Collected poems, 1945-1990 Book

Is there a good way to write poetry? In the late Sixties, like many thousands of other unwashed urchins, I encountered RS Thomas at school in a slap-in-the-face poem that has puzzled me ever since.

You remember Davies? He died you know
With his face to the wall, as the manner is
Of the poor peasant in his stone croft
On the Welsh hills...
...
The bare floor without a rug
Or mat to soften the loud tread
Of neighbours crossing the uneasy boards
To peer at Davies with gruff words
Of meaningless comfort; before they turned
Heartless away from the stale smell
Of death in league with those dank walls.
(Death of a Peasant)

In his capacity as an Anglican priest for rural communities, RS Thomas displays a proprietorial attitude to his own people, the real folk of the Welsh hills, but I am not convinced that he makes the mistake of assuming he is one of them. From my reading about Lloyd George for example, I imagine the Welsh as Non-Conformists when they are even Christians, to whom the Anglican Church was an imposition, representative of the landowner rather than the peasant. He does not even especially admire them.

You failed me farmer, I was afraid you would
The day I saw you loitering with the cows,
Yourself one of them ...
... The two things
That could redeem your ignorance, the beauty
And grace that trees and flowers labour to teach,
Were never yours, you shut your heart against them.
You stopped your ears to the soft influence
Of birds, preferring ...
... the shallow stream
Of neighbours’ trivial talk.
For this I leave you
Alone in your harsh acres, herding pennies
Into a sock to serve you for a pillow
Through the long night that waits upon your span.
(Valedication)

When he speaks of an idiot in ‘The Fair’, he is brutally frank and sees this imbecile as representative of his people.

The idiot goes round and around
With his brother in a bumping car
At the fair. The famous idiot
Smile hangs over the car’s edge,
Illuminating nothing. This is mankind
Being taken for a ride by a rich
Relation...

Sure enough, Rose Cottage, the one pretty little sight in a terrace of simple red brick dwellings, is not Welsh after all, but home to the invader:

...It was registered in the heart
Of a nation, and so, sure
Of its being. All summer
It generated the warmth
Of its blooms, red lamps
To guide you. And if you came
Too late in the bleak cold
Of winter, there were the faces
At the window, English faces,
With red cheeks, countering the thorns.
(Rose Cottage)

Thomas dislikes the English, or more accurately, he hates the way their sentiment and money has made fools of the Welsh. English money is alienating to his mind, English values are all wrong: . “...to make real the power of the pounds, / That in Wales would have gone rather / To patch up the family stocking, / Emblem of a nation’s despair.” (Rhodri)

One senses that he is disappointed in the Welsh, that he sees them as a defeated people, slowly vanishing from their countryside, unable to endure its privations.

...
We were a people bred on legends,
Warming our hands at the red past...
...
We were a people and we are so yet,
When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs
Under the table, or gnawing the bones
Of a dead culture, ...
(Welsh History)

....
There is no present in Wales
And no future;
There is only the past
Brittle with relics,
Wind bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcass of an old song.
(Welsh Landscape)

In A Priest to His People, as patronising a title as we could expect, he complains:

Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales,
With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females,
How I have hated you for your irreverence, your scorn even
Of the refinements of art and the mysteries of the Church.
...
You who are indifferent to all that I can offer,
Caring not whether I blame or praise,
With your pigs and your sheep and your sons
And hollow cheeked daughters,
You will continue to unwind your days
In a crude tapestry under the jealous heavens
To affront, bewilder, yet compel my gaze.

One senses that his is not a satisfying mission. At the end of a working day, an angry line dismisses the people he serves - “I have shut the mind / on fools. The ‘phone’s frenzy / is over” (Swifts) - before releasing his mind to meditate with greater delight on the mysteries of swifts in flight about him.

Being Irish, and subjected as much as anyone to the drivel of patriotic verse, I have to admire the Welsh for their national poetry, so harshly real and so concentrated on direct observation of the people within and as part of their natural world. His poem about WB Yeats is perhaps revealing. I have always distrusted Yeats, arguably Ireland's national poet, for his patriotism based on fantasy, the core of a more vicious nationalism in my personal opinion. Thomas speaks of sitting with Yeats on the train “in mutual silence closer than lover knit” and to my mind reveals that he has indeed nothing to say, no common ground with this glacial intellect.

...
Who would have guessed the futility even of praising
Mountain and marsh and the delicate, flickering tree
To one long impervious and cold to the outward scene,
Heedless of nature’s baubles, lost in the amazing
And labyrinth paths of his own impenetrable mind?
(Memories of Yeats While Travelling to Holyhead)

RS Thomas has a very unsentimental and hard-nosed type of nationalism but I find it far more appealing than the alternatives I have encountered because it is so well rooted in the soil and hard rock of its own place. Maybe that is why I struggled with him in my school days. Something that is brutally factual can yield astonishing visions. I think this is a good way to mythologise a nation for its school-children and a good way, if there is one, to be a national poet.

'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 enters 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.
(Poetry for Supper)