Susan Alexander Features R.S. Thomas, Guest Poetry Blog # 29, Part Two of Two

Welsh poet R.S. Thomas (1913-2000). Photo Credit: The Telegraph

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
and illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but it is the eternity that awaits you.

R.S. Thomas from Collected Poems 1945-1990, Phoenix Press, 1995

Before I get to R.S. Thomas, I want to thank Richard for inviting me share something of my slow peregrination towards poetry. It probably began with William Blake, the Romantics and T.S. Eliot when I was young. But honestly, without Richard being on fire for poetry and bringing home new translations of Rilke and Rumi, books of Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds, Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier, booking us into the Skagit River Poetry Festival with our daughter Libby, I wonder if I would have reconnected with poetry with the passion that I did.

A possible starting place for my poetry actually happened during a pilgrimage. Richard and I were travelling through Ireland in 2002 with my favourite Irishman. The Reverend Canon Doctor Herbert O’Driscoll stood up in our bus as it wound up and down and around the narrow roads of Ireland and he read The Bright Field over the speaker system.

This poem reached deep down inside of me and touched something hidden, a truth, and I have hung on to it ever since. It spoke to me about the present moment. What is the choice you are making right now? Will you turn aside to the lit bush? Will you sell all you have to possess the one thing of true value? This poem changed everything and looking at it again I see something in it new and different. How can 14 lines, do so much? Combine a profound spiritual longing and commitment in the compact sonnet form? At the time, my life felt like one big hurrying on or hankering after.

Amusingly, Richard and I have totally different memories of where this poem was actually read. He has it set in a former “Great” house run as a guest house by nuns near Glendalough. But we do agree that Herb read it. There is the time before I heard this poem and the time after. Some people come to this moment on hearing Rilke’s You must change your life. Or James Wright’s echo of Rilke, I have wasted my life. The turning aside for me was towards poetry.

After reading The Bright Field, you might be led to think it is typical of Thomas’s outlook and you would be wrong. Much of his poetry wrestles with what is dark and difficult. Think of Jacob wrestling with angel for a blessing that Jacob sorely needed. Thomas was a parish priest as well as a poet. He wrote about the farmers of rural Wales with honesty and sometimes with brutality. Here is no idealized pastoral vision. His farmers have dirt and more on their hands. They can be kind and they can be cruel. Thomas’s attachment to the land is strong, but unsentimental. He was an anti-industrialist and a skeptic of progress. As an educated person in a remote parish, I can only imagine he felt like an outsider. Thomas was a strident nationalist who fought against the anglicisation of Wales. He wrote his tracts and prose works in Welsh, but he wrote his poetry in English.

Another thing that attracts me to Thomas’s poetry was his concept or, rather, non-concept, of God. He was a follower of the Via Negativa. His poems grapple with the absence of God. The sense that there is a great mystery that humans are unable to understand because it too far beyond us. The Empty Church is a poem that plays with the idea of humanity trying to capture God through religion. This is another sonnet, this time with a question as a turn.

The Empty Church

They laid this stone trap
for him, enticing him with candles,
as though he would come like some huge moth
out of the darkness to beat there.
Ah, he had burned himself
before in the human flame
and escaped, leaving the reason
torn. He will not come any more

to our lure. Why, then, do I kneel still
striking my prayers on a stone
heart? Is it in hope one
of them will ignite yet and throw
on its illumined walls the shadow
of someone greater than I can understand?

R.S. Thomas, ibid

I get a thrill of horror from the image of the huge moth, the flame, the trap of the church. And don’t forget, this is a poem by a priest. Philip Larkin apparently despised R.S. Thomas because of his Christian faith at a time when religion was viewed with skepticism in artistic circles. And yet I do not know how you could see Thomas’s theology as an intellectual dodge. In his poem Via Negativa Thomas writes: I never thought other than/ That God is that great absence / In our lives, the empty silence/ Within. His is a dark and mystical vision, but one that makes his rare poems of hope shine.

Of course, I too am drawn by the light and I sleuthed through his oeuvre to find Thomas’s poems that had brightness in them. So I will leave you with a short poem that has been a touchstone for me. The Gift is both humble and bold. It reminds me of Blake’s vision. I have drunk from its wisdom again and again.

The Gift

Some ask the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me

only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.

R.S. Thomas, ibid