by R. S. Thomas
Suddenly
Suddenly after long silence
he has become voluble.
He addresses me from a myriad
directions with the fluency
of water, the articulateness
of green leaves; and in the genes,
too, the components
of my existence. The rock,
so long speechless, is the library
of his poetry. He sings to me
in the chain-saw, writes
with the surgeon’s hand
on the skin’s parchment messages
of healing. The weather
is his mind’s turbine
driving the earth’s bulk round
and around on its remedial
journey. I have no need
to despair; as at
some second Pentecost
of a Gentile, I listen to the things
round me: weeds, stones, instruments,
the machine itself, all
speaking to me in the vernacular
of the purposes of One who is.
Arrival
Not conscious
that you have been seeking
suddenly
you come upon it
the village in the Welsh hills
dust free
with no road out
but the one you came in by.
A bird chimes
from a green tree
the hour that is no hour
you know. The river dawdles
to hold a mirror for you
where you may see yourself
as you are, a traveller
with the moon’s halo
above him, who has arrived
after long journeying where he
began, catching this
one truth by surprise
that there is everything to look forward to.
Brother
It came into being.
From eternity? In
time? Was the womb
prepared for it, or it
for the womb? It lay in the cradle
long months, staring its world
into a shape, decorated
with faces. It addressed
objects, preferred its vocabulary
to their own: grew eloquent
before a resigned
audience. It was fed
speech and vomited
it and was not reproved.
It began walking,
falling, bruising itself
on the bone’s truth. The fire
was a tart playmate. It
was taken in by the pool’s smile.
Need I go on? It survived
its disasters; met fact
with the mind’s guile; forged
for itself wings, missiles.
Launched itself on a dark
night through the nursery
window into adult orbit
out of the reach of gravity’s control.
Remembering David Jones
Because you had been in the dark wood
and heard doom’s nightingales sing,
men listened to you when you told
them how death is many but life
one. The shell’s trumpet sounded
over the fallen, but there was no
resurrection. You learned your lettering
from bones, the propped capitals which described
how once they were human beings.
Men march because they are alive,
and their quest is the Grail, garrisoned
by the old furies so it is blood
wets their lips. Europe gave you
your words, but your hand practised
an earlier language, weaving time’s branches
together to form the thicket the soldier
is caught in, who is love’s sacrifice
to itself, with the virgin’s smile poised
like a knife over it as over her first born.
The Moment
Is the night dark? His interiors
are darker, more perilous
to enter. Are there whispers
abroad? They are the communing
with himself our destiny
is to be outside of, listeners
at our breath’s window. Is there
an ingredient in him of unlove?
It is the moment in the mind’s
garden he resigns himself
to his own will to conceive the tree
of manhood we have reared against him.
Gospel
And in the midst of the council
a bittern called from the fen
outside. A sparrow flew in
and disappeared through the far doorway.
‘If your faith can explain ...’ So
they were baptised, and the battles began
for the kingdom of this world. Were
you sent, sparrow? An eagle
would have been more appropriate,
some predator to warn them
of the ferocity of the religion
that came their way. The fire was not more voluble
than the blood that would answer the sword’s
question.
Charles by divine right
king. And not all our engines can drain
Marston Moor. The bittern
is silent now. The ploughshares are beaten
to guns and bombs. Daily we publish
hurrying with it to and fro on steel
wings, the good news of the kingdom.
Minuet
But not to concentrate
on disaster, there are the small
weeds with the caterpillar
at their base that is life’s proof
that the beautiful is born
from the demolition of the material.
The butterfly has no
clock. It is always noon
where it is, the sun overhead,
the flower feeding on what feeds
on itself. The wings turn and are sails
of a slow windmill, not to grind
but to be the signal for another
aviator to arrive that the air
may have dancing, a movement
of wings in an invisible
ballroom to a music that,
unheard by ourselves, is to them
as though it will never cease.
Sonata
Evening. The wind rising.
The gathering excitement
of the leaves, and Beethoven
on the piano, chords reverberating
in our twin being.
‘What is life?’
pitifully her eyes
asked. And I who was no seer
took hold of her loth hand
and examined it and was lost
like a pure mathematician
in its solution: strokes
cancelling strokes; angles
bisected; the line of life deviating
from the line of the head; a way
that was laid down for her to walk
which was not my way.
While the music
went on and on with chromatic
insistence, passionately proclaiming
by the keys’ moonlight in the darkening
drawing-room how our art is our meaning.
Carol
What is Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim
our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity’s
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.
Requiem
To the mature itch I lent my hand;
a sword grew in it, withered
in the exact blood. When next I looked,
murder; the sour commons
attainted me. But the king’s head
lapping at the emptying troug
h
of existence, reprieved me. I took aim
with the long musket, writing in lead
on their horses. Hysterical women
my loot, I rendered complete
service, sowing the blank field again.
Alleluia! The cannonade of the bells
rang. I built a cathedral –
to whom? Decorated it with the stone
population, the dumb mouths, the eyes blinded
by distance. Naughtiness of the chisel
in time’s hand distorted the features
of those who had looked on that far
face and lived to bear witness.
Prayer
Baudelaire’s grave
not too far
from the tree of science.
Mine, too,
since I sought and failed
to steal from it,
somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.
Guernica
Pablo Picasso
The day before
it was calm.
In the days after
a new masterpiece
was born of imagination’s wandering
of the smashed city.
What but genius can re-assemble
the bones’ jigsaw?
The bull has triumphed
at last; the tossed
humans descend up-
side down, never
to arrive. The whole is love
in reverse. The painter
has been down at the root
of the scream and surfaced
again to prepare the affections
for the atrocity of its flowers.
Portrait of a Girl in a Yellow Dress
Henri Matisse
Windows in art
are to turn the back
on. Facing the public
she challenges it to prefer her
to the view. The draught
cannot put out
her flame: yellow
dress, yellow
(if we could come close
enough) eyes; hands
that, after the busyness
of their migrations between cheek
and dressing-table, lipstick
and lip, have found in the lap’s
taffeta a repose
whose self-consciousness the painter
was at pains not to conceal.
Father and Child
Ben Shahn
Times change:
no longer the virgin
ample-lapped; the child fallen
in it from an adjacent heaven.
Heaven is far off, back
of the bombed town. The infant
is human, embraced dearly
like a human mistake.
The father presses, his face set,
towards a displaced future.
The mother has salvaged her mother’s
portrait and carries it upside down.
Portrait of Madame Renou
André Derain
Could I have loved this?
To show too little
is to ask too much.
A tendency to disdain
our requirements promises
she has nothing to give.
It is not the observer
she pouts at, but life itself.
Yet now the disclosure:
Madame Renou! While the mind
toys with the title, the
rest of me has no time
for the spouse. Art like
this could have left her tagged surname out.
The Good Inn
Frits van den Berghe
Nothing is here
but essentials
the bicycle that conveyed
him his thirst
sharpened by unpalatable
truths and the woman
reaching far down
into unmentionable
depths to draw up
the female alcohol
that will not assuage him.
The Child’s Brain
Giorgio di Chirico
The book is as closed
as the mind contemplating
it, vocabulary’s
navel in all that gross flesh.
While the school reminds,
windowless at his left
shoulder, how you open
either of them at your own risk.
The Oracle
Giorgio di Chirico
So life in the end
is profane, our worshipping
done in the cemetery
of a blackboard. Who
sits over the bones
of the problem without
face but with certifiable
expression?
So mathematicians
should appear in surrealist
mourning, shaven-headed
to reveal the skull
half in darkness, half in light
in permanent procrastination
of the eclipse of thought.
The Red Model
René Magritte
Given the boots
solitary against
the boards, I construct
the body, kneed
and hooded, perforated
with dark, taken
away at dawn on
a barrow to be provender
of a grave.
Tall
and shapeless, too
(as they deemed)
big for them, he
left them behind,
not for robins
to build nests in,
not for the dust to tell
boneless time; for his out-
at-toe ghost to walk
onward for ever against
an ingrowing thought.
Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale
Max Ernst
Inviting them into a house
haunted by a clock
on the wall, whose notes
are its music. The gate
out of the picture by which Keats left
on his way to eternity
is wide open.
Fly, children,
anticipate the nightingale’s
migration. Postpone
the knowledge of the insects
that are required to produce
its sweetness of tone.
Remember the babes
in the wood who were discovered
with their heads buried
in leaves that were the colour
of the feathers of the bird
that had sung to them,
pressing sanguinely
its breast against time.
On the Threshold of Liberty
René Magritte
What it means is:
you must accede
to the invention. Flesh,
trees, dwellings, the grain
in the wood
are vulnerable and not
to be shot at;
only the sky is
target.
Challenged
the inventor would claim
all he wants is
for it to go off.
So move
the paintings to one side
in the humanist’s
gallery; open a window.
Let the gun point its muzzle,
silently barking,
at the idea that there are limits.
Captain Cook’s Last Voyage
Roland Penrose
Beautiful because
she is without an arm
to embrace your reasons.
He has thrown the globe
about her and set forth
on his maiden voyage
to the flesh that is the iceberg
on which we are wrecked.
On eternity’s background
is the shadow
of time’s cage, where nautically
we are becalmed
listening to the echoes
in the nerves’ rigging
of that far-off storm
that is spirit blowing itself
out in the emptiness at the Poles.
Drawing by a Child
Diana Brinton Lee
All of them, Mummy and Daddy
in their various disguises –
it is my revenge on them
for bringing me to be.
And, oh, yes! The toys
who play with me, whose justification
I am. I take my revenge
on them, too, giving them claws,
indices of the underworld
to which they belong. Can you imagine
how a doll snarls? With
what relish a kitten converts
its tail into a serpent?
And horns, horns for everything
in my nursery, pointing to the
cuckold I know my father to be.
The Message
A message from God
delivered by a bird
at my window, offering friendship.
Listen. Such language!
Who said God was without
speech? Every word an injection
to make me smile. Meet me,
it says, tomorrow, here
at the same time and you will remember
how wonderful today
was: no pain, no worry;
irrelevant the mystery if
unsolved. I gave you the X-ray
eye for you to use, not
to prospect, but to discover
the unmalignancy of love’s
growth. You were a patient, too,
anaesthetised on truth’s table,
with life operating on you
with a green scalpel. Meet me, tomorrow,
I say, and I will sing it all over
again for you, when you have come to.
A Poet
Disgust tempered by an exquisite
charity, wrapping life’s claws
in purest linen – this man
has history to supper,
eats with a supreme tact
from the courses offered to him.
Waiting at table
are the twin graces, patience
and truth, with the candles’
irises in soft clusters
flowering on thin stalks.