of ‘Propaganda’ (SF, p. 10), first published as one of the above-mentioned 1943 poems: Nor shot, nor shell, but the fused word, That rocks the world to its white root, Has wrought a chaos in the mind, Or drained the love from the split heart; Nor shock, nor shower of the sharp blows, That fall alike from life and death, But some slow subsidence within, That sinks a grave for the sapped faith.

In register, tone and metrics, these quatrains are explosive. Even as Thomas says ‘nor shot, nor shell’, the line’s prosody contradicts its literal meaning: similar-sounding, monosyllabic words, each beginning with a sibilant ‘sh’ that opens onto a vowel, ring out like mortar rounds from the lines: ‘shot’,


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‘shell’, ‘shock’, ‘sharp’. Five of the eight lines end with a spondee, and Thomas sets up each of these by substituting a pyrrhic in the line’s penultimate foot. The effect of this is similar to cocking a gun and then firing it: the impact of each terminal spondee is heightened by the slack foot preceding it, and the last words are given extraordinary emphasis. In fact, those spondaic line endings alone give us a clue to Thomas’s state of mind in the early 1940s: ‘split heart’, ‘sharp blows’, ‘sapped faith’. The poem’s rhymes (very approximate now, not chiming like the breeze/trees rhymes of the 1930s) connect words almost imperceptibly. The root/heart rhyme subtly attaches the world’s root, its very essence, to its ‘split heart’ (and perhaps the poet’s heart, or humanity’s heart, or both), and the pairing of those words foreshadows a line from ‘Song at the Year’s Turning’: ‘The heart’s flower withers at the root’. The slanted death/faith rhyme is surely appropriate to that split heart, and to the ‘grave’ that is being dug for faith in the final line. Assonance, too, ties key words together: the short ‘o’ connects words of discord – ‘shot’, ‘rocks’, ‘wrought’, ‘chaos’, ‘shock’ – and the long ‘o’ connects the explosive ‘word’ in line 1 to that which it affects in line 2: ‘world’, ‘root’. Moreover, Thomas intentionally loads the poem with abrasive consonants: ‘rocks’, ‘white root’, ‘chaos’, ‘split heart’, ‘shock’, ‘sharp blows’, ‘sinks’, ‘sapped’. ‘Propaganda’ is an important poem not because of any pedestrian theme or message (for instance, that internal, propagandÂ� ized words in one’s mind can be more damaging than external bombs), or because it represents the stylistic direction in which Thomas’s poems were heading (it does not; there is nothing else quite so ‘explosive’ in The Stones of the Field, and the poem uses an accentual-syllabic prosody, from which Thomas had largely moved away). Rather, ‘Propaganda’ is an important poem because of the effect of its detonation, which freed R. S. Thomas from a Georgian grip, and because of the message of its prosody, the intensity of which gives us a good understanding of R. S. Thomas’s frame of mind in the early 1940s. Another poem from the early 1940s that conveys the violence and unrest of wartime, as well as the flux of style it generated, is ‘On a Portrait of Joseph Hone by Augustus John’: As though the brute eyes had seen In the hushed meadows the weasel, That would tear the soft down of the throat And suck the veins dry Of their glittering blood.


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And the mouth formed to the cry, That gushed from the cleft heart And flowed coldly as spring water over The stone lips. (SF, p. 35)

This poem foregrounds structural instability, particularly when viewed in the light of Thomas’s pre-1940 work. Two obvious, yet major, differences from earlier work are first, that this is a free verse poem and, secondly, that the stanzas are not symmetrical. Instead of clean, rectangular strophes, we find inconsistent syllable counts between lines, varying line lengths within stanzas and varying numbers of lines between stanzas. We also find that the first stanza is a dependent clause with no resolution, and that its relationship to the second stanza is not entirely clear – again, a disquieting experience for the reader. The first stanza could be the beginning of a sentence that abruptly dies, or it could be the end of a sentence that began ‘off-stage’; either way, the effect is unsettling. The reader is knocked off balance, and the other prosodic elements of the poem do not re-establish equilibrium. End-rhyme, for example, has all but vanished. There is one full rhyme (dry/cry) and one approximate rhyme (throat/ heart), but because there is no structured rhyme scheme, and because the rhymes cross the white space between stanzas, they actually reinforce the poem’s asymmetry. We also see an early example of a line break (between the penultimate and final line) that does not correspond to syntax, and this type of enjambement, while common (and crucial) to Thomas’s later work, is unexpected here. ‘On a Portrait’ is, like ‘Propaganda’, a stress-heavy poem. Every line but one contains consecutive stresses: ‘brute eyes’, ‘hushed meadows’, ‘soft down’, ‘veins dry’, ‘mouth formed’, ‘cleft heart’, ‘flowed coldly’, ‘stone lips’. Yet Thomas uses his stresses very differently in this poem; instead of the explosive consonance we saw in ‘Propaganda’, we now find softer sounds standing in formal contrast to the poem’s stress-heavy phrasing. The combination of labials, liquids and low-frequency vowels creates gentle (but slightly ominous) sound structures like ‘in the hushed meadows the weasel’, and open vowels close onto fricatives and labials to create soft landings, as in ‘soft down’ and ‘mouth formed’. And because the poem’s phrasing links the stressed syllables in each line (‘brute eyes .â•‹.â•‹. seen’; ‘sucked .â•‹.â•‹. veins dry’; ‘mouth formed .â•‹.â•‹. cry’; ‘gushed .â•‹.â•‹. cleft heart’), the soft consonants are disturbed by what they are tied to. For example, in the line, ‘That would tear the soft down of the throat’, the stresses fall on ‘tear .â•‹.â•‹. soft down .â•‹.â•‹. throat’, so that the stressed, harshsounding word ‘tear’ rips into the gentle-sounding ‘soft down’. Then two


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more unstressed syllables prepare the reader to land on the harsher word, ‘throat’. The significance of this is obvious: the weasel, which, in the context of both the poem and our argument, represents war, turmoil, chaos, evil, et cetera, is formally tearing into soft nature, metrically assaulting it with a harder reality. As a result, one is faced with the realization that Thomas’s view of nature, once full of golden birdsong and dewy mushrooms, has forever changed to something altogether darker and more ambiguous. Taken for what they are, not merely for what they say, these early poems manifest a life-altering chaos whose rhythmic presence is felt in the work well before we see it fully expressed thematically. As John Barnie asserts, Thomas’s poetry eventually gained a postDarwinian awareness that ‘the earlier romantic sense of grandeur and beauty of nature .â•‹.â•‹. must now be held in balance with what can seem to us to be nature’s darker side’.80 One notes, however, that as a response to turmoil, Thomas was projecting the ‘darker side’ of the world onto nature, and that he was mainly doing so through prosody. The natural world, which had been the poet’s subject matter all along, now became both the medium and recipient (as opposed to the origin) of the poet’s troubled muse; simply put, nature was arranged prosodically to reflect a brutality brought home by war. Considered together, then, the poems of the 1940s mark a period of transition, and their prosodies are a chaotic causeway, leading Thomas away from outdated poetic models and towards the style that he was about to discover in the Montgomery hills.


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2 A Style Emerging, 1943–1955

A growing realization of the plight of my country, plus long pondering over the question of Anglo-Welsh writing, together with the desire to live up to the reputation for difference implied by the terms Welsh and Anglo-Welsh, have been responsible for certain experiments of mine both in subject matter and in technique .Â€.Â€. For it seems to me that if we are unwilling to be called English poets, while at the same time we are averse from the title Anglo-Welsh, we have only the other to fall back on. But if we are to be known as Welsh poets then our work must be a true expression of the life of our country in all its forms.1

The above excerpt is from a BBC radio broadcast, ‘The Poet’s Voice: By Rev. R. S. Thomas’, dated 21 August 1947, the year immediately following the publication of The Stones of the Field and five years after the poet’s move to the hills and moorland of Manafon, Montgomeryshire. It is a telling passage, revealing how the poet’s perception of his own identity, as both Welshman and Welsh artist, had developed since the late 1930s. It also demonstrates a shift in his conception of Wales. Whereas his ‘true Wales’ was initially an imagined Welsh-speaking community somewhere in the distant west, his work of the Manafon period attempts to bring his vision within reach, to render what he calls ‘a true expression’ of his country through the medium of English-language poetry. We might refer to this as the intentional ‘cymrification’ of his work. Thomas used similar language in ‘Some Contemporary Scottish Writing’ (1946), suggesting that the ‘movement’ towards a Welsh atmosphere in poetry may constitute ‘a phase in the re-cymrification of Wales’ (SP, p. 28). In essence, R. S. Thomas – a poet who, only a few years earlier, was still writing in an outmoded, Georgian style, and who had contemplated leaving Wales in search of a Celtic Eden – was now setting his feet upon,


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and attempting to root his poetry in, the Wales beneath his feet. This process began, as we will see, with the creation of ‘a deliberately Welsh character’ called Iago Prytherch.2 In the above excerpt, Thomas remarks upon ‘certain experiments .â•‹.â•‹. both in subject matter and technique’ which he had conducted by 1947 in an attempt to give his work a Welsh air. These poems can be viewed as outgrowths of, and attempted solutions for, his pre-existing sense of estrangement. In an attempt to root both his work and himself in Wales, Thomas sought a new kind of Welsh poetry, ‘a Welsh literature in English, strongly grounded in a knowledge of Welsh history, language, and literary tradition’.3 While he would eventually abandon the idea of a distinctively ‘Welsh’ poetry written in English, the Manafon period found him earnestly attempting to create poetry with ‘a strangely un-English sound about it’.4 Indeed, what R. S. Thomas wrote of Hugh MacDiarmid and Scotland applies equally to his own linguistic experiments during this period: ‘it has been and still is MacDiarmid’s task to de-anglicize Scotland, and so get back to the native roots’.5 In the previous chapter, we discussed how the external conflict Thomas faced as a young curate was quickly internalized, becoming part of a ‘troubled muse’ that shaped stylistic developments. A similar pattern occurred when Thomas reached Manafon in 1942, where external tension of a different nature heightened his unease and further affected his style. The primary source of that external tension, and the element upon which critics have most commonly focused (albeit in a limiting manner), was the shock of the resident hill farmers and the harsh lives they led. Nothing in Thomas’s upbringing or his theological training had prepared him for what he encountered in Montgomeryshire: I came out of a kind of bourgeois environment which .â•‹.â•‹. is protected .â•‹.â•‹. and this muck and blood and hardness, the rain and the spittle and the phlegm of farm life was, of course, a shock to begin with .â•‹.â•‹. But, as one experienced it .â•‹.â•‹. sympathy grew in oneself and compassion and admiration.6

In this field, one does not wish to re-plough well-furrowed ground. It has long been established that poems such as ‘A Priest to His People’ (SF, p. 29) and ‘Affinity’ (SF, p. 20) reveal ‘a love–hate relationship with the farmers’.7 Bearing in mind that it was pre-Manafon conflict, not experience with hill farmers, that provoked the first major changes in R. S. Thomas’s style, one wishes to resist the familiar assertion that ‘it was, surely, the gnawing bafflement and pity he felt when faced with people like Prytherch that set [R. S. Thomas] writing’.8


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Nonetheless, Thomas’s inner conflict clearly deepened in Manafon and found, in the lives of the resident hill farmers, a Welsh subject matter on which to focus. Stylistic changes came quickly. Thomas once said, years later, ‘You can’t really change your style without changing your subject matter’, but for him it was usually the other way round.9 Critical interpretÂ� ations of Manafon subject matter abound, but, as Patrick Crotty argues, ‘commentary on the Prytherch series has perhaps been particularly guilty of concern with subject matter at the expense of technique’.10 Indeed, what is still in need of discussion is not the well-worn idea that hill farmers both inspired and infuriated R. S. Thomas but, rather, how the emotions and tensions they evoked affected his prosody. Considering what we know of R. S. Thomas’s emotional unrest at Chirk and Hanmer, one might expect that the poet’s initial reaction to Manafon would have been relief and satisfaction. After all, German bombs were no longer falling within earshot, and the longed-for Welsh hills were now under the rector’s feet. And Thomas did, in fact, enjoy a moment of seeming respite from ‘the storm’s hysteria’ upon his arrival in Montgomeryshire. This comes out clearly in a reflective prose passage from The Echoes Return Slow: What had been blue shadows on a longed-for horizon, traced on an inherited background, were shown in time to contain this valley, this village and a church built with stones from the river, where the rectory stood, plangent as a mahogany piano. The stream was a bright tuning fork in the moonlight. (p. 24)

However, whatever respite Thomas enjoyed was short lived. ‘Plangent’, while it can denote something strong and resonant, can also signify something plaintive, even mournful, and, in fact, as this passage continues, it ‘tunes’ to a bleaker note: ‘The young man was sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit.’ As Brown observes, this mournful image of a ‘leafless pulpit’ resonates with lines from the early poem ‘Hiraeth’:11 Autumn shakes out the thistle’s curse On the grey air, and my leafless house, Picked clean by frost and rain, Cowers naked upon the plain.

These lines convey vulnerability: a naked house, stripped by the weather, with no leaves for covering. And, by connecting the image of his ‘leafless pulpit’ with that of his ‘leafless house’, Thomas is also associating those sombre and austere registers with his vocation as a priest. Though a curate


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in Chirk and Hanmer, Thomas was a rector for the first time at Manafon, and he found himself emotionally unprepared: I was brought up hard against this community and I really began to learn what human nature, rural human nature was like. And I must say that I found that nothing I’d been told or taught in theological college was of any help at all in these circumstances.12

Perhaps the realities of Manafon would not have affected Thomas so much had he not been expecting something so very different, namely the idyllic, romantic vision of rural life that W. B. Yeats and Fiona Macleod had helped inspire in him, and that he had briefly glimpsed on his journey to Galway. Confronting a depopulated, lonely landscape, Thomas found inevitable disappointment, and the wound dealt to his communal vision compounded his loneliness and sense of seclusion. Once again, this placed Thomas in the emotional company of Edward Thomas, a poet who was fast becoming for R. S. Thomas a kindred spirit in estrangement. In fact, it is telling, albeit perhaps not surprising, that in his autobiography, R. S. Thomas selects a poem by Edward Thomas, ‘The New House’, to describe his feelings upon first arriving in Manafon (A, p. 51): Now first, as I shut the door, â•… I was alone In the new house; and the wind â•… Began to moan. .â•‹.â•‹. Nights of storm, days of mist, without end; â•… Sad days when the sun Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs â•… Not yet begun.13

‘The New House’, like ‘Hiraeth’, uses the image of a house set against harsh weather to convey loneliness. By breaking the second line after ‘alone’, Edward Thomas places ‘I was alone’ on its own line, thereby isolating the idea of isolation. Both the days and nights ‘without end’ and the sun that ‘shone in vain’ contribute to a feeling of despondency and blank repetition, as do the low-frequency vowels in the alone/moan rhyme. The speaker’s ‘old griefs’ come into a present which itself merely looks forward to ‘griefs / Not yet begun’, and the sun/begun rhyme reinforces the idea of grievous days ahead. By choosing this poem to represent his emotional state upon arriving in Manafon, R. S. Thomas reveals a connection between ‘old griefs’ and present disillusionment.


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Of course, Manafon did more for R. S. Thomas than deepen his connection with Edward Thomas. One senses that it was Thomas’s loneliness and disappointment that led, at least in part, to the creation of his most famous character, Iago Prytherch, one who in his own poetic world is likewise deracinated from communal life, and who is himself an emblematic, solitary figure on a Welsh hill. And in the creation of Prytherch, R. S. Thomas effectively reached the first perceptible destination along his stylistic journey.

This is your prototype Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition, Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress Not to be stormed even in death’s confusion. (‘A Peasant’, SYT, p. 21)

The word ‘storm’, as both noun and verb, appears in several poems by R. S. Thomas. Viewed in light of one another, these repeated ‘storms’ reveal themselves as metaphors for the poet’s troubled muse. Thomas is always close to the speakers of his poems; voices that are not strictly his own are often those of his alter egos, part of an internal dialogue that is steeped in conflict and contradiction. Whereas the ‘storminess’ of Thomas’s poetry began as a reaction to an external, non-poetic force, the storm’s fury quickly became part of his own ‘furious interiors’ (‘Probing’, LS, p. 23).14 Therefore, when Thomas writes years later of ‘storming’ at God, even ‘as Job stormed, with the eloquence / of the abused heart’ (‘At It’, F, p. 15), we recognize that ‘storming’ as a force that has come full circle: it is now an internal conflict moving outward, with the intensity of Job’s cries into the whirlwind. In fact, the book of Job weighed heavily in Thomas’s thinking at this period. The biblical poem’s depiction of a man whose inner life is ripped apart by external forces that try his patience and faith, as well as the interplay it establishes between landscape and the human interior, attracted Thomas. In ‘The Question’ he writes: Was not this the voice that lulled Job’s seething mind to a still calm, Yet tossed his heart to the racked world? (SF, p. 15)

When asked, late in his life, to name his favourite book from the Bible, he responded, not surprisingly, ‘I certainly like Job – Job is a very grand conception.’15


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It is thus both fitting and ironic that Thomas uses a line from Job to introduce us to his first volume, The Stones of the Field (1946), where we first encounter the antithesis of internal conflict: Iago Prytherch, Welsh hill farmer. The so-called ‘Prytherch poems’ mark the beginning of Thomas’s characteristic dialogues of conflicting voices. Prytherch is himself a figure of contradiction, ‘the very essence of enigma’.16 Although he at times appears as a simple-minded muck-trudger – an image that too many critics have used to emblematize Thomas’s poetry, and to figure Wales, as a whole – Iago cannot be called simplistic. He may unblinkingly follow the footsteps of his progenitors, yet his ability, born of durability, to survive both ‘the attrition of the elements’ and ‘the colonizing gaze of human observers’ makes him an admirable figure.17 Unlike R. S. Thomas, Iago Prytherch has no troubled interior, and this makes him an ‘impregnable fortress’. ‘A Peasant’ is Thomas’s best-known, most frequently anthologized poem. More critical writing has been devoted to its subject than to any other of Thomas’s poetic entities, including the later, equally enigmatic entity of God, whose poetic presence (or absence) is ultimately much more important than Prytherch’s. Initially, the sustained attention given to him was justified – he appears in, and is important to, each of Thomas’s volumes of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s – but Prytherch remained (and remains) a favourite topic for critics long after Thomas buried him. Perhaps understandably, the persona who helped establish Thomas’s reputation has become closely identified with him, but that association has resulted in a critically muddled relationship, with many ‘insisting .â•‹.â•‹. on still seeing [Thomas] in the spitting image of the phlegmatic Iago Prytherch’.18 As Crotty reminds us, this ‘extra-textual pursuit’ of Prytherchian themes has taken us too far from the poems.19 And yet, remarkably, for all the attention it has received, ‘A Peasant’ has hardly been evaluated as a poem. That is, ‘A Peasant’ is first and foremost a prosodic and linguistic creation, not a portrait of a real man or a short sketch about Welsh upland farm life. And if it is indeed, as Crotty asserts, ‘Thomas’s “breakthrough” poem, the first to sound his characteristic tonalities’, then it is imperative that the poem be evaluated on a textual level, and that one endeavour to establish just what Thomas’s ‘characteristic tonalities’ are.20 â•…â•…â•…â•… A Peasant Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed, Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills, Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud. Docking mangels, chipping the green skin


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From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind – So are his days spent, his spittled mirth Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week, And then at night see him fixed in his chair Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire. There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind. His clothes, sour with years of sweat And animal contact, shock the refined, But affected, sense with their stark naturalness. Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition, Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress Not to be stormed even in death’s confusion. Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars, Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.

In analysing the poem, Justin Wintle refers to Thomas’s ‘contrapuntal control of rhythm’.21 Although somewhat vague, his description rightly identifies rhythmic control as the most fundamental element of Thomas’s style during this period. We have discussed his movement away from accentual-syllabic prosody and towards a more accentual, non-metrical prosody in which the number of accents per line remains relatively consistent (‘A Peasant’ uses both four- and five-stress lines) and where the placement of accented syllables varies between lines. Because their placement is flexible, Thomas can deploy accents to coincide with elements of thematic or imagistic significance. Key words rise from lines like buoys on waves while the remaining words flow beneath and between to fill the gaps. In contrast to metrical verse, where stressed syllables are spread evenly, dictated by number and only varied by metrical substitution, Thomas’s non-metrical stress patterns are quite idiosyncratic. He will occasionally write a metrically regular line, but these are rare. In fact, despite his propensity for end-rhyme, irregular stress patterns make his Manafon prosody closer to free verse than metrical verse. We might call this technique ‘underscoring’ because of the way Thomas uses stress to call attention to particular words. In an early review, Cecil Price argues that ‘[Thomas’s] language can be colloquial to the point of flatness; but, suddenly, his thought thrusts up two words that transmute the passage’.22 Although Thomas’s Manafon work, with few exceptions, does not approach ‘flatness’ (his stress patterns see to that), he will ‘thrust up’


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words of particular significance. For example, in the line, ‘Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills’, a triple stress at the line’s end emphasizes the baldness (barrenness, age, bleakness and perhaps lack of refinement) and Welshness of the hills. Less pronounced stresses fall on ‘ordinary’ (regularity and normalcy as much as dullness) and ‘man’, also key words. These qualities are significant not only to ‘A Peasant’, but to the whole poetic landscape of Thomas’s early work, in which he uses accentual prosody to substantiate a world. As stresses fall upon nouns which denote tangible elements from the setting, they underscore the tactile nature of farm labour and of the hills themselves. In ‘A Peasant’, these nouns include ‘sheep’, ‘mangels’, ‘skin’, ‘bones’, ‘earth’, ‘chair’, ‘fire’, ‘clothes’, ‘sweat’, ‘animal’ and ‘rain’. Ward describes the early work in the following way: Thomas’s early poetry proliferates with sets of clear evocations of fundamental and palpable entities: tree, rain, hill, sky, soil, river, fire, cup, animal, peasant, stone, flower, field, family, bread. They may gradually accrue into symbolic reference or general pattern, but what we primarily remember is their immediate, startling impact.23

This elemental quality is important to the Manafon poems, which join man and landscape to the point that at times they become almost indistinguishable: His gaze is deep in the dark soil, As are his feet. The soil is all; His hands fondle it, and his bones Are formed out of it with the swedes. And if sometimes the knife errs, Burying itself in his shocked flesh, Then out of the wound the blood seeps home To the warm soil from which it came. (‘Soil’, AL, p. 28)

Here we see Thomas using stress to direct reader attention. In the line ‘His gaze is deep in the dark soil’, the words ‘gaze’, ‘deep’, ‘dark’ and ‘soil’ are all emphasized, placing the reader’s attention, just like the farmer’s, deep in the soil. And we once again see how the poem’s palpable elements – soil, feet, hands, flesh, bones, et cetera – are underscored rhythmically. One also notes Thomas’s taste for monosyllabic nouns, a preference evident throughout his early work. Built with the bare elements of speech, the poems themselves seem elemental. Readers remember man, soil, blood and bone; all else is secondary. In ‘Soil’, we also see the intensification of a technique we observed in ‘A Peasant’: the grouping of stressed syllables in what can be called ‘stress


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pairings’ or ‘stress clusters’, such as ‘shocked flesh’ and ‘blood seeps home’. These groups typically include one or more adjectives, as in ‘dark soil’, ‘shocked flesh’ and ‘warm soil’. In fact, Thomas becomes so fond of using stress clusters to underscore adjective-noun combinations that he can at times use the technique to excess: Long cloak to a lean land, the white flesh thaws thin, And, bare as a sky, the wind-sucked bone shows blue; The berried blood swells in the frosted vein, The speckled eye hatches its silver brood To bud with song the old, heart-echoing wood – Such is the spring Time brings the body to. (‘The Strange Spring’, SF, p. 26)

The alliteration in this poem seems overindulgent, as do the numbers of consecutive stresses at the end of the first two lines. When adjective-noun combinations are made so frequently and in such rapid succession – ‘lean land’, ‘berried blood’, ‘frosted vein’, ‘speckled eye’, ‘silver brood’ – individual images lose power. In this case, ‘berried blood’, itself a lovely image, is placed on the same level as ‘lean land’, a far less striking one, so that both appear to be little more than obvious exercises in alliteration. An overuse of adjectives and stressed syllables stifles the poem, and the heavy rhythm makes what are meant to be gentle images, such as ‘speckled eye’ and ‘silver brood’, seem too bold. Also, the self-conscious alliteration of the poem perhaps reveals too obvious an echo of Dylan Thomas, or of Hopkins. All of these are possible reasons why Thomas did not collect the poem in Song at the Year’s Turning. In ‘A Peasant’, these same techniques seem more refined, in part because the poem is longer and can accommodate more adjective-noun pairings, but mainly because those pairings are used more judiciously and to greater musical effect. Critics like Price, who calls Thomas’s work ‘colloquial to the point of flatness’, have drawn attention away from his lyricism, but R. S. Thomas is a more aural poet than he has generally been given credit for, and attention (sometimes over-attention) to sound typifies his early ‘characteristic tonalities’. For example, ‘green skin’ is an internal slant rhyme, and although ‘wind’s attrition’ and ‘half-witted grin’ are perhaps too blatant in their assonance, ‘crude earth’ and ‘spittled mirth’ are more subtle. Such pairings slow the pace of the line, stand out from it, not only because of the stressed syllables but also because of their tonal relationships. Consonance is used to similar effect; ‘bald Welsh hills’, for instance, stands out not merely as a succession of monosyllabic words but for the


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way the letter ‘l’ joins all three; similarly, ‘crack the cheeks’ is heavy on ‘k’ sounds, and ‘gaunt sky’ is joined by the velar plosives ‘g’ and ‘k’. Generally speaking, the tonalities of ‘A Peasant’ can be divided into two registers. The first and larger part of the poem, lines 1–15, is comprised mainly of monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words connected by accentuation; stressed words stand out and begin to accumulate as a group. Their connection is enhanced by consonance: ‘pens’, ‘sheep’ and ‘gap’ are joined by ‘p’ (‘sheep’ and ‘gap’ are also a slant rhyme); ‘spent’ and ‘spittled’ are connected by the ‘sp’ combination; ‘cracks’, ‘cheeks’, ‘gaunt’, ‘sky’ and ‘week’ are all joined by the velar plosives; and ‘sour’, ‘years’ and ‘sweat’ are linked by ‘s’ and ‘r’ sounds. This world seems interconnected because the words that create it cohere. However, ‘A Peasant’ turns in line 16, where the word ‘affected’ acts like a hinge in the register, shifting the poem from interconnected monosyllables to a diction that includes more formal, polysyllabic, Latinate words, such as ‘prototype’, ‘attrition’ and ‘impregnable’. This turn is emphasized by the break between lines 15 and 16: ‘shock the refined, / But affected, sense’. The line break, coupled with the comma after ‘affected’, effectively isolates each word and asks the reader to pause and to consider the meaning of each. Whose ‘refined’ sense is being ‘shocked’, the poet’s or the reader’s? And in what way is that response ‘affected’? The answer is complex. In part, that ‘your’ in ‘your prototype’ belongs to the bourgeois reader, against whom Thomas inveighs for being shocked by Iago, just as he himself had been shocked by the farmers. In this way, the invective is a kind of re-enactment, the reader adopting an angle of vision previously occupied by the poet. Thomas sets up this ‘turn’ by reinforcing the reader’s presumed superiority to Prytherch in the first fifteen lines, then immediately switching track both linguistically and thematically. But this ‘affected’ response still belongs, at least in part, to R. S. Thomas himself, whose upbringing and education at times cause him to denounce the hill farmers for their ‘scorn .â•‹.â•‹. / Of the refinements of art and mysteries of the Church’ (‘A Priest to His People’, SF. p. 29). In this sense, Thomas is acknowledging his own arrogance, and ‘affected’ can be interpreted as ‘feigned’ or ‘pretentious’. The more formal, Latinate diction coincides with this haughtiness, so that the admission of pretentiousness is selfdeprecating. But ‘affected’ can also mean emotionally stirred, which the poet certainly is. This ‘stirring’ is partially discomfort, caused by the sight and smell of Iago, but there is another kind of ‘stirring’ at work as the poet is moved to admiration. Indeed, R. S. Thomas feels a marked measure of regard for his poetic construct. One might even say that the formal diction


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in the poem’s second half is accompanied by a tone of defensiveness, a reproach to any reader whose high-brow intellectualism might dismiss Prytherch as ‘other’. Such reproaches occur in other poems from The Stones of the Field, for instance ‘Affinity’ – Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers That rot in your heart’s dust, and what have you to give To enrich his spirit or the way he lives? (p. 20)

– and ‘The Airy Tomb’ (p.42), which, in the spirit of Baudelaire and Eliot, includes the reprimand, ‘And you, hypocrite reader, at ease in your chair, / Do not mock their conduct’.24 In this sense, the line ‘this is your prototype’ is intended to ‘affect’ the reader and eradicate the difference between reader and poetic subject. At ‘affected’, the sense of wholeness and interconnectivity from the poem’s first part is eclipsed by cumbersome descriptions such as ‘stark naturalness’ and ‘impregnable fortress’. These unwieldy verbal pairings seem out of place, and the result is a verbal confusion that is consistent with the state of the reader, forced to re-evaluate his or her standing in relation to Prytherch. This intentional confusion is also in harmony with the idea of ‘death’s confusion’, which is introduced in the poem’s second part. And one cannot help but further relate this ‘confusion’ to the shell-shocked state of bewilderment in which R. S. Thomas had so recently found himself. Indeed, one suspects that the martial diction we find after the poem’s ‘turn’ is a response to the frenzy and disruption we discussed in the previous chapter, as is Prytherch’s non-violent victory, won via endurance and stability. In this vein, M. Wynn Thomas has pointed out how it was partially his own experience of sharing the ‘fear of the animal, that finds its very den has been disturbed, that perhaps led [R. S. Thomas] half admiringly to associate the Manafon upland farmers with “The land’s patience and a tree’s / Knotted endurance”’ (‘Peasant Greeting’, SF, p. 27).25 However, Prytherch, who endures ‘like a tree’, is more than a counterpoint to conflict or a means for Thomas to admire a Welshman’s staying power. He is also the means by which the poet attempts to plant his own roots in the Welsh soil. Thomas is searching for permanence, and the idea of man being like a tree – living to an old age, rooted in the soil, re-emerging annually – seems to have appealed to him personally to the extent that he wrote many poems containing man/tree metaphors.26 By creating a world where ‘man remains summer and winter through, / Rooting in vain beneath his dwindling acre’ (The Minister, SYT, p. 91), the poet places himself among those ‘Clinging stubbornly to the proud tree / Of blood


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and birth’ (‘Welsh History’, AL, p. 23). And, by ‘rooting’ the poem rhythmically in landscape and in palpable elements, Thomas is also reacting to the recent uprooting he himself experienced in Hanmer.27 The bleak world of Manafon did not always feel orderly, and the style of the poetry is not metrically ‘neat’ in the manner of Thomas’s earlier, more derivative, work, but the Manafon style is nonetheless a contrast to his war-torn, fluctuating styles of the early 1940s, emphasizing permanence and endurance, qualÂ� ities, it is crucial to note, for which R. S. Thomas was searching at the time. Though it has not been viewed in this way, the creation of Iago Prytherch can be seen as an early attempt by R. S. Thomas to define himself. This is perhaps best understood by considering the word ‘prototype’. Critics have often interpreted ‘prototype’ as meaning ‘typical example’. Ward, for example, calls Prytherch the prototype ‘of other, unnamed farmers’ in the early work.28 Elaine Shepherd writes that ‘Prytherch is a composite of the peasant farmers whom Thomas knew in his various ministries.’29 Gwydion Thomas, the poet’s son, further reveals that ‘Prytherch is a sort of amalgam of the Wilson boys from the Ffinnant, the Llwyn Coppa boys and the feuding Darlingtons, along with all those figures up in the fields above New Mills and Adfa.’30 It seems clear, then, that the poems do include traits of genuine farmers, or at least R. S. Thomas’s perceptions of their traits. Nevertheless, the Manafon poems cannot be reduced to what Byron Rogers calls ‘a gallery of portraits’.31 As some poets and critics have observed, R. S. Thomas’s Wales is ‘largely unlocatable’.32 It is ‘an inner world, an invention’, not ‘a faithful portrait of the country’.33 In other words, ‘Considered as an approximation to, let alone an accurate report of, life in an upland rural community, the Prytherch poems are, as we all know, non-starters.’34 ‘A Peasant’, in fact, is better understood as a self-defining, ‘Welsh realization’ poem. Indeed, ‘prototype’ can be read, quite literally, as ‘first type’ or ‘original type’, the earliest example of a group, species, or race, and the basis for what comes later (similar to an archetype). When ‘prototype’ is read in this way, Prytherch becomes the embodiment of the original Welshman – ‘He has been here since life began’ (‘The Labourer’, AL, p. 32) – and the seed from which, ‘season by season’, future Welshmen, including R. S. Thomas, will grow. Thomas is not merely saying (rather crudely) to his reader, ‘This man is your stereoÂ� typical Welsh, upland farmer type’, although this is how the line has most often been interpreted. Nor is he merely putting an ‘affected’ reader in his or her place by holding up Prytherch as ‘the prototype of us all’ (though this is part of his intention, for if Prytherch is the bourgeois reader’s prototype, he cannot easily be pigeonholed as a rural stereotype).35 Thomas is


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also admitting, even declaring, to himself, ‘this is your prototype’ or, in other words, ‘This is what – and where – you come from.’ By writing ‘A Peasant’, then, R. S. Thomas attempted to mitigate his own rootlessness by means of the entrenched Prytherch. He was creating a mythic Welsh genealogy that ushered in a process of self re-creation: the rejection of a bourgeois, English upbringing (‘the refined, but affected sense’) and the recasting of the self in the image of a Welshman. Prytherch, like Job, is ‘in league with the stones of the field’.36 By declaring himself a descendant from such a prototype, Thomas placed himself ‘in league’ with the Welsh landscape, seeking to give himself roots therein, hoping to ease his inner turmoil to a degree, including the turmoil so recently caused by war (‘Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars’). In fact, one notes that the change in register and sense of confusion ushered in after the word ‘affected’ is alleviated after the acceptance of Prytherch as ‘prototype’. In the final couplet, the poem reclaims its unified lyricism: ‘winner of wars’ brings back consonance with the recurring ‘w’ and ‘r’, and the wars/stars couplet gives the poem a sense of completeness, a kind of poetic calm after the earlier, confusing ‘storm’. Thus, Iago Prytherch was a means to an emerging self. His invention allowed Thomas to move beyond his initial impressions and to see the Welsh struggle as both emblematic and personal. And because Prytherch is the means by which he began to shape his own Welshness, each of Thomas’s well-known reproofs of Wales and the Welsh also became self-rebuke, ‘an act of national indictment that is itself grounded in self accusation: it is satire whose other face is confession’.37 ‘A Peasant’ was not only the beginning of Thomas’s self-reshaping as a Welshman; it was also the ‘first type’ of his experiments with cymrification, signalling a ‘deliberate withdrawal from England, including the forms of English verse, and a correspondingly self-monitored identification with Wales and Welsh culture’.38 Thomas said as much in the above-mentioned 1947 broadcast: But after moving from the Cheshire border further into Wales, I found that the character of a particular part of the earth was beginning to influence me. The enherent [sic] love of my own country was agitating for some embodiment in poetry. Hence there came poems such as ‘A Peasant’ where the landscape is not general but localized, and where a deliberately Welsh character is introduced in the person of Iago Prydderch [sic].39

This ‘love of .â•‹.â•‹. country’ that ‘was agitating for .â•‹.â•‹. embodiment in poetry’ also led Thomas to write poems featuring Welsh mythological and historical figures, Welsh landscapes and Welsh place names. In The Stones


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of the Field, these poems include ‘The Rising of Glyndŵr’ (p. 17); ‘Night and Morning’ (p. 18), a translation from the Welsh; ‘Country Church’ (p. 24), subtitled ‘Manafon’; and ‘Hiraeth’ (p. 34), which evokes the legend of Ceridwen’s cauldron. And, of course, there are many poems about Welsh farmers, named and unnamed. This cymrification expands in An Acre of Land (1952) to include more pronounced stylistic changes. Thomas would eventually change his opinion about Welsh writing in English, calling the concept ‘nonsense’.40 But in the mid- to late 1940s and early 1950s, he experimented with a style of verse that ‘strain[ed] very hard indeed to merit the description’.41 In terms of both content and style, these poems were intended to represent, and embody, the country’s condition.

A true expression Listen, listen! Where the river fastens The trees together with a blue thread, I hear the ousel of Cilgwri telling The mournful story of the long dead. Above the clatter of the broken water The song is caught in the bare boughs; The very air is veined with darkness, hearken! The brown owl wakens in the woods now. The owl, the ousel, and the toad carousing In Cors Fochno of the old laws – I hear them yet, but in what thicket cowers Gwernabwy’s eagle with the sharp claws? (‘Wales’, AL, p. 8)

In the 1947 broadcast, R. S. Thomas promoted the possibility of a distinctively Welsh poetic in English. As an example, he pointed to the above poem, ‘Wales’, explaining that in writing it, he has ‘tried to convey the atmosphere of our land at the present time’. More specifically, he called attention to ‘a great deal of falling assonance to suggest the tragedy of our position, and an occasional rising sound to suggest the faint gleams of hope which still come to us like sunlight on the mountainside’, and he asked the listener ‘to observe carefully the assonances referred to as well as the consonantal counterpointing’.42


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‘Wales’ does, in fact, include both falling and rising assonance. The first stanza begins with high-register vowels: ‘i’, ‘e’ and ‘a’ in words like ‘listen’, ‘river’, ‘fastens’, ‘together’ and ‘thread’. The register then shifts to include low-register vowels: ‘o’ and ‘u’ in ‘ousel’, ‘mournful’, ‘story’ and ‘long’. The second stanza moves from a mix of middle and low vowels in ‘clatter’, ‘water’, ‘song’, ‘caught’, ‘very’, ‘air’, ‘veined’, ‘darkness’ and ‘hearken’ to the very low vowels of ‘brown’, ‘owl’, ‘woods’ and ‘now’. The third stanza then begins with the same low-register sounds that ended the first two – ‘owl’, ‘ousel’, ‘toad’, ‘carousing’, ‘Cors Fochno’ and ‘old’ – and moves to a combination of mid- and high-register vowels at the poem’s conclusion: ‘hear’, ‘yet’, ‘thicket’, ‘Gwernabwy’ and ‘eagle’. The vowel sounds, then, fall before beginning to rise again. In addition, assonance ties words together, crossing lines and stanzas, so that earlier vowel sounds get picked up later (‘listen’, ‘river’, ‘Cilgwri’ and ‘thicket’ assonate, as do ‘ousel’, ‘boughs’, ‘brown’, ‘owl’, ‘carousing’ and ‘cowers’). Examples of internal rhyme draw one’s focus more particularly to assonance (chatter/water; bare/air), and the poem’s end-rhyme, while occasionally exact (thread/dead; laws/claws), is mainly vowel-rhyme (water/hearken; carousing/cowers), again privileging assonance in an attempt, through patterned vowel sounds, to embody ‘the atmosphere of [Wales]’. That atmosphere is one of loss, ‘the tragedy of [the Welsh] position’. In Manafon, ‘the conflict that exists between dream and reality’ (A, p. 11) was very tied up in Thomas’s conflicting feelings about Wales. He remained committed to ‘sing[ing] the land’s praises’, but he saw the decay of a ‘leprous frost’ (‘Memories’, AL, p. 38). The creatures in ‘Wales’, for example, simultaneously reflect Thomas’s desire to celebrate Welsh subject matter and his belief that his country has lost its ancient splendour. The animals come from the story of Culhwch ac Olwen in The Mabinogion. They are four of the six oldest of all creatures.43 In the tale, Arthur sends an embassy in search of Mabon, the son of Modron, and along the way the embassy encounters these animals, each of which tells of the sad transÂ� formation and decay that has transpired over time. For example, the Ousel of Cilgwri says, When I first came here, there was a smith’s anvil in this place, and I was then a young bird; and from that time no work has been done upon it, save the pecking of my beak every evening, and now there is not so much as the size of a nut remaining thereof.44

Each of the other creatures in turn speaks of similar diminishment. We learn that an oak tree has been reduced to ‘a withered stump’.45 A race of


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men has ‘rooted up’ a wooded glen, and the owl’s wings, like the oak tree, are ‘withered stumps’.46 A great rock that almost reached the stars has been reduced to a ‘span high’.47 Much of the blame for this decline is given to men, who, according to the Salmon of Llyn Llyw, are full of ‘such wrong as I never found elsewhere’.48 Images of deterioration are consistent with Thomas’s portrayal of the depopulated Montgomeryshire hill country in An Acre of Land: Too far for you to see The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot Gnawing the skin from the small bones, The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen, Arranged romantically in the usual manner On a bleak background of bald stone. Too far for you to see The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys, The nettles growing through the cracked doors, The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira, There are holes in the roof that are thatched with sunlight, And the fields are reverting to the bare moor. (‘The Welsh Hill Country’, AL, p. 7)

Imagery of decay is emphasized by heavy alliteration (‘fluke’, ‘foot-rot’, ‘fat’; ‘moss’, ‘mould’; ‘cold chimneys’, ‘cracked’; ‘bleak background’, ‘bald’) as well as stress pairings (‘fat maggot’, ‘small bones’, ‘bald stone’, ‘cracked doors’). However, the poem does more than wallow in cracks and mould and foot-rot. The ‘sunlight’ introduces a brighter image, reminding one of ‘the faint gleams of hope which still come to us like sunlight’ and also bringing to mind R. S. Thomas’s most striking poetic depiction of the Welsh dichotomy: Is there blessing? Light’s peculiar grace In cold splendour robes this tortured place For strange marriage.â•‹.â•‹. (‘Song at the Year’s Turning’, SYT, p. 101)

In ‘Wales’, the speaker suggests that Gwernabwy’s eagle, clearly a symbol for Wales’s majesty, is hiding, even cowering; but the claws are still sharp. Perhaps recalling the past amounts to ‘gnawing the bones / of a dead culture’, but Thomas retains the hope that a Welsh people may yet ‘arise / and greet each other in a new dawn’ (‘Welsh History’, AL, p. 23).


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Although Thomas’s attempts to cymrify his verse were influenced by Welsh mythology and history, they were also a response to the post-war literary scene in Wales. As the war began to draw to a close, the periodical Wales was restarted, edited by Keidrych Rhys and publishing work by Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, Glyn Jones and Alun Lewis, among others. In Wales, where Welshness and Anglo-Welshness were subjects of lively debate, Thomas published individual poems and many of his opinions on Welsh literature and the Welsh situation. He writes that it was while reading this periodical that he resolved ‘to show he was a Welshman by using names that could not possibly be English ones’ (A, p. 54). However, Thomas’s attempts at cymrification went beyond word choice. Many of the prosodic elements that he introduced (rather self-consciously) into his early, post-war poems were in fact derived from elements of Welsh cynghanedd (literally ‘harmony’), strict-metre poetry built on consonÂ� antal patterning and both internal and end-rhyme. Although cynghanedd is Welsh-language poetry, some of its properties can at times be quite pronounced in the work of Thomas’s English-language contemporaries, among them Glyn Jones, Leslie Norris and Dylan Thomas. Ned Thomas calls this R. S. Thomas’s ‘hopeful view .â•‹.â•‹. that there could be a Welsh literature in English, strongly grounded in a knowledge of Welsh history, language, and literary tradition’, composed by writers ‘who properly equipped themselves’.49 For R. S. Thomas, becoming ‘properly equipped’ meant studying Welsh-language poetry to the degree that he could incorpÂ� orate into his own verse some elements of cynghanedd. These were not passive endeavours. In the 1947 radio broadcast, he was at pains to call attention to ‘characteristically Welsh internal rhyme and alliteration’.50 As an example, he read the uncollected poem ‘Hill Farmer’: And he will go home from the fair To dream of the grey mare with the broad belly, And the bull and the prize tup That holds its head so proudly up. He will go back to the bare acres Of caked earth, and the reality Of fields that yield such scant return Of parched clover and green corn. Yes, he will go home to the cow gone dry, And the lean fowls and the pig in the sty, And all the extravagance of a Welsh sky.

The sincere, if overwrought, use of internal rhyme, vowel harmony and alliteration in this poem can be seen as a stylistic example of what Thomas


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would later call ‘strutting and beating my chest and saying “I am Welsh”’ (SP, p. 85). In his desire to discover an un-English poetic, Thomas also looked to Ireland. In particular, he responded to the work of Austin Clarke, who ‘subtly introduces the problems and concerns of modern Ireland .â•‹.â•‹. by a technically dazzling manipulation of English poetry’.51 According to Clarke, ‘Assonance .â•‹.â•‹. takes the clapper from the bell of rhyme. In simple patterns, the tonic word at the end of the line is supported by a vowel rhyme in the middle of the next line.’52 Thomas seems to have picked up on this technique, as evidenced by ‘Hill Farmer’, where he arranges assonÂ� ance so that the vowel sound of a particular line’s terminal word is picked up in the middle of the following line. For example, ‘fair’ at the end of line 1 assonates with both ‘grey’ and ‘mare’ in line 2; ‘acres’ at the end of line 5 shares exact vowel sounds with ‘caked earth’ in line 6; and the word ‘reality’ at the end of line 6 assonates with both ‘fields’ and ‘yield’ in line 7. According to Crotty, Austin Clarke’s ‘prosodic innovations – his efforts to develop .â•‹.â•‹. “an Irish mode” – link him both to the cultural nationalism of the Literary Revival and the modernist localism of William Carlos Williams and Hugh MacDiarmid’.53 It is interesting to note that in 1939, when R. S. Thomas was publishing in The Dublin Magazine, Clarke was arguing in that very periodical that ‘the verbal and poetic associations of the English language belong to a different culture’.54 Thomas responded to this idea, arguing, in the 1947 broadcast, that ‘the work of poets like Austin Clarke in Ireland has interested me, for he has shown how much of the atmosphere of old Irish verse can be brought into English by skilful counterpointing’.55 And the following year Thomas made these remarks in the pages of Wales: In the past Wales beyond Offa’s Dyke or beyond the circle of the Norman castle was always left in charge of the heather, y grug. The modern illusion is to treat the heather, or cefn gwlad as backwater .â•‹.â•‹. But Austin Clarke has shown that if one is willing to become acquainted with the Irish literary tradÂ� ition, there is no need to consider oneself in a backwater of literature, and the same applies to Scotland and Wales. We have no need to migrate to London to have the strings of our tongues unloosed.56

In Clarke’s ‘The Lost Heifer’, we find examples of the ‘skilful counterpointing’ to which Thomas responded: When the black herds of rain were grazing In the gap of the pure cold wind And the watery hazes of the hazel Brought her into my mind,


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I thought of the last honey by the water That no hive can find. Brightness was drenching through the branches When she wandered again, Turning the silver out of dark grasses Where the skylark had lain, And her voice coming softly over the meadow Was the mist becoming rain.57

In a similar manner to that which we saw in Thomas’s ‘Wales’ and ‘Hill Farmer’, assonance and consonance link words within lines, between lines and across stanzas. The long ‘a’ in ‘rain’, ‘grazing’, ‘hazes’, ‘hazel’, ‘lain’ and ‘rain’ ties the poem’s stanzas together sonically. ‘Brightness’ and ‘drenching’ share a short ‘e’ (the first unstressed, the latter stressed), and ‘drenching’ and ‘branches’ share several letters. The liquid ‘l’ in ‘black’, ‘cold’, ‘hazel’, ‘last’, ‘‘silver’, ‘skylark’ and ‘lain’ runs like a thread throughout the poem, and the ubiquitous ‘r’, for its part, holds the first four lines of the second stanza together in ‘brightness’, ‘drenching’, ‘branches’, ‘wandered’, ‘turning’, ‘silver’, ‘dark’, ‘grasses’, ‘where’ and ‘skylark’. In addition, the way Clarke uses adjective-noun combinations to form stress pairings causes one to wonder if Thomas’s use of stress may owe something to him. Pairings like ‘black herds’ and ‘dark grasses’ can be found in almost any poem from the Manafon period, and Clarke’s rhythmic phrases are at times extremely similar to Thomas’s. For example, ‘gap of the pure cold wind’ has the exact rhythm of ‘man of the bald Welsh hills’. Both phrases slow the reader as two consecutive unstressed syllables, ‘of the’, set up three stressed monosyllables, the first two of which fall upon adjectives. In both cases the three terminal words begin with consonants rather than vowels, further slowing the pace, and sharpening the focus, of the reader. Another characteristic of Clarke’s early poetry is the way he uses end-rhyme, often rhyming monosyllabic words with longer words and rhythmically stressed words with unstressed words, as in the following stanzas from ‘The Scholar’: Paying no dues to the parish, He argues in logic And has no care of cattle But a satchel and stick. The showery airs grow softer, He profits from his ploughland


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For the share of the schoolmen Is a pen in hand.58

Alliteration links words within a given line, usually tying a word near the beginning of the line to the line’s final word (paying/parish, care/cattle, satchel/stick, showery/softer, profits/ploughland, share/schoolmen). Less immediately apparent, however, is that Clarke rhymes the unstressed syllable of ‘logic’ with the stressed ‘stick’, and that he rhymes the unstressed syllable of ‘ploughland’ with the stressed ‘hand’. And, as in Thomas’s ‘Hill Farmer’, we see how Clarke picks up the vowel sound of a particular line’s terminal word in the middle of the following line: ‘cattle’ assonates with ‘satchel’, ‘softer’ assonates with ‘profits’ and ‘schoolmen’ both assonates and rhymes with ‘pen’. We find similar techniques in Thomas’s ‘Song’, which appeared in The Dublin Magazine. In fact, in the 1947 broadcast, Thomas pointed to Clarke as being ‘responsible’ for the poem’s ‘strangely un-English sound’: Up in the high field’s silence where The air is rarer, who dare break The seamless garment of the wind That wraps the bareness of his mind? The white sun spills about his feet A pool of darkness, sweet and cool, And mildly at its mournful brink The creatures of the wild are drinking. Tread softly, then, or slowly pass,59 And leave him rooted in the grasses; The earth’s unchanging voices teach A wiser speech than gave you birth.60

Like Clarke in ‘The Scholar’, Thomas rhymes monosyllables with polysyllables: ‘brink’ rhymes with the first syllable of ‘drinking’, and ‘pass’ rhymes with the first syllable of ‘grasses’. Also, like Clarke, Thomas picks up the vowel sound of a line’s terminal word in the middle of the following line: ‘where’ assonates and rhymes with ‘air’ and ‘rarer’, and ‘teach’ rhymes with ‘speech’; similarly, Thomas echoes ‘earth’s’ by ending the poem with ‘birth’; and ‘cool’ rhymes with ‘pool’, a word from earlier in the same line. He also deploys a great deal of consonance, and one notes the use of stress clusters in ‘high field’s silence’ and ‘white sun spills’. The


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poem’s techniques are not identical to Clarke’s, but they are influenced by his prosody. Thomas also found topical inspiration, and a formal model of a different kind, in the work of another Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, whose The Great Hunger (GH) was first published by the Cuala Press in 1942, the same year Thomas moved to Manafon and began to write about a severe, unimaginative labour similar to that which is portrayed in Kavanagh’s poem. Thomas certainly would have been familiar with Kavanagh’s earlier work, which had appeared in The Dublin Magazine, and Brown has observed that an extract from The Great Hunger appeared in the January 1942 edition of Horizon, the journal which had published Thomas’s ‘Homo Sapiens’ just months earlier. Kavanagh’s piece ‘was entitled “The Old Peasant” and the term “peasant” is used at several points in the poem’.61 The ‘hunger’ of Kavanagh’s poem does not refer to the Irish famines of the mid-nineteenth century but, rather, to a starvation of the affections and of the imagination that Kavanagh found in the lives of farmers in rural Ireland, and with which Thomas imbues his own poetic constructs. Significantly, a distinction between these two kinds of ‘hunger’ is made by R. S. Thomas in the opening poem of Tares (1961): There are two hungers, hunger for bread And hunger of the uncouth soul For the light’s grace. I have seen both, And chosen for an indulgent world’s Ear the story of one whose hands Have bruised themselves on the locked doors Of life; whose heart, fuller than mine Of gulped tears, is the dark well From which to draw, drop after drop, The terrible poetry of his kind. (‘The Dark Well’, T, p. 9)

Hungering in both senses seems to have been much on Thomas’s mind when he named two of his post-Manafon volumes, Poetry for Supper (1958) and The Bread of Truth (1963). It may be that themes of hunger, and the alleviation of hunger, in Thomas’s work are part of a sustained response to Kavanagh’s poem. In an essay that compares The Great Hunger and Thomas’s The Minister, Patrick Crotty cites John Montague’s remark that the ‘releasing influence’ of The Great Hunger on ‘other writers, from R. S. Thomas to Seamus Heaney, has yet to be estimated’.62 Both an imaginative and stylistic ‘release’ for Thomas, The Great Hunger modelled a style capable


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of expressing the harsh, earthy lives of farmers and the unimaginative existence that was their day-to-day routine. ‘Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?’ asks Kavanagh’s narrator on the poem’s opening page.63 For the most part, the answer is no: ‘peasantry in The Great Hunger is defined .â•‹.â•‹. less as a station in life than as a state of semi-consciousness, remote from imaginative awareness’.64 Above all, peasantry is portrayed by Kavanagh as devotion to the earth, where ‘The peasant’s intellectual energy, like his physical stamina, is drained from him by the clayey soil to which he gives his life.’65 Indeed, in Kavanagh’s poem, the landscape demands ultimate devotion. The opening line of The Great Hunger – ‘Clay is the word and clay is the flesh’ (GH, p. 1) – plays on the biblical Incarnation, ‘And the Word was made flesh’ (St John 1: 14), making the land an object of worship. That devotion consumes until the line between man and soil is blurred: ‘clay is the flesh’. Kavanagh enhances that connection by juxtaposing ‘soil’ and ‘soul’: He saw the sunlight and begrudged no man His share of what the miserly soil and soul Gives in a season to a ploughman. (GH, p. 23)

The soul of farmers (or the ‘soul’ that is Maguire, the protagonist, depending on one’s reading) is all but indistinguishable from the soil that demands devotion.66 One is again reminded of lines from Thomas’s ‘Soil’: .â•‹.â•‹. The soil is all; His hands fondle it, and his bones Are formed out of it with the swedes.

Furthermore, Kavanagh’s reference to the ploughman’s ‘season’ reminds one of Prytherch, who ploughs ‘season by season’. The poets also share the theme of seductive landscape. For example, in his youth, Maguire ‘dreamt / The innocence of young brambles’ before succumbing to the pull of earth: ‘O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes’ (GH, p. 3). Similarly, Thomas’s ‘village boy’ spends his youth ‘in the fields by thorn and thistle tuft’ before succumbing to the fields’ pull: ‘from such unconscious grace / Earth breeds and beckons to the stubborn plough’ (‘Farm Child’, AL, p. 37). This tone of loss is not far removed from what we observed in ‘Wales’ and in the excerpts from The Mabinogion, but in Kavanagh Thomas discovered a style that intensifies the connection between human loss and landscape. Stylistically, The Great Hunger is a free-verse poem in the main, but its style ranges from traditional rhyme and metre to ‘a conversational rhythm that not only mimics the Monaghan accent but is attuned to [the]


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characters’ unvoiced moods’.67 In fact, part of the ‘releasing influence’ of Kavanagh’s poem came from the sheer variety of its style(s). At times lines can be colloquial to the point of sounding like prose: The school-girls passed his house laughing every morning And sometimes they spoke to him familiarly – He had an idea. School-girls of thirteen Would see no political intrigue in an old man’s friendship. (GH, p. 21)

However, the poem also includes frequent moments of iambic regularity: ‘The grass was wet and over-leaned the path – / And Agnes held her skirts sensationally up’ (GH, p. 13). Section III is written in three sonnet-like stanzas, each of which includes lines of flawless iambic pentameter, where line breaks mainly coincide with syntax: Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap These men know God the Father in a tree: The Holy Spirit is the rising sap, And Christ will be the green leaves that will come At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb. (GH, p. 7)

Yet the poem also includes sections of heavily enjambed, shorter lines: Outside, a noise like a rat Among the hen-roosts. The cock crows over The frosted townland of the night. Eleven o’clock and still the game Goes on and the players seem to be Drunk in an Orient opium den. (GH, p. 24)

In a similar way, R. S. Thomas utilized a variety of styles in the poems written at Manafon. In the previous chapter, we discussed the chaos, both external and internal, that disrupted his style and generated poems that could reflect turmoil. These poems were stylistically liberating because they allowed Thomas to move beyond metrical regularity. In The Great Hunger, Thomas found further liberation in a poetic that, unlike his earlier models, freely explored free verse of various kinds. As in Kavanagh, we find in the Manafon poetry moments of longer-lined free verse: Dreams clustering thick on his sallow skull, Dark as curls, he comes, ambling with his cattle From the starved pastures. He has shaken from off his shoulders The weight of the sky, and the lash of the wind’s sharpness Is healing already under the medicinal sun. (‘Out of the Hills’, SF, p. 7)


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There are also examples of shorter-lined free verse where line breaks do not correspond with syntax: We were a people taut for war; the hills Were no harder, the thin grass Clothed them more warmly than the coarse Shirts our small bones. (‘Welsh History’, AL, p. 23)

And we find, as we do in The Great Hunger, examples of colloquial speech rhythms that, despite the presence of end-rhyme, can make a passage shade towards prose: Twm was a dunce at school, and was whipped and shaken More than I care to say, but without avail, For where one man can lead a horse to a pail Twenty can’t make him drink what is not to his mind. (‘The Airy Tomb’, SF. p. 42)

Perhaps what R. S. Thomas primarily gleaned from The Great Hunger was a linguistic register appropriate to a new reality of life. He once said that seeing farmers ‘squelching through liquid mud, rain pouring down’ really ‘gave me quite a prod in the direction of realistic poetry’.68 The Great Hunger offered a poetic example of what he describes as ‘muck and blood and hardness, the rain and the spittle and the phlegm of farm life’.69 Indeed, tactile, earthy, messy and uncouth language abounds in The Great Hunger: ‘wet clods’, ‘wet clay’, ‘weedy clods’, ‘tangled skeins’, ‘withered stalks’, ‘grunts and spits / Through a clay-wattled moustache’, ‘grotesque shapes’, ‘clean his arse / With perennial grass’, ‘a wizened face’, ‘twisting sod’, ‘put down / The seeds blindly with sensuous groping fingers’, ‘Coughed the prayer phlegm up from his throat and sighed: Amen’, ‘a wet weed twined’ (GH, pp. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). Thomas’s response to this linguistic register was prompt. Ward’s description of the early poetic landscape is apt: ‘Bilge, sweat and muck abound.’70 There are, however, important distinctions between Thomas’s work and Kavanagh’s. For example, Kavanagh, as we have seen, employs iambic metre in The Great Hunger, but Thomas scarcely wrote an iambic line in the poems written at Manafon, and he did not return to traditional metre in later volumes. And Thomas’s stress patterns, the most prominent and consistent features of his Manafon style, owe nothing to Kavanagh. The two poets also write from very different perspectives. ‘Kavanagh writes as a post-nationalist poet, Thomas as a [budding] nationalist one.’71 While Thomas looked at the Montgomeryshire farmers from an outsider’s


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perspective, Kavanagh was born and brought up in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, so that he had experienced rural Ireland’s social pressures at first hand. But notwithstanding these differences, Thomas’s response to The Great Hunger was significant; it seems to have spurred him in a new direction.

A Trifle Too Sweet I was more conventionally motivated lyrically in Manafon .â•‹.â•‹. and rhyme, both terminally and internally, conveyed best my view of the hill country at that time. Later the same hill country seemed to be aside from so many contemÂ�porary currents and rhyme seemed to be a trifle too sweet in the attempt to come to terms with those currents.72

At Manafon, R. S. Thomas’s movement from iambic metre to freer, accentual rhythms determined by stress patterns was accompanied by the beginning of a movement away from rhyme. As he indicated in the above excerpt, he would eventually abandon end-rhyme altogether, but rhyme was still common during this period. However, the ‘conventional’ uses of rhyme already seemed ‘a trifle too sweet’ for the poet, for he did not use rhyme consistently or traditionally.73 Conventional (closed-form) English prosody rarely uses rhyme arbitrarily. In all of its shapes – heroic couplets, elegiac quatrains, sonnets, Spenserian stanzas et cetera – it uses rhyme in fixed patterns. Thomas’s Manafon poems, by contrast, rarely follow standard rhyme schemes. They deploy rhyme opportunistically, for specific effects. Thomas does write with successive couplets: That man, Prytherch, with the torn cap, I saw him often, framed in the gap Between two hazels with his sharp eyes, Bright as thorns, watching the sunrise (‘The Gap in the Hedge’, AL, p. 15) And so he returned to the Bwlch to help his father With the rough work of the farm, to ditch, and gather The slick ewes from the hill; to milk the cow, And coax the mare that dragged the discordant plough. (‘The Airy Tomb’, SF, p. 42)

However, he also uses rhyme in nonce forms (non-conventional patterns created by the poet) as in ‘The Lonely Furrow’ (AL, p. 36), a three-stanza


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poem which follows the rhyme scheme aabab, and, more commonly, in idiosyncratic ways, where rhyme is intermittent and does not consistently follow a pattern. In ‘A Peasant’, for example, the rhyme scheme, if it can be called a scheme at all, is abaccdedffggeheijjijkk. Some of these line endings, such as ‘e’ and ‘j’, have multiple rhymes (wind/mind/refined; season/attrition/confusion), but two line ends, ‘b’ and ‘h’ (‘hills’ and ‘sweat’), have no rhymes at all. One might be tempted to view unrhymed lines as mistakes, or to imbue them with a significance that they do not warrant in the context of the poem, but one also realizes that a wholly rhymed poem (even if irregularly so) would seem too ordered for the subject matter. At Manafon, Thomas made an important formal discovery: formal irregularity is appropriate, even necessary, to a poem which is meant to be unsettling. Thomas began to apply this new discovery in particular when working with line endings. The ending of the poetic line is its most emphatic part. This is true even in free verse, but rhyme heightens line-end emphasis. As Paul Fussell explains, Every part of a poetic line accumulates weight progressively: every part anticiÂ�pates the end of the line .â•‹.â•‹. Even if the end of the line offers us no rhyme to signal the fruition of the accumulation, the end of the line constitutes an accumulation of forces.74

Knowing this, poets place thematically significant words at the ends of lines, and they often use rhyme to heighten that attention. They also use rhyme to create associations between words, and where end-rhyme is not used consistently, these rhymes draw atypical attention to themselves. Why, the reader wonders, do these lines rhyme while others do not? What is significant about these words, and their relationship with each other, that the poet has chosen to heighten my awareness of them? At times, R. S. Thomas’s Manafon prosody stubbornly refuses to answer these questions. The following stanza is from ‘Depopulation of the Hills’: Did the earth help them, time befriend These last survivors? Did the spring grass Heal winter’s ravages? The grass Wrecked them in its draughty tides, Grew from the chimney-stack like smoke, Burned its way through the weak timbers. That was nature’s jest, the sides Of the old hull cracked, but not with mirth. (AL, p. 14)

The poem’s terminal words – ‘grass’, ‘tides’, ‘timbers’, ‘smoke’, ‘sides’ and ‘mirth’ – are all thematically significant, but the poem’s single end-rhyme


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(tides/sides) does not rise to another level of import; it is less important to the poem than assonance and consonance. Assonance predominates in the stanza (‘grass’, ‘ravages’, ‘draughty’, ‘stack’, ‘cracked’; ‘winter’s’, ‘chimney’, ‘timbers’) while consonance crosses over into internal rhyme (‘wrecked’, ‘smoke’, ‘stack’, ‘cracked’, ‘weak’). Surrounded by so much sonic play, the comparatively scant end-rhyme seems almost inconsequential; indeed, after the closure of an exact rhyme in the penultimate line, the poem’s unrhymed terminal line feels incomplete. There is an earth/mirth rhyme in the stanza, but the words are perhaps too far apart to register as rhyme, much less noticeable even than the subtle vowel rhyme in timbers/mirth (speaking of the ‘e’ in timbers, not the ‘i’). Thomas’s choice to de-emphasize the poem’s end-rhyme may once again reflect the influence of Austin Clarke, who believed that internal rhyme ‘takes the clapper from the bell of rhyme’ and that ‘by cross-rhymes or vowel-rhyming .â•‹.â•‹. lovely and neglected words are advanced to the tonic place and divide their echoes’.75 But Clarke also believed that ‘By means of assonance, we can gradually approach, lead up to rhyme, bring it out so clearly, so truly as the mood needs, that it becomes indeed the very vox caelistis.’76 In poems such as this, end-rhyme offers no such transcendence; rhyme is one sonic device among many, of no outstanding importance. Thomas does use enjambement effectively – ‘the spring grass / Heal’ and ‘the grass / Wrecked’ emphasize opposite actions of the grass, so that even as the latter mirrors the former prosodically, it emphasizes its opposite, a destructive lack of healing. But Thomas pays a price for this technique. Because two consecutive lines end in ‘grass’, the conspicuous end-rhyme (if a repeated word can be called rhyme) unbalances the stanza. ‘A Priest to His People’ (SF, p. 29) provides a fuller illustration of how Thomas uses rhyme in the Manafon poems. Sometimes rhyme enhances line endings, drawing out interesting relationships between words. At other times rhyme appears arbitrary. Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales, With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females, How I have hated you for your irreverence, your scorn even Of the refinements of art and the mysteries of the Church, I whose invective would spurt like a flame of fire To be quenched always in the coldness of your stare. Men of bone, wrenched from the bitter moorland, Who have not yet shaken the moss from your savage skulls, Or prayed the peat from your eyes, Did you detect like an ewe or an ailing wether, Driven into the undergrowth by the nagging flies, My true heart wandering in a wood of lies?


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The poem begins with an inflammatory couplet. The ‘sweaty females’, placed at the end of a list that includes pigs and ponies, are equated with beasts, and because they rhyme with ‘Wales’, that derogatory depiction becomes a symbol for the nation. Thus, rhyme immediately establishes the ‘invective’ of the poem, as well as its critical tone (which is ultimately selfcritical as well). The next rhyme, too, is a couplet (fire/stare), and it works well because the priest’s ‘fire’ is directly compared to the congregation’s ‘stare’, which is cold, the opposite of fire. The slant rhyme emphasizes disparity. The phrase that creates the rhyme, ‘flame of fire’, seems redundant until one considers that the same phrase is used several times in the Bible as a metaphor for God (as in Revelation 19:12: ‘His eyes were as a flame of fire’). Rhyme, then, enforces the congregation’s indifference not only to the priest, but also to scripture and to God. Of the poem’s final four line-endings, three rhyme (eyes/flies/lies). While the relationship between ‘eyes’ and ‘lies’ is an interesting one, bringing the eyes of the congregation into direct comparison with the ‘lies’ of the priest’s heart, ‘flies’ does not seem connected. This is not to suggest that all rhyming words in a poem must relate thematically, but rhyming words, at their most effective, do work together, as we see in the next stanza of the poem: You are curt and graceless, yet your sudden laughter Is sharp and bright as a whipped pool, When the wind strikes or the clouds are flying; And all the devices of church and school Have failed to cripple your unhallowed movements, Or put a halter on your wild soul. You are lean and spare, yet your strength is a mockery Of the pale words in the black Book, And why should you come like sparrows for bread crumbs, Whose hands can dabble in the world’s blood?

The three most obvious rhymes in this stanza (pool/school/soul) work well because they bring the priest and his parishioners into direct contrast. ‘Pool’, here a metaphor for sudden, at times inappropriate, laughter, represents naturalness in the sense that these people are resistant to institutions that are meant to socialize them and drive out their wildness; ‘school’ represents the background of the speaker, who, by way of contrast, initially casts himself as a proponent of the civilizing functions of school and church. And yet he realizes that the ‘soul’ of the farmers is insepÂ�arable from the ‘pool’; that is, the farmer is inseparable from uninhibited, uncultivated nature. The priest recognizes that to tame the wildness of the soul, by liturgy or other means, is in some way to diminish it. Less obvious


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rhymes are also used effectively. ‘Book’ half rhymes with the first syllable of ‘mockery’, and the pairing of those two words encapsulates the idea that formal religion is of little value in the farmers’ lives. Additionally, the assonating ‘crumbs’ and ‘blood’ could be called a vowel rhyme, which Thomas uses to contrast two ways of life. By mentioning sparrows, Thomas alludes to Christ’s teaching that God cares for mankind as He cares for the sparrows.77 But the word ‘crumbs’ makes God’s bread (that is, formal religion and the sacraments of bread and wine) seem meagre when compared with ‘the world’s blood’, its very essence (although ‘blood’ could also connote guilt and sin, which makes the ending of the stanza, like the feelings of the priest, quite complex). Unlike other stanzas of the poem, the third stanza has no unrhymed line endings. This gives the stanza a feeling of continuity that the others lack. I have taxed your ignorance of rhyme and sonnet, Your want of deference to the painter’s skill, But I know, as I listen, that your speech has in it The source of all poetry, clear as a rill Bubbling from your lips; and what brushwork could equal The artistry of your dwelling on the bare hill?

The first rhyme (sonnet/in it) reinforces the idea that the farmers’ speech has poetry ‘in it’. One could argue that ‘it’, as an ungendered pronoun and object of a preposition, is perhaps too imprecise for a terminal word, at least in this poem. But this may be an early example of Thomas downplaying the importance of a line ending in order to speed the reader through and emphasize what follows, in this case ‘the source of all poetry’. The atypical rhyme also contrasts the conscious art-making of the poet with the unconscious poetry of the farmers. The stanza’s other lines all rhyme with each other (skill/rill/equal/hill), and they work in a manner similar to the pool/school/soul rhymes of the previous stanza. ‘Skill’ connotes a learned attribute while ‘rill’ and ‘hill’ are parts of the natural world; the rhymes once again draw a distinction between learned and natural ‘artistry’. ‘Equal’ strengthens that comparison, asking the reader to consider both kinds of poetry as ‘equal’ while paradoxically suggesting that the farmers’ uneducated yet poetic speech may in fact be unequalled by the poet’s more formal invention. In the poem’s final stanza, Thomas returns to mixing rhymed and unrhymed lines: You will forgive, then, my initial hatred, My first intolerance of your uncouth ways,


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You who are indifferent to all that I can offer, Caring not whether I blame or praise. With your pigs and your sheep and your sons â•…â•… and holly-cheeked daughters You will still continue to unwind your days In a crude tapestry under the jealous heavens To affront, bewilder, yet compel my gaze.

The immediately noticeable rhymes here are ways/days/gaze. Ending the poem with the word ‘gaze’ is effective since the poem is largely about watching and studying farmers. Indeed, much of the Manafon poetry is about Thomas looking in on hill farmers from an outside perspective, considering their ‘ways’ over the course of many ‘days’. It is also a consciously open verb in the sense that the act of gazing is continuous. There is, therefore, an interesting tension created by the closure of the poem’s final rhyme and the continuity of the speaker’s action. In contrast, the offer/daughters approximate rhyme exists solely for rhyme’s sake; the rhymes draw nothing from each other. And while ‘sons’ is technically not a terminal word, it appears to be one because of the way the poem is printed, creating the appearance of a sons/heavens rhyme. ‘Jealous heavens’ recalls the Old Testament relationship between God and His chosen people, where God is referred to as a ‘jealous God’.78 The sons/heavens rhyme thus subtly introduces the idea of the Welsh as a chosen people (in this sense, the ‘His’ in the poem’s title might refer to God, rather than back to the priest). This interpretation seems forced until one considers that Thomas introduced the same idea on other occasions.79 ‘A Priest to His People’, then, shows Thomas using rhyme according to his ear’s preference, in intermittent and inconsistent ways, and this use of rhyme is symptomatic of his overall development towards a less conventional style. In fact, near the end of the Manafon period, Thomas wrote several ‘hybrid’ poems. These retain some properties of his early work but also look forward to his less formal style of the late 1950s and 1960s. They use more enjambement, and they are, for the most part, written in free verse although free-verse lines are still interspersed with rhyming ones. A good example of this kind of poem is ‘Priest and Peasant’: You are ill, Davies, ill in mind; An old canker, to your kind Peculiar, has laid waste the brain’s Potential richness in delight And beauty; and your body grows Awry like an old thorn for lack


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Of the soil’s depth; and sickness there Uncurls slowly its small tongues Of fungus that shall, thickening, swell And choke you, while your few leaves Are green still. â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… And so you work In the wet fields and suffer pain And loneliness as a tree takes The night’s darkness, the day’s rain; While I watch you, and pray for you, And so increase my small store Of credit in the bank of God, Who sees you suffer and me pray And touches you with the sun’s ray, That heals not, yet blinds my eyes And seals my lips as Job’s were sealed Imperiously in the old days. (SYT, p. 109)

This poem foreshadows many of the poems in Poetry for Supper (1958) and Tares (1961), which typically use three or four stresses per line, each line being roughly the same length as the others. There are stylistic leftÂ� overs from Thomas’s earlier poetry, such as capitalizing the first letter of each line (a technique that Thomas would eventually abandon), and there is intermittent end-rhyme. Yet the poem’s enjambement, coupled with its many unrhymed lines, plays against those conventions so that the poem exists somewhere between Thomas’s early and later styles. Lines are also end-stopped less frequently than in earlier poems, and Thomas begins to place unexpected or surprising words after line breaks, as in ‘to your kind / Peculiar’ and ‘your body grows / Awry’. Syntactical and grammatical pauses do not necessarily coincide with ends of lines; instead, Thomas prefers medial caesuras, which he creates with commas and, less frequently, semicolons. It is important to note, however, that none of these pauses fully arrests the line. Each stanza, in fact, is a single sentence broken over multiple lines, so that the line becomes less what Fussell calls ‘a unit of measured time’ than a moment of attention within the larger, forward-moving unit of the stanza.80 End-rhyme, when it does appear, can heighten the reader’s awareness of important words and of associations between them, but the rhyme is less a tool to tie words together than it is a nod towards structure and form, a reminder that the reader is still encountering a made object. In this ‘hybrid’ style, Thomas still makes use of stress pairings – ‘soil’s depth’, ‘few leaves’, ‘wet fields’, ‘day’s rain’, ‘sun’s ray’ – and these slow


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the pace of lines. But the rhythm of the lines is no longer dictated by stress; that is, Thomas is not primarily breaking up longer lines with carefully arranged stress patterns. Nor is he primarily using those stresses to root the poem in palpable elements from the Welsh landscape. As Ward observes, ‘The strongly succulent vocabulary of mud, dripping trees and heavy fields is present still, but it does not constitute the poetry’s material; it is more spaced out.’81 The lines are shorter, lighter and less methodical, and this development in style coincides with a declared thematic shift at the end of the Manafon period. In ‘No Through Road’ (SYT, p. 115), the last poem of Song at the Year’s Turning, Thomas declares an end to the breed of poetry that inseparably links man and soil: All in vain. I will cease now My long absorption with the plough, With the tame and wild creatures And man united with the earth. I have failed after many seasons To bring truth to birth, And nature’s simple equations In the mind’s precincts do not apply. But where to turn? Earth endures After the passing, necessary shame Of winter, and the old lie Of green places beckons me still From the new world, ugly and evil, That men pry for in truth’s name.

Despite this declaration, the end of the Manafon period did not immediately signal an end to its themes. Thomas’s next several volumes included poems about Prytherch and other farmers, and the reader encounters several variations on the theme of ‘man united with the earth’. But even though Thomas, after he left Manafon, continued to explore its subject matter, he did so in new ways. His poetry is not regressive. The poem’s mathematical diction, for example, is a foreshadowing of Thomas’s interest in science, as well as his concern with the darker side of ‘new’ thinking, here described as ‘the new world, ugly and evil, / That men pry for in truth’s name’. Most significantly, the speaker’s question – ‘But where to turn?’ – is also an answer because in the very act of questioning the self, the speaker is ‘turn[ing]’ inwards. Much of the poetry written at Manafon is outward-looking and only secondarily about the speaker. ‘No Through Road’ switches these priorities. While one must not ignore


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Thomas’s outward-looking political poems of the 1960s, his work as a whole is increasingly introspective. Just as Thomas’s subject matter is not regressive, neither is his style. One recalls his above-quoted remark: ‘Later the same hill country seemed to be aside from so many contemporary currents.’ These ‘currents’ dramatically impact on his prosody; indeed, as his poems became more introspective, they became more stylistically progressive, a reflection of the contemÂ� porary world in which introspection had to take place.


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3 A Style Defined, 1955–1972

Each generation brings with it its own style, its own concerns, its own discoveries .â•‹.â•‹. The new wine cannot be put into the old bottles. And so each generation of poets is preoccupied with the problem of what language to use, of what words are suitable for poetry and what not. Sometimes there is a reversion to an earlier fashion; sometimes an almost complete break with tradition. (‘Words and the Poet’, SP, p. 55) As a priest .â•‹.â•‹. it is part of my function to look at things from a slightly different angle from the way in which you would look at them, and therefore experience crystallizing within me, expresses itself in language which is bound to have this imprint; the mark of the person who wrote it because he was a priest and because he was a countryman and because he was a Welshman who was deprived of his birthright. (‘The Making of a Poem’, SP, p. 90).

During the 1960s, R. S. Thomas delivered two addresses on poetic craft. The first, ‘Words and the Poet’, was the W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture at the University College, Swansea, in November 1963. He delivered the second, ‘The Making of a Poem’, at the thirty-fifth Conference of Library Authorities in Wales and Monmouthshire in 1968. These addresses contain not only the poet’s views on stylistic fundamentals – rhythm, rhyme, diction, poetic registers – but also statements on broader issues that influenced his stylistic choices, among them poetry’s place in the modern world and the relationship between the maker and the made object. These addresses are particularly salient because they were delivered during Thomas’s years as vicar at St Michael’s, Eglwys-fach (1954–67), ‘a period of considerable personal anguish’ for Thomas, when his poetry began, consistently and profoundly, to bear ‘the mark’ of that anguish.1 It is, therefore, not surprising that it was also a period which found him


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concerned anew ‘with the problem of what language to use’. Indeed, it was increased introspection and, related to this, a renewed preoccupation with craft that led R. S. Thomas to his definitive style. ‘Definitive’ in this sense does not mean developmentally finished, but ‘characteristic’, meaning that the poems exhibit stylistic traits which are commonly present throughout Thomas’s mature work. Some poets and critics have ascribed ‘tiresome predictability’ to Thomas’s poetry.2 But in fact, adaptation and experimentation are intrinsic to his mature style; even the styles of contemporaneous poems can vary significantly. ‘I am a lyric poet, I think’, Thomas told J. B. Lethbridge. ‘A lyric poet to me is a person who changes, you don’t ever remain the same for long.’3 There are, certainly, recurring subjects, themes and images in his work, but each volume also introduces new subject matter, and the craft keeps shifting. What we can say, however, is that, beginning at Eglwys-fach, the poetry exhibits a measure of stylistic consistency. Thomas has usefully been described by Christopher Morgan as a ‘wounded singer’, and as his poems began to confront his ‘personal anguish’ on a consistent basis, his technique became more consistent.4 Borrowing one of his metaphors for the act of composition, we might say that at Eglwys-fach, ‘slowly the blood congealed / Like dark flowers saddening a field’ (‘Composition’, PS, p. 40). In addition to a self-searching poetry, Thomas also wrote an increasingly ‘public’ poetry at Eglwys-fach, manifesting tension between his personal and public voices. According to Andrew Motion, ‘Public poetry must address occasions squarely, but look beneath and beyond them. Personal poetry must register ambiguities and paradoxes.’5 At Eglwysfach, Thomas juggled modes and even attempted to blend them, in content and form. On a personal level, he challenged himself with searching questions: ‘All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter?’ (‘A Welsh Testament’, T, p. 39); ‘What do I find to my taste?’ (‘Who’, P, p. 39); ‘What is a man’s / Price?’ (‘There’, P, p. 26); ‘Why must I write so?’ (‘Welsh’, BT, p. 15); ‘Would I exchange / My life?’ (‘Wedlock’, NBF, p. 13). As a result, the poems articulate inner struggle, ‘[bringing] into the open the matter of self-knowledge’.6 This introspection often led Thomas back into his past and, perhaps inevitably, to questions about his life at Manafon. Yet, on a public level, the opposite is true: for the first time, Thomas began to look hard at the realities of present-day Wales. Faced with a nation that, in his eyes, lacked idealism and seemed to be satisfied with modern mass consumerism, he felt a responsibility to illuminate and censure social ills. On a personal level, R. S. Thomas was ‘not one / Of the public’, but his public poems were aimed at the Welsh consciousness.7


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Thomas’s growing role as a public figure was partially determined by earlier efforts to define himself as a Welsh, rather than English, poet. As Glyn Jones observed, ‘The tradition exists very powerfully in Wales that the poet is not a man apart, a freak, but rather an accepted part of the social fabric with an important function to perform.’8 This ‘function’ was not comfortable for Thomas. While accepting a role as ‘part of the social fabric’, he was ‘a man apart’ and by his own admission ‘uneasy with relationships’.9 While one wishes to resist the persistent clichés about R. S. Thomas as the dour ‘Ogre of Wales’, it is nevertheless true that he cultivated a separateness that he felt was important to the integrity of his ideals.10 This need for distance developed gradually, but at Eglwys-fach there was a clear and demonstrably uncomfortable shift away from his earlier wish to become integrated into Welsh community. He was, paradoxically, led further away from the sociality of contemporary Wales and increasingly into the isolation of wild places, literally and imaginatively, by ‘his learned experience of a Welsh-language culture’.11 Thomas had sought out wild places before, but he had also imagined them as the setting of idealized community, of the Welsh ‘swapping englynion’ in the hafotai, ‘with their eisteddfodau, in winter, and their harvesting and turf-cutting in the summer’.12 Now these same ‘high pastures of the heart’ became a ‘green asylum’, a place of refuge from ‘A world that has gone sour’.13 If Thomas’s idyllic visions of communal life did not exist in contemÂ� porary Welsh society, he was going to ask why, and the answers led him in a political and nationalistic direction. According to Brian Morris, It may be that the disappointment, the mild frustration at finding that Eglwysfach [sic] was not the Welsh Eden to which he was striving to return, bred a kind of resentment, or sense of deprivation, which issued in the overly nationalistic poems in The Bread of Truth.14

While Thomas’s ‘frustration’ at Eglwys-fach was much more than ‘mild’, it did, indeed, breed ‘a sense of deprivation’ and a poetry that is at times teeming with ‘a kind of resentment’. As a result, these public poems are quite different from Thomas’s other, more introspective work of the same period. As we shall see, this is largely due to dramatic differences of both language and imagery. Thus, in both the private and public poetry, R. S. Thomas’s subject matter evolved, and his style followed. To paraphrase the excerpt from ‘Words and the Poet’ at the head of this chapter, the old poetic bottles could not hold the new wine.15 Thomas’s use of biblical metaphor to describe poetic change also suggests a connection between spiritual concerns and stylistic choices. To


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a degree, spiritual questions had always been a part of his thinking, and of his poems, but they intensified at Eglwys-fach, escalated by Thomas’s frustration with his congregation, which, according to him, was largely composed of ‘retired tea-planters, ex-army officers’.16 These were ‘people used to exerting authority in non-English cultures and to getting their own way’ so that ‘there were clear expectations of the role of the parish priest’.17 Thomas questioned the nature of that role amongst people who seemed to have little value for spiritual things: â•…â•… How do I serve so This being they have shut out Of their houses, their thoughts, their lives? (‘They’, NBF, p. 39)

Questions about his pastoral role complicate Thomas’s personal faith, and isolation from community expands to take in isolation from God: ‘Is this where God hides / From my searching?’ (‘In Church’, P, p. 44); ‘Does no God hear when I pray?’ (‘Here’, T, p. 43). These spiritual concerns further shape Thomas’s prosody. Their impact is most demonstrable in the poems written at Aberdaron, on the Llŷn peninsula, and will be examined in detail in chapter 4, but it is important to note that these spiritual questions, like so many of the elements that shape the style of Thomas’s mature work, emerged from the pressures of Eglwys-fach.

Eglwys-fach: a cramped womb I have looked long at this land, Trying to understand My place in it – why, With each fertile country So free of its room, This was the cramped womb At last took me in From the void of unbeing. (‘Those Others’, T, p. 31)

In his book Internal Difference: Literature in Twentieth-Century Wales, M. Wynn Thomas coins two ‘syndromes’ which help illuminate R. S. Thomas’s poetry of the 1960s. Drawing on experiences in the poet’s life, he calls these ‘the disappearing clergyman syndrome’ and ‘the black fly syndrome’. These shed light on what he sees as ‘the two most important


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concerns of R. S. Thomas’s poetry during the sixties; fears that correspond to the double threat of collapse [of Wales] from within and invasion [of Wales] from without’.18 In this same spirit, two alternate (and perhaps related) ‘syndromes’ may be noted that provide a context in which to discuss Thomas’s prosodic developments of the Eglwys-fach period: the ‘claustrophobic vicar syndrome’ and the ‘barrier syndrome’. The first of these corresponds to R. S. Thomas’s need for space and separateness, the second to the lengths to which he goes in order to protect his vision of an ideal Wales. This is not to ascribe some kind of neurosis to R. S. Thomas or to contribute to the clichés about his reclusiveness; these ‘syndromes’ are a metaphorical strategy, not an attempt at pathology. But they do underline the real emotional factors that caused Thomas’s poetry to increase in both introspectiveness and social awareness, developments which shaped the style as well as the themes of his poems. R. S. Thomas arrived in Eglwys-fach in 1954. He had grown tired of the cold, upland winters and of a community that ‘had little enthusiasm for things Welsh, cultural and the like’ (A, p. 62). Thomas was by this time a Welsh speaker, accomplished enough to have published a number of prose pieces in Welsh, and his continual desire to lead what he saw as a more authentically Welsh life had led him to look for a vacancy in a Welshspeaking parish. Despite the unromantic realities of Manafon life, ‘the old hiraeth .â•‹.â•‹. was always simmering within him’ (A, p. 62). He believed that he might more fully realize himself as a Welshman in Eglwys-fach, a place where he could ‘give a sermon in Welsh every Sunday’ (ibid.). Indeed, Thomas anticipated this move as a release from a way of life he found confining. In the prose, when Thomas writes about the Welsh hills, he commonly adopts a tone of openness, expansiveness and depth. In settings where hills ‘spread out in a long wave’ under the sky, he imagines ‘hidden audiences [that] wait to be addressed’ where ‘time is enormous’ (‘The Mountains’, SP, pp. 74–5). He writes that in one such setting, Maes-yr-Onnen, a remote chapel in Radnorshire, he experienced a religious vision so unrestrained and far reaching that he ‘could comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of the mystery of creation’ (‘Two Chapels’, SP, p. 37). Yet this sense of spaciousness is almost entirely absent from the early poetry, where farmers are confined to an acre of land, fenced in, often visible only through an open gate or gap in the hedge. Even in the prose Thomas describes Manafon as a ‘small village’ with ‘smallholdings’ and, in particuÂ�lar, narrow-minded people, whose ‘horizons .â•‹.â•‹. lay no further than the far side of the slope of the valley where they lived’ (A, pp. 52–3).


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Indeed, expansiveness exists only when the poet is able to escape the confines of the village: But the rector would sometimes climb to the hilltops, and from one of their peaks a completely different world would open out in front of him. To the north-west, Cadair Idris was to be seen; to the north, Aran Fawddwy and Aran Benllyn, and to the north-east Y Berwyn – a prospect sufficient to raise the heart and make the blood sing. Turning to look down at the valley he would see everything in perspective, the people like ants below him. (A, p. 53)

The smallness, and in particular the social crowdedness, of Manafon – a hollow surrounded by hills, a place where everyone knew the details of everyone else’s life – was overwhelming to Thomas.19 Mountain walks brought release and a change of perspective. The image of antlike people is revealing. Thomas could get nearer than this to people and still live a life in tune with his ideals, but not much nearer. ‘I am essentially an escapist’, he told Timothy Wilson, ‘a countryman seeking the semi-seclusion of Nature’.20 The ‘claustrophobic vicar syndrome’, then, first manifested itself in descriptions both of stifling congregation and secluded escape. Thomas, however, was optimistic about Eglwys-fach, where he hoped to find a community more in tune with the version of life he had first imagined as a young curate. But what he found was something entirely at odds with his idyllic Wales. In fact, most of the residents of Eglwys-fach were not Welsh at all: What he didn’t know before settling there was how weak the Welsh language was in Eglwys-fach. It was a parish of several large houses, and every one of them in the hands of the English, despite the Welsh names on almost all of them. (A, p. 64)

Finding himself once again confronted by middle-class anglicized society, Thomas found it especially oppressive. In his words: ‘The worst ones for [trying to bring down the vicar] are officers of the armed forces, and fate plays into their hands since in the armed forces the chaplain is subordinate to them in rank’ (A, p. 75). Unwilling to kow-tow to these officers, or to English influence in a wider sense, Thomas had no patience for the Welsh who did. As he once wrote in a letter to Raymond Garlick, ‘I want to waken Wales to put aside her servility.’21 In fact, it is important to note that it was at Eglwys-fach that R. S. Thomas quickly learned that he was out of sync with the values of Wales in a wider sense:


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I’m very much the minority in this, but people think that it’s possible to be an individual Welshman, speaking Welsh and looking at television, going to bingo and doing football pools and driving around in their Cortinas and all this sort of thing, I don’t think so; I’ve no use for that sort of existence.22

Whether or not Thomas’s depictions of Welsh life – depictions which are severe and intractable – are in fact accurate is not the issue. Perception, not literalness, influenced the poetry and shaped its style. His disenchantment with society led him to mistrust it, and finding himself surrounded once more by people who did not share his values, he felt stifled. Yet, ironically, he also felt isolated. Indeed, he continued to choose isolation, favour wildness and seek out places where he could, as he would later describe it, ‘evacuate the ear of the echoes of cloying Amens’ (ERS, p. 56). For R. S. Thomas, a congregation did not equate to a community, and he could simultaneously feel crowded and alone. One could argue, in fact, that the chief obstacle to Thomas’s communal vision was his susceptibility to loneliness. He referred to the comfort of separateness as ‘the old “loner” tendency’, one that began in his boyhood and made him ‘awkward in society’.23 In principle, Thomas longed for closeness with his community. In practice, a ‘lonely, uncertain self’ was apprehensive, even suspicious, of people:24 You know, no man is a hero to his valet, and you can’t live in a community where everybody knows everybody else’s history and business and so on, and of course the more you know about people the less admirable they are .â•‹.â•‹. As I say, I’ve heard about some of these great human beings that have passed through the world, but I’ve not met them. I suppose it’s a pity, so that I don’t trust them.25

That R. S. Thomas did not trust people raises a number of interesting issues. Trust – in mankind, in himself, in God – was not part of his temperaÂ�ment, and one can easily see how an ‘uncertain self’ had trouble trusting or loving or having faith: ‘What we can certainly suggest is that a self that is insecure in its identity is more likely to close protectively against the outside world, unwilling to render itself more vulnerable.’26 This tendency to ‘close protectively’ is what we will call the ‘barrier syndrome’: Thomas’s need to erect partitions – fences, hedges, windows, doors – all fortifications to safeguard his ideals and his tenuous identity from whatever might compromise them. R. S. Thomas’s gradual withdrawal from the society of contemporary Wales is, paradoxically, the very means whereby he approached poetic subjects. Or, rather, did not approach them, for when reading Thomas’s


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work of this period, one quickly identifies the primary symptom of the barrier syndrome: in order for something, or someone, to hold the poet’s interest, let alone his admiration, it must be kept at a distance. When the subject came too close, Thomas’s emotional reaction fell somewhere along a spectrum between unease and intolerance: Branwen was the Helen of Wales, wasn’t she? Many of us, I’m sure, hold an image of her in our hearts .â•‹.â•‹. There are still a few Branwens in Wales. Did I not hear the name once and turn, thinking she might steal my heart away? Who did I see but a stupid, mocking slut, her dull eyes made blue by daubings of mascara – a girl to whom Wales was no more than a name fast becoming obsolete. (‘Abercuawg’, SP, p. 125)

Although a slightly later example (1976), this passage from Thomas’s famous lecture illustrates the barrier syndrome and reveals how severe, even malicious, its symptoms can be. The poet keeps this ‘false’ Branwen at arm’s length by making her false, using her as a symbol of a Wales that, by losing touch with its past and its true nature, mocks his ideals. By doing so, he protects the ‘image .â•‹.â•‹. in [his] heart’ but also projects what Minhinnick calls ‘a misanthropic disgust’.27 Denunciation is often the barrier that preserves Thomas and his Wales. The intermingled themes of Welsh preservation and self-preservation also inform ‘The View From the Window’ (PS, p. 27), where an idyllic Wales is sealed off from the observer. Wales is metaphorically a piece of art, kept behind glass: ‘Like a painting it is set before one, / But less brittle, ageless’. So long as it remains in this framed setting, the potential negatives it contains can be ‘healed by sunlight’. But if its protective and idealizing barrier is compromised, Wales becomes corrupted. ‘The Small Window’ (NBF, p. 38), activating similar metaphors, likewise establishes a boundary between the poet’s ideals and those who would besmirch them: In Wales there are jewels To gather, but with the eye Only. A hill lights up Suddenly; a field trembles With colour and goes out In its turn; in one day You can witness the extent Of the spectrum and grow rich With looking. Have a care; This wealth is for the few


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And chosen. Those who crowd A small window dirty it With their breathing, though sublime And inexhaustible the view.

The line break between the second and third lines forces the reader to pause between ‘eye’ and ‘only’, emphasizing that it is by observation alone, not through physical contact, that Wales’s ‘jewels’ are gatherable. And these ‘jewels’, it is clear, are to be found in the landscape (there is no mention of the Welsh people as ‘jewels’). A similar technique is used between the first and second stanzas, where a line break, made more dramatic by the stanza break, emphasizes the act of observation: ‘grow rich // With looking’. Again, this is a detached, non-tactile, non-invasive appreciation, and the break, itself a partition, enhances this idea. The emphasis on growing rich by ‘looking’ (rather than by touching) suggests that Wales is not a place for intruding upon natural resources or for exploiting them. Following this prosodic barrier, the poet establishes yet another barrier, an emotional one, by introducing the imperative, ‘Have a care’. The ‘sublime’ view, we learn, can be compromised by crowding. This imperative is, on the one hand, a warning to outsiders with touristic or imperialistic intentions. Wintle, for example, calls the poem ‘a vortex of political passion’, arguing that biblical connotations of the word ‘chosen’ make Wales into ‘a paradise reserved for some and denied all others .â•‹.â•‹. according to birth and provenance’.28 On the other hand, the poem excludes not just the non-Welsh, but those Cortina-driving, bingo-playing, mascara-smeared Welsh as well. The word ‘few’ is equally important to ‘chosen’ since R. S. Thomas was every bit as uncomfortable in a Welsh crowd as he was in an English one. In many ways still an outsider himself, he was ‘equally estranged from the speakers of both languages’ because neither crowd shared his values.29 Perhaps an even better poetic example of the barrier syndrome is ‘On the Shore’: No nearer than this; So that I can see their shapes, And know them human But not who they are; So that I can hear them speak, The familiar accent, But not what they say. To be nearer than this; To look into their eyes


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And know the colour of their thought; To paddle in their thin talk – What is the beach for? I watch them through the wind’s pane, Nameless and dear. (BT, p. 29)

Here a metaphoric window (‘the wind’s pane’) acts as a barrier between the observer and the observed, and again Thomas makes the intent of that window very clear: it is safety glass. It keeps the speaker from actual interaction with those on the beach, those whose ‘thin talk’ would dilute the purity of his dreams. The adjectives ‘nameless’ and ‘dear’ are related; paired on the same line at the poem’s conclusion, they emphasize the idea that those on the beach, be they Welsh, English or other, are dear because they are nameless, their talk tolerable because their words are indecipherable. Indeed, the beach itself, not merely the window of wind, becomes a safeguard in the poem. ‘Those Others’ (T, p. 31) demonstrates the connection between our invented ‘syndromes’. The speaker looks at the land, ‘trying to understand / My place in it’.30 He wonders why, ‘with each fertile country / So free of its room’, it was the ‘cramped womb’ of Wales that ‘took [him] in’. This curious grammatical construction, ‘free of its room’, reveals a longing for space that is a symptom of the claustrophobic vicar syndrome. There is something of a pun here, or at least a creative ambiguity. On one hand ‘free of its room’ can mean generous with space, giving freely and open-handedly. But alongside this meaning is the sense that these other places are themselves wide open, with room to spare. Thus, ‘On the Shore’ demonstrates what is by now obvious: the claustrophobic vicar syndrome leads to the barrier syndrome. Thomas’s longing for freedom of – that is, freedom of room and imagination and ideals – directly leads to a need for freedom from – freedom from those who disrupt or do not share his ideals. Indeed, Thomas began to hate those representatives of a Wales that is both materialistic and supine: .â•‹.â•‹. men of the Welsh race Who brood with dark face Over their thin navel To learn what to sell. (‘Those Others’)

This sense of separation was most pronounced in Eglwys-fach, but it also affected earlier poems, where a clear social and cultural barrier exists between Thomas and the hill farmers:


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I see his face pressed to the wind’s pane, Staring with cold eyes: a country face Without beauty, yet with the land’s trace Of sadness, badness, madness. (‘The Face’, T, p. 17)

Iago Prytherch, as a symbol, functions only at a distance, indeed, when some barrier – the wind’s pane, a hedge, the rain’s bars, a field – keeps him at a distance. Additionally, Thomas’s rejection of the Eglwys-fach community strengthened his emotional connection with Manafon farmers not just because they, like the poet, were separate from modern Wales, but also because he was now considering them from a distance that protected him from excessive literalness. Once he left Manafon, Thomas portrayed its inhabitants in increasingly sympathetic, and increasingly abstract, language. A similar abstraction is important in later work, when the Machine and God enter the poems. The ominous Machine serves the poet best when its threatening presence is described in very little detail. Similarly, the speaker often desires closeness with God but worships (and writes) best in His absence. In fact, much of the religious poetry can be seen, on one hand, as the act of accepting the barriers of distance and silence as necessary to worship and, on the other, desiring to overcome barriers, a process Thomas describes as ‘the annihilation of difference’ (‘Emerging’, LS, p. 1).31 It is important that, when discussing these ‘syndromes’, one should resist the impulse to paint R. S. Thomas as a victim of circumstance. He could certainly paint himself this way, describing himself as one born lost, deprived of his birthright. But R. S. Thomas’s separateness was ultimately a choice, one that is perhaps most clearly illustrated in one of his bestknown poems of this period, ‘A Welshman at St James’s Park’: I am invited to enter these gardens As one of the public, and to conduct myself In accordance with the regulations; To keep off the grass and sample flowers Without touching them; to admire birds That have been seduced from wildness by Bread they are pelted with. â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… I am not one Of the public; I have come a long way To realise it. Under the sun’s Feathers are the sinews of stone, The curved claws.


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â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… I think of a Welsh hill That is without fencing, and the men, Bosworth blind, who left the heather And the high pastures of the heart. I fumble In the pocket’s emptiness; my ticket Was in two pieces. I kept half. (P, p. 23)

On one level, this poem is an act of self-definition. The speaker rejects English domestication in favour of ‘the high pastures of the heart’, which are coded as wilder, uncultivated and more essentially Welsh. St James’s Park is, of course, near Buckingham Palace, Horse Guards Parade, the War Rooms, Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament, situated at the very heart of the British state. Thus, when the speaker retains half of his ticket – presumably the half of his train ticket that will return him to Wales – he symbolically turns his back on the constraints and regulations of English imperialism. On another level, the poem gives us a clue as to how the claustrophobic vicar and barrier syndromes were shaping the direction of Thomas’s poetry. The birds of the poem, for example, have been ‘seduced from wildness’ by the promise of bread, only to be robbed of their essential character by their seducers.32 Thomas often described the Welsh in similar terms. Due to a line break and an indentation, the image of the birds’ ‘curved claws’ – an image of ‘wildness’ – sits directly atop the poem’s next word, ‘I’, just as earlier in the poem, also after an indentation, the same personal pronoun sits just below the world ‘wildness’. These images, thus associated with the speaker spatially, send him into a visionary state, back to ‘wildness’, where the first image to present itself is ‘a Welsh hill / That is without fencing’ (italics added). There are no barriers, and there is no barrier syndrome, in ‘the high pastures of the heart’. Even in England’s most claustrophobic city, dreams are unrestrained, and the poet’s inner landscape can be as expansive as the sky between Cadair Idris and Y Berwyn.33 But when imaginative vision gave way to literalness, Thomas was aware of the fencing and, when faced with those who threatened his vision, welcomed it. Indeed, the more one reads his work, the more one realizes that R. S. Thomas’s ‘true’ Wales could exist, and be preserved, only in his dreams. As a result, he ‘began to internalize the dream for even safer keeping’.34 Having recently sought to surmount estrangement by ‘rooting’ both poems and self in the Welsh landscape, he now accepted that any ‘rooting’ of the self in an ideal Wales must take place within the self. Thomas would eventually find the place of his birthright, but he would find it where it had always existed: in his imagination. He would call it ‘Abercuawg’,


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the creation of which fulfilled an imaginative need, namely a place for the displaced. We may say that Thomas is himself the culmination of the barrier syndrome in that he became the barrier that protected his ideals: the kingdom of Wales was within him. And it is ultimately this shift from external topography to internalized landscape that created a need for, and led to the development of, R. S. Thomas’s definitive style.

An inseparable union It is an inseparable union this marriage of sense and sound, of content and technique, and that is why I am against those reviewers and columnists who pick out a bit of subject matter and say, ‘You know, R. S. Thomas is a poet who writes about country matters and that sort of thing’. It is so very sweeping and so inadequate .â•‹.â•‹. There is nothing to show the poetic excellencies or some of the little achievements of that poet in expressing in a way which no other person who is not a poet could express. (From ‘The Making of a Poem’, SP, pp. 86–7)

A perpetual frustration for R. S. Thomas was that his poetry was often treated merely as ‘subject matter’. As he told Lethbridge, ‘Whenever one falls to talking about these things in prose, one becomes conscious that the chief motivation of a poet is to write a poem.’35 Poetry, of course, creates meaning not merely by being about something, but also by doing something, unfolding line by line and so acting upon the reader. According to Charles Hartman, ‘The prosody of a poem is the poet’s method of controlling the reader’s temporal experience of the poem, especially his attention to that experience.’36 This definition is appropriate to the linear prosody Thomas developed at Eglwys-fach, a prosody he used to maintain and direct reader attention. While the poems written at Eglwys-fach do not immediately, or altogether, abandon shifting accents, ‘stress clusters’ of tactile nouns, alliterative patterns and rhyme, the poems quickly evolve, and distinct changes are evident as early as Poetry for Supper (1958). Generally speaking, one can characterize the poems as follows: they are more musically subtle than their predecessors, with less end-rhyme and internal rhyme; their lines are typically shorter, with fewer accented syllables; and, increasingly, they are written in highly enjambed free verse. This last development, one that, as we will observe, owes much to Thomas’s reading of American poetry, as well as his continued response to Edward Thomas, is the most significant stylistic development of his career. Having already laid aside


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accentual-syllabic prosody in favour of accentual prosody, Thomas now began to favour a prosody which is ‘linear’ in two ways: 1) Lineation, and in particular the specific placement of line breaks within grammatical phrases, replaces accentuation as his primary technique. These line breaks frequently cut across syntax, creating an interplay between lineation and grammar, a practice that prosodists have referred to as ‘counterpoint’, ‘grammetrics’ and ‘syncopation’(we will use the term ‘counterpoint’).37 Thomas uses this interplay to create tension, surprise the reader and subvert expectations. 2) The poems are ‘linear’ in a sequential sense. Thomas uses lineation to create momentum. Unhindered by the frequent stresses and ‘stress clusters’ that (intentionally) slowed down earlier, more metrical poems, lines now trace, and mirror, the speaker’s thought processes and changing emotions, driving the reader towards the end of the poem, where there is typically some kind of ‘landing’ or ‘settling’ (if not resolution). Because this linear, non-metrical prosody does not call attention to itself with overt ornamentation, the poems seem less like structured representations of experience and more like experience itself. As Derek Attridge observes, By not wholly engaging with meter .â•‹.â•‹. poems cannot avail themselves of its full capacity for expressive and memorable shapings of sound, but they may gain a heightened ability to capture the movements of thoughts, speech, and feeling that run through our daily lives.38

If the Manafon poetry was more reactive than reflective, the Eglwysfach poetry moved ‘beyond .â•‹.â•‹. the physical and exterior’ and into ‘the interÂ�ior and ultimate components of being’.39 Thomas’s earlier poetry was well suited to tactile descriptions of actions in the external world, such as ‘chipping the green skin’,40 but it could not adequately mirror the interior world – the complex, uncertain, ‘green / Darkness’ of the ‘green asylum’.41 The style simply had to evolve. By the late 1950s, R. S. Thomas was moving beyond the ‘hybrid’ style we discussed at the end of the last chapter and was increasingly writing in free verse. One might suspect that this movement would equate to a lesser focus on poetic forms, but just the opposite is true. Perhaps more than in any other developmental period, form was very much on Thomas’s mind at Eglwys-fach. This is illustrated primarily by the poetry itself, but also by statements such as the following: ‘I feel now, in middle life, that it is the


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actual craft of poetry which is important, and I think this must be said and adhered to’ (‘The Making of a Poem’, SP, p. 86). To help us better appreciate the different, yet related, threads of Thomas’s development during this period, the remainder of this chapter is divided into four subsections: ‘Free verse’, ‘Edward Thomas’, ‘American poetry’ and ‘Public poetry’. Because Thomas increasingly found that the ‘craft of poetry’ led him to free verse, it will be beneficial to begin with a general overview of free verse, including some of the inherent problems in defining it. We shall also look at the role prosody plays as readers make associations between R. S. Thomas and the speakers of his poems. Then, as we progress to a close reading of individual poems, we shall consider Thomas’s responses to stylistic models. We shall first discuss his renewed response to Edward Thomas; following this, we shall examine his reaction to the American poetry he encountered in the journal Critical Quarterly. Finally, we shall consider the stylistic properties of Thomas’s public poetry, which is quite unlike the personal, introspective verse of the period and is ultimately less successful as poetry.

Free verse Even to begin a proper examination of the various histories, schools and theories of free verse would require in-depth discussions of the King James Bible, Whitman’s aesthetic populism, French vers libre, imagism and various modernisms. In very general terms, one could argue that the free verse landscape in America was colonized by Walt Whitman and populated by the descendants of William Carlos Williams. But for our present, rather specific purposes, an illustrative definition (or anti-definition) can be approached by looking to T. S. Eliot. Publicly, Eliot was inclined to back away from the whole concept of vers libre, yet in doing so, he actually gave us what are now its most commonly cited properties. In 1942, Eliot famously said that ‘no verse is free for the man that wants to do a good job’.42 As early as 1917 he was arguing: ‘If vers libre is a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.’43 These statements, namely that verse (even if unrhymed or metrically irregular) requires an adequate form and that free verse is easier to define by what it is not than what it is, still commonly appear in poetry textbooks. For example, in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Paul Fussell makes both arguments, asserting, on the one hand, that poets who do not


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write metrical poetry ‘tend to compensate by employing another kind of pattern’.44 On the other hand, he writes: ‘The free verse poem establishes a texture without metrical regularity .â•‹.â•‹. And most free verse poems eschew rhyme as well.’45 Such axioms can be puzzling because they are seemingly contradictory. Free-verse poems must be written in some kind of discernible, non-prose form in order to qualify as verse, yet poems are described as free verse because they do not ascribe to traditional formal patterns. Critics usually escape this paradox by requiring a free-verse poem to establish its own prosody, with the caveat that the form should be appropriate to the content. The terms ‘open form’, ‘invented form’ and ‘discovered form’ are often used to describe free verse because ‘contemporary prosody .â•‹.â•‹. does not emerge out of precisely identifiable historical or social circumstances’; instead, it ‘reflects an aesthetic mood’.46 In other words, poets freely adapt forms, or invent new ones, to answer demands of content and personal perception. In William Carlos Williams’s words: ‘We have no measure to guide ourselves except a purely intuitive one which we feel but do not name.’47 Concepts of formal invention became synonymous with American free verse in the 1960s, a decade represented in Stephen Berg’s and Robert Mezey’s Naked Poetry (1969), a widely read anthology of American poetry written in non-metrical forms.48 The poets featured in Naked Poetry (many of whom had also appeared in Critical Quarterly) ranged widely in terms of philosophy and style, but they shared a belief in individualism and non-repeatable forms. In its pages, William Stafford argued that ‘the feel of composition is more important than any rule or prescribed form’ and that ‘the writer or speaker enters a constant, never-ending flow and variation’. Allen Ginsberg described ‘thought stops, breath-stops, runs of inspiration, changes of mind, startings and stoppings of the car’; and W. S. Merwin offered an argument that approaches a free-verse manifesto: In an age where time and technique encroach hourly, or appear to, on the source itself of poetry, it seems as though what is needed for any particular nebulous unwritten hope that may become a poem is not a manipulable, more or less predictably recurring pattern, but an unduplicatable resonance, something that would be like an echo except that it is repeating no sound.49

The idea of ‘unduplicatable resonance’, free from historical precedent and ‘predictably recurring pattern[s]’, informs most contemporary free-verse poetry.50


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A natural consequence of these philosophies, and the poetic forms they produce, is that a given poet’s prosodic predilections act as a persona, leaving the reader with an impression of that author.51 This is perhaps what Robert Lowell meant when he said ‘I’m sure the rhythm is the person himself’, or what Ted Hughes had in mind when he described poetry as an expression of ‘deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are’.52 One of the first poet-critics to put forward this correlation was Ford Madox Ford who, in 1914, argued in favour of vers libre because ‘that which is cut to a pattern must sacrifice .â•‹.â•‹. the personality of the writer’.53 There is, then, a strong association between free-verse poets and free-verse prosodies. What R. S. Thomas says about a poem’s language is also true of its prosody generally: it shows ‘the mark of the person who wrote it’. In Thomas’s case, however, reviewers, critics and biographers have too often neglected the vital relationship between maker and made object in favour of what might be called ‘personality criticism’, which draws selectÂ� ively upon poetic content in order to confirm pre-existing notions about the author. In 1972, Harri Webb wrote ‘with some relief’ that, unlike Dylan Thomas before him, R. S. Thomas ‘has no public personality at all’.54 Yet critics have constructed a personality for him based on the subject matter of his poetry and the occasional interviews he gave, and this version of his personality has, ironically, become the very lens through which his poetry is read and discussed. Reading reviews and criticism of Thomas’s poetry, one discovers how the man himself supposedly felt about a great many things, including Iago Prytherch, Wales, England, technology, science, God, birds and the burning of holiday cottages. Some of these arguments are well made and plausible. Others are questionable, even ill intentioned. But even the best examples of this brand of writing can marginalize the poetry. Thomas himself was partly to blame for this surfeit of personality criticism, having a penchant for what he called ‘a propagandistic intention’, which led him at times to use a poem as a way ‘of getting a particular message across’ (‘Words and the Poet’, SP, p. 64). When his poems appear to be mere vehicles for ideas, they draw attention away from prosody and onto a thinly veiled agenda; indeed, in Thomas’s overtly political and nationalistic poems, the rhetoric is often at odds with the poems’ formal structures, unbalancing the relationship between content and form. Thus, while R. S. Thomas’s ‘public espousal .â•‹.â•‹. of Welsh nationalism has generated more heat than light with regard to critical perspectives of his work’, his critics are not entirely to blame.55 Thomas seemed to be aware of this, writing that ‘a pure poet’ would not have written ‘propagandistic’ poems


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(SP, p. 64). He wrote them nonetheless, presumably because he thought their ‘particular message[s]’ were of great consequence. One does not mean to suggest that poems should avoid strong ideas or strong language but, rather, that these should be serving the poem, not the other way round. Thomas’s ideas are, in fact, best conveyed when they are at the heart of well-crafted poems. His prose is generally less successful. For example, while the poem ‘Depopulation of the Hills’ (AL, p. 14), with its commanding refrain (‘Leave it, leave it’) and powerful enjambement (‘The grass / Wrecked them in its draughty tides’), leaves the reader with a memorable impression of deracinated upland workers, the related 1945 essay, ‘The depopulation of the Welsh hill country’ (SP, pp. 17–23), comes across flatly.56 While both pieces contain a similar ‘message’, the poem – because it has aesthetic purpose in addition to rhetorical force, and because its prosody is part of its message – is more persuasive. This may be what Thomas had in mind when he told Ned Thomas that, in poetry, ‘I am deploying language .â•‹.â•‹. in a more concise and memorable way than when writing prose’.57 Another explanation for the abundance of personality criticism, one that emerges from the poetry itself, is that most of Thomas’s lyrics are written in the first person. In lyric poetry especially, first-person pronouns ‘force the reader to construct a meditative persona. [They] do not simply give us the situation of discourse but force us to construct a poetic narrator who can fulfil the thematic demands of the rest of the poem.’58 In Thomas’s case, readers and critics (including the present writer) tend to associate emotional and thematic content with a speaker who is often presumed to be the poet himself. Indeed, the speaker of an R. S. Thomas poem is often R. S. Thomas. He frequently used similar themes, even similar words, in both poetry and prose; he often referred to his poems or used their language when giving his opinions in interviews; and some of his work, notably the poetry/prose hybrid volume The Echoes Return Slow, has usefully been interpreted by critics as an exercise in ‘poetic autobiography’.59 However, Christopher Morgan’s assertion, ‘for Thomas, poetry, by its very definition, is autobiography’, is an overstatement.60 And reading the poet’s work through a lens of presumptive autobiography can be problematic.61 For instance, Fflur Dafydd argues that in ‘Acting’ (H’m, p. 11), Thomas ‘explor[es] the notions of artifice and performance which, for him, constitute a marriage’.62 But the poem is not necessarily about Thomas’s own marriage, and there is, therefore, a danger in arguing that it expresses his ‘fear of being duped or deceived by his wife in some way’.63 Several of the poem’s lines, one of which includes the quotation ‘I hate you’, do not


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sit well within the body of poems about his wife, M. E. Eldridge; moreover, ‘Acting’ comes from H’m, a volume that is in large part an exercise in myth making and that contains several first-person speakers which are clearly not R. S. Thomas. Indeed, one begins to suspect that the speaker of ‘Acting’ may not be Thomas at all. There is, at the very least, good reason to be cautious. But it is understandable why critics like Dafydd presume autobiography in Thomas’s work: the poems are often focused on the speaker, who is often a priest, a Welshman, a poet, a nationalist – all things we know to be true about R. S. Thomas the man. The relationship between idiosyncratic prosody and poetic identity, something present to a degree in all free verse, is particularly strong in the free verse of R. S. Thomas. After Thomas arrived at Eglwys-fach, his transition to being a largely free-verse poet occurred quickly. It did not, however, occur without stylistic models. At Eglwys-fach, Thomas needed a fluid style, one capable of ‘captur[ing] the movements of thoughts, speech, and feeling’, and he discovered it largely through his reading of American poetry. However, before discussing this response, we must return to our earlier discussion of Edward Thomas, one of Thomas’s first thematic models and a poet who also became a key stylistic influence as R. S. Thomas began his transition from accentual to linear prosody.

Edward Thomas As we discussed in chapter 1, R. S. Thomas discovered the work of Edward Thomas while the former was a young curate at Chirk, responding to imagery drawn from the English countryside. At Eglwys-fach, however, R. S. Thomas was emotionally ready to respond to the complexities behind that imagery: feelings of inauthenticity, the despair of estrangement and a voice that shared a yearning for ‘home’ similar to his own. In short, he was prepared to respond to the emotional and psychological underpinnings of Edward Thomas’s nature poetry, not merely the images themselves. According to Edna Longley, [Edward] Thomas had deeply absorbed much of Wordsworth and some of Keats. He developed their symbolism of Nature to a point where it could reflect more intimately than ever before the psychology and situation of the individual .â•‹.â•‹. he explores on a large scale the ‘unknown’ within us and without us; our alienation from ourselves and the universe.64


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These three phrases – ‘the psychology and situation of the individual’, ‘the “unknown” within us and without us’ and ‘alienation from ourselves and the universe’ – also work well as thematic descriptions of the poetry written at Eglwys-fach. While one hesitates to say that R. S. Thomas returned to or rediscovered Edward Thomas’s poetry during this time (since he had probably never stopped reading it), it seems likely that he began to read it in a new way. Presumably this was a closer, more reflective reading, one that led him to imbibe some of Edward Thomas’s stylistic properties. In his preface to the 1964 selection of Edward Thomas’s poems, R. S. Thomas saw many of the themes as essentially Welsh. Indeed, it would not be a stretch to say that at Eglwys-fach, R. S. Thomas saw Edward Thomas as a parallel, even constructed him as an alter ego: Edward Thomas wrote in the English language; almost all his poems were about the English countryside. Yet one Welshman, at least, toys with the idea that the melancholy and wry whimsicality, the longing to make the glimpsed good place permanent, which appear in Thomas’s verse, may have had a Welsh source.65

One suspects that at Eglwys-fach, it was R. S. Thomas’s own melancholy, his own longing for permanence, that gave him fresh eyes when reading Edward Thomas. It is perhaps not surprising that feeling a lack of permanence, R. S. Thomas began to reconsider Manafon, even to look back on it with nostalgia as one who is displaced might look back on his last ‘home’, and this despite the fact that he had not felt at home in Manafon at the time. Had he perhaps been happier there than he had allowed? Could he somehow return to that life, emotionally if not physically, or was it time to focus on the present and the future? The new vicar of Eglwys-fach would have found similar questions in Edward Thomas’s work. For example, in a poem called ‘Home’ (Edward Thomas has three poems with this title), the speaker longs to ‘go back again home’, yet questions how such a return, even if it were possible, would happen and whether it would satisfy him: And could I discover it, I feel my happiness there, Or my pain, might be dreams of return Here, to these things that were.

The speaker finally decides, in the poem’s final stanza, No: I cannot go back, And would not if I could.


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Until blindness come, I must wait And blink at what is not good.66

R. S. Thomas’s poems of the 1950s and 1960s reveal this same tension – between, on the one hand, imaginatively returning to an earlier place and emotional situation and, on the other, remaining to face the discomforts of a present environment. For Thomas, the pull of the past includes a longing to resume the dialogue with Prytherch. One example of this is ‘Temptation of a Poet’ (PS, p. 14), which begins with the lines: The temptation is to go back, To make tryst with the pale ghost Of an earlier self.

Addressing Prytherch, the speaker then wonders: â•…â•… could the talk begin Where it left off? Have I not been Too long away?

At Eglwys-fach, Thomas is ‘alienated from a previous identity’, although that identity was always tenuous, a ‘pale ghost’.67 But he is also estranged from the community to which he is meant to reach out as a priest, so that he is left seeking direction. Despite this confusion, the speaker resolves, at the poem’s end, to move forward even as his emotions remain unresolved: The past calls with the cool smell Of autumn leaves, but the mind draws Me onward blind with the world’s dust, Seeking a spring that my heart fumbles.

According to Brown, ‘The mind that draws Thomas on may at one level be his sense of duty to engage the new responsibilities that face him.’68 Thomas certainly did feel an obligation to fulfil his role as priest despite the discomforts associated with what he viewed as an inauthentic existence. This idea is also expressed in the poem ‘Here’ (T, p. 43), where the speaker laments ‘I have nowhere to go’ and concludes by saying: It is too late to start For destinations not of the heart. I must stay here with my hurt.69

Again we are reminded of Edward Thomas’s ‘Home’, where the speaker ‘must wait / and blink at what is not good’. But, significantly, the ending of ‘Temptation of a Poet’ is also a realization that ‘his poetry must move


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on, should engage his new environment’.70 The poem, after all, is called ‘Temptation of a Poet’, not ‘Temptation of a Man’. In other words, Thomas’s resolve to remain in Eglwys-fach was ultimately a decision to confront his environment, and ultimately himself, by means of the poetry. The poet’s decision to explore the uncertainty of his own interior is consciously announced: I have this that I must do One day: overdraw on my balance Of air, and breaking the surface Of water go down into the green Darkness to search for the door To myself in dumbness and blindness .â•‹.â•‹. (‘This to Do’, P, p. 12)

There is still hesitancy – ‘this that I must do / One day’ – but in the decision to lose the self in darkness as an attempt to find the self, we again find a thematic parallel with Edward Thomas: There is not any book Or face of dearest look That I would not turn from now To go into the unknown I must enter, and leave, alone, I know not how. The tall forest towers; Its cloudy foliage lowers Ahead, shelf above shelf; Its silence I hear and obey That I may lose my way And myself.71

There is a distinct difference, of course. R. S. Thomas seeks to lose himself in an attempt to discover who he is, while Edward Thomas, for his part, seeks rather to lose himself completely, to lapse out of the pain of (self) consciousness. But the thematic parallels are striking. By the time he arrived in Eglwys-fach, R. S. Thomas had internalized Edward Thomas’s work, even to the degree that poems which do not at first appear to be responses to Edward Thomas often reveal, upon closer reading, an emotional and imaginative connection. In fact, many of R. S. Thomas’s images, themes and words – an acre of land, a gap in the hedge, a farmer


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plodding or ploughing, birds that are tied to history and the supernatural, a memorable word like ‘untenanted’ – are also present in Edward Thomas’s work.72 It seems clear, then, that Edward Thomas showed R. S. Thomas a means of self-exploration in poetry, and that the latter responded to the evident thematic and stylistic possibilities. For example, returning to Edward Thomas’s ‘Lights Out’, we find this opening: I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way .â•‹.â•‹.

Readers of R. S. Thomas will recognize this language and register, echoes of which appear in the opening of his later poem, ‘Gradual’: I have come to the borders of the understanding. Instruct me, God, whether to press onward or draw back. (LP, p. 178)

However, it is the lineation of Edward Thomas that is chiefly important here. By counterpointing lineation and syntax, he creates in the reader both surprise and suspense. For example, the terminal word of line 2, ‘deep’, is initially read as a noun, specifically as a sea metaphor because of the dual meaning of ‘unfathomable’; also, because ‘unfathomable deep’ simulates an adjective-noun combination, it first appears to be a modifier and metaphor for sleep, that is, sleep is a bottomless ocean. But after engaging with the third line, the reader must re-evaluate, realizing that ‘deep’ is in fact an adjective modifying ‘forest’, which then replaces the earlier metaphor. In essence, lineation allows ‘deep’ to function as both adjective and noun and as two metaphors for sleep. This surprising technique – which Helen Vendler, in her analysis of Thomas’s painting poems, refers to as forcing the reader to ‘replicate the process of interpretation’ – is not created by rhyme or meter.73 The prosody is linear. As Alan Holder points out, ‘Linebreaks .â•‹.â•‹. can create the impression of semantic completion, which in fact turns out to be not the case. The line may appear not to be enjambed, but as we proceed we find out that it is.’74 We encounter further examples of counterpointing as we continue, coming to another modifier, this time of the forest. It is a place ‘Where all must lose / Their way’. For the briefest of moments, because of the line break separating verb and direct object, exactly what must be lost in this forest is unclear. Indeed, ‘lose’ is first read as an intransitive verb, as in ‘all must be defeated’. The reader must


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continue to the subsequent line in order to find out that ‘lose’ is a transitive verb and that ‘all’, including the reader, must become lost. This pause creates a momentary sense of disorientation, so that the act of reading the poem becomes a demonstration of its theme. It is important to note that repeatedly breaking lines across syntax is not something of which Edward Thomas’s Georgian contemporaries would have approved, let alone attempted. It is an original technique, one that works independently of the poem’s rhyme and metre; that is, the enjambement does much more than create rhymes (sleep/deep). Such artful lineation is probably one reason why R. S. Thomas continued to read Edward Thomas even after he had let go of his early Georgian models. Here was a poet who offered him a subject matter and a style that was helpful to him as his own introspective, counterpointing poetic began to emerge. Indeed, counterpoint, particularly as it is used to create suspense and surprise, becomes vital to the poetry written at Eglwys-fach: At fifty he was still trying to deceive Himself. (‘A Country’, BT, p. 30) I take their hands, Hard hands. There is no love For such, only a willed Gentleness. (‘They’, NBF, p. 39)

In the first example above, from ‘A Country’, the enjambement is similar to Edward Thomas’s line break ‘Where all must lose / Their way’ in that the action of the verb suddenly turns back on the subject. What appears to be a transitive verb, ‘deceive’, is actually a reflexive verb; the reader momentarily wonders whom the ‘he’ is trying to deceive, then discovers that this is actually an attempt at self-deception. In ‘They’, the act of reading the poem mirrors the poem’s theme, similar to what we observed in ‘Lights Out’. The line break, ‘willed / Gentleness’, forces the reader to pause, the phrase left incomplete, until the speaker’s voice wills, even forces out, ‘gentleness’. Or perhaps the line break is a moment of indecision, where the lineation mimics the speaker’s uncertainty as to what exactly it is he feels. In either case, this ‘gentleness’ does not come easily to the speaker. These examples demonstrate how counterpoint can create within the reader a sense of flux, altering or subverting expectations, even


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inspiring multiple interpretations, all fundamental operations of Thomas’s linear prosody. Rowan Williams, one of the few critics to have discussed these techniques, refers to ‘a practice sometimes thought to be careless or arbitrary, unexpected line breaks and a consequent rather jarring enjambement’. But, as Williams goes on to observe, this ‘practice’ is not arbitrary at all: These [line breaks] have the effect of redistributing the sense of statement, destabilising surface meanings, and so relativising the claim of any particuÂ�lar sentence (and it is interesting to note that they work visually more than aurally: Thomas’s rhetoric is generally one of the written even more than the spoken word, and it is not in fact easy to read him aloud adequately).75

When each sentence, each line, even each word can be ‘relativised’ in this way, both the poem and the reader’s experience are ‘destabilised’. And, recalling our earlier discussion about the idiosyncratic nature of prosody and the poetic persona, one realizes that the experience of reading an R. S. Thomas poem often returns us to the persona of a ‘home’-less R. S. Thomas whose sense of his own identity is likewise ‘destabilised’. This is perhaps the chief success of the Eglwys-fach poetry: the unstable, shifting experience of the poem itself is shared between the poetic persona and the reader, so that the poem is held out to you in silent communion, where graspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own.76

As Williams also suggests, linear prosody is of necessity a visual prosody. Shifting line breaks, stanza breaks, indentations and other spatial arrangements must be seen in order to be effective. Indeed, for Thomas, the appearance and arrangement of the poem on the page was a fundamental aspect of its composition: ‘I compose on the page .â•‹.â•‹. I believe that the inner ear which goes into operation as the eye runs along a line of poetry is more delicate and subtle than the outer ear’ (‘The Making of a Poem’, SP, p. 86). Thomas remained an aural poet to the end (he was speaking of the eye in relation to the ear, not as a replacement for it), but he increasingly relied on visual techniques as his style evolved. In fact, he is particularly good at taking advantage of the visual line as the most established convention of poetry. While the contemporary poetic line is often not a grammatically complete unit, words and phrases that are grouped on the same line are nevertheless considered together ‘as the eye runs along a line of poetry’, and Thomas often destabilizes the reading experience by


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creating, then subverting, these linear associations. We see an example of this as we return to ‘They’, where the phrase ‘There is no love’ shares a line with ‘Hard hands’, so we are led to believe that it is Thomas’s Eglwysfach parishioners – those whom he visits and is meant to shepherd – who are without love. But after the line break we discover that it is in fact the speaker, the very one who takes those hands in a seeming ‘act’ of love, who is bereft of love. We find a more intricate example of this technique in ‘Because’: On the smudged empires the dust Lies and in the libraries Of the poets. The flowers wither On love’s grave. (P, p. 8)

Here meaning is created linearly, not just grammatically. For example, lineation encourages us to read through the full stop, thus creating two parallel sentences: ‘On the smudged empires the dust / Lies’ and ‘in the libraries / Of the poets the flowers wither’. That is, the ‘and’ after ‘lies’ appears to be a coordinating conjunction, but it is not. The phrase ‘The flowers wither’ actually corresponds to the prepositional phrase in the following line – ‘On love’s grave’ – not the phrase that shares a line with it. Of course, the word ‘lies’ is a pun (as it often is in Thomas’s work). On one hand, the dust physically rests upon ‘smudged empires’ and, on the other, it tells a falsehood, an inaccurate story of the past. Grammatically, the poets are part of that ‘lie’, but linearly, they become tragic figures as their poems, housed in libraries, become the withering flowers rather than their cause. The reader, however, is able to comprehend both meanings at once. As Williams suggests: ‘What each sentence “actually” (grammatically) says is shadowed by the way the lines are divided, so that the collocation of words in one line, or the apparent sense of a line standing alone, somehow nags at the reader’s awareness.’77 Thomas often enhances this effect by punning. As he does with ‘lies’, he typically places puns at the beginnings or ends of lines, which are points of heightened attention in any poem but especially in his mode of free verse. With puns, Damian Walford Davies observes, Thomas ‘sets up subversive cross currents of meaning’, even ‘illusions’.78 In fact, Thomas’s linear prosody as a whole should be seen in terms of fluid ‘cross currents’. He can adjust our initial interpretations or replace them; he can either create confusion or lead us to moments of surprising, instant clarity (or both). These techniques keep the reader at a heightened state of attention. In fact, much of the pleasure for the reader comes from being suspended between meanings, anticipating


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the turns. The more one reads R. S. Thomas, the more one gives in to that ethos, trusting that the constantly shifting ground will produce something rewarding in the end, or rather at the end (of the poem). In sum, R. S. Thomas’s stylistic response to Edward Thomas was fundamental to his development, and it prepared him for further experiments with linear prosody. However, Thomas was at this time also reading poetry from across the Atlantic and was discovering a more flexible, more fluid style than he had encountered in the work of his British contemporaries. It was a style well suited to the personal, introspective poetry he was beginning to write.

American poetry R. S. Thomas’s reading of American poetry seems to have begun around the same time he arrived at Eglwys-fach. In a 1957 BBC broadcast, he mentions Whitman, Frost, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom.79 His Penguin Book of Religious Verse (1963) contains work by several American poets, including Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Ransom, Whitman and Wallace Stevens. But his exposure to contemporÂ�ary American poetry, and in particular to those American poets who made regular use of linear prosodies, came chiefly through his association with Critical Quarterly, a journal started in 1959 by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson. Thomas mentioned that relationship, and his interaction with Critical Quarterly, in an interview with Molly Price-Owen: I think one of the influences was: I gave a reading at University in Bangor .â•‹.â•‹. and Tony Dyson, A. Dyson, a lecturer in Bangor at the time and I seemed to make a bit of an impression on him and we gradually developed a kind of liaison because he, along with Brian Cox, C. B. Cox, were editing Critical Quarterly. The early sixties was a time when the so-called leading poets were Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin and myself .â•‹.â•‹. I was really then beginning to see what contemporary English poetry was about. And that put me on to people like Eliot and Pound and Larkin of course, Plath – all those people .â•‹.â•‹. So I was considering myself a contemporary poet in English at that time.80

Thomas’s work first appeared in Critical Quarterly in 1960, and he was a regular contributor thereafter, both to the journal itself and to its annual poetry supplements. Critical Quarterly is often discussed as a conservative publication, largely because of its editors’ well-known ‘Black Papers’, which defended traditional education and lamented what the authors saw


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as cultural decline. However, the poetry published by Cox and Dyson was more stylistically progressive than is often allowed. In its pages, Thomas’s work appeared alongside that of British poets such as Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings and Ted Hughes, but also alongside the output of American poets such as Anne Sexton, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, Louis Simpson and Adrienne Rich, and these progressive poets should certainly be included in our understanding of ‘all those people’ Thomas was reading as he was trying to develop as a ‘contemporary poet’.81 Two of Critical Quarterly’s supplements featured American poets exclusively. The first, American Poetry Now (1961), was edited by Sylvia Plath, who, like Thomas, attended the Critical Quarterly summer schools in Bangor and in London. In her introduction, she wrote: ‘American Poetry Now is a selection of poems by new and/or youngish American poets for the most part unknown in Britain.’ Likewise, in their introduction to the second American-only supplement, American Poetry 1965, Cox and Dyson noted that ‘[in 1963] Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and R. S. Thomas were achieving considerable popularity in England, and the general reader knew comparatively little of recent American writing’. In other words, Plath, Cox and Dyson all recognized that many British readers had not been exposed to recent American poetry. This helps to explain why open forms, liberal enjambement and the breaking of syntax across the movement between lines would have been new discoveries for R. S. Thomas. While there were poets in Britain writing with these techniques – notably those poets now associated with what is often called the ‘British Poetry Revival’ – Thomas had not been exposed to their work because they were not favoured in critical circles or featured in mainstream publications. ‘The Movement’ that did shape the mainstream of British poetry in the 1950s, and which continued to exert its influence into the 1960s, favoured a very different style. According to Peter Finch, [Movement poetry] nurtured rationality, was inhospitable to myth, was conversationally pitched (although lacking the speech rhythms of American counterparts like William Carlos Williams) and was deliberately formal and clear. Movement poets opposed modernism and had little involvement with international influences. They regarded themselves as a direct continuation of mainstream English tradition .â•‹.â•‹. While other literatures accommodated mercurial change, mainstream English poetry stuck with decorative, rational discourse.82

Again, this description obviously cannot be applied to all British poetry written during the 1950s and 1960s. Finch subsequently notes that ‘on


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the fringes things were different’; certainly there were British poets who carved out new stylistic paths, including Ted Hughes, who also attended the Critical Quarterly summer schools; Geoffrey Hill, whose For the Unfallen was published in 1959; Charles Tomlinson, whose stylistic choices were heavily influenced by American poetry; and Edwin Morgan, who, like R. S. Thomas, intentionally distanced himself from literary England.83 It comes as no surprise, then, that Thomas responded enthusiastically to Hughes’s vision, or that he became a lifelong admirer of Hill’s work. Like Thomas, these poets did have ‘involvement with international influences’; they were willing, even eager, to ‘accommodate mercurial change’; they abandoned ‘decorative, rational discourse’ and their work is ‘hospitable to myth’. But these were exceptions, and poets with experimental inclinations did indeed write ‘on the fringes’. For example, poets often linked to the British Poetry Revival – among them Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, Tom Pickard and Tom Raworth – took stylistic cues from American free verse, but their innovative poetry went largely ignored in Britain for many years and, when it did gain critical attention, was often regarded as stylistically deficient or inept.84 As we shall see, critics responded to R. S. Thomas’s American-influenced free verse in similar terms. It is also notable that Finch, himself an experimentalist often grouped with the British Revival, mentions William Carlos Williams, a poet whose work, perhaps more than that of any other writer, has influenced the development of the contemporary free-verse lyric.85 David Lloyd has written persuasively about R. S. Thomas’s debt to Williams, arguing that Thomas possessed ‘an Americanized and Modernized sense of form’.86 And so he did, although one notes that many of the stylistic attributes which Lloyd mentions, in particular ‘sentences that force a reader to track and anticipate – and re-evaluate – grammatical elements, and that distribute meaning incrementally among successive clauses’, were also present in the work of those American poets Thomas would have read in Critical Quarterly.87 Of course, this does not preclude Williams as an influence; indeed, many of these poets were themselves influenced by Williams, and the parallels between Thomas’s pointed cuts against syntax and Williams’s use of enjambement are many, as Lloyd illustrates. However, there are some important differences between the styles of the two poets. As Lloyd asserts, both poets ‘exploit the formal possibilities of syntax and grammar’.88 However, they often do so in very different ways. Williams regularly inverts, or disarranges, syntax and he frequently extends a single sentence – or rather, a collage of fragments and imagery – over several short stanzas or an entire poem, shaping lines with spatiality


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rather than sentence logic; as a result, his lines would often not read well (or at all) as prose. Conversely, R. S. Thomas’s sentences would, in general, be quite readable (if much less interesting) as prose, and although spatiality is important in his later work, it is primarily his use of counterpoint that allows him to ‘exploit .â•‹.â•‹. syntax and grammar’.89 And unlike Williams, who believed that ‘time .â•‹.â•‹. must be counted’ in a line of poetry, R. S. Thomas does not ‘count’ in his free verse.90 Nor does he attempt to write ‘measured’ poetry, which Williams (rather confusingly) described as a hybrid of sorts between metre and free verse.91 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Williams’s work is not nearly as introspective as R. S. Thomas’s; indeed, his poetry is, on the whole, intentionally external – ‘No ideas but in things’, he famously wrote as a refrain in the first draft of Paterson – and his use of enjambement, while it certainly can, like Thomas’s lines, force the reader to make continual adjustments, is rarely used as an extension of emotional content.92 In fact, Thomas’s linear prosody is closer to that of a poet like Adrienne Rich, or even the confessionals, in that it is primarily a seeking prosody.93 Much like Thomas’s earlier response to the Georgians, which was a general assimilation of stylistic elements, his response to the American poets in Critical Quarterly did not betray the influence of any one poet. Rather, his response principally embraced new stylistic possibilities, particularly the potential of lineation as an extension of the interior. While acknowledging that there are always prominent exceptions, we may say that, in very general terms, American free-verse poets of this generation viewed prosody not as a toolbox of historically determined devices that could shape a separable subject matter, but as an extension of emotion and thought. R. S. Thomas would have been particularly drawn to the work of those American writers who broke new ground by tying prosody to an exploration of individual psychology. Some theoretical commentary will be helpful here. In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, several schools of American poetry helped shape the direction(s) of free verse. These included the Beat generation, the confessional poets, the San Francisco renaissance, the New York school and the Black Mountain school. These groups are, of course, diverse and varied and difficult to define, but for the purposes of our broad discussion, we can look to the Black Mountain school (named after the short-lived Black Mountain College in North Carolina) for stylistic properties that are common in much American free verse, including the poetry R. S. Thomas would have encountered in Critical Quarterly. In fact, the Black Mountain manifesto, Charles Olson’s ‘Projective verse’ (1950), is one of the defining


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poetics of the twentieth century. In ‘Projective verse’ Olson famously argued that ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT’, and that form is discovered in the act of writing because the poet ‘can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares for itself’.94 Because of this, the form of every poem is unique and essentially inimitable. Olson also believed in what he called ‘composition by field’, considering that the entire page – spaces, margins and especially lines – could be shaped in such a way that they mirrored the poet’s ‘breath’; as a result, the ‘energy’ of inspiration could be passed from poet to reader. He called this kinetics: ‘energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader’.95 ‘Projective verse’ is, therefore, a communicative poetic, one that creates a shared experience, but in order for this ‘energy transfer’ to take place, the poem must maintain reader attention. It does so by continually moving forward: ‘ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION’ and ‘Any slackening takes off attention, that crucial thing, from the job in hand, from the push of the line under the hand at the movement, under the reader’s eye, in his moment.’96 Many of the poems R. S. Thomas would have read in Critical Quarterly offer practical examples of the ideas expressed by Olson. The following lines, from Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Like This Together’, appeared in the 1965 poetry supplement:97 Our words misunderstand us. Sometimes at night you are my mother: old detailed griefs twitch at my dreams, and I crawl against you, fighting for shelter, making you my cave. Sometimes you’re the wave of birth that drowns me in my first nightmare. I suck the air. Miscarried knowledge twists us like hot sheets thrown askew.98

Despite Rich’s tendency to break lines across syntax, the grammar here is relatively straightforward, and her sentences would be quite readable as prose. Counterpoint, in fact, depends upon the conventions of grammar because those conventions create expectations, which can be rewarded or


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frustrated depending on where lines are broken, what occurs at the point of enjambement, and what word(s) the reader encounters after continuing to the next line. One way to appreciate the effectiveness of Rich’s linear prosody is by observing what she is not doing, namely, writing in prose or grammar verse. By ‘grammar verse’, one has in mind a free verse where line breaks always coincide with ends of grammatical units; such a prosody, which we find, for example, in Whitman and early Ezra Pound, cannot make use of linear counterpoint. A prose rendering of one of the poem’s grammatical sentences reads this way: ‘old detailed griefs twitch at my dreams, and I crawl against you, fighting for shelter, making you my cave’. Here, the absence of lineation makes for a much smoother reading, but that ‘smoothness’ also decreases demand on reader attention. And where there is less attention, subtleties – multiple meanings, puns, rewarded or frustrated expectations – can be missed. This prose rendering is an extreme example of what Olson calls ‘slackening’, something that can occur in grammar verse. For example, a version of the poem where lineation is dictated by grammatical units might read this way: old detailed griefs twitch at my dreams, and I crawl against you, fighting for shelter, making you my cave.

In this version, the poem loses tension. One gets the sense that nothing must breach the boundary of the line, and the closed line endings sap momentum, the ‘push of the line’. Consecutive lines that begin with imperfect verbs (‘fighting’, ‘making’) make the poem predictable, its lineaÂ�tion reliable. While this gives the poem a more obvious degree of order, order is not always synonymous with prosodic control. If, as discussed earlier, ‘the prosody of a poem is the poet’s method of controlling the reader’s temporal experience of the poem, especially his attention to that experience’, then the poet, through an insistence on unswerving order, can actually lose control of the reader’s attention.99 Or, to use Olson’s terminÂ� ology, the ‘energy transfer’ between the poet and reader risks failure when the poem’s kinetics are slowed or loosened. In the poem’s true version, however, Rich’s linear prosody creates momentum and promotes attention. With few exceptions, her sentences and phrases end mid-line, creating pauses, caesurae. A mid-line pause does not stop momentum like end-line punctuation because the conventions of the poetic line encourage a continual left-to-right progression. Moreover,


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when a line ending suspends rather than closes a phrase, the desire for semantic completion drives the reader into the next line. Between lines, the reader’s brain inserts a question into the white space. ‘Old detailed griefs / twitch at my dreams, and I / [what does the speaker do?] crawl against you, fighting / [what does the speaker fight?] for shelter [aha, fight for something, for shelter] making you / [making you what? Making you do something, as in forcing?] my cave [aha, making you into something, a cave]’. Of course, the reader does not literally stop to ask these things, but because of momentum, or kinetics, the reader is pushed forward, processing questions in real time even as he or she is interpreting imagery and language, deciding, for example, what it means to ‘crawl against’ someone or ‘make [someone] a cave’. Momentum is broken only in those moments when the ends of grammatical units coincide with line endings, and these become moments of increased gravity. Rich also uses grammar, punctuation and lineation to create expectations that lead to multiple interpretations. The colon after ‘mother’, for example, encourages us to look forward, to expect a modifier for ‘mother’. Accordingly, the line ‘old detailed griefs’, which gets its own line, is first read as a modifier; in other words, the narratee is not just associated with ‘old detailed griefs’, but for an instant is those ‘old griefs’, leading the reader to infer some past sadness between speaker and narratee. It is only when we read the verb ‘twitch’ at the head of the next line that we realize these ‘griefs’ are a grammatical subject rather than a modifier, but, again, they function as both, and the conventions of grammar and punctuation make this possible. When Rich writes, ‘griefs / twitch at my dreams, and I / crawl against you’, the reader anticipates a verb after ‘and I’ for two reasons. First, the previous sentence is also broken between subject and verb, creating the expectation, and secondly, the clause begins with a subject personal pronoun, which requires a subsequent verb. Rich could defy this expectation, as she does elsewhere, but in this case she chooses to confirm it. By modulating in this way – now thwarting expectation, now validating it – Rich maintains reader attention. These lines from ‘Like This Together’ demonstrate how linear prosody can function, and they illustrate the kind of technique that Thomas was encountering in Critical Quarterly. Indeed, the facility of linear prosody to explore emotional and psychological content is fundamental in the work of many American poets who appeared in the journal, including Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Gary Snyder, William Stafford and Denise Levertov. Reading their work, R. S. Thomas would have discovered remarkable examples of an ‘exploratory’ prosody that


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mirrors, through line breaks, ‘the process of thinking/feeling .â•‹.â•‹. rather than focusing more exclusively on its results’.100 He would have discovered that, in Olson’s words, ‘it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going’.101 Indeed, at Eglwys-fach, R. S. Thomas’s prosodic choices began to be shaped ‘each moment of the going’. As the following examples demonstrate, a given speaker is typically following an emotion or idea, and the variable line adjusts as it tracks this process, surprising the reader, subverting expectations and creating multiple versions of the poem that must be processed in real time: I have this that I must do One day: overdraw on my balance Of air, and breaking the surface Of water go down into the green Darkness to search for the door To myself in dumbness and blindness And uproar of scared blood At the eardrums. (‘This to Do’, P, p. 12) There is a house with a face mooning at the glass of windows. Those eyes – I look at not with them, but something of their melancholy I begin to lay claim to as my own. .â•‹.â•‹. â•…â•… .â•‹.â•‹. Son, from the mirror you hold to me I turn to recriminate. That likeness you are at work upon – it hurts. (‘Careers’, NBF, p. 7)

In ‘This to Do’, the first line gives the appearance of completion and the impression of determination, but the line break, ‘I have this that I must do / One day’, takes the wind out of the poetic voice, ‘creat[ing] a doubling back effect, a recoil from the bold approach of the opening line’.102 The line ‘overdraw on my balance’ is a banking term, presenting the reader with a financial connotation before immediately adjusting it, rendering the phrase a metaphor for gulping in air. The reader then follows the poem through diving imagery, tracking a speaker who is ‘breaking the surface / Of water’


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to ‘go down into the green / Darkness to search for the door’. The reader is now submerged with the speaker, apparently diving to a shipwreck, where there might indeed be a door. However, we then learn that this is a ‘door / To myself’. (Adrienne Rich comes to mind again; what is probably her best-known poem, ‘Diving into the Wreck’, uses similar imagery as a metaphor for self-exploration.) Just as a diver feels increased pressure on the ears, the speaker senses an ‘uproar of scared blood / At the eardrums’ as he looks to his own interior ‘in dumbness and blindness’. A poem, of course, cannot be ‘dumb’ or ‘blind’, at least in the sense of being silent or invisible, but Thomas, via words, is drawing the reader’s attention away from the idea of words and towards the frightening interior, the ‘blood’. In order to examine the self, the poet must abnegate sight and language, the sensuous means by which poets typically interact with the world. Here, there can be no protective barriers. The speaker must be immersed in what he most fears. The linear prosody thus mirrors the act of exploration or, rather, tracks the fear and hesitancy surrounding self-examination. The prosody of ‘Careers’ highlights acts of reflection. The line ‘a face mooning at the glass’ brings to the reader’s mind an image of a mirror, a face glowing in it. But after the line break, ‘the glass / of windows’, the reader discovers that this is in fact a window acting as a mirror, and that the window belongs to the previously mentioned home; the face is, therefore, reflected in a domestic setting. The subsequent linear pairing of ‘Those eyes – I look’ juxtaposes the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ of the poem and causes the reader to wonder about the reflection. Is the speaker looking at ‘those eyes’ or looking through them? This question is resolved to a degree after the line break. The speaker looks at the eyes, not with them, but he does recognize himself in them: ‘but something of / their melancholy I / begin to lay claim to as my own’. By placing the words ‘melancholy’ and ‘I’ together on a line, Thomas associates the speaker with that mood, and that ‘I’, suspended at the end of the line, returns our attention to the firstperson speaker, reminding us of the eye/I pairing two lines earlier. The poem, in fact, is ultimately about looking at the self, the ‘I’. The son, we discover, reminds the speaker of his own past, causing him to reflect on a hurtful childhood (‘The broken elbow? / the lost toy?’). The speaker also uses words like ‘pain’ and ‘suffered’, but we do not know initially that these memories are triggered by the son. Small revelations occur as the reader descends, feeling his or her way, and the poem culminates as the speaker addresses the son: ‘Son, from the mirror / you hold to me I turn / to recriminate’. Thomas’s lineation is extremely effective here.103 ‘Son, from the mirror’ functions as a label, as if the son has emerged from the mirror,


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stepping out of the speaker’s reflection (in both senses of that word). The line ‘you hold to me I turn’ emphasizes two acts, the act of holding, by the son, and the act of turning, by the speaker – turning away, turning from. There is discomfort here. This is no longer the pain of the past (earlier we learn ‘The pain has / vanished’) but a present pain, one caused by forced reflection. The linear juxtaposition reflects the uncomfortable nearness of the speaker to his ‘reflection’. Once again, there is no protective barrier. This six-word line contains all the discomfort and fear of the poetic moment and ends with the speaker’s desire to turn. But, in point of fact, this ‘turn’ in the poem is also a turnabout. Using enjambement to surprise and refocus the reader, Thomas uses the literal ‘turn’ of the line as a kind of retort, very nearly an act of reproach as the speaker ‘turn[s] / to recriminate’. However, the act of recrimination is not ultimately directed towards the son, as the reader momentarily suspects. Another pointed use of lineation turns, or re-turns, that reproach back to the speaker at the end of the line: ‘I turn / to recriminate. That likeness’. Lineation suggests that the speaker is turning not on the son, but on the likeness and, therefore, ultimately on himself. Thus, lineation asks the reader to track the speaker’s difficult internal processes. And, as in so many of the poems written at Elgwys-fach, the prosody requires that we stay attentive and involved enough to make interpretive adjustments. Although we have used the term ‘the speaker’ in our reading of ‘Careers’, the poem is very probably in the voice of R. S. Thomas. With its inspection of self and its open admission of personal pain, the poem approaches confessionalism. Indeed, Thomas’s response to the confessional poets deserves further comment. Among the American poets he was reading in Critical Quarterly, the confessionals in particular would have given Thomas poignant examples of how prosody might be used to explore individual psychology and personal subject matter. In fact, his poem ‘The Cure’ (PS, p. 41) may allude to the confessionals: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Doctors in verse Being scarce now, most poets Are their own patients, compelled to treat Themselves first; their complaint being Peculiar always.

Again, lineation emphasizes key words and makes them function doubly. The poets are ‘compelled to treat / [whom do they treat?] Themselves first; their complaint being / [being what?] Peculiar’. The word ‘peculiar’


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has at least two meanings here. The confessional poets, many of whom confronted the extremes of psychological experience, were thought by some to be ‘strange’ or ‘unusual’. But ‘peculiar’ also means ‘distinctive’ and ‘individual’, and ‘The Cure’ reveals Thomas’s awareness of a strain of poetry that is focused on treating the individual rather than on curing society. While one cannot say definitively that the poem alludes to the confessionals, ‘most poets’ in Britain were not ‘treat[ing] / Themselves’ with this brand of poetry in 1958, the year Thomas published Poetry for Supper. This was, however, a time when confessionalism was coming to the forefront of American poetry and when, as we have seen, Thomas was reading American poetry and questioning his public and private roles. Although he concludes by writing that it is ‘a sick culture’ (as opposed to a sick individual) that requires ‘a poet’s cure’, the poem seems to suggest an exposure to confessional poetry, evidence of which we also see elsewhere in his work. For example, Brown mentions the similarity between the ‘bleak moods’ of ‘Welsh Border’ – It is a dark night, but noisy. Cars pass on the road, Their lights dissect me. .â•‹.â•‹. The real fight goes on In the mind; protect me, Spirits, from myself. (BT, p. 9)

– and the world of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’:104 One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull; I watched for love cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town .â•‹.â•‹. My mind’s not right.105

Indeed, beyond the ‘moods’, the poems share both imagery – dark night, cars, lights – and a focus on the speaker’s mental state; and Lowell’s possessive construction, ‘hill’s skull’ would find itself at home in almost any R. S. Thomas poem. This is not to suggest that R. S. Thomas was responding directly to Lowell (whose poem, unlike ‘Welsh Border’, uses end-rhyme), although it is possible.106 But the clear affinity is in the relationship between poetry and introspection, the act of poetry as much as the created verbal structure.


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A distinction, however, needs to be drawn. R. S. Thomas, despite his turn to introspection at Eglwys-fach, did not become a confessional poet. The nakedness he approaches in ‘Careers’ is rare in his work. Most often, Thomas’s exploration of self is part of what Jeremy Hooker calls ‘the experience of relationship’, which takes in ‘all kinds of relationships, between the self and the world, the self and the nonself’.107 The confessionals, on the other hand, were mainly interested in ‘ego-experience’.108 In Thomas’s work, primary ‘relationships’ are those between the self and family, the self and nature, the self and Wales, the self and God. These relationships are tenuous because the poet’s sense of self is also tenuous. As a result, there can be very little self-confession in Thomas’s work; indeed, one can argue that the only true confession he can make about his identity is that he lacks a firm sense of it: But there’s an underlying despair Of what should be most certain in my life: This hard image that is reflected in mirrors and in the eyes of my friends. (‘Who?’, P, p. 39)

As in ‘Careers’, we see a painful mirror held up to the speaker and here, too, the reflection is ‘hard’. Perhaps it is hardened, but it is also difficult – difficult to look at, difficult to understand. It ‘should be most certain’, but it is not, and as the poem’s title suggests, the speaker’s identity is elusive.109 This is a type of confession, but it is not quite confessionalism. There is always something held back in Thomas’s work, a way of ‘safeguarding the integrity of his inwardness even in the process of making it public’.110 As Prys-Williams observes, ‘Thomas worked to exacting standards of honesty in his self-disclosure, but an important index of the privacy of his nature was the tortuous route he sometimes took to self revelation.’111 In other words, Thomas does not present his poems as unmediated revelations about his private life. This is yet another reason why personality criticism can be problematic: it can lead one to make too much of an exploratory poem, to mistake a transitory emotion or immediate statement for the essence of the poet’s character. We should here emphasize some additional differences between the linear, exploratory prosody that emerged at Eglwys-fach and Thomas’s earlier prosodies. One recalls that, unlike Thomas’s linear prosody, his accentual prosody slowed momentum; the stress-heavy, plodding lines mirrored the laborious trudge of hill farmers within a tactile landscape. Accordingly, there was more end-line punctuation in the earlier work;


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enjambement, when it did occur, was less flexible, more closely aligned with syntax. The poems were also more decorative in terms of internal rhyme, end-rhyme and assonance. Clearly, Thomas’s sense of language was changing at Eglwys-fach. He was discovering that words can do more than denote, or even exemplify, the external world of people, animals and landscapes. Words, properly arranged, can create the impression of a line that mirrors not just the speaking voice, but also the thinking voice and the feeling voice. Lines, Thomas was realizing, need not be congested, pulsing, or sonorous to affect a reader, for language has its own authority beyond any mimetic properties, and its cadences can be ‘poetic’ even in straightforward syntax. Thomas’s critics, however, did not seem to share these sentiments. The style of the early work had not brought Thomas under fire, but the poems written at Eglwys-fach certainly did. Because linear prosodies were not yet common in Britain, critics and poets alike struggled to make sense of what R. S. Thomas was doing. Here is Sam Adams, commenting on the poems in Pietà (1966): Though there are poems written in stanzas, poems that rhyme, it nevertheless appears from the bulk of his work that R. S. Thomas has an under-developed sense of form. There is no rhyme in any of the four poems we are about to consider. There is no syllabic consistency .â•‹.â•‹. there is no observable pattern of stress. Occasionally one wonders what logic of sound or sense prompts him to break a line at a particular point.112

Adams equates ‘form’ with rhyme, a consistent syllable count or an overt stress pattern, none of which drive Thomas’s linear prosody. One is reminded of Eliot’s statement about free verse: ‘I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre’. Unaccustomed to Thomas’s technique, critics tended to focus more on what his poems were not than on what they were. Even today, in an era where free verse prosodies are predominant, Thomas is perhaps considered a major poet because of his subject matter, his nationalism or his iconic status more than for his stylistic achievements. This perception needs to change. Without a prosody that demands attention, the poems would not affect the reader as they do. They would not, no matter what they said, be memorable if there were not also something impressive (in both senses of that word) in the manner of their saying. Gwyn Jones is one of the few critics to have apprehended the indissoluble relationship between Thomas’s prosody and the staying power of his poems:


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I wonder whether he is the finest, conscious craftsman writing verse in English today .â•‹.â•‹. I read fairly large-sized acreages of verse, especially in periodicals and the rest of it, and then at the end of it so what? Clever, smart, nothing, forgotten it. Now with Thomas you don’t do that at all. Whether you like a poem of Thomas’s, or whether you don’t like it, my word, it stays in your memory and it turns around somewhere in your vitals, because he is a master of the conjunction of lines, and he is a master therefore of the stanza.113

The importance of the connection Jones is making here – between ‘the conjunction of lines’ and a memorable prosody – cannot be overstated. In fact, Thomas’s linear prosody is so central to his mature work that one can understand his displeasure with critics who did not attempt to understand it. One recalls his grumble, quoted earlier, about reviewers ‘picking out a bit of subject matter’ and ignoring his ‘poetic excellencies’; similarly, Thomas complained to Lethbridge, ‘some of the nuances [of the poetry] are lost by these careless columnists and people’.114 The contrast between Thomas’s American-influenced poetry and the work of the so-called Movement poets deserves further comment. In The Movement (1980), Blake Morrison discusses the work of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, John Wain and Elizabeth Jennings, ‘a group of considerable importance – probably the most influential in England since the Imagists’.115 Some critics have, on occasion, linked R. S. Thomas to the Movement, largely because of the clarity of register in his work (as compared, for example, to that of the Neo-Romantics or the poet’s countryman Dylan Thomas). James Knapp writes: Although he was not a member of the Movement, R. S. Thomas was always admired by Movement poets for the qualities of clarity and economy which his verse had displayed as early as 1946, when his first volume of poetry was published. Like many of the Movement poets, Thomas saw his role as that of an intelligent and responsible member of a community.116

Knapp, however, was writing in 1971, the year before Thomas published H’m, a volume that offended the formal aesthetic of some Movement poets. Furthermore, while R. S. Thomas did feel a responsibility to a community, he never realized himself as a member of such; again, his idea of ‘community’ did not exist in the reality of modern Wales (and it certainly did not exist in English literary circles). His poetry will not fit nicely into a study of the Movement poets, and his work was not ‘always admired’ among them, largely due to his later stylistic choices. Many Movement poets were kindly disposed towards Thomas’s early work. For example, Kingsley Amis claimed in the 13 January 1956 issue


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of The Spectator that Thomas was ‘one of the half dozen best poets now writing in English’, and that his poetry ‘reduces most modern verse to footling whimsy’.117 In this same piece, however, Amis wrote that ‘[R. S. Thomas] shares with [Edward Thomas and Andrew Young] a fondness for rural subject matter and, stylistically, a contempt for modernist shock tactics, whether emotional or intellectual’.118 We have certainly established a connection between R. S. Thomas and Edward Thomas, and interesting parallels can be drawn with the work of Andrew Young.119 Ironically, though, we have also concluded that R. S. Thomas’s later, ‘modernist’ tendencies derive in part from his close reading of Edward Thomas. Further, while one cannot know for certain what Amis had in mind by ‘modernist shock tactics’, R. S. Thomas’s proclivity was for a style that embraced the ‘modern’ and shocked many critics. It perhaps comes as no surprise, then, that Amis remained curiously silent about Thomas’s post1950s work. Worth noting is a 1974 piece in the Observer, where Amis mentioned poets he liked to read while drinking Scotch because ‘they share .â•‹.â•‹. immediacy, density, strength in a sense analogous to that in which the Scotch is strong’. Among the work Amis includes is ‘the early R. S. Thomas’.120 Philip Larkin, for his part, was a Movement poet who did not care for Thomas’s early or late poetry, and who apparently disliked R. S. Thomas himself; he called him ‘Arse Thomas’ and ‘Arse-wipe Thomas’ in his letters,121 and in his review of Poetry for Supper he wrote: There is no doubt Mr. Thomas is the kind of poet one would like to be good, because he avoids a great many ways of being bad, but I find in this collection little sense of the inner organisation that gives a poem cohesion .â•‹.â•‹. Mr. Thomas’s admirers seem to me to be mistaking sympathetic subject matter and good intentions for evidence of real poetic talent.122

In other words, the problem was form, not content; Thomas’s prosody lacked ‘inner organization’ and ‘cohesion’. Larkin’s assessment was echoed by other Movement poets. Amis may have remained silent about Thomas’s later work, but Donald Davie and John Wain did not. These two poets were particularly severe. In Professing Poetry (1977), Wain called Thomas ‘a particularly depressing example of the damage caused to a poet’s work by the flight from form’.123 In a 1987 piece, Davie called Thomas’s use of enjambement ‘ruthless’, describing it as ‘a tic, a mannerism’. He went on to argue that ‘we may legitimately protest that a respectable prosody must comprehend a good deal more than this’, and he added: ‘Like John Wain I find Thomas handling [the English verse-line]


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with a peculiar gracelessness .â•‹.â•‹. That is of course, and is meant to be, a damaging comment.’124 Although Davie’s body of work on poetics is generally quite good, his rejection of Thomas’s lineation is perplexing, especially when one recalls that in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1974), Davie made important observations about differences between American and British poetry. In particular, he (justly) accused many of his British contemporaries of a ‘painful modesty of intention’.125 Yet Davie’s later deference to Wain, along with his comment about ‘respectable prosody’, causes one to wonder how much perceived immodesty he was actually willing to tolerate, or at least tolerate from R. S. Thomas. Davie and Wain rejected what they saw as a radical stylistic change in Thomas’s work of the early 1970s, but in fact, as will be discussed in the next chapter, the changes in H’m (1972), while significant, amounted to an incremental evolution of style, not a revolution. After all, Larkin, as we have just seen, was complaining about Thomas’s supposed formlessness in 1958; and he was correct to the extent that Thomas’s linear prosody was not ‘cohesive’ and ‘organized’ in the manner popular among Movement poets, who commonly favoured metrical prosodies. Thomas’s own ‘movement’ was clearly outside the parameters of what these poet-critics deemed acceptable and respectable. While one cannot positively know their motivÂ� ations, their critiques fit a pattern of dismissal that emerged whenever Thomas ventured outside what M. Wynn Thomas calls the ‘tiny space’ afforded him ‘in the Great British mentality’. Wales, according to M. Wynn Thomas, is ‘managed’ as part of the ‘British system’s self-serving programme of containment’, and Britain ‘has successfully contrived to produce a lesser R. S. Thomas to suit its own tastes and purposes’.126

Public poetry In a 1990 interview, Ned Thomas offered an account of the origins of Welsh writing in English. Citing the work of Tecwyn Lloyd, he asserted that the beginnings of Anglo-Welsh literature can be traced to the nineteenth-century writings of English travellers, who viewed Celtic Wales from an outsider’s perspective and perpetuated in their writings romantic ‘clichés of Wales, tourists’ perceptions: castles, sheep, druids’.127 Thomas referred specifically to Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature, where Arnold stands on the Great Orme at Llandudno. Looking east to the area between Llandudno and Liverpool, he sees a Wales of ‘practical industry’. Looking west, he sees ‘mists and mountains and Celtic magic’.


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For Arnold, that view to the industrial east was not Wales, but ‘intrusive England’.128 The real Wales lay in the west. In a similar vein, Shawna Lichtenwalner has shown that even in the eighteenth century, as tourism in Wales and tourist writing about Wales increased, ‘damning stereotypes of Wales .â•‹.â•‹. were replaced with new clichés about Wales’ that changed both external and internal perceptions of Welsh character. In other words, visions of a magic, Celtic land – images perpetuated by the English but embraced by a rapidly growing Welsh tourist industry – were integrated into Welsh culture.129 Lichtenwalner’s research confirms the conclusion of Ned Thomas: ‘Romanticism .â•‹.â•‹. can be transplanted and become a powerful vehicle for national feeling.’130 That Welsh Romanticism has an English, rather than a Welsh, source is certainly a hypothesis that R. S. Thomas would have rejected. Nevertheless, his early experience was much like that of Matthew Arnold: an outsider looking westward into a magical Wales. Initially from Liverpool, and subsequently as a dreaming student on a train, Thomas looked and saw the Wales of his imagination. In this sense, his early, sub-Georgian poems are perhaps something not very different from travel writings. Thus, whatever one thinks about Tecwyn Lloyd’s conclusions, his ideas seem quite appropriate in the case of R. S. Thomas, whose Romantic views derived from the English Romanticism of The Golden Treasury. Such views became changed into exterior landscapes and then absorbed into Thomas’s own interior, where they became ‘a powerful vehicle for national feeling’, the very substance of his Welsh nationalism. R. S. Thomas’s imaginative vision of Wales was out of tune with the ideals of his parishioners. As a result, he became caustic towards them, blaming the demise of Wales not just on English in-migrants, but also on the Welsh that perpetuated ‘snobbery, jealousy and love of money’ (A, p. 65). ‘I’ve lived, on the whole, among deprived people’, he told Lethbridge. ‘I mean, the moral character you know isn’t as it should be and so on. So that I do tend to take rather, possibly, a pessimistic attitude towards them.’131 This pessimism, he went on to say, comes from observing man’s tendency to deplete the natural world out of greed. ‘At some stage man took a wrong turning’, he said. ‘I can see that man has displayed tremendous courage at times. But I’m still inclined to think in terms of a fallen creature.’132 Indeed, for Thomas, Eglwys-fach was not a community of countrymen but a microcosm of a ‘fallen’ society: disingenuous, avaricious, snidely pretentious and ultimately misguided. The barrier syndrome led him to internalize and protect his vision of Wales, but it also led him to take aim at those who threatened it, and to strike out


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at them via the many socio-political, nationalistic poems of the period. Geoffrey Hill has picked up on the relationship between Thomas’s longing for a lost Wales and his nationalism. He writes: ‘The sense of perception that unites [R. S. Thomas’s] poetry is hiraeth [longing for what has been lost]. It is not inevitable that hiraeth will draw you into contemplation and expression of political vision, but it is not unlikely that it will.’133 The nationalistic poems, then, grew out of Thomas’s more local discontent, but it is also true that a climate already existed for socio-political verse. In 1962, Saunders Lewis delivered his famous radio address, Tynged yr Iaith [‘The Fate of the Language’], which warned of the extinction of the dying Welsh language if action was not taken. That same year, Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg [Welsh Language Society] was formed at the Plaid Cymru [Welsh Nationalist Party] summer school in Glamorgan. Perhaps the most dramatic development of this period came in 1966, when Gwynfor Evans became the first member of Parliament to represent Plaid Cymru at Westminster, winning a by-election victory (this followed other strong performances by the party in the mining valleys). As part of these political developments, or perhaps as a response to them, R. S. Thomas began to write more overtly political, nationalistic poems. His previous responses to the state of Wales had reflected disillusionment and despair. Now they sprang from anger and bitterness, casting a harsh light on what was ultimately infidelity to the Wales of his imagination. In terms of stirring up controversy and social reaction, R. S. Thomas’s public poems were very successful. For good or ill, they helped to establish his reputation. From a stylistic point of view, however, the poems are much less accomplished than his other work of the same period. They often stumble over severe, and often sensationalist, language and imagery. Brown, in pointing out the scatological references and graphic imagery in ‘Looking at Sheep’ (BT, p. 48) and ‘Reservoirs’ (NBF, p. 26), gives us a way into this discussion, arguing that Thomas’s ‘strident, lurid images ultimÂ�ately tend to unbalance the poems, to tip them’ and bring them ‘closer to mere rhetoric than to poetry’.134 These poems are, indeed, ‘unbalanced’, and they appear this way because they are formally unbalanced. To modify Olson’s expression, their form is not an extension of their content. That they are aggressive, and that their language is often discordant, might not matter as much if Thomas were writing prose, or perhaps a longer, more stress-heavy line that could better contain such diction. One recalls that his accentual verse was able to accommodate ‘immersion in the liquid, glutinous and messy’.135 But the content of Thomas’s public poetry is often at odds with his chosen prosody, specifically his flexible, lineated


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structures.136 The following, from ‘Reservoirs’, is a good illustration of this incongruity: â•…â•…â•…â•… There are the hills, Too; gardens gone under the scum Of the forests

Just as we have observed in many poems of this period, Thomas is attempting to use enjambement to subvert expectations. After finishing the line at ‘scum’, Thomas leaves the reader temporarily suspended, knowing only that the ‘scum’ is somehow responsible for overtaking the landscape. The reader may expect some elaboration after the line break, but probably information about something more obviously associated with ‘scum’ – pollution, refuse, et cetera. Only after the enjambement does the reader discover that the ‘scum’ is in fact ‘the forests’. The technique emphasizes ‘scum’ by placing it at the end of the line, then attempts to surprise by asking readers to readjust to the revelation of the Forestry Commission’s artificially planted trees as ‘scum’.137 However, the technique does not succeed here as it does in Thomas’s more introspective verse. In those poems, the reader is constantly re-evaluating, replacing interpretations, but in the context of ‘Reservoirs’ there is no real surprise. ‘Scum’ is unmistakably associated with both English ‘strangers’ (here exemplified by a colonizing Forestry Commission) and the Welsh who stand by with serene expressions, ‘a watercolour’s appeal’, as their land and culture are usurped. Here, as in other poems, that which is visually, tactilely and even scatologically unattractive is an unmistakable metaphor for the objects of Thomas’s invective. We see this again in subsequent lines: Where can I go, then, from the smell Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead Nation?

Here, too, the poem’s prosody is at odds with its content. Normally one would expect a revolting smell on the shore to come from a dead animal, perhaps a fish or a drowned sheep. But the line break is meant to surprise the reader, who discovers that the source of the stink from which the speaker wants to escape is a ‘dead / [Welsh] Nation’. But this is not a prosody that re-tunes itself from moment to moment, responding to emotional or intellectual currents. This is prosody in service to a harangue, and it does not function well as such. Robert Frost once wrote: ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.’138 This is a fitting way to describe the stylistic failures of much of the public poetry. The imagery and adjectives


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are so obviously ‘loaded’, so obviously seeking a simple, black-and-white response, that the lineation cannot counterbalance them by creating the ambiguities we find elsewhere. The point is that R. S. Thomas is not feeling his way, exploring himself. He knows what he thinks, and he expresses himself stridently in received images to which he knows very well what the reader response will be. Ironically, then, it is in the most public poems that the poetic persona wears thinnest, and Thomas’s personal aversions are laid barest. These can derail a prosody based on momentum, surprise and flexibility. It is clear, then, that linear counterpoint does not guarantee a successful poem any more than fourteen iambic pentameter lines make a successful sonnet. Any prosody can succeed or fail depending on diction, imagery, the poetic process and, above all, the relationship between form and content. In Thomas’s searching, introspective poems, the forms seem like reflections and/or extensions of content while in many of his socio-political poems the form appears contrived. Even when a poem succeeds in one way – as it does in the following example by maintaining momentum, or kinetic energy – another element can undermine that success: I want the town even, The open door Framing a slut, So she can speak Welsh And bear children To accuse the womb That bore me. (‘Welsh’, BT, p. 15)

The language here is too harsh, too overt in its intention for the short, fastmoving lines. The offensive ‘Framing a slut’ is particularly difficult to get past, to the extent that the otherwise lovely euphony of ‘accuse the womb’ is lost beneath the severity of the accusation itself. R. S. Thomas’s stylistic failures can, therefore, be attributed, at least in part, to his self-described ‘propagandistic intention’. It is, in fact, perceptible intention, propagandistic or otherwise, that can defeat linear prosody. Adrienne Rich reaches similar conclusions: ‘I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those matÂ�erials according to a prior plan: the poem engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses.’139 When Thomas appears to ‘express [his] materials according to a prior plan’ rather than letting the poem dictate ‘new awareness .â•‹.â•‹. as it progresses’, lineation and counterpoint do not


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function properly. This is evident in several of the slightly later poems collected in Welsh Airs (1987). In the politically charged ‘Resort’ (p. 33), for example, the speaker alludes to Proverbs 26: 11 when he describes people ‘return[ing] to the vomit / Of the factories’.140 In ‘Toast’ (p. 37), the poet returns to the language of a much earlier poem, ‘Welsh Landscape’ (AL, p. 26), where he had described the Welsh as a people ‘Sick with inbreeding, / Worrying the carcase of an old song’. Four decades later, the ‘carcase’ has rotted, become more repugnant: I look at Wales now forty years on. Was there a chance, as some hoped, that maggots, burrowing in its carcase, would grow wings and take themselves off, leaving at least the bones to acquire a finish? The opposite happened. The stench, travelling on the wind out of the west, was the lure for more flies, befouling our winding-sheet with their droppings.

Here, Wales is more decayed than ever, wrapped in a winding-sheet. English (and Welsh) maggots remain on its corpse, and English flies come to the stench, continuing to soil what is left. The intent of this socio-political commentary is so obvious that one can scarcely read the lines as poetry. Any subtleties of prosody are completely drowned out and rendered ineffective by what is not subtle: imagery and language that elbow the reader towards a single meaning. To paraphrase Keats, it is the palpability of the design that can wreck a poem.141 While the public poems were written in defence of an imaginative and artistic vision, it is clear that they were not the central substance, or the chief stylistic expression, of Thomas’s poetic journey, which was ultimately a journey inward. His public voice could overwhelm and unbalance introspective expression, but never for long. Indeed, while Thomas’s linear prosody is not well suited to his public verse, it is perhaps the ideal prosody for a poetry that corresponds to processes of thought and emotion. For this reason, his adoption of linear techniques well prepared him to write poetry of both inward and outward spiritual exploration. As we have discussed, his spiritual concerns became more personally acute at Eglwysfach, largely due to interactions with parishioners who ‘aggravated the conflict between the withdrawn solitary poet, the parish priest, and the ardent Welsh nationalist’.142 These spiritual concerns, and the inevitable


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questions they raised, grew more expansive, not less, over time; indeed, they became the focal point of the poetry after Thomas became vicar of Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron, in 1972. Consequently, at Aberdaron, Thomas further developed the style he defined at Egwys-fach. In fact, it was at Aberdaron, where the Llŷn peninsula reaches out between sky and sea, that R. S. Thomas himself reached out and found his most progressive and avant-garde poetic style.


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4 A Style Developed, 1972–1988

John Barnie: About the time you published H’m (1972), you experimented much more with stepped, indented lines, and broke syntax more radically across the line. You consolidated this in Laboratories of the Spirit (1975) by dropping the conventional capital letter at the beginning of the line. It seems a major development related to distinct changes in subject matter. The new style is very unlike most contemporary English or Anglo-Welsh poetry – but there are analogies, at least, with the work of American poets like William Carlos Williams. Could you comment on what led you toward these changes? R. S. Thomas: I left Eglwys-fach with its hinterland of Welsh hill country in 1967 .â•‹.â•‹. Looking back both geographically and chronologically from the peninsula, where I then was [i.e. Llŷn from 1967 onwards], I felt I had more or less exhausted that theme. The change in style came with a certain change of perspective .â•‹.â•‹. You are correct in thinking that William Carlos Williams was influential in my change of form in certain poems, as being apter for new subject matter and new thinking.1

The above question and response are part of ‘Probings’, a 1990 interview, first published in Planet, in which Ned Thomas and John Barnie questioned R. S. Thomas about a wide range of topics, among them his childhood, his vocation, his faith, his feelings about Wales and the Welsh language, his poetic themes and his influences. While Thomas’s views on many of these subjects can be found elsewhere, ‘Probings’ is the only interview in which he mentions a stylistic response to American free verse – a response which, as we have demonstrated, was conspicuous. Yet the American influence cannot fully account for Thomas’s late stylistic choices. Indeed, in his reply to Barnie, even as he acknowledged William Carlos Williams as an influence (and it is a measured acknowledgment: ‘in certain poems’), Thomas framed his own development within a wider context. Specifically,


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he pointed to three interrelated influences that shaped the poetry of the 1970s: a ‘change in perspective’, ‘new thinking’ and ‘new subject matter’. Thomas’s response can serve as an overview of this stylistic period. His ‘change in perspective’ led to intensified spiritual concerns and to what became the central ambition of his poetry: an exhaustive search for God. His ‘new thinking’ explored contemporary theology, philosophy and, most significantly from a stylistic viewpoint, an idiosyncratic blend of conceptual physics, chemistry and biology that he referred to as ‘pure science’. These offered the poet new metaphors for spiritual searching and for poetic form. His ‘new subject matter’ reflected this ‘new thinking’, and it revealed a growing determination to contemporize his poetry. Fearing that poetry was becoming ‘outmoded’, ‘a dying art’, Thomas attempted to make spiritually minded poems relevant within, and relevant to, a scienceminded, post-industrial world.2 The stylistic corollaries of Thomas’s new perspective and subject matter are the focus of the present chapter. We shall discover that at Aberdaron, as he continued to write poems of thinking and searching, Thomas intensified the functionality of his linear prosody. We shall also discover that poems of spiritual discord, as introspective struggles and expressions of what Thomas calls ‘the decay of traditional beliefs in God, soul, and the afterlife’, become iconic verse structures in the 1970s, reflecting the unstable frequencies of modern worship.3 Such poems are examples of ‘structural mimesis’ in that they are organized to reflect a disorganized world, one whose parts do not constitute an ordered whole.4 However, before examining the effects of these developments on specific poems, we shall make some broader distinctions about the free-verse line, and in doing so, we shall refute a fallacy that Thomas’s critics have often used as a basis for negative critiques.

Line integrity I see some people are still nit-picking about my so-called lack of form. I wish they’d catch up. John Wain, one of the Movement bunch, seems to have begun it, and Donald Davie, another Movement fan, agrees, carrying on about enjambement, etc., as if that mattered any more.5

The above excerpt is from a 1993 letter to Raymond Garlick, in which R. S. Thomas vented frustration with what he saw as an antiquated critical aesthetic. More specifically, he reacted to Donald Davie, who had recently ascribed ‘a peculiar gracelessness’ to Thomas’s poetry,


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specifically an ‘offensiveness .â•‹.â•‹. in the enjambements, the runovers’.6 Davie’s assessment applied a critical commonplace, namely that systematic enjambement cannot function prosodically. Thomas’s poems prove the opposing view, however. By pointing this out, one does not wish to take aim at Thomas’s critics so much as to address a flawed premise that undergirds their arguments. The enjambement controversy tends to circle around the concept of ‘line integrity’, a term used in various, often imprecise, ways by critics. In general, it suggests a preference for line autonomy. That is, lines should regularly be broken at natural pauses in syntax, with non-syntactical breaks being employed only for occasional rhetorical effects. When pauses bookend the line in this way, they establish boundaries which, in the absence of metre, syllable count or any other strictly measurable unit, give the line an integrity it would otherwise lack. It is, in fact, to integrity that Davie appeals in his denunciation of Thomas’s lineation: ‘such abrupt or violent enjambements are a valuable resource available to the poet; but when they are resorted to so frequently .â•‹.â•‹. the trick seems to be mere mannerism, one that denies minimal integrity to the verse line’.7 Similarly, Holder maintains that ‘you can’t get much impact from transgressing a nonexistent boundary’.8 However, arguments such as these disregard basic fact: the end of a printed line is the boundary that allows enjambement to function. Turns in syntax can occur anywhere within a line, but enjambement can happen only at the end. What Davie calls a ‘mannerism’ is in fact Thomas’s way to create a variety of line endings (and beginnings) that do work prosodically. These line endings cannot typically be heard, but they function on the page.9 It is worth mentioning that, over time, the poetic line has gradually become less determinate. We no longer require a specific number of feet, syllables or stresses in a given line. We do not ask poets to capitalize the first word of every line, or to mark line endings sonically with rhyme, as Dr Johnson required when he called for ‘every verse unmingled with another as a distant system of sounds’ (for ‘unmingled with another’, read ‘possessing line integrity’). It is telling, in fact, that in this same passage Dr Johnson calls blank verse ‘verse only to the eye’.10 That label lives on, but it is now applied to systematically enjambed free verse, the lineation of which is often viewed as completely arbitrary, requiring nothing of the poet but a word processor. Yet, in many of R. S. Thomas’s later poems, an intentional, continual lack of line autonomy is crucial to the way lines operate upon the reader. We can, however, agree with Davie’s conclusion, namely that ‘it is English verse that [Thomas does] violence


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to, not English poetry’, if we take ‘verse’ to mean lines with mandatory syntactical boundaries.11 Indeed, in poems which are mimetic of ‘metallic warfare’, or of ‘the soul’ as it ‘refrigerat[es] / under [a] nuclear winter’, doing violence to such boundaries is quite the point.12

A change in perspective R. S. Thomas finally left Eglwys-fach in 1967, and he took up the living at Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron, that same year. Located at the end of the Llŷn peninsula, the village of Aberdaron is one of the extremities of Wales. ‘The next move could only be into the Irish Channel’, wrote the poet’s wife, M. E. Eldridge.13 The church itself, below a steeply sloping graveyard, nearly rests on the beach, and sea sounds reverberate within its walls. Outside, high headlands push out on both sides of the bay, and all that is visible is a vastness of sea and sky. Across the strait is Bardsey Island, bird sanctuary and site of pilgrimage, both ancient and modern. In these surroundings, Thomas ‘became conscious of the sea all around [him], geological time, the pre-Cambrian rocks’.14 From this outpost, where land touches immensities of space, Manafon faded into the distant past, and since ‘there was [certainly] no sustenance for his muse in looking back on Eglwys-fach’ (A, p. 76), the poet’s imaginative vision widened. From this ‘peninsula / of the spirit’ (‘Emerging’, F, p. 41), Thomas re-engaged questions of identity: One headland looks at another headland. What one sees must depend on where one stands, when one stands. There was sun where he stood. But on the pre-Cambrian rocks there was also his shadow, the locker without a key, where all men’s questions are stored. (ERS, p. 70)

Thomas left Eglwys-fach feeling as though he had exhausted themes relating to the identity of Wales, but his grasp of his own identity remained tenuous. Who was this person who cast a shadow that often seemed ‘more substantial than himself’ (ERS, p. 86)? What was his place in time and in the universe? What was his – and, by extension, ‘all men’s’ – relationship to the eternal? Depending on where, and when, the poet stands, answers fluctuate and can be at variance. Because Thomas was ‘without a key’, his questions required ‘endless attempts and experiments’.15 These explored an array of opposites: sun and shadow, faith and doubt, absence and presence, language and silence. They drew upon diction and metaphor from history, mythology, mysticism, religion, biology, physics and cosmology. Any of these, alone or in combination, might rise to the surface of his poetic vision.


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This expanded perception, and a broadening search for answers, resulted in an intensification of several thematic and stylistic elements which are evident in the poems written at Eglwys-fach. According to Thomas, ‘the change [in publisher, from Rupert Hart-Davis to Macmillan] was a convenient posting-house as it followed on a somewhat new departure in my poetry consequent upon my move to Aberdaron’.16 One notes that Thomas’s description is not of a jarring or revolutionary change in his work; ‘somewhat new departure’ is measured, certainly nothing to resemble the ‘radical’ and ‘dramatic’ alterations that many critics see in Thomas’s poetry of the 1970s.17 But there is certainly a wider vision, and an increased depth of thinking, particularly with respect to prevailing spiritual concerns. One recalls that at Eglwys-fach, Thomas struggled with ‘the experience of relationship’, finding the duties of a parish priest difficult to perform amongst a people he did not respect.18 In increasingly introspective poetry, he examined his relationship to his environment, his parishioners and his country. At Aberdaron, however, Thomas became chiefly concerned with a less tangible, but ultimately more important, relationship: his relationship to ‘ultimate reality’.19 The perpetually displaced R. S. Thomas, having ‘crawled out at last / as far as [he] dare on to a bough / of country that is suspended / between sky and sea’, permanently united his introspective search for identity and ‘home’ with a far-reaching, exhaustive search for his God.20 These searches, now one search, constituted R. S. Thomas’s ‘next, and last, necessary obsession’.21 Much has been written about Thomas’s spiritual themes. In addition to many thoughtful articles, several book-length studies have been written by critics and theologians alike.22 What has scarcely been addressed, however, is the fundamental relationship between Thomas’s spirituality and his poetic style. M. Wynn Thomas rightly asserts that ‘Thomas’s theology may be inscribed in every aspect and at every level of his writing’, and he adds this enjoinder: ‘we need constantly to be aware of the theology of his style’.23 Unfortunately, when the poet’s style has occasionally been remarked upon, it has rarely been treated as a reflection of the spiritual concerns that pervade his later poetry. Whereas the Judeo-Christian God is usually discussed as a God of order and wholeness, the God of R. S. Thomas should be discussed in terms of disintegration and fragmentation. In Genesis, God creates the earth in a set order, and it is a world of order, of even days and nights and seasons, where every living thing multiplies ‘after his kind’.24 But Thomas’s God has apparently created a world of disorder. It is the


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world described in the book of Job: ‘a land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness’.25 As D. Z. Phillips observes, When [R. S. Thomas] looks at the facts that confront him, they are not facts which seem to get their sense from an integrated whole .â•‹.â•‹. Indeed, it may be assumed that there is no large sense to be found; there is simply the sense of this, that and the other thing.26

We have determined that the reader of an R. S. Thomas poem must make adjustments ‘each moment of the going’.27 This requirement is intensified in the poems written at Aberdaron, which further destabilize the reading experience. Lines are shorter, more frequently broken across syntax, rarely autonomous; they typically do not begin with capital letters. A given poetic line will contain nouns, adjectives, verbs or some combination of these, but lineation severs them from each other. As a result, Thomas’s poetic structures call attention to ‘this, that, and the other thing’, as opposed to ‘an integrated whole’. If, as Stephen Cushman argues, ‘the prosodic structure of a poem tells a story about wholeness and fragmentation, a story about the world in which the poem says what it says’, then the prosody of R. S. Thomas’s later work tells the story of a disjointed world.28 Derek Attridge describes the way such poetry affects the reader: Instead of the verse line expanding to accommodate utterances too large and momentous for the metrical frame, it splinters into fragments to achieve a minute focus on the details that might be lost in a metrical progression. The run-on is, of course, crucial in this kind of verse.29

Instead of ‘expanding [the verse line] to accommodate utterances’ (as does Whitman, for example, and Blake in his Prophetic Books), R. S. Thomas ‘splinters’ lines, directing reader attention to isolated details and away from combinations of details that are necessary for sentence logic. William Carlos Williams once described ‘words [that] remain separate, each unwilling to group with the others except as they move in one direction’.30 Built from ungrouped words, Thomas’s verse structures become iconic, mimetic forms of a consciousness that perceives the world as disjointed. ‘Making’ (H’m, p. 17), here quoted in full, is such a structure: And having built it I set about furnishing it To my taste: first moss, then grass Annually renewed, and animals To divert me: faces stared in


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From the wild. I thought up the flowers Then birds. I found the bacteria Sheltering in primordial Darkness and called them forth To the light. Quickly the earth Teemed. Yet still an absence Disturbed me. I slept and dreamed Of a likeness, fashioning it, When I woke, to a slow Music; in love with it For itself, giving it freedom To love me; risking the disappointment.

The speaker of ‘Making’ describes acts of creation but makes few connections between what is created. Instead of a planned creation, we find a seeming randomness: ‘first moss, then grass’, ‘I thought up the flowers / Then birds .â•‹.â•‹. animals / To divert me’. The chronology does not seem predetermined. ‘Thought up’ suggests impulsivity, as does ‘divert’. Similarly, ‘found the bacteria’ gives the impression that God, the likely speaker of this poem, discovered (as opposed to created purposefully) the bacteria he called forth. Indeed, Thomas often portrays God as an indiscriminate experimentalist possessing a lack of forethought, one who is scarcely in control of His own work. At times He views His creations as mistakes and, at others, does not understand or even recognize them. In ‘Echoes’ (H’m, p. 4), for example, God stares at the earth: What is this? said God. The obstinacy Of its refusal to answer Enraged him.

In ‘Soliloquy’ (H’m, p. 30), God says, ‘I have blundered / Before; the glaciers erased / My error’.31 In ‘Making’, Thomas’s use of systematic enjambement makes God’s creative acts seem systemless. Nouns are prominent – ‘moss’, ‘grass’, ‘animals’, ‘faces’, ‘wild’, ‘flowers’, ‘birds’, ‘bacteria’, ‘darkness’, ‘light’, ‘earth’, ‘absence’, ‘likeness’, ‘it’, ‘music’, ‘it’, ‘freedom’, ‘disappointment’ – but they rarely appear together on the same line, so none is given distinction; each is as (un)important as the next. The recurrence of ‘it’ is particularly noteworthy. ‘It’ is the most indistinct of personal pronouns, used for inanimate objects and abstractions. Normally it must refer to a preceding noun, of course. But here, in the opening line, there is no antecedent for ‘it’, so the reader is immediately disconnected. And the second ‘it’ can only refer back to the first. Moreover, not only do we not know what ‘it’ is, but we also do not initially know who


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the speaker is. Certainly, there is nothing in the title, or the first few lines, to suggest God as the speaker. In a similar way, ‘It’ is used to represent the earth in the first lines of ‘Soliloquy’: ‘And God thought: Pray away, / Creatures; I’m going to destroy / It’. Through lineation, the speaker is separated from the addressed ‘creatures’ (indeed, ‘creatures’ itself shows a lack of intimacy), and the verb ‘destroy’ is cut off from the direct object, ‘It’, reflecting a God who is separated from the earth, its inhabitants and even His own destructive actions. The God of ‘Making’ is likewise disconnected from the poem’s actions, which are at times buried in prepositional phrases, cut off by lineation from what precedes them: ‘Furnishing it / To my taste’; ‘animals / To divert me’ (about one-quarter of the poem’s lines begin with the preposÂ� ition ‘to’). The impression is of a whimsical God who acts first and thinks second, and whose creations, perhaps as a result of this rashness, do not amount to wholeness. None of the poem’s lines is autonomous. To function grammatically, each depends upon a previous line or a subsequent line, and most depend upon both previous and subsequent lines. The poem’s first sentence is broken over six lines, as is its last. The division of subjects and predicates adds to an overall feeling of uncertainty: ‘Quickly the earth / Teemed. Yet still an absence / Disturbed me.’ We have previously seen Thomas use lineation to place the reader in a state of continual readjustment, but we have not encountered poems where each line, each part of speech even, initially resists integration. Like many poems written at Aberdaron, ‘Making’ suggests a disconnected creator, a disorganized creative process and the disintegrated fragments of a world haphazardly compiled. In its visual reflection, and prosodic demonstration, of this theme, the poem reveals ‘the theology of [Thomas’s] style’. The irony, of course, is that ‘Making’ is not disorganized at all. It is arranged to seem disarranged. Critics have often misapprehended this technique. For example, in his analysis of Thomas’s painting poems, James A. Davies accurately observes ‘quickening lines [that] try to detach themselves from the sentences that contain them’ and points out how ‘Any lingering sense of formal order is further undermined by the sound of most endings, by fading cadences, uncertain emphases that deny climax and firm shaping.’ However, Davies sees these properties as ‘examples of [Thomas’s] impulse towards formlessness’, a distracting ‘anarchy’.32 But such poems are not ‘formless’; as we have just seen, the very form of ‘Making’ allows it to succeed.33 To employ a term from theologian Paul Tillich, whose work R. S. Thomas admired, the poem is ‘a structure of destruction’.34


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Paul Fussell has written: ‘When it solicits our attention as poetry, a group of lines arranged at apparent haphazard is as boring as tum-ti-tum’; he adds: ‘The principle is that every technical gesture in a poem must justify itself in meaning.’35 We can agree with Fussell’s second claim, that ‘every technical gesture in a poem must justify itself in meaning’, with the caveat that a ‘technical gesture’ is itself part of a poem’s meaning, not merely in service to meaning. Whether or not we can agree with Fussell’s first claim depends upon our interpretation of ‘apparent haphazard’. If we take ‘apparent’ to mean ‘obvious’ or ‘evident’, then we can agree. Poetry is not achieved through slapdash technique. However, if we interpret ‘apparent’ in its other sense, meaning ‘seeming’ or ‘ostensible’ or ‘quasi’, then a group of lines which is quasi-haphazard can, as we have just observed, ‘justify itself in meaning’ very well indeed. A crafted disjointedness, then, is not the same as incoherence. In fact, disintegration, while often vital to our reading experience, is almost never our final impression; Thomas’s poems do ultimately cohere, at least provisionally, at the end. A transient instability, transferred to the reader, comes through not as formal carelessness, but as an internal response to the world, one that feels its way through fragments towards a kind of contingent statement, or interim awareness. Finishing a poem by R. S. Thomas, one often feels not a sense of wholeness, but a momentary reprieve from randomness, a kind of temporary solid footing. One is ‘recuperating endlessly / in intermissions’, ‘growing old in / the interval between here and now’.36 ‘Making’ ends in such a way. God sleeps and ‘dream[s] / Of a likeness’, and when He wakes he is no longer rash, but deliberate, creating ‘to a slow / Music’. Of course, uncertainty remains, the poem ending with God ‘risking .â•‹.â•‹. disappointment’ by creating mankind, but the risk is consciously taken. Uncertainty is now a choice, not the product of indiscrimination. The poem finds its footing, resonating with the reader, even as it looks forward to an uncertain future. ‘Making’ is one of several poems in H’m that re-envision creation. These are often variations on the biblical: Genesis, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve. Like ‘Making’, they reflect a disruption of order. ‘Female’ (H’m, p. 27), for example, begins: It was the other way round: God waved his slow wand And the creature became a woman

These opening lines are a reordering (‘the other way round’) of JudeoChristian creation, and other lines in the poem dislocate Genesis imagery


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even as they rely on it. For example, when the poet writes ‘her forked laughter / played on him’, the reader is meant to associate ‘the woman’ with the mythical serpent; she is the temptress rather than the tempted, and this gives the poem a misogynistic tone, one enhanced as Thomas alters the common interpretation of Adam’s ‘fall’ as a forbidden sexual encounter. Here, Adam is rebuffed by Eve: â•…â•…â•…â•… .â•‹.â•‹. The man turned to her, Crazy with the crushed smell Of her hair; and her eyes warned him To keep off .â•‹.â•‹.

At times, the poems in H’m vision their own mythology of creation (and destruction). We have seen this in ‘Soliloquy’, and it is more dramatic in ‘Once’ (H’m, p. 1), which reads like a re-creation following a nuclear holocaust. Brown observes how ‘Once’ echoes The Waste Land, and it is no wonder when one considers that it is Eliot who first captured the fragmented world we have been discussing.37 Indeed, it is not surprising that when creating poems which reorder and disrupt standard notions of creation, Thomas finds a prosody that does the same. In fact, R. S. Thomas, himself the creator of the Prytherch myth, expanded and broadened his myth-making facility at Aberdaron. This facility is most pronounced in H’m, as many critics have indicated. Shepherd, for instance, states that ‘The mythic poems emerge as a specific group within the Thomas oeuvre in H’m (1972).’38 Morgan asserts that ‘Of the thirty-seven poems which make up the collection H’m, fully eleven can be labelled “mythic”’.39 Morgan goes on to point out that while these poems seem authoritative, written ‘in clipped, bold declaratives’, they are essentially ‘theological probings’.40 In both content and form, they are ways of ‘bringing / a myth up to date’ (ERS, p. 33) by re-envisioning acts of creation through the cracked lens of modernity. They owe their stylistic theology primarily to the poet’s troubled muse, but their vision also owes something to Ted Hughes. Several critics have suggested that H’m is at least partially a response to Ted Hughes’s Crow (1970). Jeremy Hooker, in his 1972 review of H’m, first proposed the idea, writing that ‘this aspect of the book, whereby a sustained use of metaphor raises it to the level of myth, bears a remarkable affinity to .â•‹.â•‹. Ted Hughes’s Crow’.41 Most recently, Tony Brown compares ‘Thomas’s technique in these sardonic, black-humoured, cartoonlike poems’ to ‘the mythic-cartoon poems’ in Crow.42 However, while Thomas’s work does share imaginative properties with Crow, Hughes’s


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influence is likely to have pre-dated that volume. When asked about the connection by Lethbridge, Thomas rejected the idea that H’m was written as a direct response to Crow, but he did admit that Hughes ‘touched the lever’ that ‘set me off on a new line’.43 One can, in fact, detect in H’m echoes of Hughes’s previous volume, Wodwo (1967). Hughes’s ‘Gog’, for example, is written in the voice of a bewildered speaker who has just come to consciousness, much like the speaker of Thomas’s ‘Once’ (H’m, p. 1).44 And Hughes’s ‘Theology’, which re-envisions the Eden myth – No, the serpent did not Seduce Eve to the apple. All that’s simply Corruption of the facts.45

– would seem quite at home in the pages of H’m. Because critics have often pointed to Crow as an influence on H’m, the nature of that connection is worth examining further. What these volumes have in common is not a shared style or technique so much as a shared aim, to ‘translate individual suffering into a universal experience through myth’.46 Crow arose at a time of great tragedy for Hughes. Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, and Hughes’s partner, Assia Wevill, did the same in 1969, also killing their 2-year-old daughter, Shura; Crow, dedicated to Assia and Shura, is, understandably, terribly bleak at times: Who owns these scrawny little feet? Death. Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death. Who owns these still-working lungs? Death. Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death. Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death. Who owns these questionable brains? Death. All this messy blood? Death. (‘Examination at the Womb-door’)47

We find a similar interrogation in Thomas’s ‘Cain’: â•…â•… The blood cried On the ground; God listened to it. He questioned Cain. But Cain answered: Who made the blood? (H’m, p. 15)

The poems, and the volumes in which they appear, seem to inhabit similar worlds. One suspects that the representation of an incompetent God in Hughes’s collection would have appealed to Thomas at this point in his development, and that the indestructible ‘machine’, another mythic creÂ�ation in Thomas’s volume, may echo the indestructible Crow.


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However, there is little in H’m from a stylistic point of view that bears resemblance to Crow. In the above excerpts, the difference in lineation is obvious. Much of Crow is written in straightforward ‘grammar verse’ with frequently end-stopped lines – Hearing shingle explode, seeing it skip, Crow sucked his tongue. Seeing sea-grey mash a mountain of itself Crow tightened his goose-pimples.48

– and, because Hughes privileges the interior rhythm of lines over the tension and momentum created by counterpoint, he extends lines to accommodate longer phrases: So in one hand he caught a girl’s laugh – all there was of it, In the other a seven-year honeymoon – all that he remembered – The spark that crashed through coked up his gonads. So in one hand he held a sham-dead spider, With the other hand he reached for the bible – The spark that thunderbolted blanched his every whisker.49

There are, in fact, considerable differences between the two volumes. For example, the poems of H’m are not sequential, and connections between them are not always obvious or even intended. Crow, on the other hand, reads like a series of poems, each part of a larger, epic narrative. Furthermore, despite a shared predilection for myth making, the poets do not use myth in the same way. One senses that Hughes uses myth as a way to deal with tragedy, creating enough distance to make writing the poem possible. By way of contrast, the poems of H’m are much closer to the poet’s spiritual angst, and the variations in Thomas’s thoughts and feelings are reflected in the movement of his lines. This helps explain why Crow is primarily written in the third person, whereas much of H’m is written in first person. We can observe the similarities and differences between the volumes by looking at the title poem from H’m, which seems to be influenced by Crow in terms of content, but is stylistically quite dissimilar: and one said speak to us of love and the preacher opened his mouth and the word God fell out so they tried again speak to us of God then but the preacher was silent reaching


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his arms out but the little children the ones with big bellies and bow legs that were like a razor shell were too weak to come. (p. 33)

The poem shares imagery and even phraseology with ‘Crow’s First Lesson’: God tried to teach Crow how to talk. ‘Love,’ said God. ‘Say, Love.’ .â•‹.â•‹. ‘A final try,’ said God. ‘Now, LOVE.’ Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and Man’s bodiless prodigious head Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes, Jabbering protest –50

We see that both poems contain a command to speak of love, both poems contain images of misshapen bodies, and both use plosive ‘b’ sounds to describe those bodies. Thomas writes of children with ‘big bellies and bow / legs’, and Hughes writes of ‘Man’s bodiless prodigious head / Bulbed’. However, Thomas uses no punctuation at all, and the only word that warrants a capital letter is ‘God’. His poem mirrors the action it expresses: ‘and the preacher opened / his mouth and the word God / fell out’. The reader ‘falls’ as he or she reads, rapidly, in search of completion. In contrast, Hughes uses punctuation to slow the reader, and he capitalizes consecuÂ� tive words, presumably to place more emphasis on God’s commands: ‘Say, Love .â•‹.â•‹. Now, LOVE’. Interestingly, there is more compassion in the Thomas poem, which is also, clearly, more directly concerned with issues of Christian faith and pastoral effectiveness. ‘Crow’s First Lesson’ contains what Thomas garnered from Crow: mythical content, register and occasional imagery. But the underlying prosodies are divergent. Having just read ‘H’m’, we should note that, in addition to segmenting poems, drawing the reader’s attention to seemingly disconnected parts of speech, systematic enjambment can also place the reader in a state of continuous expectation. It often ‘gives a breathless quality to the flow of information that increases the degree of our anticipation’.51 H’m is in flux, in both senses of that word. On one hand, the poem constantly shifts and readjusts, miming instability; on the other, it is constantly in motion,


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flowing from left to right, top to bottom (in this case, that flow is enhanced by the absence of punctuation). Both kinds of ‘flux’ are important to the poems written at Aberdaron, and what is perhaps most surprising is that they rarely impede each other; a poem can be quasi-disorganized and in fluid motion. For example, as one proceeds through the seemingly disassociated lines of ‘Making’, one is not disoriented to the point of slowing down or returning to the beginning of a given line; in fact, just the opposite occurs: one is compelled to read faster. This may be what Attridge has in mind when he argues that a run-on both violates and heightens the reader’s sense of the continuity of the sentence.52 On one hand, the reader pays less attention to syntactic units and more attention to individual words; on the other, he or she is impelled to push forward, in search of the completeness each line lacks. R. S. Thomas’s readers became accustomed to pointed cuts and surprising enjambements in the poems of the 1950s and 1960s. Not only were they taught, by the poems themselves, to take in surprising line groupings, multiple meanings and interplays between lineation and syntax, but they also came to expect these stylistic elements. Therefore, Thomas’s use of enjambement, even as it became more pronounced in the poems written at Aberdaron, would no longer have been surprising in and of itself.53 Indeed, as sites of linear interplay, the enjambments had become potentially more communicative, not less, due to increased reader awareness and attention. According to John Hollander, When enjambment is systematic .â•‹.â•‹. a wide range of effects ensures that even strong, pointed cuts at line breaks will never startle by their mere occurrence but, if at all, for what they reveal – about language, about the world, or because of when and where, in the course of the poem, they show it.54

Enjambement that is frequent is not necessarily routine; there can be great variation, ‘a wide range of effects’. R. S. Thomas is very effective, in fact, at deciding where to break a line for maximum rhetorical effect, at determining what part of speech will appear at the end of one line, at the beginning of the next. Will the line be broken after the subject, verb or direct object? Will the new line begin with an adjective, preposition or noun? Where will the sentence itself end? How far will it push into the next line? Will it end immediately after the line break, creating a jarring stop? Will it end mid-line to create a caesura? Or will the sentence conclude near the end of the line, flirt with equilibrium by being nearly, but not quite, in sync with the poem’s lineation? As he answers these questions, Thomas adjusts cadence and rhythm, creates stops and starts of various kinds. Line breaks


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become anticipatory pauses that he uses to control reader attention. This is perhaps most critical in poems of spiritual searching, which are mimetic representations of spiritual anxieties, waiting, reaching, sudden silence, fits and starts. These techniques do reveal a great deal ‘about language, about the world’ as they compose ‘the theology of Thomas’s style’. During a rare workshop with R. S. Thomas, Eddie Wainwright took the opportunity to ask the poet how he knew when to break a line. The way Wainwright describes Thomas’s response is perhaps predictable – ‘In response, he just gave me his notable basilisk glare and continued doing what he had been doing’ – but Wainwright’s subsequent impressions are noteworthy: I surmised that the question was meaningless as far as he was prepared to be concerned; but I also had the sudden notion, which I have seen no need to abjure, that the form of many of his poems was a felt one, worked out (or happening) as he went along, that his lines are thought-structured and move on when a phase of the thought moves on, or break off at a point where the beginning of the next line might occasion a slight surprise, or emphasis, lending that characteristic air of spontaneity or improvisation. In other words his lineation is an, as it were, silent rhetorical device.55

Wainwright is particularly shrewd in pairing the private (‘a felt one’; ‘worked out .â•‹.â•‹. as he went along’; ‘thought-structured’) with the public (‘influencing how you read’; ‘occasion a slight surprise’; ‘air of spontaneity’; ‘rhetorical device’). Thomas’s prosody is simultaneously personal and communicative, especially in poems of spiritual searching. In other words, ‘the theology of his style’ works mimetically, drawing the reader into the process of spiritual questioning because the poem itself is a reflection, an iconic representation, of the poet’s own quest. We can demonstrate just how important these stylistic elements are by first examining a de-stylized version of one of Thomas’s well-known poems. If we take ‘Emerging’ (LS, p. 1) and rewrite it in what we have called ‘grammar verse’, thereby nullifying the effects of counterpoint, the poem begins thus: Not as in the old days I pray, God. My life is not what it was. Yours, too, accepts the presence of the machine? Once I would have asked healing. I go now to be doctored, to drink sinlessly of the blood of my brother, to lend my flesh as manuscript of the great poem of the scalpel.


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I would have knelt long, wrestling with you, wearing you down. Hear my prayer, Lord, hear my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals have kept up their shrill cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness.

This version of ‘Emerging’ offers the same words as the original, in the same order, but it hardly resembles the poem as Thomas wrote it. Linear effects have been negated. What was once, by turns, hesitant and insistent, persistent and submissive, is now flat. Anticipation, which in Thomas’s poetry is a kind of participation, is mollified in a poem that no longer feels its way along or makes adjustments. Said in another way, the poem still deals with spiritual themes, but the stylistic theology is absent. Of course, Thomas writes a very different poem, one that – and this is the truest measure of a poem’s prosodic achievement – could not have been a more successful poem in any other form: Not as in the old days I pray, God. My life is not what it was. Yours, too, accepts the presence of the machine? Once I would have asked healing. I go now to be doctored, to drink sinlessly of the blood of my brother, to lend my flesh as manuscript of the great poem of the scalpel. I would have knelt long, wrestling with you, wearing you down. Hear my prayer, Lord, hear my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals have kept up their shrill cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness.

As opposed to our re-lineated version of ‘Emerging’, the actual poem is surprising from the onset. The first line is still end-stopped, but as we read on, we discover that the first sentence extends into the second line. In this moment, the poem becomes a prayer. The reader, who has not been prepared for the dramatic situation of a prayer by either the poem’s title or its first line, must immediately adjust, and the full stop after ‘God’ creates a moment in which to do so. ‘God’ – as a name, as a word housed in a structure of words, as subject matter and as the poem’s newly discovered (from the reader’s perspective) narratee – is framed on both sides by moments


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of silence: a comma and line break before, a full stop after. This is another example of structural mimesis – God being framed by, and emerging from, moments of silence – but it is also an instance where R. S. Thomas, as he so often does, teaches the reader how the poem is to be read. When the reader stops after ‘God’, the previous pause, at the end of the first line, is altered. Retroactively, it becomes a preparatory pause, a moment of reverence before the name of deity is spoken.56 In the moment when the pause at the beginning of line 2 asks the reader to reassess and reclassify the pause at the end of line 1, the poem’s prosody is established. One also notes that the surprise in line 2 is possible only because line 1 does not sound like a traditional prayer; it could be spoken to anyone. This is a new, more colloquial prayer; it is clearly not a rote prayer taken from a prayer book. It is not a prayer like those offered in ‘the old days’ by the ancients, the biblical supplicants, saints and pilgrims. The speaker is also saying that he is not praying as he himself once did, in his ‘old days’. Rather than being liturgical, or communal, prayer has become personal, authentic and urgent. The speaker’s circumstances, and needs, have changed. We learn this immediately after we learn that the poem is a prayer: ‘My life is not what it was.’ As the poem’s only end-stopped line, this declaration gains gravity. With these first two lines, the speaker emphasizes that this altered prayer is ‘emerging’ as part of an altered spiritual life, and we intuit that the poem will both tell and show us the nature of that change. The word ‘too’ in line 3, while seemingly minor, sets up one of the most important line breaks of the poem. ‘Too’ is both a realization and a confession, uniting speaker and addressee. On one hand, the speaker is realizing that God has accepted a presence; on the other, he is confessing that he, the speaker, has accepted that same presence. However, the reader’s understanding of this ‘presence’ can materialize, and then be adjusted, only in conjunction with the line break, where the sentence is suspended: ‘the presence of’…what? The language is familiar, common to scripture and prayer: the presence of the Lord, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the presence of angels. Thomas is trusting that the reader will bring these familiar ‘presences’ into the anticipatory pause, along with other things that may need accepting, such as imperfection and weakness. Indeed, it is this moment of waiting, wherein the reader considers various possibilities for completing the prepositional phrase, that makes the revelation in line 4 so stark when it does arrive: ‘the presence of / the machine’. Because the poet has brought other possible, more traditional religious ‘presences’ to our mind, we are now aware of their respective absences. ‘The presence of / the machine’ is striking for what it is, but also for what it is not, for what it has displaced.57


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This abruptness tempers the stated acceptance in the previous line. In fact, any acceptance of the machine, and its abrupt entrance into ‘Emerging’, is just as abruptly, and quite literally, brought into question as we discover that we have been reading a question. As a result, we must now ask questions: does God accept the machine’s presence and, by prosodic implication, its noise, its intrusiveness? And, if this speaker ‘now’ accepts the machine’s presence (the ‘now’ leads us to believe there was a ‘then’, ‘the old days’, a time when he did not accept it, or when it simply did not exist), what is the nature of this newly found acceptance? When considering these questions, one needs to be aware that in Thomas’s work, the ‘machine’ does not merely denote machinery. Rather, it represents rote, (often dangerously) non-judicious thinking. It is also ‘Thomas’s shorthand for the mechanical, unimaginative/stereotypical thinking of globalized consumerism, in which the individual becomes merely a unit of production and consumption’.58 R. S. Thomas continues to condemn such thinking. Nowhere in ‘Emerging’ is the machine itself embraced. Only its presence, its existence, is accepted, thus to be immediately questioned. As we will see, Thomas’s decision to infuse his poetry with the language and metaphors of science is never akin to accepting the destructive processes, or destructive products, of mechanical thinking. When it enters the poetry, the machine, and what we might call ‘machine language’, is tempered with self-scrutiny and doubt, and the poet employs such language to censure, not accept, the practitioners of destructive science. Thomas, in fact, distinguishes between the technological machinÂ� ations of applied science and the imaginative processes of ‘pure science’, which he embraces. As he tells John Barnie, ‘it is not pure science and religion that are irreconcilable, but a profit-making attitude to technology’, and he adds, ‘If pure science is an approach to ultimate reality, it can differ from religion only in some of its methods.’59 By the 1970s, in fact, the poet’s thinking had changed so that science, rather than being antagonÂ� istic to spiritual thought, actually offered him his preferred metaphors for spiritual searching. Thomas more clearly defined ‘pure science’ in a 1981 radio address: Pure science in its contemplation of the structures of the universe, and the mystery of space and time, all of these things are religiously orientated, it seems to me. It is only the machine and the use to which it is being put and technology, and some of the uses to which it’s being put that seem to stand between man and God.60

He remained, ‘generally speaking, anti-technology’.61 However, R. S. Thomas was not unequivocally ‘anti-modern’.62 The ‘syndromes’ we


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discussed in the previous chapter did lead him away from what he saw as the fruits of modernity: industry, materialism, overcrowding, violence, waste. But the poetry itself is a glaring exception to any retreat from modernity. The poems engage and reflect the modern world. Therefore, when the machine enters ‘Emerging’, breaking into the silence generated by a line break, it formally mirrors what it does thematicÂ� ally: it tears into silence and disrupts peaceful landscapes. The poem is also mimetic in other ways. We should consider, for example, that reading the poem necessitates a kind of faith. At the ends of lines, the reader, ‘like Michelangelo’s / Adam’, reaches out ‘into unknown [white] space’ (‘Threshold’, BHN, p. 110) in expectation of completion. Sometimes rewarded, sometimes thwarted, these anticipations are analogous to the speaker’s own seeking. When, at the end of line 4, we read ‘Once I would have asked’, our instinct is to complete the phrase with what one usually asks for in prayers: forgiveness, strength, wisdom, health, prosperity, favour, direction. These may, in fact, be the very things the speaker asked for ‘in the old days’. The word ‘healing’ at the beginning of line 5 is not the verbal shock that ‘the machine’ was in line 4 (prayers for healing are common), yet it, too, forces an adjustment because it turns the reader towards an inevitable question: why is the speaker not asking for healing now? The answer comes soon enough. The speaker is not asking for anything at all. Indeed, there is no request made anywhere in ‘Emerging’. This speaker, we are led to believe, once asked God for things, perhaps for things he did not receive, perhaps even for many of those things we insert into the pause between lines. Indeed, that pause becomes more meaningful when we realize that all possible things for which the speaker might once have asked are removed from this new form of prayer. What remains is not what we insert at the end of the line, but the line itself, just as it is written: ‘Once I would have asked’. The speaker has abandoned the notion that egocentric requests are the point of prayer. This development is enhanced by the way in which Thomas uses lineation to place pronouns at the beginning of lines, thereby giving them emphasis: I would have knelt long, wrestling with you, wearing you down. Hear my prayer, Lord, hear my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals have kept up their shrill cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness. (italics added)


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Like the biblical Jacob, to whom Thomas often alludes, the speaker once wished to wrestle God into submission. The line break ‘wearing / you down’ leads us to believe that the result of this prayer would be a change, a reversal of what usually happens when the speaker prays (namely the speaker’s being worn down by long, unheard prayer). The same God who was forced to hear Jacob’s request would now hear the speaker’s persistent voice: ‘Hear my prayer, Lord, hear / my prayer.’ When such requests have gone unanswered, they have been defeating, leading supplicants (including the speaker) to explain ‘[God’s] silence by / their unfitness’, as opposed to the otherness of God or the unfitness of the mode of prayer. In this new kind of prayer, however, asking for one’s own needs is ultimately ‘not what prayer is about’. Without the line breaks positioned immediately to precede pronouns, these points of emphasis would simply not exist. The poem also leads on to what the speaker believes prayer is about. Instead of a series of isolating or agonistic requests (‘Hear my prayer, Lord’), this new mode of prayer seeks unity; the desire to be heard has been replaced by the desire for oneness or, rather, the consciousness of oneness since desire fades to the background. The new prayer is reminiscent of Jesus’ prayer in St John 17:21: ‘That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee’, or, in the words of ‘Emerging’, ‘the consciousness of myself in you, / of you in me’. We also learn, from the diction of the poem itself, that the speaker will seek this oneness with new, modern metaphor and an appropriately contemporary vocabulary. In fact, these very metaphors allow God to be recognized, and this, too, is emphasized by a line break preceding a pronoun: ‘I begin to recognize / you anew, God of form and number’ (italics added). Similarly, when the speaker describes prayer as ‘the annihilation of difference’, he recognizes the destructive world in which prayer is offered, but his diction also connotes unity. In physics, ‘annihilation’ is the phenomenon in which a particle and an antiparticle, such as an electron and a positron, collide and disappear, and in their place emerges a combined energy which is approximately equivalent to the sum of their masses.63 In other words, their former identities have been annihilated but together they represent a new form of energy. Similar metaphors, and instances of wordplay involving scientific diction, are ubiquitous in Thomas’s later work. Yet the desired unity expressed in the poem does not mend the fragmented world in which it is written, a world that favours the other sort of ‘annihilation’, nor can the modernization of its language ensure that unity. As Thomas writes in ‘The Absence’ (F, p. 48), ‘I modernise the anachronism // of my language, but [God] is no more here / than before’. The


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oneness described in ‘Emerging’ is rare, and it must be found within a broken world, a world that, as we have seen, God often does not recognize or with which he does not have any desire to commune.64 In fact, the systematic enjambment and non-autonomous lines of ‘Emerging’ represent this world, where ‘things pass and / the Lord is in none of them’ (‘Threshold’, BHN, p. 110). Here, Thomas alludes to the biblical Elijah, who is a witness as ‘the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and break in pieces the rocks’. An earthquake follows, ‘but the LORD was not in the earthquake’. Then there is fire, ‘but the LORD was not in the fire’; and then, ‘after the fire a still small voice’. Elijah hears this voice (a voice that is no voice), and God speaks to him.65 Like Elijah, R. S. Thomas sees a world that is rent and broken. Like Elijah, he sees things pass by. But unlike Elijah, who communicates with God, Thomas is as demolished as those biblical mountain rocks: I have heard the still, small voice and it was that of the bacteria demolishing my cosmos.

In ‘Emerging’, then, the machine’s presence is accepted, and the language of science employed, but the potential consequences of the scientific revolution remain frightening. The style of the poem, even more than its content, conveys this: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Circular as our way is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted garden, but onward to the tall city of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

The break between ‘way’ and ‘is’ stresses the idea that our way continues to be circular. This becomes important because, despite the declaration that we are not returning to a mythical ‘snake-haunted / garden’, we are circling back, indeed, have circled back, to a haunted place. By separating ‘snake-haunted’ from ‘garden’, Thomas allows the adjective to remain spatially independent from the noun. Of course, ‘snake-haunted’ does modify ‘garden’, but as we have been discussing, systematic enjambement draws our attention to individual words, divorced from sentence meaning. ‘Snake-haunted’, resonating with other terminal words – including ‘way’, ‘city’ and ‘spirit’ – suggests that our ‘way’ is leading us, has led us, to a haunted place, a place where ‘Whatever you imagine / has happened’, where ‘No words / are unspoken, no actions / undone’ (‘Thus’, LS, p. 48).66 In this place, the snake that haunts us is ourselves, the actions of our unchecked minds.67


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Despite its awareness of destruction, of evil, ‘Emerging’ is ultimately a poem about growth, and it ends on an optimistic note. Misapplied science destroys, but pure science has spiritual potential. In the ‘city / of glass that is [also] the laboratory of the spirit’, the poet, who is ‘the supreme manipulator of metaphor’, can conduct his ‘endless attempts and experiments’.68 Terry Whalen calls the poems of H’m ‘intensely exploratory attempt[s] to relate Godhead to the urgency of contemporary reality’, and this is also true of the late poetry as a whole.69 Paradoxically, then, it was in prehistoric Llŷn, where he was conscious of being in touch with rocks so old that they were effectively timeless, that R. S. Thomas increasingly experimented with the language of the modern.

New thinking and new subject matter Therefore when I stand at night and look towards the stars .â•‹.â•‹. I am not a dreamer belonging to the old primitive lineage of Llŷn, but someone who, partaking of contemporary knowledge, can still wonder at that Being that keeps it all in balance. (A, p. 145)

R. S. Thomas began his career as ‘a dreamer’ who longed for ‘the old primitive lineage’ of Wales. This longing evolved into a vision of Wales that could exist only in his imagination. When his country could not live up to his ideals, Thomas ‘internalize[d] the dream for [safe] keeping’.70 At Aberdaron, the poems continued to probe interior space even as Thomas’s poetic vision expanded into outer space, to God-space.71 Aided by his daily readings in philosophy, theology and popular science, he intensified his religious questioning, and his poetry became relentless as it sought a way to approach God metaphorically. Metaphor had always been Thomas’s way of approaching deity, even in his vocation as priest.72 But now his imagination embraced metaphors of modernity. The above image of Thomas ‘look[ing] towards the stars’ is a revealing one, as is his choice of adjectives. As he gazed up from ageless Llŷn, he was no longer ‘a dreamer belonging to the old .â•‹.â•‹. lineage’, but a ‘partak[er] of contemporary knowledge’ (A, p. 145). We have discussed star imagery in Thomas’s early work, romantic imagery inspired by Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the Georgians and eventually W. B. Yeats. But for the later R. S. Thomas, stars can be approached, searched through the lenses of science. Having ‘re-interpreted / the stars’ signals’ (‘Scenes’, LS, p. 44), this one-time stargazer turns ‘space’ traveller, probing God-space and selfspace simultaneously, an ‘astronaut / on impossible journeys / to the far


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side of the self’ (‘The New Mariner’, BHN, p. 99).73 Indeed, in this metaphoric space travel, each probe sent out has, as its other face, an equal and opposite inquiry, or in-query. In ‘Groping’ (F, p. 12), Thomas emphasizes this bi-directional movement through lineation: ‘Moving away is only to the boundaries / of the self’ and ‘The best journey to make / is inward’ (italics added). In contrast to his telescopic expeditions into space, R. S. Thomas’s inward journeys often privilege chemical and microscopic metaphors, searching the table of elements and the normally sub-visible world.74 This inward focus informs the prosody we have been discussing. As we saw in ‘Making’, Thomas often draws our focus to individual words, rather than their combinations. In this way, prosody becomes a microscope of sorts, a lens that magnifies components (particles) of language, which are not always seen when one reads text at the macroscopic (prose) level: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Far off, As through water, he saw A scorched land of fierce Colour. The light burned There; crusted buildings Cast their shadows; a bright Serpent, a river Uncoiled itself, radiant With slime. (‘The Coming’, H’m, p. 35)

At first, this passage, because it begins with ‘far off’, appears more telescopic than microscopic; in the end, however, it exemplifies the twin out-and-in movement that we have been discussing, calling readers’ attention to the small elements that make up the sweeping vista. Visual elements – ‘water’, ‘scorched land’, ‘colour’, ‘light burned’, ‘crusted buildings’, ‘shadows’, ‘serpent’, ‘slime’ – are highlighted to an effect that grammar verse and prose cannot achieve. The same is true with adjectives that are separated from their nouns: ‘fierce’, ‘bright’, ‘radiant’. Each element is magnified by lineation. Indeed, for a poet who is perpetually seeking, minutiae become at least as important as the expanse of outer space. Everything, indeed, every component of a thing, deserves attention since ‘deep down is as distant / as far out’ (‘They’, WI, p. 28), and since there is ‘nothing / so small that [God’s] workmanship / is not revealed’ (‘Alive’, LS, p. 51). Because Thomas experiments in a metaphorical laboratory, as opposed to a real one, his science is inextricable from (and limited to) his use of


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language. ‘We are the slaves of language’, he tells Price-Owen.75 His science would often be suspect if taken as science,76 but as a way of thinking with words, it works extremely well. This indivisible union of science and language is addressed in ‘The Absence’: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Genes and molecules have no more power to call him up than the incense of the Hebrews at their altars. My equations fail as my words do. (F, p. 48)

By ending a line with ‘fail’, Thomas obviously gives prominence to the idea of metaphor’s inadequacy, brought home by the prepositional phrase on the next line: ‘My equations fail / as my words do’. This can be read in two ways. On the one hand, the poet’s equations fail in the same manner as his words fail. Both in prayer and in poems, Thomas’s words have failed to entice or compose God.77 Likewise, his adoption of scientific diction and metaphor has also failed to invoke Him. On the other hand, Thomas’s equations fail concurrently with his words. Words are needed for scientific expression, whether in prayer or in a poem, and for Thomas, prayer and poetry are essentially similar.78 Thus, any failure of science – of ‘genes and molecules’ – is, for Thomas, also a linguistic failure and a spiritual one; his ‘altar’ is ultimately the page, his offering words. Lineation, coupled with a stanza break, suggests a contrast between the offerings of ‘the Hebrews // at their altars’ and the verbal offerings of the poet at his altars. Line arrangement also suggests this reading: ‘At their altars, my equations fail.’ The poem says that it was as hard for the ancient Hebrews to summon God as it is for the speaker, but it also shows humility before those ancient altars and confesses that the modern believer is still worshipping at them, even when adopting contemporary metaphors. For R. S. Thomas, then, it is not a matter of either religious searching or scientific enquiry. As Morgan writes, ‘Compartmentalisation of thought is, for Thomas, a distortion of our experience of an interrelated reality,’ and ‘compartmentalisation may, ultimately, invalidate the struggle toward unity and wholeness’.79 In our discussion of ‘Emerging’, we saw that ‘the consciousness of myself in you, / of you in me’ – in short, the very ‘unity’ Morgan mentions – was tied to scientific metaphor, specifically to a view of deity as ‘God of form and number’. It is combined metaphors, in fact, that most frequently create an ‘interrelated reality’, which becomes R. S. Thomas’s way of approaching ultimate reality. We see this blending of metaphor on display in ‘Hebrews 1229’:


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If you had made it smaller we would have fallen off; larger and we would never have caught up with our clocks. Just right for us to know things are there without seeing them? Forgive us the contempt our lenses breed in us. To be brought near stars and microbes does us no good, chrysalises all, that pupate idle thoughts. We have stared and stared, and not stared truth out, and your name has occurred on and off with its accompanying shadow. Who was it said: Fear not, when fear is an ingredient of our knowledge of you? The mistake we make, looking deep into the fire, is to confer features upon a presence that is not human; to expect love from a kiss whose only property is to consume. (EA, p. 11)

The poem’s title prepares us for the subsequent melding of religious and scientific metaphor. Although the poem is certainly a meditation on Hebrews 12:29, ‘For our God is a consuming fire’, Thomas has written the title in exponential form; thus, we associate the poet’s thought proÂ�cesses with something akin to solving an equation (and also with raising the intensity of the scriptural equation to the 29th power). ‘Hebrews 1229’ takes in several different sciences: astronomy (planetary motion, stars and lenses); physics (gravitation); and biology (microbes, lenses and metamorphosis). The speaker begins by viewing creation from the perspective of optimal gravitation, reinforced by what first appears to be a comment on the first four lines, ‘Just right’. However, ‘Just right’ grammatically belongs to the succeeding lines, which ask a question: ‘Just right / for us to know things are there / without seeing them?’ ‘Just right’, therefore, works dually, first as commentary on the first four lines, then as a query about them. Why, the speaker is asking, would a God who creates an optimal physical existence create such a difficult spiritual reality? The phrase ‘to know things are there / without seeing them’ is, on one level, a reference to the sub-visible world, but it is also a biblical allusion. While the poem is a meditation on a verse from Hebrews 12, the previous chapter of Hebrews contains the most apposite biblical definition of faith: ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not


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seen.’80 These words, ‘substance’ and ‘evidence’, are scientific words, but St Paul uses them to describe the invisible: faith, hope, things not seen. The biblical allusion deepens our awareness of what the poem implies: that earth’s size can be measured, its gravity calculated, but belief in God cannot be worked out in a similar way. Lineation reinforces this disparity between physical and spiritual evidence. When we read the phrase ‘to know things are there’ at the end of line 5, we are still in the ‘just right’ mode of optimal creation, still following a confident statement, so, when we make the turn to line 6, we are surprised to find that we have been reading a question. The assured speaking voice becomes less certain, and the reader must re-evaluate his or her relationship to the poem even as certainties of gravitational physics are yielding to uncertainties of faith. In other words, prosody brings speaker and reader together just as a central theme is revealed: the unseen is part of God’s creation; human experience is ‘just right’ to provide a lack of evidence. It is, in fact, this lack that ultimately breeds contempt in the lines ‘Forgive / us the contempt our lenses / breed in us’. These ‘lenses’ are, on one level, telescopic and microscopic instruments that allow us to see ‘stars and microbes’. But these ‘lenses’ are also our own eyes. When we cannot see ‘evidence’ of God with our human lenses, what good are those other lenses? They merely elevate our sightlessness to a new, exponential power. Thus, ‘To be brought near / stars and microbes does us no good’. Again, lineation is important. ‘To be brought near’ ends line 8, suggesting that we are perhaps near God, but the line break only brings us close to stars, to microbes. In this way the poem is mimetic: it brings us near to God for a moment, then breaks away, placing us where He is not. Thomas uses a similar technique in ‘Pilgrimages’ (F, p. 51), momentarily teasing the reader with God’s poetic presence before (line-) breaking us away: ‘He is such a fast / God, always before us and / leaving as we arrive.’ Thomas also uses lineation to underscore another key theme: worship of God demands fear. In the phrase, ‘Who was it said: Fear / not’, ‘Fear’ is preceded by a colon, capitalized and in terminal position. It resounds and fills white space. The ‘not’ comes like an afterthought, after the fear has been emphasized. Rather than faith’s being the substance of the unseen God, ‘fear is an ingredient / of our knowledge of [God]’. No doubt Thomas recalls that Hebrews 12:28 ends with an exhortation to serve God ‘with reverence and Godly fear’. This is the precursor to verse 29, ‘For our God is a consuming fire’. The ‘for’ that begins verse 29 can, therefore, be read as ‘because’. We should serve God ‘with reverence and Godly fear [because] God is a consuming fire’. The fear/fire juxtaposition occurs in the Bible as


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well as the poem. But, once again, because the poem’s metaphor is also scientific, the process of ‘looking deep into the fire’ cannot be separated from processes of thermodynamics, heat transfer, radiation, combustion, friction et cetera. The word ‘property’ – used in chemistry, mathematics and physics – plays off these associations, but it also makes God’s ‘kiss’ seem material, something that has properties, when in fact our error, our ‘mistake’, is making God material at all. Again, Thomas suggests these things by melding metaphor; the process of ‘looking deep’ where we ‘stare and stare’ is part of both spiritual and scientific activity. One other biblical verse is part of the ‘substance’ of ‘Hebrews 1229’, and it is one to which Thomas frequently alludes: And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. (Exodus 3:2–3)

The fact that a burning bush is not consumed leads Moses to ‘turn aside’, to ‘see’, and this becomes an important metaphor in Thomas’s work. Life â•…â•… 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. (‘The Bright Field’, LS, p. 60)

These lines express faith, not fear. The speaker can see the ‘brightness’ of eternity. And yet, in ‘Hebrews 1229’, the act of ‘looking deep into the fire’ and ‘expecting love / from a kiss’ is a ‘mistake’. It is ‘the mistake / we make’. Again, lineation places emphasis on the pronoun, implying that God has also made mistakes (see the earlier discussion of ‘Making’) but also asserting the error in anthropomorphizing ‘a presence / that is not human’. In a letter to Simon Barker dated 21 March 1983, Thomas referred to the ‘bourgeois cosiness’ of those who ‘pray as though God is listening at the key hole’, calling them ‘the “our heavenly father” gang’. In a slightly earlier letter (9 January 1983), he wrote: ‘Perhaps I could say it is people like (Alfred North) Whitehead and Tillich that appeal more, because of their attempt to distance the deity.’81 The point is that for Thomas, increasingly in this period, God was not a being, but being itself, or ‘the Ground of Being’, an idea he gleaned from Tillich.82 One cannot, he concludes, expect love from such a source. Indeed, ‘expecting love’ ends the penultimate line, so the poem momentarily suggests that expecting love at all is a


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mistake.83 Again, this discourages faith. Unlike ‘the lit bush’ which is not consumed, God’s ‘only property is to consume’. One might guess ‘The Bright Field’ to be a later poem than ‘Hebrews 1229’. If so, it might demonstrate a growth in faith. But, in fact, it was written approximately eleven years earlier. This reinforces what we have already decided, namely, that R. S. Thomas’s experiments – with language, with metaphor, with ‘new thinking’ and ‘new subject matter’ – are discrete, independent experiments, not final demonstrations or proofs, not meant to be reconciled. For Thomas, ‘any poem paradoxically devoted to defining the infinite was necessarily provisional and self-cancelling’.84 In a fragmented world, each poem is itself a fragment of meaning. Søren Kierkegaard, a major influence on Thomas’s ‘new thinking’, argued that ‘it is contrary to the spirit of our Society to produce closely coherent works or greater wholes’, and that we ‘recognize the fragmentary as a characteristic of all human striving in its truth’.85 Minhinnick writes that Thomas’s poems ‘seem cuttings from an invisible main work, sketches for a masterpiece that has disappeared’.86 Minhinnick views this as a weakness, but the very strength of the late poetry is in the ‘cuttings’ and ‘sketches’, each one a piece of the poet’s vision, an experimental fragment. In Eliot’s words, ‘each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating’.87 Thomas’s poetry engages the work of other thinkers seeking to reconcile the scientific and the devotional. Specifically, he seems to have responded to the popular writings of two physicists, Fritjof Capra and Paul Davies. These writers offered the poet a view of the scientific world that went beyond rote, mechanical thinking and concerned itself with the spiritual. In The Tao of Physics (1975), Capra makes a case for a union between scientific and religious thought that is very similar to many of Thomas’s own statements.88 Notably, Capra argues that ‘all things and events perceived by the senses .â•‹.â•‹. are but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality’, and he maintains that the foundations of twentieth-century physics, including ‘attempts .â•‹.â•‹. to describe the phenomena of the submicroscopic world’, are essentially mystical by nature.89 Thomas referred to Capra, and The Tao of Physics, in his 1988 ‘Undod ’ (‘Unity’) lecture, arguing that contemporary physicists like Capra had discovered ‘just how mysterious the universe is, and that we need qualities such as imagination and intuition and a mystical attitude if we are to begin to discover its secrets’ (SP, p. 147). Thomas also pointed to Capra in ‘Probings’, mentioning his work in conjunction with that of Davies: ‘I have been interested in the tendency of recent physics to harmonize to some extent with


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Eastern theology and have read some of the works of Fritjof Capra and Paul Davies.’90 In God and the New Physics (1983), Davies wrote: It is my deep conviction that only by understanding the world in all its many aspects – reductionist and holistic, mathematical and poetical, through forces, fields, and particles as well as through good and evil – that we will come to understand ourselves and the meaning behind the universe, our home.91

This paragraph creates a strong rationale for a melding of images and metaphor derived from science with those derived from religious reflection. And R. S. Thomas’s search for God was, as we have observed, also a search to ‘come to understand [himself]’, a search for ‘home’. Davies’s conviction, which Thomas shared, is that understanding requires a breadth of thinking and knowledge. It also requires a union of our selves and the universe. The world’s metaphor, its language, in all its variety, should be embraced: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… There is a long sigh from the shore, the wave clearing its throat to address us, requiring no answer than the due we give these things that share the world with us, that compose the world: an ever-renewed symphony to be listened to admiringly, even as we perform it on whatever instruments the generations put into our hands. (‘Andante’, EA, p. 61)

Thomas’s compositions can be ‘ever-renewed’ because he is willing to compose on the latest instruments. ‘Instruments’ can be scientific, musical or otherwise; the ‘things’ that ‘compose / the world’ are, in this context, both the table of elements that make up its substance and those who arrange that substance metaphorically. We have seen, however, that despite the poet’s desire for a unity of composition, the resulting ‘symphony’ is often disintegrated, and in this discord lies an interesting comparison. In music, the roots of symphonic form are grounded in harmony; indeed, it can be argued that tonal logic is the basis of the symphony, at least from a historical point of view. Thus, some music critics, like literary critics, argue that ‘if the succession of tonalities is not clear, [the symphony] loses its momentum and balance’, and ‘some new factor must be found to give the modern symphony an excuse for existing’.92 Yet, modern composers, like modern poets, often feel that obscured tonalities and unbalanced


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forms most accurately reflect their experiences in the modern world. R. S. Thomas – who realized that the metaphoric music of this world is often ‘one grass blade / grat[ing] on another as member / of a disdained orchestra’ (‘Retired’, MHT, p. 23), and that modern ‘music’ can be, and often is, composed by people like Adolf Eichmann, who ‘played on his / / victims’ limbs the symphony / of perdition’ (ERS, p. 23) – opened himself to the possibilities, even the bleak and cacophonous ones, of modern metaphor, and to a corresponding, necessary expansion of technique. He began to speak to the modern world in its language, from the inside, rather than continuing to rail against it from behind self-erected barriers. By embracing pure science, R. S. Thomas was also able to warn against the misuse of science, what he called ‘The Frankenstein spectre’.93 Thomas’s work may remind us of McLuhan’s pronouncements on the importance of artists in the technological age: The effects of technology do not occur at the levels of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.94

In Thomas’s case, the artist was ‘aware of the changes in sense perception’ because he was participating in those changes and actively trying to embody them in poetry. His lines reflect the modern age: its communication and language, its instability and fragmentation, its evolving metaphors, its starved spirit. Thomas brought all of these to the words he placed on poetry’s altar: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… God, I whispered, refining my technique, signalling to him on the frequencies I commanded. (‘One Way’, BHN, p. 95)

Technique must constantly be refined if the poet is to master modern frequencies of communication and use them in his worship. Here, lineation emphasizes key words – ’God’, ‘refining’, ‘signalling’, ‘frequencies’, ‘commanded’ – and line breaks once again accentuate pronouns: ‘refining / my technique, signalling / to him on the frequencies / I commanded’. The poem’s structure of non-autonomous lines suggests an unstable setting for communication, and also that communication is itself unstable. At times, Thomas extends this instability beyond lineation and into spatial arrangement:


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He had strange dreams â•…â•… that were real in which he saw God â•…â•… showing him an aperture â•…â•…â•…â•… of the horizon wherein â•…â•… were flasks and test-tubes. â•…â•…â•…â•… And the rainbow ended there not in a pot â•…â•… of gold, but in colours that, dissected, had the ingredients of â•…â•… the death ray. (‘Roger Bacon’, F, p. 40)

As in other poems from this period, sentences are ‘dissected’, reflecting instability.95 But because the poem itself has ‘the ingredients of / the death ray’, lines become even more volatile.96 They behave like free radicals, atoms with rogue electrons, as they vibrate and shape-shift. The implication is that Roger Bacon, arguably the father of experimental science, also possessed these same ‘ingredients’. In other words, the poem is structurally mimetic because it represents both the reactionary components of ‘the death ray’ and the volatile thinking of Roger Bacon, who, according to Thomas, possessed ‘the kind of mind that can drive [one] to invent deadly and ruinous things’ (A, p. 107). As John Pikoulis says of Thomas’s poem ‘Castaway’ (YO, p. 27), lines ‘crackle with tension; they slip, slide, will not stay in place .â•‹.â•‹. as if in reaction to the discovery of how vulnerable life now is’.97 Thomas has, indeed, discovered vulnerability, volatility, ‘ruinous things’, ‘the galaxies’ / violence, the meaningless wastage / of force’ (‘Balance’, F, p. 49), and his poetry reflects these realities even as it addresses them. Among the books in Thomas’s personal library when he died was I. T. Ramsey’s Religion and Science: Conflict and Synthesis (1964). Thomas rarely made notes or comments in the margins of books, but he did make a telling annotation in Ramsey’s book.98 At one point, Ramsey recounts the biblical story of the prophet Nathan, who confronts King David about his many evils. David, according to Ramsey, has been in a kind of denial or mental fog, but Nathan’s accusation makes him self-aware, obliging David to open a previously closed mind.99 Ramsey relates this to the moral obligation that must be present in both religion and science. According to him, an aware personality ‘can allow for and welcome the full and everexpanding range of scientific inquiry; it can also help bridge the moral, for it is a concept rooted in and common to both types of discourse’.100 Next


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to this passage, which Thomas has marked with an asterisk, is a question written in Thomas’s hand: ‘Who is to act as a Nathan to the scientist?’ R. S. Thomas’s later poetry is an answer to his own question.101 He took it upon himself, as a poet in the Welsh tradition and as a poet of the modern age, to act as a warning voice and ‘help bridge the moral’ between modes of enquiry. He outlined the need for such a voice in his interview with Barker: Roger Bacon says, I have discovered this explosive but don’t blame me for the use you put it to. Well, human beings, as I say, because they’re unimaginative, because they’re greedy, fleshly, weak, you know, all these things, they will misuse it .â•‹.â•‹. I think the only hope for society – or the main hope, I won’t put it at the only hope – the main hope for society is through the artist, because he’s a man of vision .â•‹.â•‹. he has an understanding of human needs and frailties.102

This passage reveals how Thomas’s private poems became public: the artist’s own imagination and vision have the potential to create awareness in others. As Thomas wrote elsewhere, the artist can ‘mak[e] private and personal and dear things universal .â•‹.â•‹. in verse which is contemporary’.103 By examining his own ‘human needs and frailties’, and by doing so in progressive, even experimental poetry, R. S. Thomas did not ‘disclaim responsibility’. Neither did he continue to rail, as he did at Eglwys-fach, against those who lack vision. Instead, he sought to provide a ‘hope for society’ by holding a mirror up to it. He believed that ‘because of his clearsightedness a poet is less easy to dupe, so in a way does have an obligation to warn his neighbours against the conditioned or stock response’.104 ‘The New Mariner’ (BHN, p. 99), which is of course a play on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, suggests this ‘obligation’. In Coleridge’s poem, the Ancient Mariner has a message, gained from profound experience, that he is compelled to share; accordingly, he stops a guest on his way to a wedding and delivers his speech on the ultimate harmony of the creation and the dangers of mindless, unimaginative individualism and violence. The mariner, like the poet, brings a message of the need for unity within the created universe – a unity symbolized by the wedding itself. While Thomas’s ‘New Mariner’ ‘cannot decipher’ his own message, the raw, shifting and fragmented nature of that message may nevertheless reach a fragmented world. Thus, the speaker feels compelled to ‘[worry] the ear / of the passer-by, hot on his way / to the marriage of plain fact with plain fact’. This marriage, unlike its counterpart in Coleridge’s poem, does not symbolize unity. ‘Plain fact’ is what imagination-less, spirit-less scientists wield; combinations, or ‘marriages’, of these facts eventually give birth to ‘the cold acts of the machine’ (‘The Gap’, LS, p. 37).


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R. S. Thomas’s poetry attempts to be a ‘Nathan’ to the breeders and practitioners of ‘plain fact’. We might ask some questions of those critics who reject Thomas’s late prosody out of hand: What style would be more appropriate? What other form, for example, can contain malleable gasses and shifting atoms? Where is a prosody that is a more effective mimetic of time dilation, Doppler red shift or a black hole? What other line or syntax can contain the process of radioactive decay, symbolized by the imaginative dynamism of ‘radioactive verses’?105 Is there a pattern of lines or stanzas that can neatly contain metaphors for eclectic, often uncertain, spiritual probing, and for humanity’s disintegrating spirit? Adrienne Rich, whose work we discussed in the previous chapter, once described her early use of poetic form as ‘asbestos gloves’ because ‘it allowed [her] to handle materials [she] couldn’t pick up barehanded’.106 Later in her career, however, Rich abandoned rhyme and metre in favour of a free verse that could adapt as she directly confronted unique experiences. This was also the case with R. S. Thomas. He found that the established conventions of poetry were as about as useful .â•‹.â•‹. as a map would be for an astronaut. A modern poet’s explorations in faith require the reformation of language and they lead to a discovery that in looking merely for a lost world of belief he has entered a boundless universe of spiritual experience.107

It is this experience most of all that is reflected in Thomas’s late prosody. Indeed, it is perhaps obvious by now that the fragmented spiritual world of these poems is a reflection of a fragmented poet, a perpetually estranged R. S. Thomas for whom ‘there was no developing / structure’ but, rather, ‘the dismantling / by the self of a self it / could not reassemble’ (‘In Context’, F, p. 13). Thomas’s poems are, in some ways, obsessive experiments in a personal God-quest, but they are also a consciously contemporized public voice, a kind of ‘Nathan to the scientist’ in a technology-driven world, meant to increase awareness and accountability.108 This tension is embodied by a style that exemplifies instability, uncertainty and constant change. One can argue, as some critics have, that the poems suffer for this. But one can also conclude, as Hooker has, that the poems exhibit ‘a greater strength and intensity’ than is found in Thomas’s earlier work, that he ‘sounds vibrancies, and signals given and received, with an unmistakable voice’ and that this period, therefore, represents ‘the culmination of the greatest phase of [R. S. Thomas’s] writing’.109


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5 A Style (Un)Refined, 1988–2000

There is no God but God. This is what exists at the centre of things, the unity in which everyone can see the reason for, and the meaning of, the life of the whole of creation and of their own little personal lives. It was a sublime and triumphant vision which inspired man’s greatest works in art, music, and literature. And it is far from finished with even today. Indeed, there are signs that this will be the creed of the future, too. (‘Unity’, SP, p. 144)

In 1978 R. S. Thomas left behind Aberdaron, and his forty years as a clergyman, retiring to the four-hundred-year-old cottage at Sarn-y-Plas, just a few miles to the north-east. The cottage – made famous by a Howard Barlow photograph that depicts Thomas leaning over the half-door, looking every bit the formidable ‘Ogre of Wales’ of popular myth – overlooked the bay at Porth Neigwl, or Hell’s Mouth. In The Echoes Return Slow (1988), perhaps the most important volume from this period, Thomas described the cottage as ‘a sounding box in which the sea’s moods made themselves felt’. Like those of the sea, the poet’s own, fluctuating moods pervade his late work, often bringing currents of isolation and despair (p. 104). The Echoes Return Slow, as Brown observes, was ‘written in Elsi’s last long illness’,1 and much of Mass for Hard Times (1992) was written in the wake of her passing; Thomas, who had, in one sense, always been isolated, now found himself alone in a haunting cottage.2 At Sarn-y-Plas, ‘lights turn / to sores in the mist’, and it often appears that landscape and seascape ‘[have] nothing / to teach but that time / is the spirit’s privation’ (‘Plas-yn-Rhiw’, MHT, p. 30). But the sea has calmer tides as well. Indeed, there is an increased attention to balance in the late work, particularly as regards the existential self. With renewed persistence R. S. Thomas explores the self he has never fully known – its imprecision, its complexity, its composition


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over time. The tide’s moods, as well as the poet’s memories, wash up their detritus and wreckage, but there are also intermittent waves of unity, moments of calm when the fragments are made whole. Of course, attempts at wholeness have never been entirely absent from Thomas’s poetry.3 We saw, for example, the possibility of oneness in ‘Emerging’ (LS, p. 1), where Thomas writes of ‘the consciousness of myself in you, / of you in me’, and ‘Andante’ (EA, p. 61), where the elements that ‘compose / the world’ play ‘an ever renewed / symphony’. Rare as they are, such moments offer momentary glimpses of a reality akin to Wordsworth’s ‘central peace subsisting at the heart / of endless agitation’.4 In his introduction to A Choice of Wordsworth’s Verse, Thomas quoted these lines and argued that they represent ‘the heights’ of Wordsworth’s abilities.5 The idea of a ‘central peace’ is also echoed in Thomas’s 1985 ‘Undod’ [‘Unity’] lecture, quoted at the head of this chapter, where he speaks of ‘what exists at the centre of things, the unity in which everyone can see the reason for, and the meaning of, the life of the whole of creation and of their own little personal lives’ (SP, p. 144). While much of the poetry Thomas wrote in retirement continues to emblematize fragmentariness, a random universe and a disintegrated self, his late style also reveals attempts to overcome these through acts of composition, both in poetry and, in the case of The Echoes Return Slow, corresponding adjacent prose. In his last efforts to organize unrefined experience, Thomas refined his poetic technique. As discussed in chapter 3, one of Thomas’s chief complaints was that critics were too narrow in their analyses of his work. One narrow view is that Thomas’s work is all bleakness and brokenness. For example, Dyson rightly describes Thomas as ‘a poet of the cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness’, but he seems at pains to keep him in the dark.6 He neglects the essential, if infrequent, moments of wholeness expressed in the poetry: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… For some it is all darkness; for me, too, it is dark. But .â•‹.â•‹. sometimes a strange light shines, purer than the moon. (‘Groping’, F, p. 12)

‘At the End’ (NTF, p. 42), an example of late optimism in Thomas’s work, also reads like a response to critics who have been narrow in their assessment of his vision: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… By day the passers-by, who are not


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pilgrims, stare through the rain’s bars, seeing me as prisoner of the one view, I who have been made free by the tide’s pendulum truth that the heart that is low now will be at the full tomorrow.

As demonstrated repeatedly in this study, R. S. Thomas has often been caricatured as a dour hermit obsessing over equally dour hill farmers. ‘At the End’ is partially a response to these stereotypes in that it addresses false conjectures made by ‘passers-by’. These ‘are not pilgrims’ on their way to Bardsey Island but, more likely, tourists visiting Llŷn from ‘the city lights’ that the speaker has ‘rejected’. The poem’s lineation suggests that these ‘passers-by .â•‹.â•‹. are not’; that is, they are either imaginary or, more likely, lacking in substance. The linear turn then emphasizes what these ‘passers-by’ are not: ‘pilgrims’, fellowseekers, those who share the poet’s vision. More particularly, they do not share his vision of himself, which has never been reducible to ‘one view’. This punning phrase – ‘prisoner / of the one view’ – most clearly alludes to false depictions of R. S. Thomas. While there is a single outlook from Sarn-y-Plas over Porth Neigwl, this ‘view’ is more expansive than any view from Aberdaron. Passers-by may see it as limited, but it leads the poet to his most expansive meditations. Of course, Thomas is also referring to his ‘views’, his own opinions and perceptions, which are often seen as narrow in scope, a single furrow, ‘a restricted [world]’.7 As we have seen, even some critics who read the poetry carefully have been guilty of making Thomas into a ‘prisoner of .â•‹.â•‹. one view’ because they fail to see, or at least fail to acknowledge, ‘pendulum truth’. The image of an imprisoned speaker is brought out clearly by the image of ‘rain’s / bars’. ‘Rain’s’ is guaranteed attention by its line-end position, and the possessive construction increases reader anticipation (the rain’s what?). Thus, when the reader encounters ‘bars’ and then, owing to a comma, must immediately pause, the image of speaker-as-prisoner becomes vivid, then is further underscored as ‘bars’ shares a line with ‘seeing me as prisoner’. Perhaps as a reaction to such characterization, Thomas concludes ‘At the End’ with an expression of faith, in a poetic form that reflects a development towards unity. The poem begins by constructing a life from fragments: ‘Few possessions: a chair, / a table, a bed / to say my prayers by .â•‹.â•‹. bone-like, crossed-sticks’. The tone and linear separation remind one of ‘Making’ (H’m, p. 17): ‘first moss, then grass’ .â•‹.â•‹. ‘I thought up the


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flowers / Then birds .â•‹.â•‹. animals / To divert me’. But unlike ‘Making’, ‘At the End’ gradually moves from a list of fragments, expressed in lines that break across syntax, towards alignment until, in its last four lines, lineation coincides with phrasing, creating a structural oneness, a unity of form that culminates in a rhymed couplet: ‘that the heart that is low now / will be at the full tomorrow’. This is not an exact rhyme any more than the poem expresses permanent oneness. The full heart will, like the tide, fall low once again. Still, to fix Thomas’s poetry permanently at its ebb – as in one critic’s remark that ‘his subject matter has always been rather lowering’ and that ‘the lowered, daunted quality of the subject matter is matched by the same characteristics in the expression’ – is inaccurate, a demonstration of the critical reductiveness of which Thomas often complained.8 Thus, in the late poems, the tide is a metaphor not only for changing moods, but also for the fluctuating results of faith: The waves run up the shore and fall back. I run up the approaches of God and fall back. (‘Tidal’, MHT, p. 43)

Lines 1 and 3 are both broken just before the words ‘and fall back’; both line endings are like crested waves in the last moment before gravity claims them. Thomas breaks both lines at natural grammatical pauses, before conjunctions.This creates a rhythmic evenness, the lines breaking as the waves do. And because a full stop follows each ‘fall back’, both ‘fallen’ lines completely die out, exhausted. Because line 2 ends with a less natural pause, between verb and preposition, and because it begins a new sentence at its end, the subject and verb ‘I run’ are emphasized, underscoring the speaker’s metaphorical relationship to the tide: ‘I run / up the approaches of God’. In other words, the speaker’s acts of worship are like waves breaking on God, then falling back.9 Depite the exhaustion, the speaker strikes a more positive tone at the end of the poem: Let despair be known as my ebb-tide; but let prayer have its springs, too, brimming, disarming him; discovering somewhere among his fissures deposits of mercury where trust may take root and grow.

And yet, just as the readers encounters the image of brimming prayer, which is positive and faith affirming, the line break immediately introduces the


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unexpected idea that God needs to be ‘disarmed’. This might simply be read as ‘surprised’ or ‘won-over’, but it also suggests that God is armed and ready for battle with the supplicant; thus, ‘disarming’ effectually disarms the reader, taking away his or her sense of overflowing faith. The verb is perhaps a reference to breaking God’s silence, His preferred weapon, and also to removing obstacles to unity.10 Significantly, however, the poem expresses the need to find trust ‘among [God’s] fissures’. That is, it is within the cracks and broken places that trust must ‘take root and grow’. The line break emphasizes this: ‘discovering somewhere / among his fissures’. Indeed, for R. S. Thomas, wholeness emerges from disorder. It ‘takes root’ after traditional tropes of religion, of prayer, have been disarmed. This is why Thomas subscribes to Keats’s definition of negative capability: when he finds unity, he finds it ‘in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts’.11 From a stylistic perspective, this generally translates into a verbal structure that feels its way through uncertainty. And yet, as we have also demonstrated, there is, in the late poetry, an intensified struggle to order experience, as it relates to both the world and the self. This can be seen in the structure of the poems, and it is perhaps most notable in Thomas’s late use of the stanza.12

The sight-stanza I have seldom seen such disorder and brokenness – such a mass of unrelated parts and things lying about. That’s it! I concluded to myself. An unrecognizable order! Actually – the new!13 ‘Thomas divides his stanzas in unusual ways,’ he cautioned his pupil. ‘The last word of this stanza, “What,” is the first word in the next stanza, actually. The meaning of the line doesn’t end there’.14

Taken together, the above excerpts become a good introduction to R. S. Thomas’s late use of the stanza. He uses visual stanzas – what we, borrowing a term from Philip Jason, will call ‘sight-stanzas’ – to unify what William Carlos Williams calls ‘unrelated parts and things’, attempting to transcend ‘disorder and brokenness’. In fact, Thomas probably first encountered the sight-stanza in the poetry of Williams. In addition, ‘Thomas divides his stanzas in unusual ways’ and ‘the meaning of the line doesn’t end [with the stanza]’. These latter assertions, spoken by the character Kizu in Kanzaburō Ōe’s novel Somersault, are important when we consider


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the manner in which Thomas uses ‘sight-stanzas’ to approach order and wholeness. Beginning in Frequencies (1978), and increasingly in the later work, poems are written in strophes that resemble each other, both in length of line and number of lines. As we have discussed in previous chapters, the visual, or graphic, element of poetry is not merely transcription of sound. What was once an oral genre is now largely encountered as printed text.15 Spatiality, rendered via typography, can work prosodically because it affects the way a poem is read. It groups, divides and juxtaposes material in ways other than strictly linear. Unlike critical-theoretical approaches to the line in poetry, which are extremely diverse, critical commentary on the stanza has been surprisingly consistent. A characteristic description of the stanza appears in Jason’s piece, ‘Stanzas and anti-stanzas’: The material of the poem is divided into roughly equal units suggesting equivaÂ�lent weight. The white space between each pair of stanzas stands for some shift in perspective, emotion, imagery, or thought. Variations from the normative stanzaic patterns are purposefully crafted to create a range of special relationships among stanza materials. The shaping of the poem into stanzas contributes to the effect and meaning of the poem in demonstrable ways; the deviations from the produced or implied stanzaic norms have meaning when observed against the normative pattern.16

In R. S. Thomas’s early work, stanzas more or less fall in line with Jason’s description. They are almost always self-contained: sentences do not cross the white space between stanzas, and white space ‘stands for some shift’. In Thomas’s middle to late work, poems are often stichic, having no stanzas at all, but when poems are stanzaic their stanzas are, almost without exception, also self-contained.17 Any number of poems could be used to illustrate this. ‘Sorry’ (BT, p. 12) will serve our purpose: Dear parents, I forgive you my life, Begotten in a drab town, The intention was good; Passing the street now, I see still the remains of sunlight. It was not the bone buckled; You gave me enough food To renew myself. It was the mind’s weight Kept me bent, as I grew tall.


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It was not your fault. What should have gone on, Arrow aimed from a tried bow At a tried target, has turned back, Wounding itself With questions you had not asked.

Even without explicating the poem we can see that it is ‘divided into roughly equal units suggesting equivalent weight’. Though there is some enjambement, it never cuts sharply across syntax, and many of the lines are end-stopped. Each phase of the poem is housed within a strophic boundary. Stanza 1 addresses the speaker’s parents and their intentions. Stanza 2 contrasts those intentions with the speaker’s reality as he grew. Stanza 3 returns to the present and draws conclusions about the meaning of the past. The poem, therefore, falls nicely in line with Jason’s description: ‘the white space between each pair of stanzas stands for some shift in perspective, emotion, imagery, or thought’. However, when discussing ‘Stanzas and anti-stanzas’, Jason concerns himself primarily with the latter, or what he sees as a false use of stanzas: One of the more disturbing habits of contemporary practitioners of poetry is that of casting their non-stanzaic works in stanzaic shapes. For reasons that are either unclear or suspect, a phenomenon which may be called the ‘sightstanza’ has developed: on the printed page, the poem looks stanzaic, but no clear principle of stanzaic composition justifies this appearance.18

To this Jason adds: ‘To borrow the prestige of stanzaic form without paying the price of stanzaic control is a deceit.’19 Based on these descriptions, Jason would have found R. S. Thomas’s late use of the stanza disconcerting, even dishonest at times. Although Thomas’s stanzas do attempt ‘stanzaic control’, they do not always ‘[pay] the price’ in the way Jason prefers, namely by dividing themselves according to movements in time, theme, grammar et cetera. Much as he earlier violated the notion of ‘line integrity’, R. S. Thomas, beginning in Frequencies, increasingly violates the conventions of the stanza, crossing white space without making any discernible, transitional ‘shift’. One of the first poems to reflect this change, one that is also a good illustration of the reasons for the change, is ‘The White Tiger’: It was beautiful as God must be beautiful; glacial eyes that had looked on violence and come to terms


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with it; a body too huge and majestic for the cage in which it had been put; up and down in the shadow of its own bulk it went, lifting, as it turned, the crumpled flower of its face to look into my own face without seeing me. It was the colour of the moonlight on snow and as quiet as moonlight, but breathing as you can imagine that God breathes within the confines of our definition of him, agonising over immensities that will not return. (F, p. 45)

Certainly, ‘The White Tiger’ is visually stanzaic. Each line grouping contains the same number of lines as the others, and all lines are leftjustified and of approximately equal length.20 Thus, there is a typographic balance which suggests order and evenness. But these stanzas do not function as quatrains except in the broadest definition of that term, and the poem’s visual order is seemingly at odds with its lineation. In point of fact, however, lineation and stanza division play off each other in prosodically significant ways. In the first stanza, line breaks necessitate several adjustments. The first line apparently stands alone, a straight simile: ‘It was beautiful as God’. After the line break, however, the sentence continues: ‘as God / must be beautiful’. This technique, as it so often does, accents the first word of the next line. The grammatical phrase reads like a kind of imaginative, even wistful, conjecture, as in the sentence, ‘Heaven must be a beautiful place’, but lineation makes the sentence more forceful, suggesting an attribute we often require of God – ‘God / must be beautiful’ – an insistence that ‘truth should defer / To beauty’ (‘Petition’, H’m, p. 2, italics added). Yet the beautiful, we learn, is also dangerous. ‘Glacial’, at the end of line 2, brings to mind images of a beautiful, cold mass with the potential to destroy, and as


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we read through the line break, discovering that ‘glacial’ modifies ‘eyes’, that coldness and potential destructiveness is transferred back to, and is personified by, the tiger, a poetic symbol of a God that we cannot ‘domesticate .â•‹.â•‹. to our uses’ (‘Praise’, WI, p. 20). Line 3 seemingly stands alone. ‘Eyes that had looked on’ are observing eyes, watching eyes, but they are also detached. In other words, God ‘looks on’ but does not intervene. This creates a brief calm before the line break, after which ‘violence’ disrupts that calm. ‘Violence’ is given greater impact not just by its position at the head of the line, but also by the grammatical adjustment it requires of the reader: the verb changes from an intransitive verb, ‘to look on’, to a transitive verb, ‘to look on / violence’. Line 4 ends with the phrase ‘come to terms’, but the phrase is incomplete; in Kizu’s words, ‘The meaning of the line doesn’t end there.’ The tiger has ‘looked on / violence and come to terms // with it’. The meaning here is ambiguous, and asking the reader to carry the anticipation of sentence completion across both line break and stanza break only increases uncertainty. One interpretation is that God has come to physical terms with violence because he has literally felt the violence of the human world when He was a part of it.21 Another interpretation – since the line break, exaggerated by a concurrent stanza break, emphasizes the word ‘with’ – is that God has come to terms with violence; that is, he has used violence to attend to humankind. This interpretation corresponds to the God of ‘Soliloquy’ (H’m, p. 30), or the even more terrifying God of ‘The Island’ (H’m, p. 20). Or, simply, the line may suggest that the tiger has accepted violence as necessary. Interestingly, all three of these potential portrayals of God exist elsewhere in Thomas’s work, and the ambiguity of interpretation, which is also a diversity of interpretation, corresponds to the unpredictability and multidimensional nature of the tiger. If one, for instance, accentuates ‘with’, reading it as an expression of God’s violence, then the violence of the first stanza intensifies as it is carried into the second. That is, violence is no longer merely being ‘looked on’ but is now being used. However, if God is merely looking on, a detached observer, then the second stanza is somewhat anticlimactic. The violence still crosses white space, but only as a pronoun, ‘it’, not nearly as threatening as its antecedent noun, ‘violence’, which remains on the other side of white space. Therefore, the unsettled (and unsettling) form of the poem is, in its ambiguous undulations, an example of structural mimesis: the threat of the tiger moves ‘up / and down’, in one’s face or behind safe bars, tearing into the stanza, or remaining on the other side of white space, either an impending menace or a ‘flower’, harmless as ‘moonlight’ and


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‘snow’. Much could be said about the poem’s other stanzas, but we can already conclude that the relatively static visual order of stanzas in ‘The White Tiger’ is at odds with the poem’s dynamic, continually adjusting linear interiors, and this creates structural and creative tension which, in turn, helps to create meaning. Hartman refers to the visual stanza as ‘gesturing casually towards imposed order without accepting the kind applied by regular [metrical] stanzas’.22 However, in Thomas’s case it is even more than this. The very structure that ostensibly holds this poem together betrays an underlying anxiety, an interior force exerting pressure against its frame. Pace Jason’s argument that the reasons for the sightstanza are ‘unclear’ and ‘suspect’, R. S. Thomas could not have chosen a more effective mimetic structure for a ‘violent’ animal ‘too huge / and majestic for [its] cage’, and for a God made uneasy by ‘the confines / of our definition of him’.23 His stanzas reveal a struggle to contain what resists containment, a way of ‘look[ing] on / violence and com[ing] to [structural] terms // with it’. R. S. Thomas’s proclivity for experimentation, and for adapting form to the needs of each individual poem, rules out any inflexible pattern, but the use of visually congruent, open stanzas is pronounced in the late work and can be seen as one of its most relevant stylistic features. Flexible free verse continues to reflect the often volatile materials of experience while stanzaic structures, which echo the form-seeking interiors of the poet, attempt to order what would otherwise be disparate: Waking and wondering when was I and where had I been? Standing back from myself, beginning to recall uterine experience, an antiphonal music in infinite counterpoint between mirror and mirror. Time was technology’s folk-tale. My introspection could have been called a navel engagement; the truth my ability


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to hold all things in play; bringing beauty to birth out of my unbreached side. My apostrophes were to myself only. I found when I leaned closer, the second person did not exist. Vertical in my dimensionless presence I kept calling to the undying echoes: ‘Prove that I lie.’ (‘Sonata in X’, MHT, p. 81)

‘Sonata in X’ is a long poem written in untitled movements, each of which could stand alone as a poem in its own right. The above movement begins by disorienting the reader. We are initially unsure whether ‘waiting’ and ‘wondering’ are nouns or verbs, until we realize in line 3 that the first ‘sentence’of the poem is a gerund phrase. The second ‘sentence’ also happens to be a gerund phrase. As a result, we follow the movement of lines in anticipation of completion that never arrives. As in ‘The White Tiger’, sight-stanzas ensure that we are given text in even distribution, but the initial grammatical confusion, coupled with lines that cut against syntax and cross stanza breaks, works against the poem’s visual order, again creating structural tension, an underlying anxiety. And what we eventually discover is that ‘Sonata in X’ is about the anxiety of identity. The speaker is looking back on a life and trying to locate the point in time when he was most authentically the ‘I’ that is himself, as in ‘when was I and when / had I been?’ The speaker is displaced, lacking an awareness of time and place and authenticity. The confusion we experience as readers is, therefore, appropriate and intended. The first stanza break, for example, creates distance between speaker and self: ‘Standing back // from myself’. Ironically, the speaker desires to understand the self, to draw closer to genuineness, but in order to do so, he must step back and attempt to see clearly. One notes that this is not far removed from the dramatic situation of many early poems, where the speaker tries to understand the hill farmer (a persona for the poet) by considering him from a distance. But now, rather than observe the self through the indirect act of observing another, the speaker confronts himself directly.24 In this sense, the X of the poem’s title invites comparisons to an X-ray, which looks inward. However, also like an X-ray, the speaker’s image of self is an ill-defined outline, a picture of ‘bent bones .â•‹.â•‹. fractured / By life’ (‘The Kingdom’, H’m, p. 34).


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This image of the self, formed by experience, is full of uncertainty. ‘Uterine experience’, for example, is an ambiguous term. It may be a literal reference to the speaker’s beginnings, since Thomas does trace his life back to the womb in the late work, most vividly in The Echoes Return Slow, and since the pun ‘navel / engagement’ relates the speaker’s ‘introspection’ to the place of the attached or, rather, detached umbilical cord. But ‘uterine’ may also be a metaphor for a sense of self that is still developing, a kind of ‘embryonic thought’.25 Alternatively, ‘uterine experience’ may refer to all experience that is enclosed and dark, where one must ‘[grope one’s] way up to the light’ (ERS, p. 2). Certainly, this is what R. S. Thomas is doing in the late work, searching for ‘the one light that can cast such shadows’ (‘Somewhere’, LS, p. 46). And, as already noted, the search for God is also a search for self. In this light, the X in the poem’s title is the unknown quantity in ‘X = self’. ‘Sonata in X’ is not a ‘Song of Myself’; it is the song of the missing, or unknown, self. A sonata is, of course, written in a key: C major, B minor, F flat minor et cetera. A sonata written in X is off the staff, its tune unrecognizable. The poem’s reference to ‘antiphonal music’ is suggestive. ‘Antiphonal music’ is performed by two halves of a divided choir, each singing alternate musical phrases.26 In one sense, Thomas’s own songs are divided; ‘I like now polyphony’, he told Ned Thomas.27 Certainly, ‘the tide’s pendulum truth’ inspires alternating phrases, a kind of rhythmic conversation. In another sense, however, the poem locates antiphonal division within the speaker. The speaker sings to himself, and then, though he tries to ‘[stand] back // from [himself]’) and gain perspective, he finds even his observing faculty divided and estranged. In the end, he describes himself as ‘Vertical in my / dimensionless presence’. In physics, the term ‘dimensionless’ describes a physical quantity that is not measurable.28 And yet, measuring is exactly what the speaker wants to do: to quantify an unknowable quantity. His frustrated effort reveals that self-definition is also self-composition. Here, then, we come to understand one reason why R. S. Thomas uses sight-stanzas as opposed to closed stanzas. Closed stanzas are very defined, making (and marking) clear divisions and movements between line groupings. As such, they are too ordered to be structurally mimetic. Jason argues that closed stanzas ‘create a range of special relationships among stanza materials’.29 However, for R. S. Thomas, material relationships are ambiguÂ�ous, particularly as they represent the formation of self. Sight-stanzas, on the other hand, allow the poet to gesture towards order without defining what cannot yet be defined. In the words of ‘Sonata in X’, ‘truth’ is the poet’s ‘ability / to hold all things in play’; we may say


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that Thomas must formally ‘hold’ (but not confine) all things which are structurally, linearly ‘in play’. To do so makes ‘bringing beauty to birth’ a possibility. Geoffrey Hill has written that ‘In a chaotic society the poet creates his own moral world, his own pattern and order’, and this is what Thomas does with his late form.30 For him, sight-stanzas represent a way of seeking order while staying true to the rendering of insecure experience. Their open-ended structural order is continually threatened by close association with lines that resist order. In this vein, the American poet Charles Wright has said: ‘Stanzas [seem] to me the proper study of poetkind. Which is to say if the poetry isn’t in stanzas, it’s all kind of unorganized. Wrenching order out of chaos is one of the things we know poetry does.’31 Thomas’s sight-stanzas formally ‘[wrench] order out of chaos’. His linear prosody and sight-stanzas together create a fragile ‘pattern and order’, resisting each other even as they balance and complement each other. It is a kind of formal tightrope walk constantly threatened by formlessness. To use the poet’s words slightly out of context, ‘Ah // what balance is needed at / the edges of such an abyss’ (‘Threshold’, BHN, p. 110).32 It is likely that R. S. Thomas was first exposed to visual stanzas, and some of their prosodic possibilities, in the work of William Carlos Williams, who may be called the inventor of the sight-stanza.33 While it is difficult to know just how extensive Thomas’s direct response to Williams may have been (see the discussion in chapter 3 of Thomas’s debt to Williams and American poetry), it seems clear from Thomas’s comments that Williams was primarily a formal influence, rather than a thematic one.34 Lloyd does find ‘significant common ground’ between the poets, including a shared interest in birds and ‘experiences intrinsic to vocations ministering to the public: as a physician for Williams, as a priest for Thomas’.35 And Lloyd’s treatment of the poets’ comparable responses to painting is persuasive. However, ‘common ground’ is not the same thing as influence. R. S. Thomas’s interest in birds, for example, is not attributable to Williams, nor are the ‘public’ poems written at Eglwys-fach influenced by Williams’s more rhetorical offerings, such as ‘Tract’ and ‘Gulls’. As Lloyd more or less concedes, the poets are more dissimilar than alike; that is, of course, with one important exception: their use of visual form, especially the sight-stanza. It is interesting that R. S. Thomas uses the sight-stanza only in groupings of four lines or fewer. Longer stanzas, even in the late work, are closed. One reason for this may be that the eye more readily perceives a visual pattern when stanzas are shorter. If a structure made up of sight-stanzas is a


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graphic representation of order, then the reader must be able to perceive the poem as an ordered, visual structure. This is illustrated by the following comparison: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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It is not that the eye fails to see the visual pattern on the right, which groups six lines rather than three, but that it cannot easily ‘hold’ multiple stanzas of this length at one time while engaging with flexible, enjambed lines. This would not matter as much if the stanzas were closed. The white space between each stanza would be a transition, giving one permission to ‘reset’ when moving on to the next series of lines. But as we saw in both ‘The White Tiger’ and ‘Sonata in X’, sight-stanzas require us to retain unfinished thoughts and phrases, to carry them over white space; indeed, sometimes we must carry them over three stanzas or more, and short stanzas make this possible in a way that longer stanzas do not. Thus, it is visual form in combination with lineation that allows Thomas’s sightstanzas to function prosodically. We might invent a term for this, referring to his as a ‘lineo-spatial’ prosody. A purely visual form, such as concrete or shape poetry, would not allow for the degrees of enjambment that Thomas requires. His sight-stanzas, however, establish a visual pattern while allowing words to be read as parts of lineated, left-to-right, grammatical sentences. Williams, it is worth pointing out, often negates this aspect of


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sentence-language, suspending single words in typographic space. When he does this, his prosody shifts from ‘lineo-spatial’ to purely visual. Purely visual techniques notwithstanding, William Carlos Williams’s poems provide us with any number of examples of the ‘lineo-spatial’ sightstanza. ‘The Eyeglasses’, from Spring and All (1923), begins as follows: The universality of things draws me toward the candy with melon flowers that open about the edge of refuse proclaiming without accent the quality of the farmer’s shoulders and his daughter’s accidental skin, so sweet with clover and the small yellow cinquefoil in the parched places. It is this that engages the favorable distortion of eyeglasses that see everything and remain related to mathematics – 36

Eleanor Berry proposes some possible reasons why Williams orders the poem this way. She first suggests that he is attempting ‘to create a sense of order that wins the reader’s patience with material at the apparent chaos of which he might otherwise balk’.37 This certainly coincides with what R. S. Thomas attempts in his late poetry. Berry also suggests that ‘A stanzaic format amounts to an invitation from the writer to give attention to the particulars of language of the text, to regard them as intentional rather than contingent.’38 Thomas, too, uses systematic enjambement to separate parts of speech, thereby ‘giv[ing] attention to the particulars of language’. It may well be that he took inspiration from William’s experiments. In any case, it seems clear that Thomas found in lineo-spatial prosody the mode to balance intention with disorder. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that R. S. Thomas’s most sustained attempt to ‘order’ his own experience, The Echoes Return Slow, consists primarily of sight-stanzas. In this way,


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the volume resembles much of the poet’s late work. However, in other, stylistically significant ways, The Echoes Return Slow is unique, quite unlike anything else R. S. Thomas ever published.

Identity in performance: The Echoes Return Slow â•…â•…â•…â•… In a dissolving â•… â•… world what certainties for the self, whose identity â•… â•… is its performance? (ERS, p. 33)

When considering R. S. Thomas’s oeuvre, readers will unavoidably have diverse opinions about which volumes are most (and least) successful. Without suggesting a hierarchy of value, one might nevertheless argue that there are two volumes which perhaps stand out as Thomas’s greatest stylistic achievements. The first, Frequencies, marks the apex of the poet’s skill with linear prosody. It features a convergence of counterpoint, mimesis, contemporary metaphor and wordplay, and it also represents the full union of the poet’s two great searches, into God-space and self-space. It may very well be his magnum opus. The second volume, The Echoes Return Slow (1988), is R. S. Thomas’s most ambitious work, a collection of untitled ‘cuttings’ and ‘sketches’ in both poetry and prose that seek understanding by viewing, then re-viewing, developmental experiences, key moments in the formation of self.39 As opposed to ‘the dismantling / by the self of a self it / could not reassemble’ (‘In Context’, F, p. 13), The Echoes Return Slow attempts to assemble the self, to trace its development over a lifetime. The Echoes Return Slow has not, until fairly recently, received much critical attention; however, two important pieces of criticism have recently shed considerable light on both the purpose and method of this distinctive volume. M. Wynn Thomas describes The Echoes Return Slow as ‘spiritual autobiography’, demonstrating how R. S. Thomas constructs an image of self through the interplay of poetry and prose. This interplay ‘[explores] the multi-dimensional character of a self that relates to time in an extremely complex fashion’ and does so with a Kierkegaardian awareness that ‘the spiritual self [exists] only in, and as, a process of self-relating’. As autoÂ� biography it is unconventional because it ‘address[es] the problem of how to develop a contemporary discourse appropriate for exploring the concept .â•‹.â•‹. of the intrinsically spiritual character of the self’.40 Barbara PrysWilliams, in her examination of the volume, describes the way in which


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Thomas represents himself ‘at times [as] the detached observer of his banal human story, at times [as] an intensely involved protagonist in a cosmic encounter’. He becomes ‘the epitome of existential loneliness .â•‹.â•‹. vulnerably adrift in a bleak, hostile universe’, yet he can also, at times, ‘affirm the power of love as an overwhelming reality’. As she examines these and other themes, Prys-Williams concludes that Thomas ‘sees personality as a constant process of becoming’, and that ‘in translating a myriad transient sensations into specific powerful images, Thomas is arriving at very necessary moments of self-definition, fleeting times when he assembles his sense of self most completely’.41 Both critics are, therefore, aware that The Echoes Return Slow is a multifaceted exercise in self-definition, selfrelating and self-assembly, and that, as such, it presents R. S. Thomas with unique psychological and technical challenges. Given the context of our discussion, focus will be on the latter; that is, it will be concerned with determining precisely what sort of technique Thomas creates. There is a particular stylistic feature of The Echoes Return Slow that makes the volume a unique point of arrival along Thomas’s stylistic journey. This is perhaps the volume’s most obvious, yet also most importÂ�ant, feature: each lyric poem immediately follows, and faces on an adjoining page, a prose paragraph.42 Generally speaking, these paragraphs are highly wrought and imagistic, and they use metaphor, wordplay and condensed language in much the same manner as the poetry. Indeed, ‘in some cases it is difficult for a reader to understand in what respect precisely, except for the style of its layout, the prose discourse differs from the poetic discourse’.43 And yet, as simple as it may sound, the layout of the prose is its most important stylistic property. A characteristic feature of prose as compared to poetry (some would say the defining feature) is that it is not divided into lines. This feature alone provides The Echoes Return Slow with a stability that is largely absent in the late poetry. There the poet seeks oneness, with God and with self, but his lines of poetry refuse, or at least resist, order. Sight-stanzas are a gesture towards order, but they are certainly not defined in the same way that closed stanzas are. This begs obvious questions: why does Thomas not return to closed stanzas? Why not employ grammar verse, or even rhyme and metre? Why not stabilize the poetic forms themselves? The answer is likely to be that by the time R. S. Thomas composed The Echoes Return Slow, his linear prosody had long since become synonymous with the very acts of thinking, feeling, searching and praying. He could not divorce himself from these and stay true to experience any more than he could change the reality of that experience by altering his form. As


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M. Wynn Thomas comments, ‘Thomas needs faithfully to render the temporal conditions that, paradoxically, provide the spiritual self with the very terms of its existence’, and this is nowhere more evident than in the structure of his poetry.44 His prosody is the most faithful available means of self expression. ‘In a dissolving / world .â•‹.â•‹. identity / is its performance’ (ERS, p. 33, italics added). As we discussed in chapter 3, the prosody of a free-verse poet is a persona. For Thomas, this persona grew more, not less, unstable over time. If we view his late prosody as a mirror, a reflection of himself, then these late lines could serve as its description: â•…â•… Its camera is an X-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where graspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own. (‘Reflections’, NTF, p. 31)

Unlike the poetry, however, the prose paragraphs in The Echoes Return Slow do not shift. They do not cut against syntax or readjust their meanings continually. Each is a stabilizing counterpoint to its corresponding poem. Two poems side by side, each of them rich with ambiguity and multiple meanings, would not interact in the same way. This does not mean that the prose expresses stability any more than the poetry does; rather, the genre is itself more stable, and it can give dimension to a speaker who is often a ‘dimensionless presence’ (‘Sonata in X’, MHT, p. 81). We can slightly alter our earlier mathematical formula of ‘X = self’ by making X the intersection of poetry (A) and prose (B). In mathematical terms, X = A ∩ B (X equals A intercept B). By addressing the same experience, event, or view of the self in two genres, the intersection of those genres, in turn, gives dimension to the experience, event or view of the self. None of the poems or prose paragraphs is titled. None of them is dated. Each might slip into the ‘dissolving world’ were it not for its corresponding counterpoint. In The Echoes Return Slow, the prose passages always appear on the left page, the poems on the right. If we take it as a given that the volume’s pages are meant to be read in order – and there is no reason to think that they are not – then the arrangement suggests that we should read the prose first, followed by the poetry. This also means that the prose will be in our mind as we read the poem; in this sense, the prose acts as a lens, an angle of vision through which we view the poem:


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Not from conceit certainly, yet he could not escape from his looking glass. There it was the concealed likeness, always ahead in its ambush. Imagining the first human, he conceived his astonishment in finding himself face to face with the unknown denizen of water. With the refinement of the mirror there occurred only the refinement of his dilemma. (ERS, p. 108)

The poet scans the stars and the scientist his equations. Life, how often must I be brought to confront my image in an oblique glass? The spirit revolves on itself and is without shadow, but behind the mirror is the twin helix where the chromosomes pass one another back to back to a tune from the abyss. (ERS, p. 109)

When we read the above prose paragraph, which is in the third person, we read of a man who cannot stop looking at his reflection.45 The phrase ‘cannot escape’ suggests that he has no choice. Is he a narcissist, we wonder? Or is he looking merely to catch a glimpse of an elusive, ‘concealed likeness’? Yet the opposite also seems true, that his likeness is waiting to catch him. Just how the speaker’s (or narrator’s, since this is prose) likeness might ‘ambush’ him is unclear, but there is an element of trepidation on the part of the man, a fear of seeing the very thing for which he is searching. This inspires a vision of the first human, an Adam-figure who sees his own reflection yet thinks it is another being, an ‘unknown denizen of water’. The word ‘denizen’ can denote either an inhabitant or an alien living in a foreign land. Both meanings seem valid here. The paragraph ends with two kinds of ‘refinement’: of mirror and dilemma. Just how can a mirror be refined? One notes that this section of The Echoes Return Slow corresponds to the first years of Thomas’s retirement at Sarn-y-Plas. Having retired from the ministry, the poet did not fill his days with vocational work, and this left increased time for introspection. In a subsequent prose passage, he writes: ‘The problems he had concealed from his congregation had him now all to themselves’ (ERS, p. 112). Perhaps, then, the ‘refinement’ is increased introspection, which allows a longer, closer look at the self. Katie Gramich notes that, at times, the Narcissus of Thomas’s poetry ‘is obsessed not so much with the beauty of his own image as with what is going on behind that image’.46 In this sense, the refined mirror of introspection leads Thomas only to a further realization of his ambiguity. The more he looks at himself, the more he realizes he simply does not know who he is.


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Our interpretation of the prose passage is carried with us as we read the corresponding poem that, we note, is in the first person rather than the third. This makes the voice more immediate, perhaps more akin to the speaker looking into the mirror than to his distanced reflection. The poem opens with a reference to science: ‘The poet scans the stars / and the scientist his equations’. Because we read these lines in the light of the prose passage, we wonder, is the poet scanning the stars the same man who stares into the mirror? Are the stars, then, a kind of mirror? Are equations a kind of mirror for the scientist? The next lines answer our question: Life, how often must I be brought round to confront my image in an oblique glass?

Without the prose passage, we might consider the opening lines as separÂ�ate from the mirror, but in fact the ‘oblique glass’ is both the stars and the equations. Thus the speaker can speak of the spirit ‘revolv[ing] / on itself’ as if it were a planet, and he can speak of DNA, which is also a mirror, a ‘twin helix’ .â•‹.â•‹. back / to back’, all in the context of his reflection. Of course, in the dynamic poem, Thomas’s lineation can create meanings, and point out certain words, in a manner that the prose cannot. For example, the break between sight-stanzas, ‘confront // my image’, magnifies the effect of the line break, underscoring the poet’s impatience and distaste at confronting himself. It also suggests that he wants to confront the image of another. But whose? The ‘oblique glass’ is an allusion to 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ The scriptural promise is that one day the glass between man and God will not be ‘dark’. It will not be ‘oblique’. We will see God ‘face to face’ (‘Face to face? Ah, no / God; such language falsifies / the relation’ [‘Waiting’, F, p. 32]). The speaker is thus, ultimately, asking how long he must wait for this promise to be realized, to know himself and to know God. And what we begin to notice is that not only does the prose influence the way we read the facing poem, but that the poem causes us to re-envision, to re-evaluate the prose in much the same way that a line of Thomas’s poetry will often ask us to reinterpret the preceding line. Is the ‘concealed likeness’, we now wonder, the hidden God? Certainly, Thomas’s God hides; he even waits in ambush at times. Does the trepidation, then, come from the poet’s fear of God as much as himself? Is the paragraph in the third person in order to


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distance the deity? This brings us back to a point we have made previously but which bears repeating: Thomas’s quest for God and his quest for self are one and the same. Oneness with God is wholeness of self. Fear of one is fear of the other. Because of the interplay of poetry and prose, we are able to arrive at a kind of unity. This is not a unity of self but, rather, a unity of meaning. The poet has not yet achieved spiritual wholeness, but neither is he ‘dimensionless’. If ‘identity / is its performance’, then any performance that leads to understanding is part of self-awareness, even if it requires uncertainty (negative capability). As Prys-Williams indicates, The Echoes Return Slow is a way for Thomas ‘to explore and understand himself’, and in writing it, he ‘has fashioned an artefact that represents a unique identity which can reflect back to the lonely, uncertain self some sense of who he is’.47 In doing this, R. S. Thomas has composed what is, without a doubt, his most wholly original stylistic achievement. We see that Thomas never ceases to experiment, to seek new forms as he searches for wholeness. We may say that his late poems are both an attempt to create wholeness (an action) and the place where wholeness is sought (a setting for action). A description of this can be found in the words of Wallace Stevens, whose work Thomas read religiously.48 According to Stevens, ‘the poem of the mind’ is both ‘the act of finding / What will suffice’ and ‘the theatre’ where the modern poet must ‘construct a new stage’.49 Stevens believed that the modern poet could approach unity through the imagination, which could order, and reorder, the world around it. But, like R. S. Thomas, he believed that the voice of the modern poet must also be in tune with the realities of the modern world: It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice.

In other words, unity must be sought within the modern world, not as an escape from it: â•…â•… It has to be on that stage, And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one.50


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This vision of ‘becoming one’, of becoming whole not merely by writing about wholeness, but by writing a poem that is, that reflects, and to a degree determines the search for unity, is the warp and woof of R. S. Thomas’s late work. It is a vision that, in time, emerges most vividly and most movingly as the imagined Abercuawg, the place for the displaced self, the manifestation of the internalized dream. Abercuawg is not a tangible location any more than God or self is tangible, but neither is it a fiction: This is man’s estate. He is always on the verge of comprehending God, but insomuch as he is a mortal creature, he never will. Nor will he ever see Abercuawg. But through striving to see it, through longing for it, through refusing to accept that it belongs to the past and has fallen into oblivion; through refusing to accept some second-hand substitute, he will succeed in preserving it as an eternal possibility. (‘Abercuawg’, SP, p. 55)

R. S. Thomas’s stylistic journey, like his spiritual journey, is one of resolute longing: for sound, for shape, for technique that can adequately reflect painful and unsatisfying experience even while ‘preserving .â•‹.â•‹. eternal possibility’. Shepherd does not relate the following words to Thomas’s style, but they well describe the ‘unity of being’ (SP, p. 143) he attempts to wrench from chaos: ‘Whereas speech is linear, a series of consecutive moments articulated in time, the moment of passive union is not consecutive. It refuses fragmentation.’51 Moment to moment, poem by poem, R. S. Thomas seeks such unity – and ultimately seeks himself – as he builds with what is broken, creating an ‘identity in performance’.


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Conclusion

In a 1993 editorial in Poetry Wales, Richard Poole writes that ‘R. S. Thomas seems always to have kept at least one step ahead of his readers.’1 Much like the electron-God of his late poetry, Thomas had already set off again by the time his readers, and his critics, arrived. In terms of an enlightening discussion of his style, few critics have arrived at all. In 2003, Damian Walford Davies suggested that ‘a “second generation” R. S. Thomas criticism should .â•‹.â•‹. strive to see an iconic Thomas anew and seek to defamiliarize its subject’.2 To Davies’s refreshing suggestion, one might add a call for criticism to familiarize itself with Thomas’s prosodies, and thus fulfil a fundamental prerequisite to a fuller understanding of his work. In order truly to see R. S. Thomas afresh, critics must get away from merely viewing him as poet of the bald Welsh hills, or as the dark seeker of a God who refuses to talk. They must even go beyond seeing him as the seeker of ‘an horizon / beyond the horizon’.3 They must look, as this book has attempted to look, at how, as a poet – not as a political figure or Welsh culture hero – he does this, engaging the very techniques he uses. R. S. Thomas both applied the known techniques of his poetic calling and unceasingly sought out new ones. His was a trajectory that began in imitation but ultimately led him to innovation as he absorbed his influences and experimented with prosodies that shaped, and were shaped by, his experience. Never willing to be boxed in by critics or conventions, always willing to seek out new methods for relating that experience, R. S. Thomas – often caricatured as a backwater, anti-progress recluse – was in fact the most forward-looking poet of the so-called ‘Second Flowering’ in Wales and one of the most stylistically progressive poets of his generation. It is bewildering that no one has previously made an

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even-handed, sustained attempt to analyse and evaluate the intricacies of his craft. One is hard pressed to think of another English-language poet of equal reputation whose work has been thus neglected. The present book, while it has sought partially to fill a rather large gap in scholarship, is only a beginning. There is more, a good deal more, that needs saying before R. S. Thomas criticism will have caught up with a poetry that, more than a decade after the poet’s death, still seems ahead of the times in many ways. Indeed, a phrase in J. Meek-Davies’s review of Residues (2002) serves as a fitting description of Thomas’s stylistic achievement: ‘the author in death still manages to outpace us’.4

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Notes

Introduction 3 4 5 1 2

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

13

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‘From Harri Webb’, Poetry Wales, 7, 4 (spring 1972), 121–3. Ibid., 123. Ibid. Ibid. For a discussion of the debate surrounding Thomas’s literary pre-eminence in Wales, see Matthew Jarvis, Becoming ‘Prifardd of English-speaking Wales’: The Reception of R. S. Thomas in the 1960s and Early 1970s, Tucker Lecture Series No. 3 (Lampeter: Trivium Publications, 2009). M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Reviewing R. S. Thomas’, Books in Wales (summer 1993), 5–7. Gwyn Jones, quoted in R.S. Thomas at Seventy, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 7 December 1983. Reproduced from M. J. J. van Buuren, Waiting: The Religious Poetry of Ronald Stuart Thomas, Welsh Priest and Poet (Dordrecht: ICG Printing, 1993), p. 179. Robert Minhinnick, ‘Living with R. S. Thomas’, Poetry Wales, 29, 1 (July 1993), 11–14. Andrew Duncan, Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 212, 210. Ibid., p. 212. Harvey Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), p. 10. Gross may have in mind Cleanth Brooks, who famously coined the term ‘heresy of paraphrase’ in his book The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947). Michael H. Whitworth, introduction, in Michael H. Whitworth (ed.), Modernism: A Guide to Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 47. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Irony in the soul: the religious poetry of R. S[ocrates] Thomas’, Agenda, 36, 2 (1998), 49–69; Damian Walford Davies, ‘“Double-entry

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poetics”: R. S. Thomas – punster’, in Damian Walford Davies (ed.), Echoes to the Amen, pp. 149–82; David Lloyd, ‘Making it new: R. S. Thomas and William Carlos Williams’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 8 (2003), 121–40.

1â•‡ Origins of a Style, 1936–1943 The undated manuscript is one of six holograph poems in the National Library of Wales (NLW), which, in style and presentation, are similar to Thomas’s other work from 1939 (NLW 20006 C). Also in the NLW is a letter from R. S. Thomas to Gwyn Jones, sent in 1939, which accompanied a group of poems to be considered for publication in The Welsh Review (Professor Gwyn Jones Papers, NLW 41/130). Thomas’s work never appeared in The Welsh Review, but it is probable that this manuscript represents his 1939 submission. 2 Thomas acknowledges this imitative phase in several places. See, for example, A, pp. 44–5. 3 Edward Marsh edited and published five volumes of Georgian Poetry between 1912 and 1922. 4 Upon reading in a newspaper that the National Library of Wales had purchased the poems, Thomas denied authorship, writing an indignant letter to the librarian in Aberystwyth. After receiving details of the poems, he admitted penning them. He believed they ‘had most likely been kept by some editor from the early days and then sold’ (Sandra Anstey, ‘Some uncollected poems and variant readings from the early work of R. S. Thomas’, Page’s Drift, pp. 22–35). 5 John Powell Ward, The Poetry of R. S. Thomas (Bridgend: Seren, 2001), pp. 17, 30. 6 Prior to Song at the Year’s Turning, Thomas published two full volumes, The Stones of the Field (1946) and An Acre of Land (1952). He also published The Minister (1953), a long poem originally given as a radio broadcast. Published by small, local printer/publishers in Carmarthen and Montgomeryshire, these volumes did not receive much critical attention outside Wales until they were collected in Song at the Year’s Turning (1955), which consists of Thomas’s selection of poems from these early volumes along with new work. SYT was published in London by Rupert Hart-Davis and was reviewed not only in the press but in BBC Radio’s Third Programme. 7 Dilys Rowe, review of The Stones of the Field, by R. S. Thomas, Wales, 27, 7 (1946), 229–30. 8 Tony Brown and M. Wynn Thomas, ‘The problems of belonging’, in M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 165–202. 9 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘“The Stones of the Field” and the power of the sword: R. S. Thomas as war poet’, in Tony Curtis (ed.), Wales at War: Critical Essays on Literature and Art (Bridgend: Seren, 2007), pp. 142–64. 10 These lines echo Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, but they also allude to 1 Cor. 13:11: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ 1

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R. S. Thomas, ‘Y Llwybrau Gynt 2’ [‘The paths gone by’] (1972), SP, p. 103. ‘Spring and Fall’, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 88; ‘Fern Hill’, Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957), p. 178. 13 The Golden Treasury was first published in 1861, and Palgrave edited new editions in 1862, 1878, 1884, 1891 (revised 2nd edn, enlarged) and 1896. In 1897, Palgrave edited a ‘Second Series’ of The Golden Treasury that included living poets. Oxford University Press editions have appeared in 1907, 1909, 1929, 1940, 1964 and 1994. The 1994 edition, edited by John Press, includes work by R. S. Thomas. 14 Carl Woodring and James Shapiro, introduction, in Carl Woodring and James Shapiro (eds), The Columbia Anthology of Modern Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. xxviii. 15 ‘Norwich Tapes Ltd: The Critical Forum’, 1978, quoted in Anstey, ‘Uncollected poems and variant readings’, p. 23. 16 ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, David Jones Journal, 3, 1–2 (summer/autumn 2001), 93–102. 17 From An Essay On Criticism, inÂ€The Poems of Alexander PopeÂ€(New Haven: Yale University Press), ed. John Butt, lines 350–1. 18 P. B. Shelley, ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples’, in Francis Turner Palgrave (ed.), The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 227. 19 NLW 20006 C. 20 Tony Brown, Writers of Wales: R. S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), pp. 5–6. 21 Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), p. 122. 22 Anstey, ‘Uncollected poems and variant readings’, p. 25. 23 Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 7. The image of the mirror is also frequently associated, in the later work, with the myth of Narcissus, an association which, as Katie Gramich observes, Thomas uses ‘to flesh out his own personal demons’. See ‘Mirror games: self and m(o)ther in the poetry of R. S. Thomas’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 132–48. 24 R. S. Thomas, ‘Autobiographical essay’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 1–20. 25 Ibid., p. 6: ‘What had we been taught in school? The Georgians mainly, but hardly Edward Thomas.’ 26 Walter de la Mare, ‘Wanderers’, in Edward Marsh (ed.), Georgian Poetry 1913– 1915 (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1915), p. 78. 27 NLW 20006 C. 28 Similar images exist in de la Mare’s prose, including a description of ‘slender water-weeds’ (The Return [Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004], p. 83). 29 John Press, A Map of Modern English Verse (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 107. 30 ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, p. 94. 31 R. S. Thomas, preface, in R. S. Thomas (ed.), The Batsford Book of Country Verse (London: B. T. Batsford, 1961), pp. 7–8. 32 With Great Pleasure, presented by R. S. Thomas; reader: Ronald Pickup. BBC Radio 4, 2000. 11 12

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Edward Thomas, ‘The Unknown Bird’, in Edna Longley (ed.), Edward Thomas: Poems and Last Poems (Glasgow: MacDonald and Evans, 1978), p. 43. 34 John Davies, ‘“Only the mind to fly with”: birds in R. S. Thomas’s poetry’, Poetry Wales, 30, 3 (January 1995), 18–22. 35 Edward Thomas, ‘Good-Night’, Poems and Last Poems, p. 57. 36 ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, p. 93. 37 Edward Thomas, ‘For These’, Poems and Last Poems, p. 94. 38 Brown, R. S. Thomas, pp. 4–5. 39 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘For Wales see landscape: early R. S. Thomas and the English topographical tradition’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 9 (2004–05), 21–45. 40 R. S. Thomas, introduction, in R. S. Thomas (ed.), Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 12. 41 Ibid., p. 13. 42 R. S. Thomas, ‘Autobiographical essay’, p. 6. 43 Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 10. 44 R. S. Thomas, ‘Autobiographical essay’, p. 6. 45 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘For Wales see landscape’, p. 21. 46 It is perhaps not surprising, given the fact that R. S. Thomas was reading Edward Thomas at the same time he was imagining a Celtic ‘home’, that he attempts to see Edward Thomas in Welsh terms, painting him as one who was ‘fascinated’ by ‘lines such as Llywarch Hen’s “Yn Aber Cuawc yt ganant gogeu” – “at Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing”’, and whose relationship to nature potentially had a ‘Welsh source’ (Selected Poems of Edward Thomas, p. 11). 47 Tony Brown, ‘“Blessings, Stevens”: R. S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 112–31. 48 R. S. Thomas, ‘The Bat’, The Dublin Magazine (July–September 1939), 8. 49 W. B. Yeats, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, in Richard J. Finneran (ed.), The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner, 1996), p. 160. 50 Yeats, ‘The Madness of King Goll’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, p. 16. 51 From ‘The Sorrow of Love’, ‘The White Birds’ and ‘The Rose of the World’, respectively, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, pp. 40; 41; 36. 52 Yeats, ‘When You Are Old’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, p. 41; ‘Who Goes With Fergus?’ The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, p. 43. 53 Yeats, ‘A Dream of Death’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, p. 42. 54 For an in-depth study of this topic, see Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). 55 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘For Wales see landscape’, p. 22. 56 Jeremy Hooker, Imagining Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), p. 33. 57 In medieval Welsh mythology, Ceridwen’s cauldron is associated with the rebirth of the poet Taliesin. It also frequently represents poetic inspiration, enlightenment and wisdom. 58 Davies compares the poem to Goronwy Owen’s ‘Hiraeth am Fôn’ and suggests that ‘a shared sense of exile’ attracted Thomas to Owen’s work. For an in-depth discussion of Thomas’s debt to Welsh-language literature, see Jason Walford Davies, ‘“Thick ambush of shadows”: allusions to Welsh literature in the work of 33

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59

60

63 61 62

64

65

66

67 68

69

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R. S. Thomas’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 1 (1995), 75–127. R. S. Thomas would later write his own poem called ‘The Fisherman’ (NBF, p. 19), a portrait of his father, which seems to have been inspired by the W. B. Yeats poem of the same title. Yeats paints his fisherman as a ‘wise and simple man’ who would cast his flies (‘The Fisherman’, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, p. 148); Thomas’s poem begins with similar language: ‘A simple man, / He like the crease on the water / His cast made.’ Keidrych Rhys, ‘Replies to “Wales” questionnaire 1946’, Wales, 6, 3 (1946), 22–7. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘For Wales see landscape’, p. 40. Ibid. The letter, until recently in the possession of the late antiquarian bookseller Peter Jolliffe, founder of London’s Ulysses Bookshop, is quoted in Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas (London: Aurum, 2006), p. 55. Grahame Davies, ‘Resident aliens: R. S. Thomas and the anti-modern movement’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 7 (2001–2), 50–77. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘For Wales see landscape’, p. 31. In addition to contemplating a move to Ireland, it appears that Thomas may have considered setting up on a remote Scottish island. Rogers quotes from a letter that Thomas received in June 1941 from the Scottish naturalist Frank Fraser Darling, who was living on the Isle of Tanera Mor, one of the Summer Isles. In the letter, Darling advises Thomas not to give up his calling as a priest for ‘anything so rash’. Darling writes: ‘What can you do with your hands? If you cannot use them in a score of different ways you could not live this kind of life at all.’ Rogers calls Thomas a would-be ‘Robinson Crusoe’ seeking the change ‘in the interests of better birdwatching’, but clearly the motivation for writing to Darling was much more complex than Rogers allows (see Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West, p. 54). Hooker, Imagining Wales, pp. 28–9. Thomas describes the experience of the bombing raids thus: ‘The curate decided to erect an earthwork against the wall of the parsonage, opposite the space under the stairs, as a shelter, should more bombs start to fall. One night when he was leaving the church, which was next door to the house, he heard a terrible bang very close by. He ran inside and urged his wife to come and take cover under the stairs, and there they were for hours, while the enemy aeroplanes circled above their heads’ (A, p. 50). These phrases also reveal Thomas’s reading of Tennyson, his favourite poet as a teenager (see ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, p. 93). Writers were, of course, questioning naive nature poetry before the world wars; they did not need the trenches to show how nature, ‘red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed’ [i.e. God’s word] (In Memoriam, section 56, lines 15–16), or that it could represent struggles with faith. But it was the Second World War that awakened these feelings in R. S. Thomas, perhaps leading him to read Tennyson in a new way.

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Wales, 2, 2 (1943): ‘The Labourer’, ‘A Farmer’, ‘Frost’, ‘Propaganda’ and ‘Confessions of an Anglo-Welshman’. Previously, Thomas had published work under the pseudonyms Curtis Langdon and Figaro in Omnibus, a student publication of University College of North Wales, Bangor, and The Dublin Magazine. He had also published poems in The New English Weekly (1939) and Horizon (1941). 71 R. S. Thomas, ‘Words and the Poet’ (SP, p. 53). Thomas is referring to what consonants do in general, not necessarily to their effect in ‘Frost’. 72 Reprinted as ‘A Labourer’ in SF, p. 8. 73 Anstey, ‘Uncollected poems and variant readings’, p. 24. 74 The term ‘feet’ is technically incorrect when discussing accentual poetry since feet exist only in metrical poetry; however, for the sake of a convenient vocabulary, this text uses the names of metrical feet to describe non-metrical phrasing and rhythmic patterns. 75 This is the first line of ‘Affinity’ (SF, p. 20). 76 R. S. Thomas, introduction, in R. S. Thomas (ed.), A Choice of Wordsworth’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), pp. 11–19. 77 Davies, ‘Resident aliens: R. S. Thomas and the anti-modern movement’, p. 63. 78 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘“The Stones of the Field” and the power of the sword’, p. 158. 79 Ibid, p. 146. 80 John Barnie, ‘Was R. S. Thomas an atheist manqué?’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 60–75. 70

2â•‡ A Style Emerging, 1943–1955 R. S. Thomas, The Poet’s Voice, BBC Radio broadcast, 21 August 1947. A broadcast time and date is given on the transcript, but it bears a handwritten note, ‘Not broadcast’, across the top. 2 Ibid. 3 Ned Thomas and John Barnie, ‘Probings: an interview with R. S. Thomas’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 21–46. 4 R. S. Thomas, The Poet’s Voice. 5 R. S. Thomas, ‘Some contemporary Scottish writing’, SP, p. 24 6 John Ormond, ‘R.Â€S. Thomas: priest and poet’, BBC film transcript, broadcast 2 April 1972, reprinted in Poetry Wales, 7, 4 (spring 1972), 47–57. 7 Marie-Thérèse Castay, ‘The self and the other: the autobiographical element in the poetry of R. S. Thomas’, Page’s Drift, pp. 119–47. 8 Anne Stevenson, ‘The uses of Prytherch’, Page’s Drift, pp. 36–56. 9 ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, David Jones Journal, 3, 1–2 (summer/autumn 2001), 93–102. 10 Patrick Crotty, ‘The Iago Prytherch poems’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 13–43. 11 Tony Brown, R. S. Thomas (Writers of Wales series) (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), p. 13. 12 Ormond, ‘R.Â€S. Thomas: priest and poet’, 49. 13 Edward Thomas, ‘The New House’, in Edna Longley (ed.), Edward Thomas: Poems and Last Poems (Glasgow: MacDonald and Evans, 1978), p. 58. 1

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Given that it was German air raids that uprooted R. S. Thomas, the verb ‘storm’ cannot fully be separated from the idea of a Nazi storm trooper or the blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’). Prytherch, who is ‘not to be stormed’, is, therefore, shielded from the very storms that had so recently shaken R. S. Thomas. 15 ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, p. 99. 16 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Reviewing R. S. Thomas’, Books in Wales (summer 1993), 5–7. 17 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘For Wales see landscape: early R. S. Thomas and the English topographical tradition’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 9 (2004–5), 21–45. 18 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Reviewing R. S. Thomas’, p. 6. 19 Crotty, ‘The Iago Prytherch poems’, p. 18. 20 Ibid., p. 19. The poem’s ‘tonalities’ are perhaps better described as being ‘characteristic’ of Thomas’s style at Manafon, not his style in general. 21 Justin Wintle, Furious Interiors: Wales, R. S. Thomas and God (London: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 184. 22 Cecil Price, ‘The poetry of R. S. Thomas’ (1952), Critical Writings, pp. 21–5. 23 John Powell Ward, The Poetry of R. S. Thomas (Bridgend: Seren, 2001), p. 52. 24 Charles Baudelaire, ‘To the reader’, in The Flowers of Evil, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 2003), p. 5: ‘– hypocrite reader, – my alias, – my twin!’ T. S. Eliot ends the first section of The Waste Land, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, with the same language. 25 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘“The Stones of the Field” and the power of the sword: R. S. Thomas as war poet’, in Tony Curtis (ed.), Wales at War: Critical Essays on Literature and Art (Bridgend: Seren, 2007), pp. 142–64. 26 Such poems are ubiquitous, but in this early period they include: ‘A Labourer’ (SF, p. 8), ‘Frost’ (SF, p. 9), ‘A Thought From Nietzche’ (SF, p. 13), ‘A Peasant’ (SF, p. 14), ‘Man and Tree’ (SF, p. 19), ‘The Mistress’ (SF, p. 21), ‘The Strange Spring’ (SF, p. 26), ‘Peasant Greeting’ (SF, p. 27), ‘An Old Man’ (SF, p. 36), ‘Evensong’ (SF, p. 47), ‘Song For Gwydion’ (AL, p. 9), ‘The Gap in the Hedge’ (AL, p. 15), ‘The Tree’ (AL, p. 18), ‘Soil’ (AL, p. 28), ‘Summer’ (AL, p. 30), ‘The Labourer’ (AL, p. 32), The Minister (SYT, p. 75) and ‘Lament for Prytherch’ (SYT, p. 99). 27 Prytherch’s victories are most immediately a reaction to the Second World War, but they also transcend the moment, becoming something more timeless, even heroic. In fact, ‘A Peasant’ ‘shows signs of Thomas’s reading of Welsh language praise poetry in the traditional metres … thus underlining the fact of Iago’s heroism’ (Tony Brown and M. Wynn Thomas, ‘The problems of belonging’, in M. Wynn Thomas [ed.], Welsh Writing in English [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003], pp. 165–202). 28 John Powell Ward, The Poetry of R. S. Thomas (Bridgend: Seren, 2001), p. 23. 29 Elaine Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence: Images of God Explored (New York: St Martins, 1996), p. 75. 30 ‘Quietly as snow: Gwydion Thomas interviewed by Walford Davies’, New Welsh Review, 64 (spring 2004), 15–48. 31 Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas (London: Aurum, 2006), p. 245. 14

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Robert Minhinnick, ‘Living with R. S. Thomas’, Poetry Wales, 29, 1 (1993), 11–14. 33 Leslie Norris, ‘From Leslie Norris’, Poetry Wales, 7, 4 (spring 1972), 118–21. 34 M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference: Twentieth-Century Writing in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), p. 110. 35 Crotty, ‘The Iago Prytherch poems’, p. 24. 36 Job 5:23: ‘For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.’ 37 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Reviewing R. S. Thomas’, 6. 38 Stevenson, ‘The uses of Prytherch’, p. 39. 39 R. S. Thomas, The Poet’s Voice. Considering the Welsh spelling of ‘Prydderch’, rather than the anglicized version that appears in the actual poem, one surmises that the transcript was typed by someone at the BBC, not by the poet himself. The typeface also differs from manuscripts known to have been typed by the poet. 40 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 29. 41 Ibid. 42 R. S. Thomas, The Poet’s Voice. 43 The other two creatures, the Salmon of Llyn Llifon and the Stag of Rhedynfre, appear in ‘The Ancients of the World’ (AL, p. 13), a poem with similar patterns of assonance. In the 1947 broadcast, Thomas explains that the unique assonance of that poem is achieved by ‘rhyming English vowel sounds with Welsh ones’ (The Poet’s Voice). 44 The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest (Chicago: Academy Press, 1978), p. 246. 45 Ibid., p. 247. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 248. 49 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 28. 50 R. S. Thomas, The Poet’s Voice. 51 G. Craig Tapping, Austin Clarke: A Study of His Writings (Dublin: Academy Press, 1981), p. 50. 52 Austin Clarke, quoted in Liam Miller (ed.), The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 547. 53 Patrick Crotty, ‘Austin Clarke’, in Patrick Crotty (ed.), Modern Irish Poetry (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995), p. 13. 54 Austin Clarke, ‘The Black Church’, The Dublin Magazine (October–December 1939), 13. 55 R. S. Thomas, The Poet’s Voice. Thomas makes similar comments about the Scottish poet Adam Drinam in ‘Some contemporary Scottish writing’ (SP, p. 28), writing that ‘Drinam’s greatest achievement .â•‹.â•‹. is his success in conveying an unmistakably Scottish atmosphere by means of the English tongue.’ 56 R. S. Thomas, ‘A view of the Scottish Renaissance’, Wales, 8, 30 (November 1948), 600–4. 57 Austin Clarke, ‘The Lost Heifer’, The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke, p. 126. 58 Clarke, ‘The Scholar’, The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke, p. 162. 32

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180 59


Despite their un-English sound, these lines recall Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’: Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! (lines 1–4)

R. S. Thomas, ‘Song’, The Dublin Magazine (January–March 1948), 3. Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 19. ‘Homo Sapiens’ appeared in Horizon, 4, 22 (1941), 232. 62 Patrick Crotty, ‘Lean parishes: Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger and R. S. Thomas’s The Minister’, in Katie Gramich and Andrew Hiscock (eds), Dangerous Diversity: The Changing Faces of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), pp. 131–49. 63 Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1942), p. 1. 64 Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Critical Study (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 128. 65 John Nemo, Patrick Kavanagh (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), p. 65. 66 The soil/soul comparison is also biblical: ‘And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground .â•‹.â•‹. and man became a living soul’ (Gen. 2:7). 67 Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh, p. 146. 68 ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, 93. 69 Ormond, ‘R.Â€S. Thomas: priest and poet’, 50. 70 Ward, The Poetry of R. S. Thomas, p. 39. 71 Crotty, ‘Lean Parishes’, p. 145. 72 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 44. 73 Thomas gives a similar account to Price-Owen: ‘As I rubbed my nose in the crude life of the hill farmer I no longer felt that rhyming couplets or stanzas were appropriate’ (‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, 100). 74 Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 167. 75 Clarke, quoted in Miller (ed.), The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke, p. 547. 76 Clarke, quoted in Maurice Harmon, Austin Clarke, 1896–1974: A Critical Introduction (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1989), p. 22. 77 See Matt. 10:29–31; Luke 12:6–7. 78 As part of the Ten Commandments, for example, God tells Moses, ‘I the LORD thy God am a jealous God’ (Exod. 20:5). 79 In ‘A Welsh Testament’ (T, p. 39), Thomas writes: 60 61

Even God had a Welsh name: We spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a particular care For the Welsh people.

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Wintle points out a possible (though not definitive) interpretation of the word ‘chosen’ in ‘The Small Window’ (NBF, p. 38), arguing that lines about the beauty of Wales – ‘Have a care; / This wealth is for the few / And chosen’ – are

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an example of ‘God’s favour [being] reserved for the members of one race only’ (Wintle, Furious Interiors, p. 17). 80 Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, p. 167. 81 Ward, The Poetry of R. S. Thomas, p. 62.

3â•‡ A Style Defined, 1955–1972 Tony Brown, ‘‘‘Blessings, Stevens”’: R. S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 112–31. 2 Robert Minhinnick, ‘Living with R. S. Thomas’, Poetry Wales, 29, 1 (summer 1993), 11–14. In a much earlier review, Philip Larkin similarly asserts that ‘[Thomas’s] images and metaphors are too-often repetitive’ (Guardian, 5 September 1958, 6). 3 ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, Anglo-Welsh Review, 74 (1983), 36–56. 4 Christopher Morgan, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 7. 5 Andrew Motion, ‘Yes and no’ (2000), in W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis (eds), Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000), p. 233. Further references to this volume are given as Strong Words. 6 John Powell Ward, The Poetry of R. S. Thomas (Bridgend: Seren, 2001), p. 61. 7 R. S. Thomas, ‘A Welshman at St. James’s Park’ (P, p. 23). 8 Glyn Jones, The Dragon has Two Tongues (London: Dent, 1968), p. 135. 9 Timothy Wilson, ‘R. S. Thomas’ (1972), in Sandra Anstey (ed.), Critical Writings on R. S. Thomas (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1982), pp. 67–71. 10 Byron Rogers calls this ‘A term that stuck after the photograph appeared of the grim figure over the half door’ (The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas [London: Aurum, 2006], p. 22). The London papers frequently used this photograph, taken by Howard Barlow, in articles and obituaries. 11 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Keeping his pen clean: R. S. Thomas and Wales’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 61–79. 12 R. S. Thomas, ‘The Mountains’ (SP, p. 32); ‘The Depopulation of the Hill Country’ (SP, p. 21). 13 R. S. Thomas, ‘A Welshman at St. James’s Park’ (P, p. 23); ‘Song’ (SYT, p. 62); ‘Afforestation’ (BT, p. 17). 14 Brian Morris, ‘The topography of R. S. Thomas’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 47–60. 15 Matt. 9:17: ‘Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.’ 16 R. S. Thomas, ‘Autobiographical Essay’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 1–20. 17 Tony Brown, R. S. Thomas (Writers of Wales series) (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), p. 41. 18 M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference: Twentieth-Century Writing in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), p. 108. 1

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This feeling comes out clearly in a prose passage from Y Llwybrau Gynt: This interest in one another’s work and affairs was innate .â•‹.â•‹. As I would be leaving the doorway of some farm, the woman of the house would say, “Ho, Meri, Tŷ Brith, has already done her washing” .â•‹.â•‹. When someone went round to collect money for a good cause, they would scrutinize his collection book .â•‹.â•‹. If a farmer with a hundred acres had given ten shillings, a farmer with fifty acres would give five. It was as simple as that. (A, p. 12)

Wilson, ‘R. S. Thomas’, p. 69. Letter 126 (27 May 1988), in Jason Walford Davies (ed.), R. S. Thomas: Letters to Raymond Garlick, 1951–1999 (Llandysul: Gomer, 2009), p. 131. 22 ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, pp. 36–7. 23 Ned Thomas and John Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 36. 24 Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), p. 147. 25 ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, p. 41. 26 Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 98. 27 Robert Minhinnick, ‘Forgive my naming you .â•‹.â•‹. R. S. Thomas (1913–2000)’, Poetry Wales, 36, 3 (January 2001), 2–3. 28 Justin Wintle, Furious Interiors: Wales, R.S. Thomas and God (London: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 17. 29 M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference, p. 120. 30 Here, lineation emphasizes apartness. As the speaker looks on, ‘trying to understand / My place’, he implies that others have a place, a sense of belonging, that he lacks (italics added). 31 One irony of the late work is that it is often God, not the speaker, who creates barriers, but it is also true that, for Thomas, the anxiety to be in touch with God becomes a barrier to worship because it disturbs patience and silence and causes the rational self to conceive of God in inappropriate ways. 32 Ward believes that ‘the occasion [of the poem] was surely when Thomas paid a rare visit to London in 1964 to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry’ (The Poetry of R. S. Thomas, p. 83). Elsewhere, Thomas does, in fact, describe the experience of receiving the medal as a bit of a hoodwinking, so the verb ‘seduced’ is provocative in this context. 33 One suspects that Edward Thomas’s ‘Up in the Wind’ influenced the writing of ‘A Welshman at St James’s Park’. Despite some thematic differences, the poems have remarkably similar diction and imagery. ‘Up in the Wind’ refers to a ‘public house’ as being ‘public for birds’, and its phrase ‘subdued .â•‹.â•‹. by wildness’ is alike in register to ‘seduced from wildness’. And R. S. Thomas’s ‘hill .â•‹.â•‹. without fencing’ and ‘high pastures of the heart’ may be inspired by these expansive lines from ‘Up in the Wind’: 20 21

But the land is wild, and there’s a spirit of wildness Much older, crying when the stone-curlew yodels His sea and mountain cry, high up in Spring. He nests in fields where the gorse is still as free as When all was open and common.

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Not surprisingly, Thomas includes ‘Up in the Wind’ in Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 44. M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference, p. 120. ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, p. 37. Charles Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 13. Ibid., p. 25; Hartman uses the term ‘counterpoint’ to describe any kind of ‘rhythmic patterns’ that ‘stand in conflict’, not just to denote the interplay between lineation and grammar. Donald Wesling, The Scissors of Meter: Grammetrics and Reading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); grammetrical theory, although it has many facets, essentially explores the interplay between rhythm and syntax; the term ‘grammetrics’ was coined by Peter Wexler in ‘On the grammetrics of the classical alexandrine’, Cahiers de Lexicologie, 4 (1964), 61–72. Alan Holder, Rethinking Meter (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), p. 58; Holder prefers the term ‘syncopation’ over ‘counterpoint’. Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995), p. 176. Morgan, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity, p. 25. R. S. Thomas, ‘A Peasant’ (SF, p. 14). R. S. Thomas, ‘This to Do’ (P, 12); ‘Song’ (SYT, p. 62). In this earlier poem, the ‘green asylum’ is an elusive, Romantic place of refuge in the natural world. Now Thomas himself has become the asylum, ‘the keeper / Of the heart’s relics’ (‘A Welsh Testament’, T, 39). T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York; Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 31. T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on vers libre’, in Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 90. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 79. Ibid., p. 77. Harvey Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), p. 305. William Carlos Williams, ‘On measure – statement for Cid Corman’ (1954), Strong Words, pp. 83–6. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey (eds), Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). Ibid., p. 82; p. 222; pp. 270–1. This is, ironically, also a way of saying that a free-verse prosodic tradition does exist. That is, the concept of inimitable form, emerging from cultural and historical precedents, is itself a kind of tradition. Metrical prosodies also do this since poets use them in distinctive ways, but because free verse carries with it connotations of individuality, associations with the author are intensified. ‘Robert Lowell’, in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (eds), Conversations on the Craft of Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), pp. 33–47; Ted Hughes, ‘Words and experience’ (1967), Strong Words, pp. 152–7.

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Ford Madox Ford, ‘Les Jeunes and Des Imagistes’ (Second Notice, 1914), in Max Saunders and Richard Stang (eds), Ford Madox Ford: Critical Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 154–8. 54 ‘From Harri Webb’, Poetry Wales 7, 4 (spring 1972), 121–3. 55 Grahame Davies, ‘Resident aliens: R. S. Thomas and the anti-modern movement’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 7 (2001–2), 50–77. 56 R. S. Thomas’s prose often illuminates his poetry, but it rarely rises to the same artistic level. ‘The Mountains’, ‘Abercuawg’ and the prose passages in The Echoes Return Slow are exceptions. 57 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 42. 58 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 167. 59 See, for example, Barbara Prys-Williams’s ‘Buried to be dug up’ (TwentiethCentury Autobiography, pp. 120–47), M. Wynn Thomas’s ‘“Time’s changeling”: autobiography in The Echoes Return Slow’ (Echoes to the Amen, pp. 183–205) and David Lloyd’s ‘Through the looking glass: R. S. Thomas’s The Echoes Return Slow as poetic autobiography’ (Twentieth-Century Literature, 42, 4 [winter, 1996], 438–52). 60 Morgan, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity, p. 13. 61 In his 1972 review of H’m, Hooker makes a similar argument, writing that ‘the I of the poems should discourage us from using them as an excuse for making impertinent observations about the poet’s personality’ (Poetry Wales, 7, 4 [spring 1972], 89–92). 62 Fflur Dafydd, ‘“There were fathoms in her, too”: R. S. Thomas and women’, Renascence, 60, 2 (winter, 2008), 117–130. 63 Ibid., 118. 64 Edna Longley, introduction, in Edna Longley (ed.), Edward Thomas: Poems and Last Poems (Glasgow: MacDonald and Evans, 1978), pp. 11–12. 65 R. S. Thomas, Selected Poems of Edward Thomas, p. 11. 66 ‘Home’, Edward Thomas: Poems and Last Poems, p. 54. 67 Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 56; in context, the ‘pale ghost / Of an earlier self’ can be read either as a reference to the speaker of the poem, who is remembering his past, or as a reference to Iago Prytherch, who is an alter ego for the poet. Read in the latter way, the poem becomes the expression of a desire for internal dialogue, which is what the Prytherch poems ultimately represent. 68 Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 56. 69 The speaker of ‘Here’ is probably Christ, on His cross. His hands will not obey him, and they are ‘red / With the blood of .â•‹.â•‹. many dead’. The poem suggests something of R. S. Thomas’s state of mind at this point: isolated, in pain, sacrificing something of himself. 70 Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 56. 71 ‘Lights Out’, Edward Thomas: Poems and Last Poems, p. 132. 72 The majority of the Edward Thomas poems that correspond to these images are quoted or mentioned in chapter 1. R. S. Thomas’s poem ‘The Gap in the Hedge’ appears in An Acre of Land (p. 15), and the Edward Thomas image appears in ‘Over the Hills’ (Poems and Last Poems, p. 40): ‘To a new country, the path I had 53

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to find / By half-gaps that were stiles once in the hedge’. R. S. Thomas uses the ‘untenanted cross’ to represent the absent God (‘In Church’, P, p. 44). Edward Thomas uses the adjective in ‘Gone, Gone Again’ (Poems and Last Poems, p. 127): ‘Look at the old house, / Outmoded, dignified, / Dark and untenanted’. Helen Vendler, ‘R. S. Thomas and painting’, Page’s Drift, pp. 57–81. Holder, Rethinking Meter, p. 142. Rowan Williams, ‘“Adult geometry”: dangerous thoughts in R. S. Thomas’, Page’s Drift, pp. 82–98. R. S. Thomas, ‘Reflections’ (NTF, p. 31). In this vein, Marjorie Perloff describes a mode of free verse ‘created by artists who felt the traditional accentual-syllabic meters were alien to their experience, that experience was itself fluid, shifting, nondefinable’ (‘The linear fallacy’, The Georgia Review 35 [winter 1981], 855–69). Williams, ‘Adult geometry’, p. 91. Damian Walford Davies, ‘“Double-entry poetics”: R. S. Thomas – punster’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 149–82. A Time for Carving, BBC Welsh Home Service, 21 April 1957. ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, David Jones Journal, 3, 1–2 (summer/autumn, 2001), 93–102. Thomas also would have encountered the work of several American poets in the pages of Al Alvarez’s anthology, The New Poetry. The first edition, published in 1962, included work by John Berryman and Robert Lowell, and the expanded 1966 edition also included work by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Significantly, it also contained work by R. S. Thomas. In his controversial preface, ‘The new poetry or beyond the gentility principle’, Alvarez was critical of contemporary English poetry while praising American poetry. Peter Finch, ‘Poetry since 1945’, The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature (New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 767–70. Two other well-known ‘fringe’ groups of the 1960s, the Underground poets – Michael Horovitz, Pete Brown and Adrian Mitchell being perhaps the most notable – and the Liverpool poets – Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri – published alternative poetries in the 1960s. Horovitz’s anthology Children of Albion (1969), dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, consolidated the Underground’s accomplishments, and the popular anthology The Mersey Sound (1967) collected work by the Liverpool poets. One important exception to this critical neglect was Eric Mottram (1924–1995), a pioneering poet-critic who, through his critical work and teaching at King’s College London and London University, and through his editorial work on the journal Poetry Review in the 1970s, introduced American literary studies into the British academy and created an important link between non-mainstream British poetries and the university. Between 1966 and 1973, Peter Finch edited Second Aeon, a Cardiff-based literary magazine that championed experimental poetry from Wales and also helped to introduce international artists into Wales. David Lloyd, ‘Making it new: R. S. Thomas and William Carlos Williams’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 8 (2003), 121–40.

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Ibid., 127. Ibid., 126. 89 Although R. S. Thomas almost never fragments syntax for the sake of spatiality, his most significant direct response to Williams is a visual one: his late use of line groupings, or ‘sight-stanzas’. These are discussed in chapter 5. 90 William Carlos Williams, ‘Speech rhythm’ (1913), quoted in Stephen Cushman, William Carlos Williams and the Meaning of Measure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 1. Prosody that asks the reader to count time within a line is called isochrony, a device R. S. Thomas does not employ. 91 Williams is the author of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry’s entry on ‘Free verse’, which includes his somewhat arcane theory of the ‘variable foot’: ‘The new unit thus created may be called the “variable foot”, a term and a concept already accepted widely as a means of bringing the warring elements of freedom and discipline together’ (quoted in Cushman, William Carlos Williams and the Meaning of Measure, p. 11). 92 William Carlos Williams, Paterson, in A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (eds), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1986): 87 88

– Say it, no ideas but in things – nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees .â•‹.â•‹. .â•‹.â•‹. Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr. Paterson has gone away to rest and write. (pp. 263–4) This does not invalidate the comparisons Lloyd makes, which are insightful; indeed, Lloyd’s study was groundbreaking in its exploration of Thomas’s response to American poetry, which had previously been ignored. 94 Charles Olson, ‘Projective verse’, Strong Words, pp. 92–9. Olson capitalizes entire words and sentences to stress their importance. 95 Ibid., p. 93. 96 Ibid., pp. 93, 96. 97 Rich, whose stylistic evolution parallels Thomas’s in that she wrote accentualsyllabic poetry, then accentual poetry, before making the transition to free verse in the late 1950s, was not directly affiliated with the Black Mountain school, nor is she an ‘open-field’ poet (as indeed R. S. Thomas is not) in the manner of Charles Olson. But the ideas in ‘Projective verse’ are applicable to the work of many freeverse poets, including Rich, and they are the closest thing we have to a unifying theory of American free verse during the 1950s and 1960s. 98 Adrienne Rich, ‘Like This Together’, Poems, Selected and New (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 75. 99 Hartman, Free Verse, p. 13. 100 Denise Levertov, Denise Levertov: New and Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1992), p. 79. 101 Olson, ‘Projective verse’, p. 95. 93

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Morgan, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity, p. 14. In ‘Careers’, the lack of line autonomy is magnified by non-capitalized words at the beginning of each line. It is the only poem in the volume with non-capitalized line headings, a stylistic feature that becomes the rule, rather than the exception, in later volumes, beginning with Laboratories of the Spirit (1975). In fact, one suspects that although it is the first poem in Not That He Brought Flowers, ‘Careers’ was probably one of the last to be written. 104 Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 73. 105 Robert Lowell, ‘Skunk Hour’, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 95. 106 ‘Skunk Hour’ was first published in 1957, then collected in Life Studies (1959). The poem did not appear in Critical Quarterly, but it is Lowell’s best-known poem. It may represent a form of words that Thomas had read and stored in the subconscious, a form that he associated with the particular mood of ‘Welsh Border’. Interestingly, Thomas compares himself to Lowell in an interview with Simon Barker, distancing himself from the confessionals even as he admits to being emotion-driven: ‘God forbid that I should write confessional verse, like Robert Lowell descended into, but this is the debit side of leading a country, semireclusive existence, that you do tend to fall back on your own emotions’ (quoted in Simon Barker, Probing the God-space: R. S. Thomas’s poetry of religious experience [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wales, Lampeter, 1991], p. 316). 107 David Lloyd, ‘Interview with Jeremy Hooker (I)’, Writing on the Edge: Interviews with Writers and Editors of Wales, pp. 41–50. 108 Ibid., p. 43. 109 Another illustration of Thomas’s ‘uncertain self’ is his autobiography. Whether one translates its ambiguous title, Neb, as ‘No-One’ or ‘Anyone’, neither pronoun is specific, and the text is written in the third person with little introspection, as if Thomas were writing about someone else rather than himself. 110 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Time’s changeling’, p. 187. 111 Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography, p. 120. 112 Sam Adams, ‘A note on four poems’, Poetry Wales, 7, 4 (spring 1972), 75–81. 113 ‘R. S. Thomas at seventy’, reproduced in M. J. J. van Buuren, Waiting: The Religious Poetry of Ronald Stuart Thomas, Welsh Priest and Poet (Dordrecht: ICG Printing, 1993), p. 179. 114 ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, p. 46. 115 Blake Morrison, The Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 6. Other poets have been linked to the Movement, which was never an official organization, but the writers Morrison includes are those most typically associated with it. 116 James F. Knapp, ‘The poetry of R. S. Thomas’, Twentieth Century Literature, 17, 1 (January 1971), 1–9. 117 Kingsley Amis, ‘A true poet’, collected in Sandra Anstey (ed.), Critical Writings on R. S. Thomas (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1982), pp. 29–30. Rupert HartDavis featured this quotation on the jacket of every R. S. Thomas volume he published. 102 103

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Ibid., p. 29. Like R. S. Thomas, Andrew Young drew his images and metaphors from Celtic landscapes (Scottish, as opposed to Welsh); also like Thomas, Young was a vicar in the Anglican Church and used biblical language and metaphor in his work. Stylistically, he often makes use of ‘stress clusters’ in a similar manner to that outlined in chapter 2. 120 Kingsley Amis, quoted in Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000), p. 336, italics added. 121 See Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 260, 341. 122 Philip Larkin, review of Poetry for Supper (Guardian, 5 September 1958), 6. Larkin is right insofar as ‘Thomas’s admirers’ (as well as his detractors) have focused much more on ‘subject matter’ and ‘intentions’ than on ‘organization’, ‘cohesion’ or any other stylistic property. 123 John Wain, Professing Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 107. Thomas viewed Wain’s comments as negligent: 118 119

It’s a kind of reaction I think that the later work has tended to be dismissed. You get people like John Wain dismissing it and talking about my ‘collapse of form’, something like this, you know, which to me is meaningless. You expect something better from the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. (Quoted in Barker, Probing the God-space, p. 329) 124

Donald Davie, ‘R. S. Thomas’s poetry of the Church of Wales’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 127–39. Davie uses the title ‘Church of Wales’ for rhetorical purposes. There is, of course, no Church of Wales, only the Church in Wales. The essay was collected in 1993, the same year Thomas wrote to Garlick. However, it is possible that Thomas read the essay much earlier, in Religion and Literature, 19, 2 (summer 1987), 35–47. Davie’s comments are perhaps more surprising than Wain’s since Davie’s poetry had also appeared in Critical Quarterly and Davie, by the time he wrote this piece, had been living and teaching in the United States for nearly two decades. Perhaps this illustrates a condition Davie himself lamented in 1972: One is tempted to say that for years now British poetry and American poetry haven’t been on speaking terms. But the truth is rather that they haven’t been on hearing terms – the American reader can’t hear the British poet .â•‹.â•‹. and the British reader only pretends to hear the rhythms and the tone of American poetry since William Carlos Williams. (Thomas Hardy and British Poetry [New York: Oxford University Press, 1972], p. 184).

Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, p. 11. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Reviewing R. S. Thomas’, Books in Wales (summer 1993), 5–7. 127 Tecwyn Lloyd, ‘The Romantic parody’, Planet, 31 (March 1976), 29–36. 128 David Lloyd, ‘Interview with Ned Thomas’, Writing on the Edge: Interviews with Writers and Editors of Wales, pp. 14–22. 129 Shawna Lichtenwalner, Claiming Cambria: Invoking the Welsh in the Romantic Era (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), p. 94. 125 126

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David Lloyd, ‘Interview with Ned Thomas’, p. 15. ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, p. 41. 132 Ibid., pp. 42, 41. 133 Geoffrey Hill, ‘R. S. Thomas’s Welsh pastoral’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 44–59. 134 Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 64. 135 Ward, The Poetry of R. S. Thomas, p. 39. 136 In a similar vein, Minhinnick argues that ‘R. S. Thomas’s poetry cannot maintain the pressure of incorporating such matters without degenerating into a bitterness which all but destroys the writing’s effect’ (‘Living with R. S. Thomas’, p. 13). 137 During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Welsh writers in both languages frequently attacked the Forestry Commission as a colonial instrument, one that usurped landscapes and displaced rural communities. Thomas’s depiction of a polluting, disease-like entity is not atypical. For an in-depth discussion of this strain of literature and its historical context, see Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 93–103. 138 Robert Frost, ‘The figure a poem makes’, in Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson (eds),The Robert Frost Reader: Poetry and Prose (New York: Holt, 2002), p. 440. 139 Adrienne Rich, ‘Poetry and experience: statement at a poetry reading’ (1964), Strong Words, pp. 141–2. 140 Prov. 26:11: ‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.’ 141 Letter from John Keats to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 February 1818 (extract), printed in Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 1021: ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.’ 142 Wilson, ‘R. S. Thomas’, p. 68. 130 131

4â•‡ A Style Developed, 1972–1988 Ned Thomas and John Barnie, ‘Probings: an interview with R. S. Thomas’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 21–46. 2 Thomas asks these questions in his interview with Simon Barker: Is poetry a dying art? Is it being outmoded? (Probing the God-space: R. S. Thomas’s poetry of religious experience [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wales, Lampeter, 1991], p. 330). 3 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’: 1

With science and technology .â•‹.â•‹. spawning as they do new words every day, and with the decay of traditional beliefs in God, soul, and the afterlife, surely what England should be waiting for is a poet who can deploy the new vocabuÂ� lary and open up new avenues, or should I say airways for the spirit in the twenty-first century. (p. 40) 4

Both Plato and Aristotle describe mimesis as a reflection of nature. In poetics, the term denotes verbal structures that somehow embody, act out or otherwise ‘mime’ subject matter. In the case of R. S. Thomas, poems can be called ‘structurally

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mimetic’ in that their very structures reflect a destabilized spiritual condition and an unstructured, fragmented world. Letter 141 (8 March 1993) in Jason Walford Davies (ed.), R. S. Thomas: Letters to Raymond Garlick, 1951–1999 (Llandysul: Gomer, 2009), p. 146. Donald Davie, ‘R. S. Thomas’s poetry of the Church of Wales’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 127–39. Davie, ‘R. S. Thomas’s poetry of the Church of Wales’, p. 129. Alan Holder, Rethinking Meter (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), p. 149. It is for this reason that R. G. Thomas errs when he, on one hand, describes ‘sentences .â•‹.â•‹. broken up by taut, jerky phrases, frequent questions, and vitriolic phrases’ but then, on the other, contends that ‘illustrations would be tedious .â•‹.â•‹. especially in print, because R. S. Thomas is essentially a poet to be read aloud’ (‘Humanus sum: a second look at R. S. Thomas’, Critical Writings, pp. 39–48). Certainly, the poems do frequently gain something from being read aloud, but print illustrations of Thomas’s technique are crucial. In an interview with Gwyneth Lewis and Peter Robinson, he said: When I write, I’m listening with an inner ear to the way it sounds. I build the poem up like that. And if there’s a word too many, it goes into the next line. But the thing is I never really meant for them to be read out loud (quoted in Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas [London: Aurum, 2006], p. 254)

Samuel Johnson, ‘Milton’, Lives of the English Poets, quoted in John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 91. 11 Donald Davie, ‘R. S. Thomas’s poetry of the Church of Wales’, Miraculous Simplicity, p. 136. 12 R. S. Thomas, ‘The Casualty’ (LS, p. 21); ‘Formula’ (EA, p. 1). Davie does seem to realize this on some level; responding to ‘Cain’ (H’m, p. 15), he writes: ‘I can accept that the poem has to be graceless if it is to be (as it surely is) sublime and tragic and austere’ (‘R. S. Thomas’s poetry of the Church of Wales’, p. 139). 13 M. E. Eldridge, Memoirs, quoted in Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West, p. 225. 14 ‘The poetry and life of R. S. Thomas’, The South Bank Show, prod. Melvyn Bragg, ITV, 17 February 1991; quoted in Tony Brown, R. S. Thomas (Writers of Wales series) (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), p. 78. 15 In a 1972 letter to Christine Evans, Thomas writes, ‘As a teacher you are short of the time necessary to make endless attempts and experiments’ (quoted in Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West, p. 242). 16 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 27. 17 J. D. Vicary uses the term ‘radical break’ to describe these changes (‘Via Negativa: absence and presence in the recent poetry of R. S. Thomas’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 89–101). Julian Gitzen argues that, with H’m, Thomas ‘suddenly shifted the bulk of his effort’ (‘R. S. Thomas and the vanishing God of form and number’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 170–81). Patrick Deane ascribes ‘radical 10

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changes’ to Not That He Brought Flowers, then asserts that Thomas ‘made an even more dramatic departure with the publication of H’m’ (‘The unmanageable bone: language in R. S. Thomas’s Poetry’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 200–24). And Anthony Conran, writing in 1972, calls it a ‘plain fact’ that ‘R. S. Thomas has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis’, breaking free of ‘stylistic mannerisms’ that ‘were repeated sometimes to screaming point’ (‘R. S. Thomas and the AngloWelsh crisis’, Poetry Wales, 7, 4 [spring 1972], 67–74). David Lloyd, ‘Interview with Jeremy Hooker (I)’, Writing on the Edge: Interviews with Writers and Editors of Wales, Costerus New Series 112 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 41–50. R. S. Thomas first uses the term ‘ultimate reality’ in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963): ‘Roughly defining religion as embracing the experience of ultimate reality, and poetry as the imaginative representation of such’ (p. 9). It is possible that Thomas borrowed the term from Bishop John Robinson, who uses it in his popular book Honest to God (London: SCM, 1963): ‘God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like’ (p. 29). Thomas mentions Robinson in Neb: ‘Our image of God must be transformed, as Bishop Robinson has said’ (A, p. 107). The term ‘ultimate reality’ is also used by Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics (1975), a volume that influenced Thomas’s ‘new thinking’. R. S. Thomas, ‘Retirement’ (EA, p. 38). M. Wynn Thomas, ‘R. S. Thomas and modern Welsh poetry’, in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 167–8. See, for example, D. Z. Phillips, R. S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God (London: Macmillan, 1986); Elaine Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence: Images of God Explored (London: Macmillan, 1996); William J. McGill, Poet’s Meeting: George Herbert, R. S. Thomas, and the Argument with God (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2003); Barry Morgan, Strangely Orthodox: R. S. Thomas and his Poetry of Faith (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 2006); and William V. Davis, R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007). M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Irony in the soul: the religious poetry of R. S[ocrates] Thomas’, Agenda, 36, 2 (1998), 49–69. See Genesis 1. Job 10:22. Phillips, Poet of the Hidden God, p. 42. Charles Olson, ‘Projective verse’, Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000), pp. 92–9. Stephen Cushman, William Carlos Williams and the Meaning of Measure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 41. Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press 1995), p. 170. William Carlos Williams,Â€ Spring and All, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939Â€ ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher

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MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), p. 231. Williams is describing the work of Marianne Moore. See also ‘Repeat’ (H’m, p. 26); ‘Other’ (H’m, p. 36); ‘The Hand’ (LS, p. 2); ‘God’s Story’ (LS, p. 7); ‘The Tool’ (LS, p. 11); ‘The Gap’ (F, p. 7); and ‘The Woman’ (F, p. 14). James A. Davies, ‘Pessimism and its counters: Between Here and Now and after’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 231–2, 242. Another part of Thomas’s stylistic theology is the manner in which he draws the reader into a shared spiritual moment. He manages to do this even in, or perhaps especially in, poems that reflect fragmentation. What Helen Vendler says of Thomas’s painting poems is equally true here: ‘[His] enigmatic and epigrammatic reflections mimic .â•‹.â•‹. the instant responses of the mind .â•‹.â•‹. and are pointedly designed to draw the reader into an identity with the writer’ (Helen Vendler, ‘R. S. Thomas and painting’, Page’s Drift, pp. 57–81). Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology vol. II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 60. The three volumes of Systematic Theology were among the books in Thomas’s personal library when he died. Although it was obviously not meant as such, Tillich’s term can serve as a theory of poetics. He argues that ‘destruction has no independent standing [and] it is dependent on the structure of that in and upon which it acts destructively’. ‘Making’ seems disintegrated in part because we are comparing our reading experience to that of reading prose sentences. In this sense, Thomas’s prosody depends upon the grammatical structure of his sentences because the destruction of that structure exposes the nuances of language that can more easily be glossed over in prose. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 88. R. S. Thomas, ‘Aleph’ (BHN, p. 93, italics added); ‘Pluperfect’ (BHN, p. 89, italics added). Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 74. Shepherd, Conceding an Absence, p. 90. Christopher Morgan, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 158. Ibid., p. 155. Jeremy Hooker, review of H’m, Poetry Wales, 7, 4 (1972), 91–2. Brown, R. S. Thomas, p. 74. ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, Anglo-Welsh Review, 74 (1983), 36–56. Ted Hughes, ‘Gog’, in Selected Poems, 1957–1967 (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 85. Hughes, ‘Theology’, in ibid., p. 84. Rand Brandes, ‘Ted Hughes: Crow’, in Neil Roberts (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 514. Ted Hughes, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (London: Faber, 1999, paperback edn), p. 5. Hughes, ‘Crow on the Beach’, in ibid., p. 34. Hughes, ‘Crow Improvises’, in ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 11.

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Stephen Dobyns, Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 110. 52 Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, p. 170. 53 Those critics who flatly rejected Thomas’s 1970s work are, of course, an exception to this statement. They were surprised, and frustrated in their expectations. In his review of H’m, Hooker writes: 51

Undoubtedly, of all the books so far this one offers the least excuse for encapsulating his work in the image still common in England and Wales, of the bleak nature poet taking his stand on the primal sanities of rural Wales .â•‹.â•‹. At any rate, this new book is likely to disappoint some expectations .â•‹.â•‹. But the capacity of a poet to disappoint expectations can also be a measure of continuÂ�ing growth (Poetry Wales, 7, 4 [spring 1972], 93). Hollander, Vision and Resonance, p. 110. Eddie Wainwright, Poetry in Our Time: The Poet, Publisher, Reader and Reviewer (Belfast: Lapwing, 2008), p. 86. 56 Thomas uses this same technique in another ‘prayer’ poem, ‘Waiting’: ‘Face to face? Ah, no / God; such language falsifies / the relation’ (F, p. 32). As in ‘Emerging’, the first line break asks the reader to reconsider the poem as a prayer. However, that break also places individual emphasis on ‘no’, a terminal word, and ‘God’, an initial one, suggesting that there may be ‘no God’ listening to this prayer at all. Thomas uses similar ambiguity in ‘After the Lecture’ (NBF, p. 22) when he writes, ‘God is not there / to go to’, momentarily suggesting that God is simply ‘not there’. For one to speak as Jacob does in Genesis 32:30, ‘I have seen God face to face’, is to ‘falsif[y] / the relation’. Indeed, lineation emphasizes that ‘such language falsifies’, or is itself deceptive. Alternatively, it may be prayer itself, or a poem-prayer, that is a false linguistic act, an exercising of ‘the duplicity / of language, that could name / what [is] not there’ (‘Code’, BHN, p. 98). Once again, these meanings are revealed prosodically, spiritual ambiguity being a key component of Thomas’s stylistic theology. 57 This technique is also used in ‘Soliloquy’ (H’m, p. 30), where the machine enters the verbal structure abruptly and displaces expectations associated with traditional worship: ‘Within the churches / You built me you genuflected / To the machine’. 58 Brown, R. S. Thomas, pp. 75–6. 59 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 37. 60 Furrows into Silence, BBC Radio 4, 31 July 1981. 61 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 37. 62 Grahame Davies, ‘Resident aliens: R. S. Thomas and the anti-modern movement’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 7 (2001–2), 50–77. Davies discusses modernism in terms of destructive technology and industry, which threaten humanity’s spiritual connection to nature. In this sense he is quite right to call Thomas ‘anti-modern’. One simply wishes to qualify his use of the terms ‘modern’ and ‘modernism’. 63 M. Simhoney, Invitation to the Natural Physics of Matter, Space, and Radiation (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1994), p. 87: ‘When a free electron 54 55

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meets a free positron, the two nuclear particles may disappear in a point of space, out of which will then emerge .â•‹.â•‹. combined energy.’ 64 Thomas’s God is often described in terms of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: observable only when He has already moved on. One example is found in ‘Adjustments’ (F, p. 29): We never catch him at work, but can only say, coming suddenly upon an amendment, that here he has been. The idea of God as elusive is a near-constant in Thomas’s later work. ‘His are the echoes / We follow, the footprints he has just / Left’ (‘Via Negativa’, H’m, p. 16). 65 1 Kings 19:11–12. 66 Of course, ‘haunted’ can simply be interpreted as ‘frequented’ or ‘inhabited’, but Thomas seems to intend more than this. 67 The dark side of human imagination is also addressed in ‘Pre-Cambrian’ (F, p. 23), where Thomas writes that

â•…â•…â•… Plato, Aristotle, all those who furrowed the calmness of their foreheads are responsible for the bomb. See Thomas’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Religious Verse: ‘Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor’ (p. 8). 69 Terry Whalen, Philip Larkin and English Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 135. 70 M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference: Twentieth-Century Writing in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), p. 120. 71 R. S. Thomas, ‘The New Mariner’: 68

â•…â•…â•… For me now there is only the God-space into which I send out my probes. (BHN, p. 99) In his interview with John Ormond, Thomas said: ‘Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and as preacher as one who is to present poetry’ (‘R.Â€S. Thomas: priest and poet’, BBC film transcript, reprinted in Poetry Wales, 7, 4 [spring 1972], 47–57). 73 For a thorough treatment of Thomas’s star imagery and its development over time, see John Pikoulis, ‘“The Curious Stars”: R. S. Thomas and the Scientific Revolution’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 76–111. 74 See, for example, ‘Adjustments’: 72

â•…â•…â•…â•… There is an unseen power, whose sphere is the cell and the electron. (F, p. 29)

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‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, David Jones Journal, 3, 1–2 (summer/autumn 2001), 93–102. 76 Thomas conceded as much in ‘Probings’, saying: ‘To an austere scientist much of my imagery may be reprehensible, but as far as I have understood astronomy, relativity theory, and nuclear physics, I have found images in poetry, which I hope are not too muddle-headed’ (p. 36). 77 Failed attempts to summon God are addressed in ‘The Empty Church’: 75

They laid this stone trap for him, enticing him with candles, as though he would come like some huge moth out of the darkness to beat there. Ah, he had burned himself before in the human flame and escaped, leaving the reason torn. He will not come any more to our lure. (F, p. 35) 78

See, for example, Thomas’s 1984 interview with Barker, when he said: [The form of prayer is an attempt] to discover in what terms can I even address this being and in what terms can it or he come into contact with me. As I say, when the mind goes off on that train of thought it’s obviously so like the kind of poetry one is trying to write that I don’t really know when I’m praying and when I’m writing poetry. (Probing the God-space, p. 305)

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Morgan, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity, p. 86. Hebrews 11:1. Barker, Probing the God-space, p. 293. R. S. Thomas, quoted in M. J. J. van Buuren, Waiting: The Religious Poetry of Ronald Stuart Thomas, Welsh Priest and Poet (Dordrecht: ICG Printing, 1993): ‘I do like Tillich’s idea of the Ground of Being, that God is not a being’ (p. 178). In a late interview in the Daily Telegraph, Thomas asserted that ‘loving God is too much of a human construct’ (‘A poet who sang creation’, 4 December 1999, 7). M. Wynn Thomas, ‘R. S. Thomas and modern Welsh poetry’, p. 168. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 150. Robert Minhinnick, ‘Living with R. S. Thomas’, Poetry Wales, 29, 1 (summer, 1993), 11–14. Eliot, ‘East Coker’ V, lines 7–9, Four Quartets. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (London: Wildwood House, 1975). An edition of this book was in Thomas’s personal library at the time of his death. These excerpts from The Tao of Physics are quoted in Paul Harvey and Philip Goff (eds), The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 128. Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 36.

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Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 229. Like The Tao of Physics, God and the New Physics was among the books in Thomas’s personal library at the time of his death. 92 Douglas Moore, A Guide to Musical Styles (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 295. 93 Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’: ‘[The machine] serves us, but at a price, and the Frankenstein spectre is never far off, as science fiction’s success shows’ (p. 37). 94 Marshall McLuhan, in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (eds), Essential McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 159. Thomas quotes McLuhan’s most famous argument when, in his introduction to A Choice of Wordsworth’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), he argues that ‘a poem’s message is in itself. One can no more tear apart form and content in a poem than body and soul in a human being. The medium is the message!’ (p. 18). 95 The dissected rainbow in ‘Roger Bacon’ probably alludes to both Keats and Wordsworth. At a dinner party in December 1817, Keats proposed the toast, ‘Confusion to the memory of Newton!’ Wordsworth demanded an explanation, to which Keats replied: ‘Because he destroyed the beauty of a rainbow by reducing it to a prism.’ In ‘The Tables Turned’, Wordsworth writes: 91

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: – We murder to dissect. Thomas quotes the poem in his introduction to A Choice of Wordsworth’s Verse, writing that ‘[Wordsworth’s formal choices] decry too great an indulgence of the scientific spirit, which “murders to dissect”’ (p. 18). 96 By ‘death ray’, Thomas may have had in mind a particle beam weapon that Nikola Tesla was supposed to have invented in the 1920s; see Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 290. 97 Pikoulis, ‘The Curious Stars’, p. 86. 98 Thomas’s copy of Ramsey’s book is now housed in the R. S. Thomas Study Centre at Bangor University. 99 See 2 Samuel 12. 100 I. T. Ramsey, Religion and Science: Conflict and Synthesis (London: SPCK, 1964), p. 43. 101 Thomas’s later poetry also answers an earlier question, one he asks in ‘Words and the Poet’ (1964): ‘A vast amount of new knowledge is accumulating, with its accompanying vocabulary. One of the great questions facing the poet is: Can significant poetry be made with these new words and terms?’ (SP, p. 66). 102 Barker, Probing the God-space, p. 318. 103 R. S. Thomas, letter to Christine Evans (1972), quoted in Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West:

To make private and personal and dear things universal is one of the great tasks in which only a few poets succeed. This is made more difficult by the times. The rocks at Braich-y-Pwyll are some 600 million years old. The main

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human reverberations here are from vanished hermits and pilgrims, and nameless peasant farmers and fishermen. How do we reconcile these with television aerials and the cheap bric-à-brac of Aberdaron tourism and write about it in verse which is contemporary? (p. 241) Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 32. In The Echoes Return Slow, Thomas describes himself as ‘composer of the first / radio-active verses’ (p. 75). 106 Adrienne Rich, ‘When we dead awaken: writing as re-vision’, College English, 34, 1 (1972), 18–25. 107 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Reviewing R. S. Thomas’, Books in Wales (summer, 1993), 5–7. 108 Regarding the public nature of Thomas’s spiritual poetry, Wintle writes: 104 105

R. S. seeks to deflect us from a soiled world of ordinary temporal and material concern .â•‹.â•‹. If he fails in this .â•‹.â•‹. the fault may not be his: it is we perhaps who have lost the capacity to be entranced, to be deflected. Imagination’s flint cannot strike sparks off a pillow or lettuce. (Justin Wintle, Furious Interiors: Wales, R.S. Thomas and God [London: Harper Collins, 1996], p. 441) Jeremy Hooker, The Presence of the Past: Essays on Modern British and American Poetry (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), p. 137.

109

5â•‡ A Style (Un)Refined, 1988–2000 Tony Brown, Writers of Wales: R. S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), p. 104. 2 From the beginning, Thomas described the cottage in registers of haunting: ‘Living in a four-hundred-year-old cottage, and thinking of the tenants of that cottage throughout the centuries, he would imagine seeing their faces watching him from the stone walls’ (A, p. 109). Subsequently, Elsi’s absence, like God’s absence, became a haunting presence, particularly in No Truce with the Furies (1995). In ‘No Time’ (p. 33), her presence is sensed in ‘a tremor / of light’ and ‘a bird crossing / the sun’s path’. In ‘The Morrow’ (p. 77), he writes: 1

Later I was alone in my room reading and, the door closed, she was there, speechlessly enquiring: Was all well?

And in ‘Still’ (p. 27), an owl seems to embody her presence: Last night, as I loitered where your small bones had their nest, the owl blew away from your stone cross softly as down from a thistle-head. I wondered.

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See, for example, ‘The Moor’ (P. p. 24), ‘Alive’ (LS, p. 51), ‘Suddenly’ (LP, p. 201) and ‘A Thicket in Lleyn’ (EA, p. 45). 4 From The Excursion, collected in R. S. Thomas (ed.), A Choice of Wordsworth’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 132. 5 Ibid., p. 13. Thomas also includes these lines in his Penguin Book of Religious Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 131. 6 A. E. Dyson, Yeats, Eliot, and R. S. Thomas: Riding the Echo (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981), p. 296. Even as he portrays Thomas as a poet ‘riding the echo’ of Yeats and Eliot, both of whom expressed fragmentation and wholeness in their work, Dyson does not detect a similar diversity of feeling, form and imagery in Thomas’s work. 7 Leslie Norris, ‘From Leslie Norris’, Poetry Wales, 7, 4 (spring 1972), 118–21: ‘Thomas’s world is a restricted one, but consistent and recognizable.’ 8 John Wain, Professing Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 107, 108. 9 Thomas uses similar, albeit less transient, imagery in The Echoes Return Slow: 3

â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… It is then that I lie in the lean hours awake, listening to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic rising and falling, rising and falling â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… .â•‹.â•‹. And the thought comes of that other being who is awake, too, letting our prayers break on him not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity. (p. 79, italics added) 10

See, for instance, ‘The Combat’ (LS, p. 43): â•…â•… But who you are does not appear, nor why on the innocent marches of vocabulary you choose to engage us, belabouring us with your silence.

In his introduction to The Penguin Book of Religious Verse, Thomas writes, ‘Over every poet’s door is nailed Keats’s saying about negative capability. Poetry is born of the tensions set up by the poet’s ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason”’ (p. 11). 12 Since the stanza has its tradition in rhyme patterns, the free-verse ‘stanza’ is perhaps more appropriately called a ‘line-grouping’; however, the term ‘stanza’ is now commonly used in critical discussions of non-metrical, as well as metrical, prosody. 13 William Carlos Williams, ‘Comedy Entombed: 1930’, Make Light of It (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 322. 14 Kanzaburō Ōe, Somersault (New York: Grove Press, 2003), p. 71. This excerpt comes from a chapter of the novel titled ‘Reading R. S. Thomas’. 11

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There remains, of course, an oral tradition in poetry that often contributes to the dramatic and/or rhetorical nature of contemporary poems, and to poems which lean heavily on aural features. This tradition is stronger in Wales than in England or America, owing to poetry’s more public role and the active tradition of eisteddfodau. 16 Philip K. Jason, ‘Stanzas and anti-stanzas’, College English, 39, 6 (1978), 738–44. 17 Because many of Thomas’s mid-period lyrics are divided into two strophes – one of eight lines, one of six – some critics have taken to calling them sonnets. For example, R. G. Thomas writes of ‘a short sharp burst of a poem, frequently of sonnet form with an octosyllabic line and the merest hint of an assonantal rhyme, and with a clear-cut antithesis between octave and sestet’ (‘Humanus sum: a second look at R. S. Thomas’, Critical Writings, pp. 39–48). While these ‘sharp bursts’ are often very good poems, they are not very good sonnets and do not strive to be. There is often no turn, or ‘clear-cut antithesis’, between the two stanzas, and rhyme, if it is present, is idiosyncratic and does not follow a sonnet scheme. As Davie correctly argues, this type of poem ‘is a sonnet only on the understanding that all fourteen-line poems are sonnets’ (Donald Davie, ‘R. S. Thomas’s poetry of the Church of Wales’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 127–39). 18 Jason, ‘Stanzas and anti-stanzas’, p. 738. 19 Ibid. 20 The lines of Thomas’s free verse do approximate each other in length, and this can be seen as a visual technique, but the operations of his linear prosody do not allow him to cut off the end of each line at precisely the same visual point. 21 The theme of a God who is scarred by His human incarnation occurs frequently in Thomas’s late work. In ‘The Empty Church’, God has 15

â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… burned himself before in the human flame and escaped, leaving the reason torn. (F, p. 35) Charles Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 155. Hartman is specifically discussing stanza use in the work of John Berryman and William Carlos Williams. 23 Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Jaguar’ may be somewhere in the back of Thomas’s mind (Ted Hughes: Selected Poems, 1957–1967 [New York: Harper and Row, 1973]). That poem, too, expresses restlessness, as well as the incapacity of bars to constrain the energy of 22

â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… a jaguar hurrying enraged Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes On a short fierce fuse. (p. 3) 24

In ‘Sonata in X’, self-confrontation is symbolized by the image of the mirror. For more on the recurrence and significance of mirror imagery in Thomas’s work, see William V. Davis, R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor

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University Press, 2007), pp. 73–83, and Katie Gramich, ‘Mirror games: self and m(o)ther in the poetry of R. S. Thomas’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 132–48. R. S. Thomas, ‘Enigma’ (AL, p. 31): ‘Or would the cracked lips, parted at last, disclose / The embryonic thought that never grows?’ Antiphonal music is especially common in the Anglican tradition, where the choir often divides into two halves, the Cantoris and the Decani. Ned Thomas and John Barnie, ‘Probings: an interview with R. S. Thomas’, Miraculous Simplicity, pp. 21–46. Thomas was referring here to his musical tastes, but ‘Sonata in X’ is written in multiple voices, and the direct comparison to music is evident from the title. Paul Davies uses the term ‘dimensionless’ repeatedly in The New Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For example, he writes: ‘You can find the log of a dimensionless number unambiguously, but the log of a mass depends on the units in which the mass is measured’ (p. 453). Jason, ‘Stanzas and anti-stanzas’, 744. Geoffrey Hill, ‘The poetry of Allen Tate’, Geste, 3 (1958), 8–12. ‘Metaphysics of the quotidian: a conversation with Charles Wright’, in Earl G. Ingersoll, Judith Kitchen and Stan Sanvel Rubin (eds), The Post-Confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), pp. 25–38. Thomas’s late poetry is often concerned with ‘balance’, and it is a word he uses in both interviews and in prose. For example, he has spoken plainly of his ‘struggle to balance off the urgency of [his] need for revelation with the need for patience’ (‘R.Â€S. Thomas: priest and poet’, BBC film transcript, reprinted in Poetry Wales, 7, 4 [spring 1972], 47–57), and he refers to God as ‘that Being that keeps it all in balance’ (A, p. 145). Thomas, like his God, struggles to ‘[keep] it all in balance’. In this vein, Damian Walford Davies has written that Thomas’s ‘startling conceits .â•‹.â•‹. hold science and belief, technology and humanity, in a paradoxical and disturbing balance’ (‘“The frequencies I commanded”: recording R. S. Thomas (with some thoughts on Dylan)’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 2, 1 (2002), 12–23). For more on Williams and the genesis of the sight-stanza, see Eleanor Berry’s insightful essay, ‘Williams’ development of a new prosodic form – not the “variable foot,” but the “sight-stanza”’, William Carlos Williams Review, 7 (1981), 21–30. Berry also takes the term ‘sight-stanza’ from Jason and shows how, in contrast to his arguments, Williams uses sight-stanzas prosodically. R. S. Thomas, quoted in Ned Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, p. 44: ‘William Carlos Williams was influential in my change of form in certain poems.’ David Lloyd, ‘Making it new: R. S. Thomas and William Carlos Williams’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 8 (2003), 121–40. William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 48. Eleanor Berry, ‘Williams’ development of a new prosodic form’, 25. Ibid. Robert Minhinnick, ‘Living with R. S. Thomas’, Poetry Wales, 29, 1 (summer 1993), 11–14: ‘[Thomas’s poems] seem cuttings from an invisible main work, sketches for a masterpiece that has disappeared.’

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M. Wynn Thomas, ‘“Time’s changeling”: autobiography in The Echoes Return Slow’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 183–205, 184, 185, 187. 41 Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography, pp. 122, 124, 135. 42 This, unfortunately, is not the case in the Bloodaxe Collected Later Poems: 1988– 2000 (2004), which ignores this pattern and in so doing negates the essential interplay between prose and poetry. 43 M. Wynn Thomas, ‘“Time’s Changeling”’, p. 183. 44 Ibid., p. 188. 45 The prose in The Echoes Return Slow is written in the third person, and while, like the poetry, it is written in condensed language, it is also more abstract, less immediate than the poetry, which is often written in the first person. Thus, the poetry very often enacts what is being talked about in the prose, which provides a context for the private drama. 46 Katie Gramich, ‘Self and m(o)ther in the poetry of R. S. Thomas’, p. 142. 47 Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography, p. 147, italics added. 48 Thomas speaks in religious terms of Stevens in ‘Homage to Wallace Stevens’: 40

I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens .â•‹.â•‹. â•…â•… Blessings, Stevens; I stand with my back to grammar at an altar you never aspired to, celebrating the sacrament of the imagination whose high-priest notwithstanding you are. (NTF, p. 62)

For more on Thomas’s response to Stevens, see Brown’s ‘“Blessings, Stevens”: R. S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens’, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 112–31. 49 Wallace Stevens, ‘Of Modern Poetry’, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), p. 239. 50 Ibid. 51 Elaine Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence: Images of God Explored (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 187–8, italics added.

Conclusion 3 4 1 2

Richard Poole, ‘R. S. Thomas at eighty’, Poetry Wales, 29, 1 (July 1993), 2–6. Damian Walford Davies, introduction, Echoes to the Amen, pp. 5–6. R. S. Thomas, ‘A Life’ (EA, p. 52). J. Meek-Davies, ‘Even in death this author can still outpace us’, Western Mail, 2 September 2002.

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R. S. Thomas: Select Bibliography

Note: Works written or edited by R. S. Thomas, as well as interviews with him, are listed chronologically within the relevant section. Journals and works by other authors are listed in alphabetical order by author’s name. Poetry The Stones of the Field (Carmarthen: The Druid Press, 1946). An Acre of Land (Newtown: Montgomeryshire Printing Co., 1952). The Minister (Newtown: Montgomeryshire Printing Co., 1953). Song at the Year’s Turning: Poems, 1942–1954 (London: Hart-Davis, 1955). Poetry for Supper (London: Hart-Davis, 1958). Tares (London: Hart-Davis, 1961). The Bread of Truth (London: Hart-Davis, 1963). Pietá (London: Hart-Davis, 1966). Not That He Brought Flowers (London: Hart-Davis, 1968). H’m (London: Macmillan, 1972). Young and Old (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972). Selected Poems, 1946–1968 (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1973). What is a Welshman? (Llandybïe: Christopher Davies, 1974). Laboratories of the Spirit (London: Macmillan, 1975). The Way of It (Sunderland: Coelfrith Press, 1977). Frequencies (London: Macmillan, 1978). Between Here and Now (London: Macmillan, 1981). Later Poems, 1972–1982 (London: Macmillan, 1983). Destinations (Halford: Celandine Press, 1985). Ingrowing Thoughts (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1985). Experimenting with an Amen (London: Macmillan, 1986). Welsh Airs (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987). The Echoes Return Slow (London: Macmillan, 1988).

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203

Counterpoint (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1990). Frieze (Schondorf am Ammersee: Babel, 1992). Mass for Hard Times (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992). Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: J. M. Dent, 1993). No Truce With the Furies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1995). Residues (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002). R. S. Thomas: Selected Poems, Penguin Modern Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). Collected Later Poems, 1988–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2004). Prose Neb, ed. Gwenno Hywyn (Caernarfon: Gwasg Gwynedd, 1985). ‘Autobiographical essay’, Contemporary Authors: Autobiographical Series, 4 (1986), pp. 301–13; reprinted in William V. Davis (ed.), Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas (see below). ‘Language, exile, a writer and the future’, The Works, 1, Christopher Mills (ed.) (Cardiff: Welsh Union of Writers, 1988), pp. 22–43. Pe Medrwn yr Iaith ac Ysgrifau Eraill, ed. Tony Brown and Bedwyr Lewis Jones (Abertawe: Christopher Davies, 1988). Blwyddyn yn Llŷn (Caernarfon: Gwasg Gwynedd, 1990). Cymru or Wales? (Llandysul: Gomer, 1992). ABC Neb, ed. Jason Walford Davies (Caernarfon: Gwasg Gwynedd, 1995). Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey (3rd edn; Bridgend: Seren, 1995). Wales: A Problem of Translation (1996 Adam Lecture; Adam Archive Publications/Centre for 20th-Century Cultural Studies, King’s College, London, 1996). Autobiographies, ed. and trans. Jason Walford Davies (London: J. M. Dent, 1997). Books edited The Batsford Book of Country Verse (London: Batsford, 1961). The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). A Choice of George Herbert’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1967). A Choice of Wordsworth’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). Letters R. S. Thomas: Letters to Raymond Garlick, 1951–1999, ed. Jason Walford Davies (Llandysul: Gomer, 2009). Interviews ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, Anglo-Welsh Review, 74 (1983), 36–56. ‘Probings: an interview with R. S. Thomas’ (interview with Ned Thomas and John Barnie), Planet, 80 (April/May 1990), 28–52; reprinted in William V. Davis (ed.), Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas (see below).


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Untitled interview with Simon Barker, recorded 5 September 1984; collected in Probing the God-space: R. S. Thomas’s poetry of religious experience (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, Lampeter, 1991), pp. 299–333. ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, David Jones Journal, 3, 1–2 (summer/autumn 2001), 93–102 (see below). Collections of critical essays Essays by various hands collected in these volumes are not listed individually, but each is fully referenced in the chapter notes. Anstey, Sandra (ed.), Critical Writings on R. S. Thomas (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1982; revised and expanded edn, Bridgend: Seren, 1992). Davies, Damian Walford (ed.), Echoes to the Amen: Essays After R. S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003). Davis, William V. (ed.), Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993). Thomas, M. Wynn (ed.), The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty (Bridgend: Seren, 1983). Special journal issues These volumes are devoted, in part or in full, to the work of R. S. Thomas. Essays by various hands collected in these volumes are not listed individually, but each is fully referenced in the chapter notes. Agenda, 36, 2 (1998), special R. S. Thomas issue. David Jones Journal (summer/autumn 2001), special R. S. Thomas issue. New Welsh Review, 20 (spring 1993), special eightieth birthday issue. Poetry Wales, 7, 4 (spring 1972), special R. S. Thomas issue, including text of John Ormond’s documentary. Poetry Wales, 29, 1 (summer 1993), special issue: R. S. Thomas at 80. Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, 60, 2Â€(winter, 2008), special R. S. Thomas issue. Other critical and biographical studies The following works are referenced in the present study but not collected in the volumes listed above. A full bibliography of critical studies to 1993 appears in John Harris (ed.), A Bibliographical Guide to Twenty-Four Modern Anglo-Welsh Writers (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994). Subsequent work is listed in the annual bibliographies of Almanac: Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English (2005– ), which, prior to the 2007–8 issue, was titled Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays. Brown, Tony, Writers of Wales: R. S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006).


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van Buuren, M. J. J., Waiting: The Religious Poetry of Ronald Stuart Thomas, Welsh Priest and Poet (Dordrecht: ICG Printing, 1993). Crotty, Patrick, ‘Lean parishes: Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger and R. S. Thomas’s The Minister’, in Katie Gramich and Andrew Hiscock (eds), Dangerous Diversity: The Changing Faces of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), pp. 131–49. Davies, Damian Walford, ‘“The frequencies I commanded”: recording R. S. Thomas (with some thoughts on Dylan)’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 2, 1 (2002), 12–23. Davies, Grahame, ‘Resident aliens: R. S. Thomas and the anti-modern movement’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 7 (2001–2), 50–77. Davies, Jason Walford, ‘“Thick ambush of shadows”: allusions to Welsh literature in the work of R. S. Thomas’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 1 (1995), 75–127. Davies, John, ‘“Only the mind to fly with”: birds in R. S. Thomas’s poetry’, Poetry Wales, 30, 3 (January 1995), 18–22. Davis, William V., R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007). Dyson, A. E., Yeats, Eliot, and R. S. Thomas: Riding the Echo (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981). Hooker, Jeremy, “R. S. Thomas: Prytherch and after”, in The Presence of the Past: Essays on Modern British and American Poetry (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), pp. 128–40. ——, ‘“The true Wales of my imagination”: Welsh and English in the poetry of R. S. Thomas, David Jones and Gillian Clarke’, Imagining Wales: A View of Modern Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), pp. 28–49. Jarvis, Matthew, Becoming ‘Prifardd of English-speaking Wales’: The Reception of R. S. Thomas in the 1960s and Early 1970s, Tucker Lecture Series no. 3 (Lampeter: Trivium Publications, 2009). Knapp, James F., ‘The poetry of R. S. Thomas’, Twentieth Century Literature, 17, 1 (January 1971), 1–9. Lloyd, David, ‘Through the looking glass: R. S. Thomas’s The Echoes Return Slow as poetic autobiography’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 42, 4 (winter, 1996), 438–52. ——, ‘Making it new: R. S. Thomas and William Carlos Williams’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 8 (2003), 121–40. McGill, William J., Poet’s Meeting: George Herbert, R. S. Thomas, and the Argument with God (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2003). Minhinnick, Robert, ‘Living with R. S. Thomas’, Poetry Wales, 29, 1 (summer 1993), 11–14. ——, ‘Forgive my naming you .â•‹.â•‹. R. S. Thomas (1913–2000)’, Poetry Wales, 36, 3 (January 2001), 2–3.


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Morgan, Barry, Strangely Orthodox: R. S. Thomas and his Poetry of Faith (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 2006). Morgan, Christopher, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Phillips, Dewi Z., R. S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God (London: Macmillan, 1986). Prys-Williams, Barbara, ‘Buried to be dug-up: R. S. Thomas (1913–2000)’, Twentieth Century Autobiography (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 120–47. Rogers, Byron, The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas (London: Aurum, 2006). Shepherd, Elaine, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence: Images of God Explored (New York: St. Martins, 1996). Thomas, M. Wynn, ‘R. S. Thomas: the poetry of the sixties’, Internal Difference: Twentieth-Century Writing in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), 107–29. ——, ‘Reviewing R. S. Thomas’, Books in Wales (summer 1993), 5–7. ——‘For Wales see landscape: early R. S. Thomas and the English topographical tradition’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 9 (2004–5), 21–45. ——, ‘R. S. Thomas and modern Welsh Poetry’, in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 167–8. ——, ‘“The Stones of the Field” and the power of the sword: R. S. Thomas as war poet’, in Tony Curtis (ed.), Wales at War: Critical Essays on Literature and Art (Bridgend: Seren, 2007), pp. 142–64. Ward, John Powell, The Poetry of R. S. Thomas (Bridgend: Seren, 2001). Wintle, Justin, Furious Interiors: Wales, R. S. Thomas and God (London: Harper Collins, 1996).


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Index

Abercrombie, Lascelles 13 Abercuawg 78, 169, 175 n.46 Aberdaron 3, 70, 114, 116, 118–19, 120, 122, 124, 128, 136, 148, 150 accentual prosody 23–4, 27–8, 40–1, 58, 80, 85, 104 accentual-Â�syllabic prosody 23, 24, 40, 80, 185 n.76 Adams, Sam 105 Alvarez, Al 185 n.81 Amis, Kingsley 106–7 ‘Anglo-Â�Welsh’ writing see Welsh writing in English Anstey, Sandra 12, 29 alliteration 42, 43, 49, 50, 53 American poetry, response to 79, 81, 85, 93–108, 115, 160, 185 n.81 anxiety see troubled muse Arnold, Matthew 108–9 assonance 15, 31, 42, 47–8, 50–2, 53, 60, 62, 105, 199 Attridge, Derek 80, 120, 128 autobiography, poetry as 84–5, 163–9 Bacon, Roger 145, 146 Bardsey Island 118, 150 Barker, Simon 141, 146, 189 n.2, 195 n.78

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Barlow, Howard 148, 181 n.10 Barnie, John 80 see also R. S. Thomas (interviews) ‘Probings’ ‘barrier syndrome’ 71, 73–6, 77, 78, 79, 101, 102, 109, 144, 182 n.31 Baudelaire, Charles 44 Beat generation 96 Berg, Stephen 82 Berry, Eleanor 162, 200 n.33 Berryman, John 185 n.81 biblical (language, allusion and metaphor) 46, 62, 63, 69–70, 113, 119–20, 123–4, 134, 135, 138–42, 145, 166, 167, 173 n.10, 180 n.66 birds 5, 11, 13, 15, 16, 33, 78, 83, 89, 160 Black Mountain school 96–7 Blake, William 120 Bohata, Kirsti 175 n.54, 189 n.137 Bottomley, Gordon 13 Brandes, Rand 192 n.46 British Poetry Revival 94, 95 Brooks, Cleanth 172 n.11 Brown, Pete 185 n.83 Brown, Tony 6, 20, 36, 87, 103, 110, 124, 181 n.1, 181 n.17, 182 n.26, 184 n.67, 193 n.58, 201 n.48

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index

Davies, Paul 142–3, 200 n.28 Davies, W. H. 13 Davis, William V. 191 n.22, 199 n.24 de la Mare, Walter 13, 14–15 Deane, Patrick 190 n.17 Dobyns, Stephen 192 n.51 dreams see imagined Wales Drinam, Adam 179 n.55 Dublin Magazine, The 12, 20, 21, 51, 53, 54, 177 n.70 Duncan, Andrew 2 Dyson, A. E. 93–4, 149 Dyson, Tony see A. E. Dyson

Cadair Idris 72, 78 Capra, Fritjof 142–3 Castay, Â�Marie-Â�Thérèse 177 n.7 Celtic Romanticism see imagined Wales Ceridwen 175 n. 57 Children of Albion 185 n.83 Chirk 3, 7, 9, 11, 16, 19, 26, 30, 36–7, 85 Church in Wales 12, 188 n.124 Clarke, Austin 9, 51–4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 146 colonialism 22, 39, 78 confessional poetry 96, 102–4, 187 n.106 Conran, Anthony 191 n.17 consonance 15, 31, 32, 42–3, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53, 60 consumerism 68, 76, 109, 132–3 counterpoint 80, 89, 90, 96, 97–8, 112, 126, 129, 163 Cox, C. B. 93–4 ‘claustrophobic vicar syndrome’ 71–3, 76, 78 Critical Quarterly 81, 82, 93–6, 97, 99, 102 Crotty, Patrick 36, 38, 51, 54, 179 n.35, 180 n.71 Culler, Jonathan 184 n.58 Curtis, Tony 173 n.9 Cushman, Stephen 120 Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society) 110 ‘cymrification’ 34–5, 46–54 cynghanedd 50

Eglwys-Â�fach 3, 18, 67–80, 85, 86–8, 90, 91, 93, 100, 104, 105, 109, 115, 118, 119, 146, 160 Eldridge, Mildred (Elsi) 20, 85, 118, 148, 197 n.2 Eliot, T. S. 9, 20, 44, 81, 93, 105, 124, 142 end-Â�stopped line see line ending enjambement 64, 75, 78, 79, 80, 84, 89, 90–1, 94, 95, 97–8, 100, 102, 105, 111, 116–17, 120, 127, 128–9, 131, 133, 135, 140, 144, 151–2, 154, 161, 167 Enright, D. J. 106 estrangement 20, 25–6, 35, 37–8, 46, 69, 70, 73, 75, 85–6, 119, 147, 148 Evans, Gwynfor 110 exile see estrangement existentialism 12, 148, 164

Dafydd, Fflur 84–5 Darling, Frank Fraser 176 n.66 Darwinism 33 Davie, Donald 106, 107–8, 116–18, 188 n.124, 199 n.17 Davies, Damian Walford 3, 92, 170, 200 n.32 Davies, Grahame 26, 30, 184 n.55, 193 n.62 Davies, James A. 122 Davies, Jason Walford 24 Davies, John 16

Figaro (pseudonym) 177 n.70 Finch, Peter 94–5, 185 n.85 First World War 19, 20 Fisher, Allen 95 Fisher, Roy 95 Ford, Ford Madox 83 Forestry Commission 111, 189 n.137 free verse 13, 32, 40, 55, 63, 79, 80, 81–5, 95–106, 116–18, 147, 157, 165 Frost, Robert 93, 111 Fussell, Paul 64, 81, 123

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Galway 20, 26, 37 Garlick, Raymond 72, 116 Georgian poetry 3, 5, 7, 13–16, 17, 19, 26, 31, 34, 90, 96, 109, 136 Ginsberg, Allen 82, 185 n.83 Gitzen, Julian 190 n.17 Golden Treasury, The 3, 8–9, 10, 15, 109, 136 God 3, 7, 11, 16, 38, 39, 56, 61–3, 64, 70, 73, 77, 83, 89, 104, 116, 119, 121–3, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130–5, 136–44, 147, 148, 150–2, 154–7, 159, 163, 164, 167–9, 170, 176 n.69 Gramich, Katie 166, 174 n.23, 180 n.62, 200 n.24 ‘grammar verse’ 98, 126, 129, 137, 164 grammetrics see counterpoint Great Hunger, The see Patrick Kavanagh Gross, Harvey 3, 183 n.46 Gunn, Thom 94, 106 Hanmer 3, 7, 26, 36, 37, 45 Hart-Â�Davis, Rupert 119, 173 n.6, 187 n.117 Hartman, Charles 79, 157 Heaney, Seamus 54 Henri, Adrian 185 n.83 hill farmers 6, 30, 35–6, 39–46, 47, 71, 76, 88–9, 104, 150, 158 Hill, Geoffrey 95, 110, 160 Holder, Alan 89, 117 Hollander, John 128 Hooker, Jeremy 26, 104, 124, 147, 184 n.61, 191 n.18, 193 n.53, 197 n.109 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 8, 42 Horovitz, Michael 185 n.83 ‘home’, loss of and search for 18, 20, 25, 85, 86, 91, 119, 143, 175 n.46 Hughes, Ted 83, 93, 94, 95, 124–7, 199 n.23 identity: insecurity of 12, 73, 87, 91, 104, 118, 147, 148–9, 150, 158–60, 163–9 see also Welsh identity

10 Index.indd 209

209

imagined Wales 19–22, 26, 34, 45, 48, 71, 74–6, 78–9, 108–10, 136, 169 imagism 81 imperialism see colonialism introspection, poetry as a means of 25, 38, 66, 68, 71, 80, 81, 89, 90, 93, 96, 101, 103–4, 113, 119, 166 Ireland, contemplated move to 26 isolation see estrangement Jarrell, Randall 99 Jarvis, Matthew 172 n.5 Jason, Philip 152, 153–4, 157, 159 Jeffers, Robinson 93 Jennings, Elizabeth 94, 106 Job, Book of 38–9, 46, 64, 120 see also biblical language, allusion and metaphor Johnson, Hewlett 12 Johnson, Samuel 117 Jolliffe, Peter 176 n.63 Jones, Glyn 50, 69 Jones, Gwyn 2, 105–6, 173 n.1 Joyce, James 9 Kavanagh, Patrick 9, 54–8 Keats, John 8, 85, 113, 152, 196 n.95, 198 n.11 Kierkegaard, Søren 142 Knapp, James 106 Langdon, Curtis (pseudonym) 177 n.70 language, relevance and appropriateness of 67–8, 69, 137–88 Larkin, Philip 93, 94, 106, 107–8 Levertov, Denise 99, 186 n.100 Lewis, Saunders 110 Lichtenwalner, Shawna 109 line break see enjambement line ending 59, 64, 99, 104, 130, 153 line integrity, fallacy of 116–18 linear prosody 13, 24, 79–80, 89, 91, 93, 95–106, 108, 110–13, 116, 122, 133, 137, 138, 140, 144,

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151, 155–7, 159–60, 164–5, 167, 182 n.30 ‘lineo-Â�spatial’ prosody 144, 161–3 Liverpool 20, 108 Llandudno 108 Llŷn peninsula 70, 114, 118, 136, 150 London 6, 94 loneliness see estrangement Longley, Edna 85 Lowell, Robert 83, 99, 103, 185 n.81, 187 n.106 Lewis, Alun 50 Lloyd, David 3, 95, 160, 184 n.59, 186 n.93 Lloyd, Tecwyn 108–9 Mabinogion, The 48–9 MacDiarmid, Hugh 35, 51 ‘machine, the’ 131–2, 135 Manafon 3, 6–7, 18, 23, 26, 29, 30, 34–66, 68, 71–2, 77, 80, 86, 118 Marsh, Edward 5, 13 MacLeish, Archibald 93 Macleod, Fiona 19, 20, 26, 36 see also William Sharp Maes-Â�yr-Â�Onnen 71 materialism see consumerism McGill, William J. 191 n.22 McGough, Roger 185 n.83 McLuhan, Marshall 144 Meek-Â�Davies, J. 171 Mersey Sound, The 185 n.83 Merwin, W. S. 82 Mezey, Robert 82 mimesis 105, 115, 129, 133, 147, 163, 189 n.4 see also structural mimesis Milton, John 8 Minhinnick, Robert 2, 74, 142, 179 n.32, 181 n.2, 189 n.136, 200 n.39 Mitchell, Adrian 185 n.83 Monro, Harold 13 Montague, John 54 Moore, Douglas 196 n.92 Moore, Marianne 93

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index

Morgan, Barry 191 n.22 Morgan, Christopher 68, 84, 124, 138, 183 n.39, 186 n.102 Morgan, Edwin 95 Morris, Brian 69 Morrison, Blake 106 Motion, Andrew 68 Mottram, Eric 185 n.84 ‘Movement, the’ 94, 106–8, 116 mushroom gathering (as symbol of innocence) 7–8, 10–11, 14, 27, 28, 33 myth, poetry as 94, 124, 125–7 Naked Poetry 82 National Library of Wales holograph manuscript 5, 10–12, 13, 14, 28, 173 n.4 nationalism 26, 69, 83, 105, 109–10, 113 Nemo, John 180 n.65 Neo-Â�Romantic poets 106 New Criticism 3 New Poetry, The 185 n.81 New York school 96 nature imagery 3, 7, 8–9, 10, 11–12, 14, 15–17, 22, 23, 25, 33, 61, 62, 72, 85, 176 n.69 non-Â�metrical prosody 24, 40, 80, 82, 177 n.74, 198 n.12 Norris, Leslie 50, 179 n.33, 198 n.7 Ōe, Kanzaburō 152 ‘Ogre of Wales’ caricature 69, 148 Olson, Charles 96–7, 100, 110, 191 n.27 Ormond, John 177 n.6, 177 n.12, 180 n.69 O’Sullivan, Seamus 12, 20, 26 Owen, Goronwy 175 n.58 pacifism 12 Palgrave, Francis Turner 3, 8–9, 136 pastoral role, questions about 70, 87, 103, 127 Patten, Brian 185 n.83 Perloff, Marjorie 185 n.76 ‘personality criticism’ 83–5, 104

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Phillips, D. Z. 120, 191 n.22 Pickard, Tom 95 Pikoulis, John 145, 194 n.73 Plaid Cymru 110 Plath, Sylvia 93, 94, 99, 125, 185 n.81 political poetry see public poetry Poole, Richard 170 Pope, Alexander 10 Pound, Ezra 9, 93, 98 Press, John 14, 174 n.13 Price, Cecil 40, 42 ‘Projective Verse’ see Charles Olson prosody 2–4, 6, 30, 36, 79, 82–3, 84, 98, 105, 107, 111, 120, 122, 124, 130, 137, 147, 165, 170 see also accentual prosody; Â�accentual-Â�syllabic prosody; linear prosody; Â�lineo-Â�spatial prosody; Â�non-Â�metrical prosody; visual prosody Prys-Â�Williams, Barbara 12, 104, 163–4, 168, 184 n.59 Prytherch, Iago 6, 15, 35, 38–46, 83, 87, 124, 184 n.67 public poetry 68–70, 81, 108–14, 147 puns 3, 76, 92, 98, 150, 159 Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry 182 n.32 Quinn, Antoinette 180 n.64, 180 n.67 R. S. Thomas Study Centre (Bangor University) 196 n.98 Ramsey, I. T. 145 Ransom, John Crowe 93 Raworth, Tom 95 Rhiw 3 see also Â�Sarn-Â�y-Â�Plas rhyme 5, 10–11, 28, 31, 32, 37, 40, 42, 46, 48, 53, 58–63, 67, 79, 81–2, 85, 105, 151, 164 Rhys, Keidrych 24, 28, 50 see also Wales Rich, Adrienne 94, 96, 97–9, 101, 112, 147, 186 n.97 Roberts, Michael 5

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211

Robinson, John 191 n.19 Rogers, Byron 45, 176 n.66, 181 n.10, 196 n.103 Rowe, Dilys 6 San Francisco Renaissance 96 Sarn-Â�y-Â�Plas 148–9, 150, 166 science, language and metaphors of 65, 83, 116, 118, 132–47, 163 Scotland, contemplated move to 176 n.66 Second Aeon 185 n.85 Second World War poetic response to 7, 18–19, 27, 30, 33, 44, 45, 46, 56, 176 n.69 Sexton, Anne 94, 99, 185 n.81 Shakespeare, William 8 Shapiro, James 174 n.14 Sharp, William 19 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 9, 10, 23, 26 Shepherd, Elaine 45, 124, 169, 191 n.22 Simhoney, M. 193 n.63 Simpson, Louis 94 spiritual exploration, poetry as means of 113–14, 116, 119–28, 130, 131, 138–47, 163, 165, 169 Snyder, Gary 99 sonnet 56, 58, 112, 199 n.17 Stafford, William 82, 99 stanzas 32, 91, 152–63, 164, 186 n.89, 198 n.12 Stevens, Wallace 20, 93, 168 Stevenson, Anne, 177 n.8, 179 n.38 stress pairings and stress clusters 29, 32, 40, 41–2, 49, 52, 53, 64, 79, 80 ‘structural mimesis’ 116, 120, 127, 129, 131, 140, 145, 156, 159 stylistic biography 4 Swinburne, Algernon 8–9 syncopation see counterpoint Taliesin 175 n.57 Tapping, G. Craig 179 n.51 Tate, Allen 93 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 176 n.69 Tesla, Nikola 196 n.96

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Thomas, Dylan 1, 8, 42, 50, 83, 106 Thomas, Edward 13, 15, 16–19, 25, 26, 37–8, 79, 81, 85–93, 107 poems ‘For These’ 175 n.37 ‘Gone, Gone Again’ 185 n.72 Â�‘Good-Â�Night’ 16–18 ‘Home’ 86–7 ‘Lights Out’ 89, 90 ‘New House, The’ 37 ‘Over the Hills’ 184 n.72 ‘Unknown Bird, The’ 16 ‘Up in the Wind’ 182 n.33 Thomas, Gwydion 45 Thomas, M. Wynn 2, 6, 18, 20, 30, 44, 70–1, 108, 119, 163, 165, 173 n.9, 175 n.55, 176 n.61, 176 n.62, 176 n.65. 177 n.78, 177 n.79, 178 n. 16, 178 n. 17, 178 n. 18, 179 n.34, 179 n.37, 181 n.11, 182 n.29, 183 n.34, 184 n.59, 187 n.110, 191 n.21, 194 n.70, 195 n.84, 197 n.107, 201 n.43 Thomas, Ned 108, 109 see also R. S. Thomas (interviews) ‘Probings’ Thomas, R. G. 190 n.9, 199 n.17 Thomas, R. S. broadcasts Furrows into Silence 193 n.60 ‘Poet’s Voice, The’ 34, 47, 50, 51, 177 n.4 ‘R. S. Thomas: Priest and Poet’ (John Ormond film) 177 n.6, 177 n.12, 194 n.72, 200 n.32 Time for Carving, A 185 n.79 With Great Pleasure 16 interviews ‘Probings: An Interview with R. S. Thomas’ 50, 84, 115–16, 132, 159, 177 n.3, 179 n.40, 179 n.41, 179 n.49, 180 n.72, 182 n.23, 184 n.57, 189 n.3, 190 n.16, 193 n.61, 195 n.76, 196 n.93, 197 n.104, 200 n.34 ‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Â�Price-Â�Owen’ 9,

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15, 93, 138, 176 n. 69, 177 n.9, 178 n.15, 180 n.68, 180 n.73 ‘R. S. Thomas talks to J. B. Lethbridge’ 68, 79, 106, 109, 125, 182 n.19, 182 n.25 poetry ‘Absence, The’ 134 Acre of Land, An 17–18, 47, 49 ‘Acting’ 84–5 ‘Adjustments’ 194 n.64, 194 n.74 ‘Affinity’ 35, 44, 177 n.75 ‘Afforestation’ 181 n.13 ‘After the Lecture’ 193 n.56 ‘Airy Tomb, The’ 44, 57, 58 ‘Aleph’ 192 n.36 ‘Alive’ 137, 198 n.3 ‘Ancients of the World, The’ 179 n.43 ‘Andante’ 143, 149 ‘At It’ 38 ‘At the End’ 149–51 ‘Balance’ 145 ‘Bat, The’ 19–23 ‘Because’ 92 Bread of Truth, The 54, 69 ‘Bright Field, The’ 141–2 ‘Cain’ 190 n.12 ‘Careers’ 100, 101–2, 104 ‘Castaway’ 145 ‘Casualty, The’ 190 n.12 ‘Code’ 193 n.56 ‘Combat, The’ 198 n.10 ‘Coming, The’ 137 ‘Composition’ 68 ‘Confessions of an Â�Anglo-Â� Welshman’ 177 n.70 ‘Country, A’ 90 ‘Country Church’ 47 ‘Cure, The’ 102–3 ‘Cyclamen’ 12–13, 21 ‘Cynddylan on a Tractor’ 16 ‘Dark Well, The’ 54 ‘Depopulation of the Hills’ 59, 84 ‘Echoes’ 121

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Echoes Return Slow, The 7, 8, 36, 73, 84, 118, 124, 144, 148, 149, 159, 162–8, 197 n.105, 198 n.9 ‘Emerging’ (Frequencies) 118 ‘Emerging’ (Laboratories of the Spirit) 129–36, 138, 149 ‘Empty Church, The’ 195 n.77, 199 n.21 ‘Enigma’ 17, 200 n.25 ‘Evensong’ 178 n.26 ‘Face, The’ 77 ‘Farm Child’ 55 ‘Farmer, A’ 177 n.70 ‘Female’ 123 ‘Fisherman, The’ 176 n.59 ‘Formula’ 190 n.12 Frequencies 153, 154, 163 ‘Frost’ 177 n.70, 178 n.26 ‘Gap, The’ 146, 192 n.31 ‘Gap in the Hedge, The’ 58, 178 n.26, 184 n.72 ‘God’s Story’ 192 n.31 ‘Gradual’ 89 ‘Groping’ 137, 149 ‘Hand, The’ 192 n.31 ‘Hebrews 1229’ 138–42 ‘Here’ 70, 87 ‘Hill Farmer’ 50, 53 ‘Hiraeth’ 23–4, 27, 36, 47 H’m 85, 106, 108, 115, 124–6, 136, 184 n.61, 190 n.17 ‘H’m’ 126–7 ‘Homage to Wallace Stevens’ 201 n.48 ‘Homo Sapiens’ 54 ‘In Church’ 70, 163, 185 n.72 ‘Island, The’ 156 ‘Kingdom, The’ 158 Laboratories of the Spirit 115 ‘Labourer, A’ (The Stones of the Field) 177 n.72, 178 n.26 ‘Labourer, The’ (An Acre of Land) 45 ‘Labourer, The’ (Wales, reprinted as ‘A Labourer’ in The Stones of the Field) 29, 177 n.70, 178 n.26

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‘Lament for Prytherch’ 178 n.26 ‘Life, A’ 201 n.3 ‘Lonely Furrow, The’ 58 ‘Looking at Sheep’ 110 ‘Making’ 120–3, 128, 137, 150–1 ‘Man and Tree’ 178 n.26 Mass for Hard Times 148 ‘Memories’ 48 ‘Memories of Yeats Whilst Travelling to Holyhead’ 23, 25–6 Minister, The 44, 54, 178 n.26 ‘Mistress, The’ 178 n.26 ‘Moon in Lleyn, The’ 25 ‘Moor, The’ 198 n.3 ‘Morrow, The’ 197 n.2 ‘Movement’ 9 ‘New Mariner, The’ 136–7, 146, 194 n.71 ‘Night and Morning’ 47 ‘No Through Road’ 7, 65 ‘No Time’ 197 n.2 No Truce with the Furies 197 n.2 ‘Observer, The’ 11 ‘Old Man, An’ 178 n.26 ‘On a Portrait of Joseph Hone by Augustus John’ 31–3 ‘On the Shore’ 75–6 ‘Once’ 124, 125 ‘One Way’ 144 ‘Other’ 192 n.31 ‘Out of the Hills’ 18, 56 ‘Peasant, A’ 22, 38–46, 178 n.26, 183 n.40 ‘Peasant Greeting’ 44, 178 n.26 ‘Petition’ 155 ‘Pilgrimages’ 140 ‘Plas-Â�yn-Â�Rhiw’ 148 ‘Pluperfect’ 192 n.36 ‘Pre-Â�Cambrian’ 194 n.67 ‘Priest and Peasant’ 63–4, 79 Poetry for Supper 54, 64, 79, 103, 107 ‘Praise’ 156 ‘Priest to His People, A’ 35, 43, 60 ‘Probing’ 38

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index

‘Propaganda’ 27, 30–1, 177 n.70 ‘Reflections’ 165, 185 n.76 ‘Repeat’ 192 n.31 ‘Reservoirs’ 11, 110, 111 Residues 171 ‘Resort’ 113 ‘Retired’ 144 ‘Retirement’ 191 n.20 ‘Rhondda’ 17 ‘Rising of Glyndŵ r, The’ 47 ‘Scenes’ 136 ‘Small Window, The’ 74, 180 n.79 ‘Soil’ 41, 55 ‘Soliloquy’ 121, 124, 156, 193 n.57 ‘Somewhere’ 159 ‘Sonata in X’ 157–60, 161, 165 ‘Song’ (An Acre of Land) 27 ‘Song’ (The Dublin Magazine) 53 ‘Song’ (Song at the Year’s Turning) 181 n.13, 183 n.41 ‘Song at the Year's Turning’ 31, 49 Song at the Year's Turning 6, 30, 42, 65 ‘Song for Gwydion’ 7, 178 n.26 ‘Sorry’ 153–4 ‘Still’ 197 n.2 Stones of the Field, The 6, 12, 18, 21, 31, 34, 39, 44, 46–7 ‘Strange Spring, The’ 42, 178 n.26 ‘Suddenly’ 198 n.3 Tares 6 ‘Temptation of a Poet’ 87–8 ‘There’ 68 ‘They’ (Not That He Brought Flowers) 70, 90, 92 ‘They’ (The Way of It) 137 ‘This to Do’ 88, 100–1, 183 n.41 ‘Thicket in Lleyn, A’ 198 n.3 ‘Those Others’ 6, 70, 76 ‘Thought from Nietzche, A’ 178 n.26 ‘Threshold’ 133, 135, 160

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‘Thus’ 135 ‘Tidal’ 151 ‘To a Young Poet’ 6 ‘Toast’ 113 ‘Tool, The’ 192 n.31 ‘Tree, The’ 178 n.26 unpublished and uncollected poems 5, 10–12, 14, 28, 50 ‘Via Negativa’ 194 n.64 ‘View from the Window, The’ 74 ‘Waiting’ (Between Here and Now) 25 ‘Waiting’ (Frequencies) 167, 193 n.56 ‘Wales’ 47, 49 ‘Wedlock’ 68 ‘Welsh’ 68 Welsh Airs 113 ‘Welsh Hill Country, The’ 49 ‘Welsh History’ 45, 49, 57 ‘Welsh Landscape’ 22, 111 ‘Welsh Testament, A’ 68, 180 n.79, 183 n.41 ‘Welshman at St James’s Park, A’ 77–8, 181 n.7, 181 n.13 ‘White Tiger, The’ 154–7, 158, 161 ‘Who?’ 68, 104 ‘Woman, The’ 192 n.31 prose ‘Abercuawg’ 74, 169, 184 n.56 ‘Autobiographical essay’ 175 n.44, 181 n.16 Autobiographies (comprising ‘Former Paths’, ‘The Creative Writer’s Suicide’, No-one [Neb] and A Year in Lly n̂ ) 11, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 37, 48, 50, 71–2, 109, 118, 136, 145, 176 n.68, 182 n.19, 187 n.109, 191 n.19, 197 n.19, 200 n.32 Batsford Book of Country Verse, The (introduction) 15 Choice of Wordsworth’s Verse, A (introduction) 30, 149, 196 n.94, 198 n.4

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‘Depopulation of the Welsh hill country’ 84, 181 n.12 ‘Making of a Poem, The’ 67, 79, 81 ‘Mountains, The’ 71, 181 n.12, 184 n.56 Penguin Book of Religious Verse, The (introduction) 93, 191 n.19, 194 n.68, 198 n.11 Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (introduction) 86, 175 n.40, 175 n.46 ‘Some Contemporary Scottish Writing’ 34, 177 n.5, 179 n.55 ‘Two Chapels’ 71 ‘Undod’ 142 ‘Words and the Poet’ 67, 69, 83, 177 n.71, 196 n.100 ‘Y Llwybrau Gynt 2’ 8 Tillich, Paul 122, 141 Tomlinson, Charles 95 tourist writing 26, 108–9 ‘troubled muse’ 6–7, 12–13, 18–19, 33, 36, 38–9, 124 ‘ultimate reality’ 119, 132, 138, 142, 191 n.19 underscoring 40–2 see also stress pairings and stress clusters van Buuren, M. J. J. 195 n.82 van Gogh, Vincent 15 ‘variable foot’ 186 n.91 Vendler, Helen 89, 192 n.33 verse libre 81 Vicary, J. D. 190 n.17 visual prosody 91, 117, 144–5, 153, 157, 160–3, 190 n.9, 199 n.20 vowel frequency 32, 48 Wain, John 106, 107–8, 116, 188 n.123, 198 n.8 Wainwright, Eddie 129 Wales 28, 50, 51 Ward, John Powell 45, 181 n.6, 182 n.32, 189 n.135 Waste Land, The 5, 124, 178 n.24

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Watkins, Vernon 24, 50 Webb, Harri 1, 2, 83 Welsh-Â�language poetry 9, 50 see also cynghanedd Welsh identity (idea of and search for) 26, 27, 44–6, 51, 69, 78, 86, 106, 118, 175 n.46 Welsh writing in English 34, 47, 50, 108–9 Wevill, Assia 125 Wexler, Peter 183 n.37 Whalen, Terry 136 Whitehead, Alfred North 141 Whitman, Walt 81, 93, 98, 120 Whitworth, Michael 172 n.12 Williams, Rowan 91, 92 Williams, William Carlos 3, 51, 81, 82, 94, 95–6, 115, 120, 152, 160–2 Wilson, Timothy 72, 181 n.9, 189 n.142 Wintle, Justin 40, 75, 180 n.79, 197 n.108 Woodring, Carl 174 n.14 Wordsworth, William 85, 149, 173 n.10, 180 n.59, 196 n.95 Wright, Charles 160 Wright, James 94 Y Berwyn 72, 78 Yeats, William Butler 19, 20–6, 36, 136 poems ‘Ballad of Moll Magee, The’ 21 ‘Ballad of Father Gilligan, The’ 21 ‘Dream of Death, A’ 22 ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ 21 ‘Fisherman, The’ 24–5 ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree, The’ 19 ‘Madness of King Goll, The’ 21 Rose, The 21, 23 ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’ 19 Tower, The 24 ‘When You Are Old’ 21 ‘Who Goes With Fergus?’ 21 Young, Andrew 107

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