by R. S. Thomas
I dreamed of. I am saved by music
From the emptiness of this place
Of despair. As the melody rises
From nothing, their mouths take up the tune,
And the roof listens. I call on God
In the after silence, and my shadow
Wrestles with him upon a wall
Of plaster, that has all the nation’s
Hardness in it. They see me thrown
Without movement of their oblique eyes.
Blondes
They pass me with bland looks.
It is the simplicity of their lives
I ache for: prettiness and a soft heart, no problems
Not to be brought to life size
By a kiss or a smile. I see them walking
Up long streets with the accuracy of shuttles
At work, threads crossed to make a pattern
Unknown to them. A thousand curtains
Are parted to welcome home
The husbands who have overdrawn
On their blank trust, giving them children
To play with, a jingle of small change
For their pangs. The tear-laden tree
Of a poet strikes no roots in their hearts.
The Dance
She is young. Have I the right
Even to name her? Child,
It is not love I offer
Your quick limbs, your eyes;
Only the barren homage
Of an old man whom time
Crucifies. Take my hand
A moment in the dance,
Ignoring its sly pressure,
The dry rut of age,
And lead me under the boughs
Of innocence. Let me smell
My youth again in your hair.
Who?
Someone must have thought of putting me here;
It wasn’t myself did it.
What do I find to my taste?
Annually the grass comes up green;
The earth keeps its rotary motion.
There is loveliness growing, where might have been truth’s
Bitterer berries. The reason tempers
Most of the heart’s stormier moods.
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.
It is for this that the air comes in thin
At the nostril, and dries to a crust.
The Face
When I close my eyes, I can see it.
That bare hill with the man ploughing,
Corrugating that brown roof
Under a hard sky. Under him is the farm,
Anchored in its grass harbour;
And below that the valley
Sheltering its few folk,
With the school and the inn and the church,
The beginning, middle and end
Of their slow journey above ground.
He is never absent, but like a slave
Answers to the mind’s bidding,
Endlessly ploughing, as though autumn
Were the one season he knew.
Sometimes he pauses to look down
To the grey farmhouse, but no signals
Cheer him; there is no applause
For his long wrestling with the angel
Of no name. I can see his eye
That expects nothing, that has the rain’s
Colourlessness. His hands are broken
But not his spirit. He is like bark
Weathering on the tree of his kind.
He will go on; that much is certain.
Beneath him tenancies of the fields
Will change; machinery turn
All to noise. But on the walls
Of the mind’s gallery that face
With the hills framing it will hang
Unglorified, but stern like the soil.
Schoonermen
Great in this,
They made small ships do
Big things, leaping hurdles
Of the stiff sea, horse against horses
In the tide race.
What has Rio
To do with Pwllheli? Ask winds
Bitter for ever
With their black shag. Ask the quays
Stained with spittle.
Four days out
With bad cargo
Fever took the crew;
The mate and boatswain,
Peering in turn
Through the spray’s window,
Brought her home. Memory aches
In the bones’ rigging. If tales were tall,
Waves were taller.
From long years
In a salt school, caned by brine,
They came landward
With the eyes of boys,
The Welsh accent
Thick in their sails.
In Church
Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.
Careers
Fifty-two years,
most of them taken in
growing or in the
illusion of it – what does the mem-
ory number as one’s
property? The broken elbow?
the lost toy? The pain has
vanished, but the soft flesh
that suffered it is mine still.
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.
A boy in school:
his lessons are
my lessons, his
punishments I learn to deserve.
I stand up in him,
tall as I am
now, but without per-
spective. Distant objects
are too distant, yet will arrive
soon. How his words
muddle me; how my deeds
betray him. That is not
our intention; but where I should
be one with him, I am one now
with another. Before I had time
to complete myself, I let her share
in the building. This that I am
now – too many
labourers. What is mine is
not mine only: her love, her
child wait for my slow
signature. Son, from the mirror
you hold to me I turn
to recriminate. That likeness
you are at work upon – it hurts.
A Grave Unvisited
There are places where I have not been;
Deliberately not, like Søren’s grave
In Copenhagen. Seeing the streets
With their tedious reproduction
Of all streets, I preferred Dragort,
The cobbled village with its flowers
And pantiles by the clear edge
Of the Baltic, that extinct sea.
What they could do to anchor him
&nb
sp; With the heaviness of a nation’s
Respectability they have done,
I am sure. I imagine the size
Of his tombstone, the solid marble
Cracking his bones; but would he have been
There to receive this toiling body’s
Pilgrimage a few months back,
Had I made it?
What is it drives a people
To the rejection of a great
Spirit, and after to think it returns
Reconciled to the shroud
Prepared for it? It is Luke’s gospel
Warns us of the danger
Of scavenging among the dead
For the living – so I go
Up and down with him in his books,
Hand and hand like a child
With its father, pausing to stare
As he did once at the mind’s country.
No
And one said, This man can sing;
Let’s listen to him. But the other,
Dirt on his mind, said, No, let’s
Queer him. And the first, being weak,
Consented. So the Thing came
Nearer him, and its breath caused
Him to retch, and none knew why.
But he rested for one long month,
And after began to sing
For gladness, and the Thing stood,
Letting him, for a year, for two;
Then put out its raw hand
And touched him, and the wound took
Over, and the nurses wiped off
The poetry from his cracked lips.
The Observer
Catrin lives in a nice place
Of bracken, a looking-glass
For the sea that not far off
Glitters. ‘You live in a nice place,
Catrin.’ The eyes regard me
Unmoved; the wind fidgets
With her hair. Her tongue is a wren
Fluttering in the mouth’s cage.
Here is one whom life made,
Omitting an ingredient,
For fun; for luck? How should I know
Its motives, who was not born
To question them, only to see
What I see: the golden landscape
Of nature, with the twisted creatures
Crossing it, each with his load.
Concession
Not that he brought flowers
Except for the eyes’ blue,
Perishable ones, or that his hands,
Famed for kindness were put then
To such usage; but rather that, going
Through flowers later, she yet could feel
These he spared perhaps for my sake.
Sir Gelli Meurig
(Elizabethan)
I imagine it, a land
Rain-soaked, far away
In the west, in time;
The sea folded too rough
On the shingle, with hard
Breakers and steep
To climb; but game-ridden
And lining his small table
Too thickly – Gelli Meurig,
Squire of a few
Acres, but swollen-headed
With dreaming of a return
To incense, to the confections
Of worship; a Welsh fly
Caught in a web spun
For a hornet.
Don’t blame him.
Others have turned their backs,
As he did, and do so still,
On our land. Leaves light
The autumn, but not for them.
Emptily the sea’s cradle
Rocks. They want the town
And its baubles; the fine clothes
They dress one in, who manage
The strings. Helplessly they dance
To a mad tune, who at home
In the bracken could have remained
Humble but free.
Christmas
There is a morning;
Time brings it nearer,
Brittle with frost
And starlight. The owls sing
In the parishes. The people rise
And walk to the churches’
Stone lanterns, there to kneel
And eat the new bread
Of love, washing it down
With the sharp taste
Of blood they will shed.
The Green Isle
It is the sort of country that,
After leaving, one is ashamed of
Being rude about. That gentleness
Of green nature, reflected
In its people – what has one done
To deserve it? They sit about
Over slow glasses, discussing,
Not the weather, the news,
Their families, but the half
Legendary heroes of old days:
Women who gave their name
To a hill, who wore the stars
For bracelet; clanking warriors,
Shearing the waves with their swords.
That man shuffling dustily,
His pants through, to the door
Of the gin shop, is not as mean
As he looks; he has the tongue
For which ale is but the excuse
To trespass in golden meadows
Of talk, poaching his words
From the rich, but feasting on them
In that stale parlour with the zest
And freedom of a great poet.
The Fisherman
A simple man,
He liked the crease on the water
His cast made, but had no pity
For the broken backbone
Of water or fish.
One of his pleasures, thirsty,
Was to ask a drink
At the hot farms;
Leaving with a casual thank you,
As though they owed it him.
I could have told of the living water
That springs pure.
He would have smiled then,
Dancing his speckled fly in the shallows,
Not understanding.
Traeth Maelgwn
Blue sea; clouds coming up
For convention only; the marks
On the sand, that mean nothing
And don’t have to to the fat,
Monoglot stranger. Maelgwn
Was here once, juggling
With the sea; there were rulers
In Wales then, men jealous
Of her honour. He put down
Rivals, made himself king
Of the waves, too; his throne
Buoyant – that rocking beacon
Its image. He kept his power
By intelligence; we lose
Ours for lack of it,
Holding our caps out
Beside a framed view
We never painted, counting
The few casual cowries
With which we are fobbed off.
Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant
This is where he sought God.
And found him? The centuries
Have been content to follow
Down passages of serene prose.
There is no portrait of him
But in the gallery of
The imagination: a brow
With the hair’s feathers
Spilled on it? a cheek
Too hollow? rows of teeth
Broken on the unmanageable bone
Of language? In this small room
By the river expiating the sin
Of his namesake?
The smooth words
Over which his mind flowed
Have become an heirloom. Beauty
Is how you say it, and the truth,
Like this mountain-born torrent,
Is content to hurry
Not too furiously by.
Sailors’ Hospital
It was warm
Inside, but there was
Pain there. I came out
&n
bsp; Into the cold wind
Of April. There were birds
In the brambles’ old,
Jagged iron, with one striking
Its small song. To the west,
Rising from the grey
Water, leaning one
On another were the town’s
Houses. Who first began
That refuse: time’s waste
Growing at the edge
Of the clean sea? Some sailor,
Fetching up on the
Shingle before wind
Or current, made it his
Harbour, hung up his clothes
In the sunlight; found women
To breed from – those sick men
His descendants. Every day
Regularly the tide
Visits them with its salt
Comfort; their wounds are shrill
In the rigging of the
Tall ships.
With clenched thoughts,
That not even the sky’s
Daffodil could persuade
To open, I turned back
To the nurses in their tugging
At him, as he drifted
Away on the current
Of his breath, further and further,
Out of hail of our love.
Reservoirs
There are places in Wales I don’t go:
Reservoirs that are the subconscious
Of a people, troubled far down
With gravestones, chapels, villages even;
The serenity of their expression
Revolts me, it is a pose
For strangers, a watercolour’s appeal
To the mass, instead of the poem’s
Harsher conditions. There are the hills,
Too; gardens gone under the scum
Of the forests; and the smashed faces
Of the farms with the stone trickle
Of their tears down the hills’ side.
Where can I go, then, from the smell
Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead
Nation? I have walked the shore
For an hour and seen the English
Scavenging among the remains
Of our culture, covering the sand
Like the tide and, with the roughness
Of the tide, elbowing our language
Into the grave that we have dug for it.
Touching
She kept touching me,
As a woman will
Accidentally, so the response,
When given, is
A presumption.
I retained my