Collected Poems 1945-1990

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Collected Poems 1945-1990 Page 5

by R. S. Thomas


  Of age ! ‘Come home, come home. All is forgiven.’

  I began a Bible class;

  But no one came,

  Only Mali, who was not right in the head.

  She had a passion for me, and dreamed of the day ...

  I opened the Bible and expounded the Word

  To the flies and spiders, as Francis preached to the birds.

  Narrator

  Over the moor the round sky

  Was ripening, and the sun had spread

  Its wings and now was heading south

  Over the sea, where Morgan followed.

  It was August, the holiday month

  For ministers; they walked the smooth

  Pavements of Aber and compared their lot

  To the white accompaniment of the sea’s laughter.

  The Minister

  When I returned, strengthened, to the bare manse

  That smelled of mould, someone had broken a window

  During my absence and let a bird in.

  I found it dead, starved, on the warm sill.

  There is always the thin pane of glass set up between us

  And our desires.

  We stare and stare and stare, until the night comes

  And the glass is superfluous.

  I went to my cold bed saddened, but the wind in the tree

  Outside soothed me with echoes of the sea.

  Narrator

  Harvest, harvest ! The oats that were too weak

  To hold their heads up had been cut down

  And placed in stooks. There was no nonsense

  Plaiting the last sheaf and wasting time

  Throwing sickles. That was a fad of Prytherch

  Of Nant Carfan; but the bugger was dead.

  The men took the corn, the beautiful goddess,

  By the long hair and threw her on the ground.

  Below in the valleys they were thinking of Christmas;

  The fields were all ploughed and the wheat in.

  But Davies still hadn’t made up his mind

  Whom they should ask to the Thanksgiving.

  The sea’s tan had faded; the old pallor

  Was back in Morgan’s cheeks. In his long fight

  With the bare moor, it was the moor that was winning.

  The children came into Sunday School

  Before he did, and put muck on his stool.

  He stood for the whole lesson, pretending not to notice

  The sounds in his desk: a mouse probably

  Put there to frighten him. They loved their joke.

  Say nothing, say nothing. Morgan was learning

  To hold his tongue, the wisdom of the moor.

  The pulpit is a kind of block-house

  From which to fire the random shot

  Of innuendo; but woe betide the man

  Who leaves the pulpit for the individual

  Assault. He spoke to Davies one day:

  Davies

  Adultery’s a big word, Morgans: where’s your proof?

  You who never venture from under your roof

  Once the night’s come; the blinds all down

  For fear of the moon’s bum rubbing the window.

  Take a word from me and keep your nose

  In the Black Book, so it won’t be tempted

  To go sniffing where it’s not wanted.

  And leave us farmers to look to our own

  Business, in case the milk goes sour

  From your sharp talk before it’s churned

  To good butter, if you see what I mean.

  Narrator

  Did you say something?

  Don’t be too hard on them, there were people here

  Before these and they were no better.

  And there’ll be people after may be, and they’ll be

  No better; it is the old earth’s way

  Of dealing with time’s attrition.

  Snow on the fields, snow on the heather;

  The fox was abroad in the new moon

  Barking. And if the snow thawed

  And the roads cleared there was an election

  Meeting in the vestry next the chapel.

  Men came and spoke to them about Wales,

  The land they lived in without knowing it,

  The land that is reborn at such times.

  They mentioned Henry Richard and S.R. – the great names;

  And Keir Hardie; the names nobody knew.

  It was quite exciting, but in the high marginal land

  No names last longer than the wind

  And the rain let them on the cold tombstone.

  They stood outside afterwards and watched the cars

  Of the speakers departing down the long road

  To civilisation, and walked home

  Arguing confusedly under the stars.

  The Minister

  Winter was like that; a meeting, a foxhunt,

  And the weekly journey to market to unlearn

  The lesson of Sunday. The rain never kept them

  From the packed town, though it kept them from chapel.

  Drive on, farmer, to market

  With your pigs and your lean cows

  To the town, where the dealers are waiting

  And the girl in the green blouse,

  Fresh as a celandine from the spring meadows,

  Builds like a fabulous tale

  Tower upon tower on the counter

  The brown and the golden ale.

  Narrator

  A year passed, once more Orion

  Unsheathed his sword from its dark scabbard;

  And Sirius followed, loud as a bird

  Whistling to eastward his bright notes.

  The stars are fixed, but the earth journeys

  By strange migrations towards the cold

  Frosts of autumn from the spring meadows.

  And we who see them, where have we been

  Since last their splendour inflamed our mind

  With huge questions not to be borne?

  Morgan was part of the place now; he was beginning

  To look back as well as forwards:

  Back to the green valleys, forward along the track

  That dwindled to nothing in the vast moor.

  But life still had its surprises. There was the day

  They found old Llywarch dead under the wall

  Of the grey sheep-fold, and the sheep all in a ring

  Staring, staring at the stiff frame

  And the pursed lips from which no whistle came.

  The Minister

  It was my biggest funeral of all; the hills crawled

  With black figures, drawn from remote farms

  By death’s magnet. ‘So sudden. It might have been me.’

  And there in the cheap coffin Llywarch was lying,

  Taller than you thought, and women were trying

  To read through their tears the brass plate.

  It might have been Davies ! Quickly I brushed

  The black thought away; but it came back.

  My voice deepened; the people were impressed.

  Out in the cold graveyard we sang a hymn,

  O fryniau Caersalem; and the Welsh hills looked on

  Implacably. It was the old human cry.

  But let me be fair, let me be fair.

  It was not all like this, even the moor

  Has moods of softness when the white hair

  Of the bog cotton is a silk bed

  For dreams to lie on. There was a day

  When young Enid of Gors Fach

  Pressed an egg into my hand

  Smiling, and her father said:

  ‘Take it, Morgans, to please the child.’

  never heard what they said after,

  But went to my bed that night happy for once.

  I looked from my top window and saw the moon,

  Mellow with age, rising over the moor;

  There was something in its bland expression

  That softened the
moor’s harshness, stifled the questions

  Struggling to my lips; I made a vow,

  As other men in other years have done,

  To-morrow would be different. I lay down

  And slept quietly. But the morrow woke me

  To the ancestral fury of the rain

  Spitting and clawing at the pane.

  I looked out on a grey world, grey with despair.

  Narrator

  The rhythm of the seasons: wind and rain,

  Dryness and heat, and then the wind again,

  Always the wind, and rain that is the sadness

  We ascribe to nature, who can feel nothing.

  The redwings leave, making way for the swallows;

  The swallows depart, the redwings are back once more.

  But man remains summer and winter through,

  Rooting in vain within his dwindling acre.

  The Minister

  I was the chapel pastor, the abrupt shadow

  Staining the neutral fields, troubling the men

  Who grew there with my glib, dutiful praise

  Of a fool’s world; a man ordained for ever

  To pick his way along the grass-strewn wall

  Dividing tact from truth.

  I knew it all,

  Although I never pried, I knew it all.

  I knew why Buddug was away from chapel.

  I knew that Pritchard, the Fron, watered his milk.

  I knew who put the ferret with the fowls

  In Pugh’s hen-house. I knew and pretended I didn’t.

  And they knew that I knew and pretended I didn’t.

  They listened to me preaching the unique gospel

  Of love; but our eyes never met. And outside

  The blood of God darkened the evening sky.

  Narrator

  Is there no passion in Wales? There is none

  Except in the racked hearts of men like Morgan,

  Condemned to wither and starve in the cramped cell

  Of thought their fathers made them.

  Protestantism – the adroit castrator

  Of art; the bitter negation

  Of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy –

  You have botched our flesh and left us only the soul’s

  Terrible impotence in a warm world.

  Need we go on? In spite of all

  His courage Morgan could not avert

  His failure, for he chose to fight

  With that which yields to nothing human.

  He never listened to the hills’

  Music calling to the hushed

  Music within; but let his mind

  Fester with brooding on the sly

  Infirmities of the hill people.

  The pus conspired with the old

  Infection lurking in his breast.

  In the chapel acre there is a grave,

  And grass contending with the stone

  For mastery of the near horizon,

  And on the stone words; but never mind them:

  Their formal praise is a vain gesture

  Against the moor’s encroaching tide.

  We will listen instead to the wind’s text

  Blown through the roof, or the thrush’s song

  In the thick bush that proved him wrong,

  Wrong from the start, for nature’s truth

  Is primary and her changing seasons

  Correct out of a vaster reason

  The vague errors of the flesh.

  Children’s Song

  We live in our own world,

  A world that is too small

  For you to stoop and enter

  Even on hands and knees,

  The adult subterfuge.

  And though you probe and pry

  With analytic eye,

  And eavesdrop all our talk

  With an amused look,

  You cannot find the centre

  Where we dance, where we play,

  Where life is still asleep

  Under the closed flower.

  Under the smooth shell

  Of eggs in the cupped nest

  That mock the faded blue

  Of your remoter heaven.

  The Village

  Scarcely a street, too few houses

  To merit the title; just a way between

  The one tavern and the one shop

  That leads nowhere and fails at the top

  Of the short hill, eaten away

  By long erosion of the green tide

  Of grass creeping perpetually nearer

  This last outpost of time past.

  So little happens; the black dog

  Cracking his fleas in the hot sun

  Is history. Yet the girl who crosses

  From door to door moves to a scale

  Beyond the bland day’s two dimensions.

  Stay, then, village, for round you spins

  On slow axis a world as vast

  And meaningful as any poised

  By great Plato’s solitary mind.

  Lament for Prytherch

  When I was young, when I was young !

  Were you ever young, Prytherch, a rich farmer:

  Cows in the byre, sheep in the pen,

  A brown egg under each hen,

  The barns oozing corn like honey?

  You are old now; time’s geometry

  Upon your face by which we tell

  Your sum of years has with sharp care

  Conspired and crossed your brow with grief.

  Your heart that is dry as a dead leaf

  Undone by frost’s cruel chemistry

  Clings in vain to the bare bough

  Where once in April a bird sang.

  Song at the Year’s Turning

  Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.

  The props crumble. The familiar ways

  Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.

  The heart’s flower withers at the root.

  Bury it, then, in history’s sterile dust.

  The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.

  Love deceived him; what is there to say

  The mind brought you by a better way

  To this despair? Lost in the world’s wood

  You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.

  The earth sickens; under naked boughs

  The frost comes to barb your broken vows.

  Is there blessing? Light’s peculiar grace

  In cold splendour robes this tortured place

  For strange marriage. Voices in the wind

  Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.

  Winter rots you; who is there to blame?

  The new grass shall purge you in its flame.

  Invasion on the Farm

  I am Prytherch. Forgive me. I don’t know

  What you are talking about; your thoughts flow

  Too swiftly for me; I cannot dawdle

  Along their banks and fish in their quick stream

  With crude fingers. I am alone, exposed

  In my own fields with no place to run

  From your sharp eyes. I, who a moment back

  Paddled in the bright grass, the old farm

  Warm as a sack about me, feel the cold

  Winds of the world blowing. The patched gate

  You left open will never be shut again.

  The Poacher

  Turning aside, never meeting

  In the still lanes, fly infested,

  Our frank greeting with quick smile.

  You are the wind that set the bramble

  Aimlessly clawing the void air.

  The fox knows you, the sly weasel

  Feels always the steel comb

  Of eyes parting like sharp rain

  Among the grasses its smooth fur.

  No smoke haunting the cold chimney

  Over your hearth betrays your dwelling

  In blue writing above the trees.

  The robed night, your dark familiar,

&nbs
p; Covers your movements; the slick sun,

  A dawn accomplice, removes your tracks

  One by one from the bright dew.

  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

  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.

  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.

  Pisces

  Who said to the trout,

  You shall die on Good Friday

  To be food for a man

  And his pretty lady?

  It was I, said God,

  Who formed the roses

  In the delicate flesh

  And the tooth that bruises.

  The Return

  Coming home was to that:

  The white house in the cool grass

  Membraned with shadow, the bright stretch

  Of stream that was its looking-glass;

  And smoke growing above the roof

  To a tall tree among whose boughs

  The first stars renewed their theme

  Of time and death and a man’s vows.

  A Welshman to any Tourist

  We’ve nothing vast to offer you, no deserts

  Except the waste of thought

  Forming from mind erosion;

  No canyons where the pterodactyl’s wing

  Falls like a shadow.

  The hills are fine, of course,

  Bearded with water to suggest age

  And pocked with caverns,

  One being Arthur’s dormitory;

  He and his knights are the bright ore

  That seams our history,

  But shame has kept them late in bed.

  The Last of the Peasantry

  What does he know? moving through the fields

  And the wood’s echoing cloisters

  With a beast’s gait, hunger in his eyes

 

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