Collected Poems 1945-1990

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Collected Poems 1945-1990 Page 7

by R. S. Thomas


  Of the mild evening outside your room.

  A slow singer, but loading each phrase

  With history’s overtones, love, joy

  And grief learned by his dark tribe

  In other orchards and passed on

  Instinctively as they are now,

  But fresh always with new tears.

  Poetry for Supper

  ‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural

  As the small tuber that feeds on muck

  And grows slowly from obtuse soil

  To the white flower of immortal beauty.’

  ‘Natural, hell ! What was it Chaucer

  Said once about the long toil

  That goes like blood to the poem’s making?

  Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,

  Limp as bindweed, if it break at all

  Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat

  And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build

  Your verse a ladder.’

  ‘You speak as though

  No sunlight ever surprised the mind

  Groping on its cloudy path.’

  ‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window

  Before it enter a dark room.

  Windows don’t happen.’

  So two old poets,

  Hunched at their beer in the low haze

  Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran

  Noisily by them, glib with prose.

  Iago Prytherch

  Iago Prytherch, forgive my naming you.

  You are so far in your small fields

  From the world’s eye, sharpening your blade

  On a cloud’s edge, no one will tell you

  How I made fun of you, or pitied either

  Your long soliloquies, crouched at your slow

  And patient surgery under the faint

  November rays of the sun’s lamp.

  Made fun of you? That was their graceless

  Accusation, because I took

  Your rags for theme, because I showed them

  Your thought’s bareness; science and art,

  The mind’s furniture, having no chance

  To install themselves, because of the great

  Draught of nature sweeping the skull.

  Fun? Pity? No word can describe

  My true feelings. I passed and saw you

  Labouring there, your dark figure

  Marring the simple geometry

  Of the square fields with its gaunt question.

  My poems were made in its long shadow

  Falling coldly across the page.

  Power

  Power, farmer? It was always yours.

  Not the new physics’ terrible threat

  To the world’s axle, nor the mind’s subtler

  Manipulation of our debt

  To nature; but an old gift

  For weathering the slow recoil

  Of empires with a tree’s patience,

  Rooted in the dark soil.

  On a Line in Sandburg

  ‘Where did the blood come from?

  Before I bit, before I sucked

  The red meat, the blood was there

  Nourishing sweetly the roots of hair.’

  ‘The blood came from your mother

  By way of the long gut-cord;

  You were the pain in her side;

  You were born on a blood-dark tide.’

  ‘My mother also was young

  Once, but her cheeks were red

  Even then. From its hidden source

  The hot blood ran on its old course.

  Where did the blood come from?’

  Meet the Family

  John One takes his place at the table,

  He is the first part of the fable;

  His eyes are dry as a dead leaf.

  Look on him and learn grief.

  John Two stands in the door

  Dumb; you have seen that face before

  Leaning out of the dark past,

  Tortured in thought’s bitter blast.

  John Three is still outside

  Drooling where the daylight died

  On the wet stones; his hands are crossed

  In mourning for a playmate lost.

  John All and his lean wife,

  Whose forced complicity gave life

  To each loathed foetus, stare from the wall,

  Dead not absent. The night falls.

  Expatriates

  Not British; certainly

  Not English. Welsh

  With all the associations,

  Black hair and black heart

  Under a smooth skin,

  Sallow as vellum; sharp

  Of bone and wit that is turned

  As a knife against us.

  Four centuries now

  We have been leaving

  The hills and the high moors

  For the jewelled pavements

  Easing our veins of their dark peat

  By slow transfusions.

  In the drab streets

  That never knew

  The cold stream’s sibilants

  Our tongues are coated with

  A dustier speech.

  With the year’s passing

  We have forgotten

  The far lakes,

  Aled and Eiddwen, whose blue litmus

  Alone could detect

  The mind’s acid.

  Absolution

  Prytherch, man, can you forgive

  From your stone altar on which the light’s

  Bread is broken at dusk and dawn

  One who strafed you with thin scorn

  From the cheap gallery of his mind?

  It was you who were right the whole time;

  Right in this that the day’s end

  Finds you still in the same field

  In which you started, your soul made strong

  By the earth’s incense, the wind’s song.

  While I have worn my soul bare

  On the world’s roads, seeking what lay

  Too close for the mind’s lenses to see,

  And come now with the first stars

  Big on my lids westward to find

  With the slow lifting up of your hand

  No welcome, only forgiveness.

  Bread

  Hunger was loneliness, betrayed

  By the pitiless candour of the stars’

  Talk, in an old byre he prayed

  Not for food; to pray was to know

  Waking from a dark dream to find

  The white loaf on the white snow;

  Not for warmth, warmth brought the rain’s

  Blurring of the essential point

  Of ice probing his raw pain.

  He prayed for love, love that would share

  His rags’ secret; rising he broke

  Like sun crumbling the gold air

  The live bread for the starved folk.

  Farm Wife

  Hers is the clean apron, good for fire

  Or lamp to embroider, as we talk slowly

  In the long kitchen, while the white dough

  Turns to pastry in the great oven,

  Sweetly and surely as hay making

  In a June meadow; hers are the hands,

  Humble with milking, but still now

  In her wide lap as though they heard

  A quiet music, hers being the voice

  That coaxes time back to the shadows

  In the room’s corners. O, hers is all

  This strong body, the safe island

  Where men may come, sons and lovers,

  Daring the cold seas of her eyes.

  Epitaph

  The poem in the rock and

  The poem in the mind

  Are not one.

  It was in dying

  I tried to make them so.

  The Dark Well

  They see you as they see you,

  A poor farmer with no name,

  Ploughing cloudward, sowing the wind
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  With squalls of gulls at the day’s end.

  To me you are Prytherch, the man

  Who more than all directed my slow

  Charity where there was need.

  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.

  To the Farmer

  And the wars came and you still practised

  Your crude obstetrics with flocks and herds.

  You went out early under a dawn sky,

  Savage with blood, and turned the patience

  Of your deep eyes earthward. The crops grew,

  Nursed by your hands, to be mown later

  By the hot sickle of flame: no tears

  Thawed your bleak face with their salt current.

  Instead you waited till the ground was cool,

  The enemy gone, and led your cattle

  To the black fields, where slow but surely

  Green blades were brandished, the old triumph

  Of nature over the brief violence

  Of man. You will not do so again.

  Walter Llywarch

  I am, as you know, Walter Llywarch,

  Born in Wales of approved parents,

  Well goitred, round in the bum,

  Sure prey of the slow virus

  Bred in quarries of grey rain.

  Born in autumn at the right time

  For hearing stories from the cracked lips

  Of old folk dreaming of summer,

  I piled them on to the bare hearth

  Of my own fancy to make a blaze

  To warm myself, but achieved only

  The smoke’s acid that brings the smart

  Of false tears into the eyes.

  Months of fog, months of drizzle;

  Thought wrapped in the grey cocoon

  Of race, of place, awaiting the sun’s

  Coming, but when the sun came,

  Touching the hills with a hot hand,

  Wings were spread only to fly

  Round and round in a cramped cage

  Or beat in vain at the sky’s window.

  School in the week, on Sunday chapel:

  Tales of a land fairer than this

  Were not so tall, for others had proved it

  Without the grave’s passport, they sent

  The fruit home for ourselves to taste.

  Walter Llywarch – the words were a name

  On a lost letter that never came

  For one who waited in the long queue

  Of life that wound through a Welsh valley.

  I took instead, as others had done

  Before, a wife from the back pews

  In chapel, rather to share the rain

  Of winter evenings, than to intrude

  On her pale body; and yet we lay

  For warmth together and laughed to hear

  Each new child’s cry of despair.

  The Conductor

  Finally at the end of the day,

  When the sun was buried and

  There was no more to say,

  He would lift idly his hand,

  And softly the small stars’

  Orchestra would begin

  Playing over the first bars

  Of the night’s overture.

  He listened with the day’s breath

  Bated, trying to be sure

  That what he heard was at one

  With his own score, that nothing,

  No casual improvisation

  Or sounding of a false chord,

  Troubled the deep peace.

  It was this way he adored

  With a god’s ignorance of sin

  The self he had composed.

  The Parish

  There was part of the parish that few knew.

  They lived in houses on the main road

  To God, as they thought, managing primly

  The day’s dirt, bottling talk

  Of birth and marriage in cold eyes;

  Nothing to tell in their spick rooms’

  Discipline how with its old violence

  Grass raged under the floor.

  But you knew it, farmer; your hand

  Had felt its power, if not your heart

  Its loveliness. Somewhere among

  Its green aisles you had watched like me

  The sharp tooth tearing its prey,

  While a bird sang from a tall tree.

  Genealogy

  I was the dweller in the long cave

  Of darkness, lining it with the forms

  Of bulls. My hand matured early,

  But turned to violence: I was the man

  Watching later at the grim ford,

  Armed with resentment; the quick stream

  Remembers at sunset the raw crime.

  The deed pursued me; I was the king

  At the church keyhole, who saw death

  Loping towards me. From that hour

  I fought for right, with the proud chiefs

  Setting my name to the broad treaties.

  I marched to Bosworth with the Welsh lords

  To victory, but regretted after

  The white house at the wood’s heart.

  I was the stranger in the new town,

  Whose purse of tears was soon spent;

  I filled it with a solider coin

  At the dark sources. I stand now

  In the hard light of the brief day

  Without roots, but with many branches.

  Anniversary

  Nineteen years now

  Under the same roof

  Eating our bread,

  Using the same air;

  Sighing, if one sighs,

  Meeting the other’s

  Words with a look

  That thaws suspicion.

  Nineteen years now

  Sharing life’s table,

  And not to be first

  To call the meal long

  We balance it thoughtfully

  On the tip of the tongue,

  Careful to maintain

  The strict palate.

  Nineteen years now

  Keeping simple house,

  Opening the door

  To friend and stranger;

  Opening the womb

  Softly to let enter

  The one child

  With his huge hunger.

  The Musician

  A memory of Kreisler once:

  At some recital in this same city,

  The seats all taken, I found myself pushed

  On to the stage with a few others,

  So near that I could see the toil

  Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth

  Fluttering under the fine skin

  And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

  I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,

  Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,

  As we sat there or warmly applauded

  This player who so beautifully suffered

  For each of us upon his instrument.

  So it must have been on Calvary

  In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:

  The men standing by and that one figure,

  The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,

  Making such music as lives still.

  And no one daring to interrupt

  Because it was himself that he played

  And closer than all of them the God listened.

  Judgment Day

  Yes, that’s how I was,

  I know that face,

  That bony figure

  Without grace


  Of flesh or limb;

  In health happy,

  Careless of the claim

  Of the world’s sick

  Or the world’s poor;

  In pain craven –

  Lord, breathe once more

  On that sad mirror,

  Let me be lost

  In mist for ever

  Rather than own

  Such bleak reflections,

  Let me go back

  On my two knees

  Slowly to undo

  The knot of life

  That was tied there.

  Abersoch

  There was that headland, asleep on the sea,

  The air full of thunder and the far air

  Brittle with lightning; there was that girl

  Riding her cycle, hair at half-mast,

  And the men smoking, the dinghies at rest

  On the calm tide. There were people going

  About their business, while the storm grew

  Louder and nearer and did not break.

  Why do I remember these few things,

  That were rumours of life, not life itself

  That was being lived fiercely, where the storm raged?

  Was it just that the girl smiled,

  Though not at me, and the men smoking

  Had the look of those who have come safely home?

  Ninetieth Birthday

  You go up the long track

  That will take a car, but is best walked

  On slow foot, noting the lichen

  That writes history on the page

  Of the grey rock. Trees are about you

  At first, but yield to the green bracken,

  The nightjar’s house: you can hear it spin

  On warm evenings; it is still now

  In the noonday heat, only the lesser

  Voices sound, blue-fly and gnat

  And the stream’s whisper. As the road climbs,

  You will pause for breath and the far sea’s

  Signal will flash, till you turn again

  To the steep track, buttressed with cloud.

  And there at the top that old woman,

  Born almost a century back

  In that stone farm, awaits your coming;

  Waits for the news of the lost village

  She thinks she knows, a place that exists

  In her memory only.

  You bring her greeting

  And praise for having lasted so long

  With time’s knife shaving the bone.

 

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