by R. S. Thomas
of his own mind, and let himself
down for the poetry stranded
on the bare ledges.
For some
it is all darkness; for me, too,
it is dark. But there are hands
there I can take, voices to hear
solider than the echoes
without. And sometimes a strange light
shines, purer than the moon,
casting no shadow, that is
the halo upon the bones
of the pioneers who died for truth.
In Context
All my life I tried to believe
in the importance of what Thomas
should say now, do next.
There was a context
in which I lived; unseen forces
acted upon me, or made their adjustments
in turn. There was a larger pattern
we worked at: they on a big
loom, I with a small needle,
drawing the thread
through my mind, colouring it
with my own thought.
Yet a power guided
my hand. If an invisible company
waited to see what I would do,
I in my own way asked for
direction, so we should journey together
a little nearer the accomplishment
of the design.
Impossible dreamer!
All those years the demolition
of the identity proceeded.
Fast as the cells constituted
themselves, they were replaced. It was not
I who lived, but life rather
that lived me. There was no developing
structure. There were only the changes
in the metabolism of a body
greater than mine, and the dismantling
by the self of a self it
could not reassemble.
The Woman
So beautiful – God himself quailed
at her approach: the long body curved
like the horizon. Why had he made
her so? How would it be, she said,
leaning towards him, if, instead of
quarrelling over it, we divided it
between us? You can have all the credit
for its invention, if you will leave the ordering
of it to me. He looked into her
eyes and saw far down the bones
of the generations that would navigate
by those great stars, but the pull of it
was too much. Yes, he thought, give me their minds’
tribute, and what they do with their bodies
is not my concern. He put his hand in his side
and drew out the thorn for the letting
of the ordained blood and touched her with
it. Go, he said. They shall come to you for ever
with their desire, and you shall bleed for them in return.
At It
I think he sits at that strange table
of Eddington’s, that is not a table
at all, but nodes and molecules
pushing against molecules
and nodes; and he writes there
in invisible handwriting the instructions
the genes follow. I imagine his
face that is more the face
of a clock, and the time told by it
is now, though Greece is referred
to and Egypt and empires
not yet begun.
And I would have
things to say to this God
at the judgement, storming at him,
as Job stormed, with the eloquence
of the abused heart. But there will be
no judgement other than the verdict
of his calculations, that abstruse
geometry that proceeds eternally
in the silence beyond right and wrong.
Play
Your move I would have
said, but he was not
playing; my game a dilemma
that was without horns.
As though one can sit at table
with God! His mind shines
on the black and the white
squares. We stake our all
on the capture of the one
queen, as though to hold life
to ransom. He, if he plays, plays
unconcernedly among the pawns.
The Truce
That they should not advance
beyond certain limits left –
accidentally? – undefined;
and that compensation be paid
by the other side. Meanwhile the
peasant – There are no peasants
in Wales, he said, holding
his liquor as a gentleman
should not – went up and down
his acre, rejecting the pot
of gold at the rainbow’s
end in favour of earthier
values: the subsidies gradually
propagating themselves on the guilt
of an urban class.
Strenuous
times! Never all day
did the procession of popular
images through the farm
kitchens cease; it was tiring
watching. Such truce as was
called in the invisible
warfare between bad and
worse was where two half-truths
faced one another over
the body of an exhausted
nation, each one waiting for
the other to be proved wrong.
Night Sky
What they are saying is
that there is life there, too:
that the universe is the size it is
to enable us to catch up.
They have gone on from the human;
that shining is a reflection
of their intelligence. Godhead
is the colonisation by mind
of untenanted space. It is its own
light, a statement beyond language
of conceptual truth. Every night
is a rinsing myself of the darkness
that is in my veins. I let the stars inject me
with fire, silent as it is far,
but certain in its cauterising
of my despair. I am a slow
traveller, but there is more than time
to arrive. Resting in the intervals
of my breathing, I pick up the signals
relayed to me from a periphery I comprehend.
The Small Country
Did I confuse the categories?
Was I blind?
Was I afraid of hubris
in identifying this land
with the kingdom? Those stories
about the far journeys, when it was here
at my door; the object
of my contempt that became
the toad with the jewel in its head!
Was a population so small
enough to be called, too many
to be chosen? I called it
an old man, ignoring the April
message proclaiming: Behold,
I make all things new.
The dinosaurs have gone their way
into the dark. The time-span
of their human counterparts
is shortened; everything
on this shrinking planet favours the survival
of the small people, whose horizons
are large only because they are content to look at them
from their own hills.
I grow old,
bending to enter the promised
land that was here all the time,
happy to eat the bread that was baked
in the poets’ oven, breaking my speech
from the perennial tree
of my people and holding it in my blind hand.
Henry James
It was the eloq
uence of the unsaid
thing, the nobility of the deed
not performed. They looked sideways
into each other’s eyes, met casually
by intention. It was the significance
of an absence, the deprecation
of what was there, the failure
to prove anything that proved his point.
Richness is in the ability
of poverty to conceal itself.
After the curtains deliberately
kept drawn, his phrases were servants moving
silently about the great house of his prose
letting in sunlight into the empty rooms.
Hesitations
I rubbed it
and the spirit appeared
(of history): What you will,
it said. Die, I said.
But it would not.
Old gods are no good;
they are smaller than
they promise, or else they are large
like mountains, leaning over
the soul to admire themselves.
I put the bone back
in its place and went on
with my journey. History
went at my right side
hungry for the horizon.
Were there towns I came
to? The sky over
them was without expression.
No God there. I would have
passed on, but a music
detained me in one of
blood flowing, where two
people side by side
under the arc lamps
lay, from one to the other.
Bravo !
Oh, I know it and don’t
care. I know there is nothing in me
but cells and chromosomes
waiting to beget chromosomes
and cells. You could take me to pieces
and there would be no angel hard
by, wringing its hands over
the demolition of its temple.
I accept I’m predictable,
that of the thousands of choices
open to me the computer can calculate
the one I’ll make. There is a woman
I know, who is the catalyst
of my conversions, who is
a mineral to dazzle. She will
grow old and her lovers will not
pardon her for it. I have made
her songs in the laboratory
of my understanding, explosives timed
to go off in the blandness of time’s face.
Pre-Cambrian
Here I think of the centuries,
six million of them, they say.
Yesterday a fine rain fell;
today the warmth has brought out the crowds.
After Christ, what? The molecules
are without redemption. My shadow
sunning itself on this stone
remembers the lava. Zeus looked down
on a brave world, but there was
no love there; the architecture
of their temples was less permanent
than these waves. Plato, Aristotle,
all those who furrowed the calmness
of their foreheads are responsible
for the bomb. I am charmed here
by the serenity of the reflections
in the sea’s mirror. It is a window
as well. What I need
now is a faith to enable me to out-stare
the grinning faces of the inmates of its asylum,
the failed experiments God put away.
Abercuawg
Abercuawg! Where is it?
Where is Abercuawg, that
place where the cuckoos sing?
I asked the professors.
Lo, here, lo, there: on the banks
of a river they explained
how Cuawg had become Dulas.
There was the mansion, Dolguog,
not far off to confirm them. I
looked at the surface of the water,
but the place that I was seeking
was not reflected therein.
I looked as though through a clear
window at pebbles that were the ruins
of no building, with no birds tolling
among them, as in the towers of the mind.
An absence is how we become surer
of what we want. Abercuawg
is not here now, but there. And
there is the indefinable point,
the incarnation of a concept,
the moment at which a little
becomes a lot. I have listened
to the word ‘Branwen’ and pictured
the horses and the soil red
with their blood, and the trouble
in Ireland, and have opened
my eyes on a child, sticky
with sweets and snivel. And: ‘Not
this,’ I have cried. ‘This is the name,
not the thing that the name
stands for.’ I have no faith
that to put a name to
a thing is to bring it
before one. I am a seeker
in time for that which is
beyond time, that is everywhere
and nowhere; no more before
than after, yet always
about to be; whose duration is
of the mind, but free as
Bergson would say of the mind’s
degradation of the eternal.
Dialectic
They spoke to him in Hebrew and he understood
them; in Latin and Italian and
he understood them. Speech palled
on them and they turned to the silence
of their equations. But God listened to them
as to a spider spinning its web
from its entrails, the mind swinging
to and fro over an abysm
of blankness. They are speaking to me still,
he decided, in the geometry
I delight in, in the figures
that beget more figures. I will answer
them as of old with the infinity
I feed on. If there were words once
they could not understand, I will show
them now space that is bounded
but without end, time that is where
they were or will be; the eternity
that is here for me and for them
there; the truth that with much labour
is born with them and is to be
sloughed off like some afterbirth of the spirit.
Shadows
I close my eyes.
The darkness implies your presence,
the shadow of your steep mind
on my world. I shiver in it.
It is not your light that
can blind us; it is the splendour
of your darkness.
And so I listen
instead and hear the language
of silence, the sentence
without an end. Is it I, then,
who am being addressed? A God’s words
are for their own sake; we hear
at our peril. Many of us have gone
mad in the mastering
of your medium.
I will open
my eyes on a world where the problems
remain but our doctrines
protect us. The shadow of the bent cross
is warmer than yours. I see how the sinners
of history run in and out
at its dark doors and are not confounded.
The Signpost
Casgob, it said, 2
miles. But I never went
there; left it like an ornament
on the mind’s shelf, covered
with the dust of
its summers; a place on a diet
of the echoes of stopped
bells and children’s
voices; white the archi
tecture
of its clouds, stationary
its sunlight. It was best
so. I need a museum
for storing the dream’s
brittler particles in. Time
is a main road, eternity
the turning that we don’t take.
Adjustments
Never known as anything
but an absence, I dare not name him
as God. Yet the adjustments
are made. There is an unseen
power, whose sphere is the cell
and the electron. We never catch
him at work, but can only say,
coming suddenly upon an amendment,
that here he has been. To demolish
a mountain you move it stone by stone
like the Japanese. To make a new coat
of an old, you add to it gradually
thread by thread, so such change
as occurs is more difficult to detect.
Patiently with invisible structures
he builds, and as patiently
we must pray, surrendering the ordering
of the ingredients to a wisdom that
is beyond our own. We must change the mood
to the passive. Let the deaf men
be helped; in the silence that has come
upon them, let some influence
work so those closed porches
be opened once more. Let the bomb
swerve. Let the raised knife of the murderer
be somehow deflected. There are no
laws there other than the limits of
our understanding. Remembering rock
penetrated by the grass-blade, corrected
by water, we must ask rather
for the transformation of the will
to evil, for more loving
mutations, for the better ventilating
of the atmosphere of the closed mind.
The Game
It is the play of a being
who is not serious in
his conclusions. Take this
from that, he says, and there is everything
left. Look over the edge
of the universe and you see
your own face staring
at you back, as it does
in a pool. And we are forced
into the game, reluctant
contestants; though the mathematicians
are best at it. Never mind, they
say, whether it is there
or not, so long as our like
can use it. And we are shattered
by their deductions. There is
a series that is without