The University of Notre Dame

R. S. Thomas's Poetry of the Church in Wales

Author(s): Donald Davie
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 35-47
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059341 .
Accessed: 28/06/2014 14:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Notre Dame is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Religion
&Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 R. S. THOMAS'SPOETRY
OF THE CHURCH IN WALES

Donald Davie

In 1972 R. S. Thomas'sninth collectionof poems (there have always

been too many of them) had the arch and unpromising title, H'm. It
markeda turning-pointin Thomas'swriting, and the turn that he made
alienated some who had admired him. Their discontent was voiced by
John Wain in one of his lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford:
R. S. Thomas ... is a particularlydepressing example of the damage caused
to a poet's work by the flight from form; his subject-matter has always been
rather lowering (depopulation of the countryside, depopulation of the human
heart throughthe decay of beliefs, etc.). But therewas a time when the depressing
nature of what Mr. Thomas conveyed was irradiated and made beautiful by
his beautiful sense of rhythm and sound. The poems in H'm offer no such
consolation.
And Wain quoted in support of this contention "Via Negativa":
Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes

This article was originally presented at Rutgers University, in October 1985, as the
First Catherine Cantalupo Lecture.

R&L 19.2 (Summer 1987)

35

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
36 Religion & Literature

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Here, Wain contended, "the lowered, daunted quality of the subject-

matteris matchedby the same characteristicsin the expression";whereas
"in the days when Mr. Thomas made graceful, lyrical poems about
being daunted, he was telling us that the negative experience was be-
ing contained in a mind, and expressedby a sensibility, that was reach-
ing beyond, attaining something positive."
The response is clearly and forthrightlyexpressed, it is understand-
able, and certainly it was widely shared. But it is open to certain ob-
jections. In the first place, and most importantly,it must be questioned
whether the subject-matterof "Via Negativa" is, as John Wain con-
fidently takes for granted, "lowered,daunted."Thomas's other poems
suggested, and were to suggest, that a God who "keepsthe interstices
/ In our knowledge, the darkness / Between stars"was a concept not
daunting but consolatory. The religious mind finds its consolations in
regions where the secular mind discerns only forbidding bleakness,
and just that paradox or seeming paradox is what R.S. Thomas's later
poems resolutely explore. If one's worst fear is that technological man
may extend his knowledge to the point where no mysteries are left in
the universe, then a God who can be relied on always to reveal gaps
in that knowledge is a God to be thankful for. The way of negation,
the "Via Negativa" of the title, is thus one of the ways to transcen-
dence; this is what traditionalChristianthinking affirms, and the poem
endorses that traditional understanding.
Secondly one may question Wain's implicit assumption that the
poetry he calls "lyrical"characteristicallyworks by expressing "lower-
ing"apprehensionsin a sweetly formal way that makes them paradox-
ically exalting. That some poetry works on us in that way, need not
be denied. But to take that way of working as a norm runs the risk
of overvaluinga suave melancholy, the poignantlymanaged dying fall.
It is a risk that English readers of Wain's generation are particularly
prone to, enamoured as they mostly are of Philip Larkin, that poet
of very lowering apprehensions indeed. The least one can say is that
the poet of H'm, though for that matter of earlier collections also, had
no interest in being lyrical on that understanding of "lyric."
All the same,John Wain undoubtedlyhad a point: the R. S. Thomas
of the 1970's certainly went to great lengths to offend and disappoint

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 DONALD DAVIE 37

the reader's ear. As soon as we consider how to read "Via Negativa"

aloud, we can see where that offensiveness is: in the enjambements,
the run-overs. As the reading voice turns from the third line into the
fourth, and again %fromthe fourth into the fifth, it encounters after two
syllables the jarring stop that had been denied it (where it would not
have jarred) at the end of the verse-line. There are not much less jar-
ring enjambements where the fifth line turns into the sixth, and the
seventh into the eighth; a particularly abrupt one, on to a single syllable,
where the ninth line turns into the tenth; and another, only one syllable
more lenient, where the eleventh line turns into the twelfth. Of course
such abrupt or violent enjambements are an invaluable resource
available to the poet; but when they are resorted to so frequently in
a short poem (which is a sonnet only on the understanding that all
fourteen-line poems are sonnets), the trick seems to be a mere man-
nerism, one that denies even minimal integrity to the verse-line. Where
the verse-line is concerned - and "verse"comes from versus,the turn(from
one line into the next)- John Wain's allegation, "flight from form,"
seems not excessive. Wain called "Via Negativa" "a fine poem," but
then, on second thoughts, "a fine piece of writing"; it would be more
accurate to say (teasingly, yet in all seriousness) that it may or may
not be a fine poem, but it certainly isn't a fine piece of verse.
This is not always the case. In "The Calling," from the next collec-
tion Laboratories of theSpirit(1975), the enjambements - not just between
lines but between quatrains - are similarly violent; yet in every case
there is rhetorical justification. That is to say, they are expressive, and
therefore an aid rather than an impediment to the voice that would
read the poem aloud:
And the word came - was it a god
spoke or a devil?- Go
to that lean parish; let them tread
on your dreams; and learn silence
is wisdom. Be alone with yourself
as they are alone in the cold room
of the wind. Listen to the earth
mumbling the monotonous song
of the soil: I am hungry, I
am hungry, in spite of the red dung
of this people. See them go
one by one through that dark door
with the crumpled ticket of your prayers
in their hands. Share their distraught
joy at the dropping of their inane
children. Test your belief

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
38 Religion & Literature

in spirit on their faces staring

at you, on beauty's surrender
to truth, on the soul's selling
of itself for a corner
by the body's fire. Learn the thinness
of the window that is
between you and life, and how
the mind cuts itself if it goes through.
In this fine poem the line-endings over-ridden so imperiously are in
the serviceof a saturnine, even savage, wit - considerhow in the fourth
quatrain the line-endings link "distraught"with "inane."It is not how
we imagine a Christian priest contemplating his flock; but in that case
we had better (so the poem implies) revise our notions, and not sup-
pose that either Christian charity or pastoral care precludes the Yeat-
sian arrogance that is invoked in the third and fourth lines. (Thomas
alludes to Yeats continually: something too little noticed by those who,
findinghim for the most part a ruralperson, have typedhim as a Words-
worthianpoet, grey and good and sober- that is not at all his character.)
Even so, Thomas's ruthless enjambements became in the 1970's,
and have remained to the present day, such a prominent feature of
his style - sometimes to affective purpose, more often not - that it is
hard not to see this as a tic, a mannerism. It is as if this sole device
constitutes for him a prosody; and we may legitimately protest that
a respectable prosody must comprehend a good deal more than this.
Before I am through, I shall venture to suggest how and why this came
about. If I am right, the matter cannot be explained as simple mis-
judgment in the niceties of verse-writing as a craft; on the contrary
it involves us in sympatheticallyspeculatingabout what it means now-
adays to be, as Thomas is, a Welshman, and a Welshman who writes
in English.
Moreover this is a Welshman of a very special kind, in one crucial
respect unrepresentative. For Thomas, who was born in 1913, spent
his workinglife (he has now retired)as a priest of the Church in Wales,
that is to say of the Anglican Church. I am not aware that Thomas
has ever explained- why should he? - what impelled him to that par-
ticular priesthood rather than some other. But it sets a gulf between
him and many, indeed most, of his fellow-Welshmen. I do not have
any statistics, but am willing to believe what is commonly assumed:
that the religious experience of the Welsh people, in Wales and out
of it, is characteristicallyfocussed on "chapel,"not on "church";that
is to say, that many more of them worship with the nonconformist
dissenting sects (for instance, the Baptists) than with those who recog-

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 DONALD DAVIE 39

nize, as the head of their Church, the monarch of the United King-
dom. I am picking my words with some care, for these are potentially
very inflammable considerations. In England the Church of England
is describedjust so, as "of England";whereas the Church of Scotland
is not the Anglican Church, and in Wales the Anglican Church is
scrupulously described as the Church not of Wales but in Wales.
Neither in Scotland nor Wales, nor for that matter in Ireland, is the
Church that R. S. Thomas served the established Church, as it is in
England. In Wales the Anglican Church is no more privileged, among
other Protestant churches, than is the Episcopal Church of America
among other Protestant churches in the U.S.A. . Indeed, Welsh na-
tionalists (and R. S. Thomas is ardently one of them, as we shall see)
sometimes conceive of the Anglican Church in Wales as profoundly
alien, an ecclesiasticalextension of the English drive, sustainedthrough
centuries, to subjugateWelsh culture to English. To be a Welsh patriot
while serving as priest of what was originally and is persistingly an
Englishchurch- this is the anomaly, as some see it, of the condition
that R. S. Thomas chose and lived with.
The effect of this, poetically, can be seen most clearly by compar-
ing Thomas's poems with those of the EnglishAnglican poet who with
characteristicgenerosity took note of Thomas's first collection, paro-
chially published from an obscure Welsh printing-house, and enthu-
siasticallylaunchedhim before a metropolitanaudience. This wasJohn
Betjeman, later Poet Laureate, a lesser poet than Thomas and yet not
just the quaint and comical rhymester that he was for too long sup-
posed to be. Betjeman followed up laudatory newspaper-reviews by
introducing in 1955 Thomas's Song at the Years Turning: Poems, 1952-
1954. Betjeman'spoems of Christian experience, though early and late
they often turn on such uncomfortable matters as mortality and orig-
inal sin, are nevertheless cosyas Thomas's are not; Betjeman when he
attends church is aware of participating in a socio-political as well as
a religious ritual, whereas Thomas the Welshman when he attends or
officiates at worship has, and can have, no such confidence. For him
the worship has a religious significance, or none at all; and to judge
from his poems, "none at all"is the bleak verdict that his demanding
consciousness often passes on his priestly endeavours. Of the many
poems that the poet-priest has addressed to his parishioners, we may
take as typical "To Church":
You sat in the stone church;
To what secret prayers
Did your lips say, Amen?
The preacher spoke from the high

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
40 Religion & Literature

Pulpit, his quick words

Bounced on your mind's crust.
You were not there to learn
Agility of a creed
Grown nimble from keeping
Its balance on smooth tongues.
You sat in the tall pew;
No new vows were wrung
From your hard heart, pardon,
Hovering on the air,
Had no place to go.
You went down on your knees
With the rest; the priest's blessing
Fell on you like the tree's
Shadow in which at last
Your crossed bones were buried.

There are several ways in which the bones in the grave can be said
to be "crossed";but one sense of the word surely is that the bones have
had the sign of the cross made over them. If so, this line and the poem
as a whole may be thought to express the Anglo-Catholic and Roman
Catholic faith that such consecrationsby a priestlyhand are efficacious
even if they stir no responsive feeling or understanding on the part
of the person consecrated.
When this poem first appeared (in Poetryfor May 1962) it was ac-
companied by "This,"typical of many poems that derive from the poet-
priest'spastoral care for his parishioners outside of church. One such
parishioner, doubtless a woman, speaks:
I thought, you see, that on some still night,
When stars were shrill over his farm,
And he and I kept ourselves warm
By an old fire, whose bars were bright
With real heat, the truth might ripen
Between us naturally as the fruit
Of his wild hedges, or as the roots,
Swedes and mangolds, he grew then.
No luck; the thoughts hopefully sown
On such evenings never could break
The mind's crust. Keeping my own
Company now, I have forsaken
All but this poor basement of bone,
Where the one dry flame is awake.

We may reasonablytake this poem as an example of that suavity which

John Wain liked in Thomas's earlier collections, which he deplored

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 DONALD DAVIE 41

the lack of when in the 1970's Thomas's style became harsher, more
rebarbative. And it is true that the enjambements here are managed
with a liquid ease that Thomas later would not pause for; as it is also
true that the formal decorum of the sonnet, for instance in regard to
rhyme, is here respected as it would not be later. Yet this decorum
is largely illusory or superficial: it is notable for instance that only one
line, the sixth, can be scanned as iambic pentameter, though that is
the meter which traditional decorum requires for the English sonnet.
(The other lines are accentual tetrameters, and indeed Thomas's meters
are nearly always accentual, despite the rough and uncertain rhythms
which accentual meters lend themselves to, as against the stricter re-
quirements of the accentual-syllabic.) The signs were always there that
Thomas's observance of traditional forms was grudging, mutinous and
temporary. But the signs were overlooked by Thomas's English ad-
mirers like, of all people, Kingsley Amis (who declared that Thomas's
earliest poems moved him to tears).
They were overlooked also by such American readers as took notice
of him. Calvin Bedient for instance, writing of Thomas in his Eight
ContemporaryPoets (1974), decided that "Reading Thomas one learns
to endure the glare of emotion; one learns again a kind of innocence."
Thomas, Bedient said, "is an anachronism, a poet of feeling in an age
of intellect"; and further, he claimed, "Thomas never really challenges
the mind. His appeal is all to feeling. ..." Such a misreading was
barely understandable even in 1974; for how could Bedient discern an
of
"age intellect," after the feelingful excesses of Anglo- American poetry
and public behaviour in the 1960's? Today it is quite inadmissible. Be-
dient to be sure had bad luck, for he wrote just too soon to take ac-
count of the new turn that Thomas's poetry was taking in the 1970's.
Yet Thomas, I have suggested, was at that point merely taking off the
wraps - he had always been an intellectual poet, and a rebellious one.
However it may have been with English readers like Wain and Amis,
it is plain how this American reader went wrong. Calvin Bedient had
a hazy and inaccurate idea of the Anglo-Welsh poetic tradition that
R. S. Thomas inherited, a tradition represented in Bedient's mind by
Gerard Manley Hopkins, who so far as I know conceived of himself
always as a Victorian Englishman, and by Dylan Thomas, an urbanized
and anglicized Welshman who spoke no Welsh. If we are to get our
poet into sharper focus, we need to do rather better than that in con-
ceiving what it means to be a Welsh writer in the present century. And
first we must recognize the force and the validity of Welsh nationalism.
Because Welsh nationalism is less of a political force than Scottish,

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
42 Religion & Literature

not to speak of Irish, the outside observer tends to think that Welsh
nationhood is something merely picturesque and sentimental, which
the Englishmay safelyindulge. In facthowever,just becausethe political
assimilation of the Welsh has gone further than with the Irish and the
Scots, and because accordinglythe English are readierto indulge what
they see as endearing Welsh foibles, the Welsh writer's attitude to
English culture is peculiarly exacerbatedand in many cases peculiarly
intransigent. It turns for him, far more than for his Irish and Scottish
peers, specificallyon matters of language. For on the one hand Welsh
is far nearer being, as a practical possibility, an alternative national
tongue than Gaelic is for the Irish and the Scots; yet on the other hand
the English spoken and writtenby Welshmen differsfrom metropolitan
English, lexically and grammatically, much less than the English of
Ireland or Scotland does. Accordingly the Welsh writer who writes in
English feels especially guilty at doing so, although he cannot contrive
a third option such as Hugh MacDiarmid contrived for Scotland with
Lallans or "syntheticScots."Anglo-Welsh, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Scottish
are three hyphenated compounds that ought as it were to lie parallel
one with another; but this is not so - the three conditions, though
similarly painful in a way that few English or Americans recognize,
are in important ways unalike.
The predicament, and the pain of it, are touched on rather more
often in R. S. Thomas's earlier poetry than later. But the dilemma
has not been solved, and if Thomas set it aside in his poetry he has
not set it aside in his politics nor in his sense of himself as an artist
responsible to his nation. In 1978, in an address originally delivered
in Welsh, he spoke of it heatedly, as some may think with anguish:
This devilish bilingualism! O, I know about all the arguments in favour of it:
how it enriches one's personality, how it sharpens one's mind, how it enables
one to enjoy the best of two worlds and so on. Very likely. But to anyone in
Wales who desires to write, it is a millstone around his neck. . . .
A foreign language! Yes. Let nobody imagine that because there is so much
English everywhere in Wales it is not a foreign language. . . .
An Anglo-Welsh writer is neither one thing nor the other. He keeps going in
a no-man's land between two cultures. . . .
Woe that I was born! Who has suffered, if I have not suffered? For I bear in
my body the marks of this conflict. . . .
What emerges elsewhere in this extremely personal testimony is the
fact that Thomas writes in English because (he spells this out, and it
does him honour)his Welsh was too lately and too laboriouslyacquired,

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 DONALD DAVIE 43

for him to be criticalenough of his own performancesin that language.

What seems to follow however is that accordingly he regards English
as the medium that an unkind fate has condemned him to. And in-
deed Thomas says nothing to suggest that he regards English other
than grudgingly, even resentfully.This is surely a very uncommon way
for an artist to feel towards the medium that he is working in. And
the oddity is highlighted by the way in which when Thomas speaks
of the poetic tradition in Welsh, he dwells admiringly on its formal
intricacies. For, as we have seen, his way with such elegances inherited
from the Englishtradition- for instance, those of the English sonnet- is
quite brutally rough-and-ready.
There is a strikingcontrast, in certain poets from the Irish northeast
who attracted in the 1970's much admiring attention outside Ireland.
Not only Seamus Heaney explicitly, but Derek Mahon and Michael
Longley almost as plainly, were in love with the English language, and
with English poetry of the past as manifesting that language raised to
its highest power. Indeed in 1968-1970, the years of their first collec-
tions, these Irishmenmade deft and accomplisheduse of the traditional
English resources which too many English poets were then rejecting,
often with contumely. The Irish, it seemed, could embrace the English
tongue without any suspicion that by doing so they betrayed their
Irishness. But the Anglo-Welsh poet could have no such confidence.
His namesake Ned Thomas sees R. S. Thomas as subscribing to the
desperate view held by other Anglo-Welsh nationalist writers of the
1970's:"one was writing poetry in English so as to render that poetry
unnecessary in the Wales of the future." Surely no Irish nor Scottish
poet was ever driven to this logical but lunatic extreme of prolonging
a tradition in the devout hope that it would soon be extinguished.
These questions do not arise with a poet whom R. S. Thomas was
from time to time prepared to consider one his Anglo-Welsh peers:
the author of TheAnathemata, David Jones, who died in 1974. One of
the humiliating embarrassments for the hyphenated cultures in the
United Kingdom is the over-abundanceof borderlinecases; the English
readeris understandablythough too easily bemused whenJohn Buchan
is presented to him as a Scottish writer, Louis Macneice as Irish, Ed-
ward Thomas as Welsh. David Jones is not one of these; it is plain
that his ancestral Welshness was crucial to his sense of his own iden-
tity, and also that that inherited allegiance was a principle of, and a
motive behind, the one interminable poem which, as now appears,
he spent most of his life putting together. Jones however, though an
Anglo-Welshman, was in a very differentsituationfrom R.S. Thomas.

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
44 Religion & Literature

London-born, having never achieved more than an inaccurate smat-

tering of Welsh, and having spent little time inside the Principality,
Jones was moreover deeply attached to the British army with which
he had served on the Western Front in 1916, in a regiment where Lon-
don Cockneysfoughtbeside Welsh-speakingWelshmen- an experience
which he commemoratedmovingly in his long-meditatedIn Parenthesis
(1937). From then on he seems to have devoted himself to re-creating,
with a wealth of archaeologicallearning, that era in the history of the
British Isles when Englishman and Welshman were not yet at odds
since both were citizens of Roman Britain. It was entirely consistent
that Jones as a young man should have joined the Roman Catholic
Church; for the worship of that Church, so long as it was conducted
in Latin, preserved for the linguistically sensitive the memory of that
Romano-British unity. Jones thus avoided the Anglo-Welsh predica-
ment by tracking back through recorded and legendary history to the
point where the predicament had not yet arisen. For that reason one
finds in Jones no resentmentof the English donation to Wales, beyond
a certain tetchinesswith those periods of English culture when it seems
to have attended more to other connections (e.g. French) than to the
Celtic.
Some who sought to excuse Philip Larkin'sexclusion of David Jones
from The OxfordBook of Twentieth-CenturyEnglish Versepleaded that,
whereas at times Jones had indeed written finely in English, none of
that writing was in any strict sense poetry. It would have made more
sense, and a better apology, if they had contended that whereasJones's
writing was undoubtedly poetry, very little of it - and that not the best
part- was in verse. For the verse-line, and the niceties of turning from
one verse-line into the next, Jones very seldom showed any suscep-
tibility at all; and in his letters, whenever he is required to comment
on rhythm and meter and the relation between them, his remarksare
puerile. In this if in little else he is at one with his fellow Anglo-
Welshman R. S. Thomas: it is English verse that they do violence to,
not English poetry.
Jones's stance however is Olympian. It is R.S. Thomas who has ar-
ticulated and suffered through the predicament of the modern Welsh-
man. The analogy with the Irish, partial though it is and potentially
misleading, is illuminating. If we compare Seamus Heaney with his
formidablyaccomplishedand cosmopolitanfellow Northern Irishman,
Derek Mahon, the comparison cannot resolve itself into asking which
is the better poet. Rather, Heaney has chosen to enter himself in a
league that Mahon, perhaps honourablyjudging himself unqualified,

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 DONALD DAVIE 45

has chosen not to compete in: that is to say, the aspiration by the poet
to be the voice of his people. Heaney and Thomas have chosen to act
out, in their lives as reflected in their writings, the role and the predica-
ment imposed in our times on the generic Irishman in the one case,
the generic Welshman in the other. This is presumptuous, and in both
cases the presumption has been fastened on, and derided, by the poet's
compatriots: Heaney in Ireland, and R. S. Thomas in Wales, have
been prophets without much honour in their native countries. But the
presumption is allowable, and indeed necessary, in the case of those
who aspire to be national poets. Contrary to what is often supposed,
a national poet addresses his own nation far more than he addresses
foreigners on behalf of that nation. Such a poet holds up a glass in
which his nation shall see itself as it is, not as it is thought to be in
some beguiling image available alike for internal and external consump-
tion. So one has heard Welsh people complain that while Thomas's
unflattering portrait of the Welsh is faithful, he should have registered
it only in Welsh, not in a language that foreigners can read. So too
Heaney is extolled much less wholeheartedly in Ireland than in the
United Kingdom and the U.S.A. . Affronted by the presumption of a
Heaney or a Thomas, who impudently offer in their words and stanzas
to enact the dilemmas not of themselves only but of entire nations,
many readers may understandably prefer the beguiling modesty of
Derek Mahon or (though the case is admittedly very different) of David
Jones. But it is the presumptuousness of Thomas and Heaney that
keeps the faith with great national poets of the past - or for that matter
of the present, as in the case of many subjugated nations of Eastern
Europe.
That last reference is not altogether gratuitous, at least not for those
who may be asking themselves how Thomas the Welsh patriot can be
reconciled with Thomas the Christian believer and Christian priest.
For we have news of how in Poland, and less certainly in Czechoslo-
vakia and Hungary and Romania, priests of the Roman Church and
also sometimes Lutheran and Calvinist pastors seem to have taken upon
themselves, as an extension of their pastoral functions, the safeguard-
-
ing of their respective nationhoods if only to the extent of prevent-
ing their nations from being torn apart by internal strife. We observe
the same exertions by clerics, white and black, in South Africa. Of
course the comparison is out of all proportion. In these countries the
stakes are higher, and the risks of pursuing such a course are much
greater. R. S. Thomas is not likely to be murdered or thrown into
prison. Yet the principle, it may be thought, is the same. "The Church

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
46 Religion & Literature

in Wales"- and in that formulation "Wales"gets as much emphasis

as "Church."
I have been suggesting that there is in R. S. Thomas a perhaps in-
termittent but certainly persistent animosity towards English culture;
and that this appears not in what his poems say, but in their way of
saying it. In other words the clues are to be found, with this poet as
with any serious artist, precisely in his art, in how he handles his ar-
tistic medium. For Thomas that medium is the English language and
the English verse-line; and like John Wain I find Thomas handling
that medium with a peculiar gracelessnesswhich he has indulged more
and more over the years. That is of course, and is meant to be, a damag-
ing comment. Damaging, and yet not quite damning. For grace or
gracefulness, though we are right to look for it in poetry and to feel
resentment when it is denied us, is not traditionally held to be a sine
quanonof poetry. It is not even, if we may trust the wisest authorities
throughthe centuries,one of poetry'shighest attributes.These thoughts
and admonitions come to mind when we look at the best of the un-
doubtedly bleak and craggy poems that have come from R.S. Thomas
in recent years. One of these is a poem overtly on the Old Testament
theme of Cain slaying his brother Abel, but in fact and more urgently
on the New Testament themes of Incarnation, Crucifixion and Re-
demption. Thomas's treatment of these sacred matters seems at first
sight deeply shocking:
Abel looked at the wound
His brother had dealt him, and loved him
For it. Cain saw that look
And struck him again. The blood cried
On the ground; God listened to it.
He questioned Cain. But Cain answered:
Who made the blood? I offered you
Clean things: the blond hair
Of the corn; the knuckled vegetables; the
Flowers; things that did not publish
Their hurt, that bled
Silently. You would not accept them.
And God said: It was part of myself
He gave me. The lamb was torn
From my own side. The limp head,
The slow fall of red tears- they
Were like a mirror to me in which I beheld
My reflection. I anointed myself
In readiness for the journey
To the doomed tree you were at work upon.

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 DONALD DAVIE 47

This is graceless in the ways we have looked at earlier. But to speak

for myself, faced with something so uncompromising in its treatment
of matters so troubling, I can accept that the poem has to be graceless
if it is to be (as it surely is) sublime and tragic and austere.

VanderbiltUniversity

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.97 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:53:11 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions