Personal Choice 21

R. S. Thomas

Without a doubt the major influence on my own work. I consider Thomas one of the very best of the modern poets. His celebration of ordinary human lives is unparalleled in the Western canon. I had a brief correspondence with him around the time he lost his faith and left the church and his subsequent death. A Peasant is without a doubt one of the greatest modern poems!

Welsh Landscape

To live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went into the making of the wild sky,

Dyeing the immaculate rivers

In all their courses.

It is to be aware,

Above the noisy tractor

And hum of the machine

Of strife in the strung woods,

Vibrant with sped arrows.

You cannot live in the present,

At least not in Wales.

There is the language for instance,

The soft consonants

Strange to the ear.

There are cries in the dark at night

As owls answer the moon,

And thick ambush of shadows,

Hushed at the fields' corners.

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 carcase of an old song.

R.S.Thomas

A Peasant

Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,

Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,

Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.

Docking mangels, chipping the green skin

From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin

Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth

To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind—

So are his days spent, his spittled mirth

Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks

Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.

And then at night see him fixed in his chair

Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.

There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.

His clothes, sour with years of sweat

And animal contact, shock the refined,

But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.

Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season

Against siege of rain and the wind's attrition,

Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress

Not to be stormed, even in death's confusion.

Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,

Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.

R.S.Thomas

Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913 – 2000) was a Welsh poet and Anglican clergyman, noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicization of Wales. He was one of the most famous Welsh poets. In 1955, John Betjeman, in his introduction to the first collection of Thomas’s poetry to be produced by a major publisher, Song at the Year's Turning, predicted that Thomas would be remembered long after Betjeman himself was forgotten. Professor M. Wynn Thomas said: ‘He was the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience. He was one of the major English language and European poets of the 20th century.’