This essay was written in the mid-1980s and accepted for book publication. In the event, neither essay nor projected book appeared.
1
It's difficult to generalise about R. S. Thomas's religious poetry. To confront this difficulty, however, is immediately to engage with what's
characteristic of it and of the temperament of the man who wrote it. It's poetry that emerges from a deep restlessness, from a sensibility volatile
in the extreme. Casting about for a snap term to describe the kind of activity that's going on in it, one might plump for dialectical.
Out of his argument with himself, said Yeats, a man makes poetry: the experience of reading through any of Thomas's collections from Laboratories
of the Spirit onwards is like listening to a man arguing back and forth amongst his selves. One might, as an alternative to calling
him a dialectical poet, call him a poet of moods. He's written, for a contemporary poet, a great deal; his poems are mainly short; their shortness
of breath is the shortness of lyricism. The business of the lyric poet is to catch the mood, the feeling, the conviction, the idea, as it exists
fleetingly now, at this very moment, here. Tomorrow the mood will be different, by so little or so much, and so will the poem (if there is one).
Thomas told J. B. Lethbridge in 1981: "I am a lyric poet, I think. A lyric poet is a person who changes, you don't ever remain the same for
long." 1 To attend to Thomas is to attend, not to a series of discrete and final definitions, but to a process
of questioning and self-questioning, of continual redefinition, to a man whose mind and heart will not sit still. The dynamic, the rhythm of
the verse when it's viewed as a whole, is one of intellectual and emotional restlessness. It could hardly be otherwise: a poet who pursues truth
so single-mindedly as Thomas is inevitably going to find that there exists no such thing: that in truth there are only truths: so that
a process of endless redefinition and revision, which demands that the same ground be traversed repeatedly, but always approached from a different
compass-point, is the only honest response the poet can make to the shifting nature of "reality" – which is to say, the shifting states and
perceptions of consciousness. The realm of truth may in fact prove so multifaceted and scattered with contradictions that a reader will think
it bodies forth, not the verbal clarity of a Newtonian universe, but the relativistic dance of poetic quanta - more exciting to be sure, but
problematical to map.
Thomas's sense of the slipperiness of "truth" may be shown by a brief comparison of two poems, one from The Way of It (1977), and one
from the final section – 'New Poems' – of Later Poems 1972-1982 (1983). The earlier, "Travellers", begins:
I think of the continent
of the mind. At some stage
in the crossing of it, a traveller
rejoiced. This is the truth,
he cried; I have won
my salvation!
Such certainty, thinks the poet, is inconceivable in his own time (it's certainly inconceivable for him). How enviable such sureness! At the
same time, what simplicity, what innocence could alone have made it possible! History has moved on, the world of the mind has altered out of
recognition:
The territory
has expanded since then. We
see now that the journey is
without end, and there is no joy
in the knowledge. Going on, going
back, standing aside – the alternatives
are appalling...
It's a bleak prospect, and yet it's viewed in language so measured and impersonal as to defuse the prospect of the appallingness it contemplates.
The poet refuses to be horrified other than in some remote region of his intellect. The poem articulates what might for some people be a quandary:
What shall I do? Which of these alternatives shall I choose? But one feels that the speaker isn't involved in this way. The impersonality may
be a strategy to evade the trap of self-pity, but I prefer to think that the poet does not feel overwhelmed by his recognition because his
destiny is already decided – he is a committed traveller: one must in fact be a committed traveller in order to have arrived at the insight
the poem expresses. One who has got this far isn't going to give up now: he couldn't if he wanted to. There may be no joy in the knowledge that
the journey is endless, but that doesn't mean that the journey must be bare of satisfactions. The speaker does not make the modern-day traveller
out to be a hero, but neither does he write him down a fool.
"I think of the continent / of the mind"; "The territory / has expanded since then": the mind is an Asia or an Africa which can never be mapped
precisely because its contours and features are inward, mental, and, because inward, ceaselessly changing. The mind's continent is its content,
which exists in a state of flux as things are discovered, clarified, obscured, forgotten, remembered. (Prince Hal could pun on Falstaff as a
"globe of deceitful continents".) The traveller in this continent is reason itself, and it can move only by rigorously ignoring the unbounded
vastness of its realm, by taking bearings on what impinges upon the attention. In a later poem, "Inside", Thomas imagines his mind in geological
terms as an accumulation of strata honeycombed by passages and chambers in which "ideas have formed and become / rigid". The poem ends:
To the pot-holing few there is a way
in along passages that become
narrower and narrower,
that lead to the chamber
too low to stand up in,
where the breath condenses
to the cold and locationless
cloud we call truth. It
is where I think.
How different this is from the unparticularized, open and external metaphor of the continent! In "Travellers" the outward stood for the inward
(paradoxically, we may now see, but quite without strain); now the metaphors are planetary and inward: if we are to locate the poet's latest
thoughts we must penetrate to the cramped, obscure chamber which contains them. But I must say that I find "Inside" a curiously ambiguous poem.
On the one hand it looks as if Thomas, through a calculated act of self-dramatization, is sending himself up – even criticizing himself (the
"rigid" ideas, for instance, or that last sentence, which, with its deliberately weighted enjambment, possesses for me a mildly comic theatricality).
On the other hand, certain lines and sentences read resonantly enough: that "cold and locationless / cloud we call truth" seems to emanate from
a mind that means business. To give such lines their due requires that one try to read the whole thing without irony (which is difficult when
it refers to you, the reader, as a poetical pot-holer). However, my purpose in citing "Inside" is to emphasise its author's sense of the problematical
nature of truth: and there, in that "cold and locationless cloud" we have it. The poem as a whole is concerned with petrification and its metaphors
are dominantly stony: but no matter how petrified the mind and mental processes of the poet, what they bring forth, truth, demands expression
in different imagery: truth is a cloud, buoyant, unfixed, a numinous presence in such surroundings. It's possible that this cloud – which
is "cold", unaccommodating, discomfortable – will in time, having become familiar and so perhaps despised, calcify as have the ideas which the
poet speaks of earlier in the poem. But that is a possibility for the future: as it stands, the metaphor of the cloud insists that the nature
of new-discovered truth is other than the condition in which, the processes by which, it's given birth. A vaporous exhalation, it's uncontained
and unseizable, and exists to tantalize the mind.
It's clear from "Travellers" that Thomas regards himself as a traveller. In a poem from Frequencies (1978), "Night Sky", he admits: "I
am a slow / traveller". The purpose of this essay is to map the journey he has made as a religious poet, to survey the terrain over which he
has passed in going from Song at the Year's Turning (1955), which included the best of the his work from three previous books (the earliest
of which appeared in 1946), to Later Poems (1983). To begin by saying how the focus of his attention has shifted during this period will
also enable me to define more precisely what it is with which this essay is concerned. Put simply, that shift is from the social to the personal.
The earlier volumes are much taken up with the priest's relationship with his parishioners, with the pastoral life of a minister of the Church
in Wales (the long poem entitled The Minister (1953) stands at the centre of this exploration, whilst the figure of Iago Prytherch is
emblematic of the humankind which the priest is striving to understand). But increasingly, as Thomas goes on publishing in the second half of
the 1960s (a process that runs concurrently with his declining interest in, and need of, Prytherch), appear poems which investigate the relationship
between one man and his God. The chief matters at stake in this investigation, though it's artificial to think of them as separate issues, may
be said to be the nature and purposes of God, the nature of faith in an age of science and technology, and the nature and function of prayer.
It’s with this later order of religious poetry that I'm concerned, poetry that's universal precisely because it's so intensely personal.
It must inevitably be the poetry of a solitary. So much is plain from "In a Country Church", the first poem to depict the poet at prayer in
Song at the Year's Turning, and the penultimate piece in the book:
To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind's song, maddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man's body.
This is utterly secure and positive – even in its opening paragraph. The "wind's song", though fancifully said to sadden "the grave saints"
(a Dylan Thomasish pun?), isn't unamicable; while the blunt "Bats not angels" is humorous. In the second paragraph, the long wait of the supplicant
is rewarded in full with an intense vision of the crucified Christ. Here Christ is the living principle and inexhaustible food of love – not
the terrible and worrisome entity that he becomes in later poems. It's worth noting that the experience, though undoubtedly autobiographical,
has been cast in the impersonal third person – "one", "he". For some poets in this century (one thinks notably of T. S. Eliot, and more recently
of Geoffrey Hill), a shift into the third person has been the essential precondition of a release of the personal. For others, the strategy
of impersonality may come to seem an evasion. "In a Country Church" is poetry at rest: it articulates no tension or urgency. When Thomas has
these qualities to communicate, he will prefer the first person.
Alongside "In a Country Church" I shall place "The Musician", from Tares (1961), and "The Moor", from Pietà (1966). "The Musician"
begins with a memory of Kreisler, suffering "beautifully" for each member of his audience "upon his instrument". It concludes:
So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns' halo:
The men standing by and that one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them the God listened.
This is verse taut with the attention of the poet. The wonder of Christ's audience at the figure of the heroic and redemptive artist is the
wonder of the poet. Listening more closely still, however, is "the God" – the God. That definite article is worth pondering. Perhaps
Thomas's sense of rhythm demanded its inclusion; perhaps not. "And closer than all of them, God listened" is, I think, more emphatic, and it
implies "the one God" as does what the poet wrote. I can only think that Thomas did not want the sort of dramatic touch to be felt in
"God listened", that he wanted a phrase (at the cost of a slight awkwardness, "the" following "them") which suggests the naturalness, the inevitability,
of God listening. There can be no doubting the rightness of everything in the scene the poet imagines: the network of intentness that draws
into oneness humankind, the Son and the Father (I venture to suggest names Thomas himself does not supply), makes sense of the world for him,
makes existence make sense, makes existence purposeful. The poem is a statement of faith: "So it must have been on Calvary...": how could
it have been otherwise?
Here is "The Moor":
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart's passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind's cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
On the soundtrack of the film John Ormond made about him, first broadcast in April 1972, Thomas declares; "I'm a solitary, I'm a nature mystic;
and silence and slowness and bareness have always appealed". Here again the religious experience is positive, it's the rightness of things that
the poet perceives and that brings him tranquillity, persuading him to yield up his self-possession before the rhythms, shapes and colours of
nature. The poem is securely Christian. In the sestet, the choice of "kingdom" brings to mind the kingdom of God, and the image of the broken
bread draws in Christian communion. "What God there was" is loose enough to escape the charge of pantheism, especially when the instinctual
"himself" follows, with its anthropomorphising orthodoxy. "The Moor" expresses a mysticism that complements the statements of faith to be found
in "In a Country Church" and "The Musician"; together the three poems portray a religious sensibility that's passionate and solidly-founded.
Roughly contemporary with these poems, however, are others in which a very different range of feelings presses for expression. "The Journey",
in Poetry for Supper (1958), speaks disturbingly, if obscurely, of a road which "runs on / With many turnings towards the tall / Tree
to which the believer is nailed" – where the believer is I think to be identified with the person the speaker of the poem is addressing. The
notion of the Christian nailed, like his Saviour, to the cross of his religious belief, suggests a mood absolutely opposite to that expressed
in "In a Country Church": belief here isn't a source of visionary ecstasy, but of torment. In Tares, "Here" – surely one of the finest
poems Thomas has written – includes the stanza:
Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?
In "Service" (Pietà), the poet calls on God during a church service; in the absence of a reply he imagines his shadow wrestling with
God on the plaster wall: in the eyes of his congregation he is thrown. These are the fresh shoots of a contrary response rather than the developed
flower, yet already we can see that the stage is set for what will prove to be a protracted drama, an intense and unresolvable argument amongst
his selves.
Three further poems, one from Pietà and two from Not That He Brought Flowers (1969) extend the boundaries of the argument and
clarify the tensions at work in Thomas. Two give us the priest-poet at vigil. "Kneeling", in Not That He Brought Flowers, is positive,
tranquil, luminous, without any sense of strain; but, if one compares it with "In a Country Church", one immediately sees that its horizons
have contracted. It ends:
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.
The language of this poem represents a different dimension of response to that of the second paragraph of the earlier one. Passionate vision
gives way to measured plainness, to speech that has no room for the extravagance of metaphor. The poet who writes thus has come to expect and
to be content with less. The notion that he might be "balked by silence" is not now one that would occur to him: silence is significant, nothing
indeed is more so. He has come to understand prayer in a new way. The speaking of prayers is now seen to be less important than the preparation
for speaking: communion with silence, which is communion with God, has become crucial because it's that communion which determines the direction
and substance of the prayer: once the supplicant comes to speak, the spell, as it were, is broken: actual speech is crude in comparison with
the mystical communion of silence, which takes place beyond language. "Kneeling" also invites comparison with the slightly earlier "In Church",
the last but one poem in Pietà, which begins:
Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences. Is this where the God hides
From my searching?
And concludes:
There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.
The verse moves steadily, unhurriedly along, but we are aware that beneath its surface calm lie troubled depths. The faith that appears secure
in "Kneeling" is now under test. The cross that was occupied in "In a Country Church" by the golden and fructifying body of Christ, in "The
Journey" by the crucified believer, is now bare. Where is the God of Love? What has become of the Son, the redemptive principle? Is his sacrifice
no longer operative? Is mankind abandoned? The poem is pregnant with unspoken questions, to which silence returns no answer.
"After the Lecture", in Not That He Brought Flowers, brings matters to a head. The poet expresses the age-old obstacle to belief: Why,
in a world supposedly created by a God of Love, is there so much suffering? The speaker of the poem knows the standard reply, that God's purposes
are beyond human understanding; but this response has no power to console him – "from as far off as Tibet / The cries come". Has prayer, then,
any power to affect the course of individual destinies, to alleviate suffering?
From one not to be penned
In a concept, and differing in kind
From the human; whose attributes are the negations
Of thought; who holds us at bay with
His symbols, the opposed emblems
Of hawk and dove, what can my prayers win
For the kindred, souls brought to the bone
To be tortured, and burning, burning
Through history with their own strange light?
The poet cannot answer his own question; he can only drop the interrogative into the silence (the same silence which presides over "In Church").
I suspect, however, that he fancies his prayers can win little or nothing: he is on the verge of abandoning the notion of prayer as petition,
as an asking for something which may be granted or withheld. Unresolved though the poem is, the poet does emerge from the experience of writing
it with more than he had before – with, that is, more than he has been able to put into poetry before: a certain way of thinking of God (it
cannot be called a 'concept', since he rejects the word). God is utterly other, abstract; he (it?) accommodates and perhaps reconciles within
himself (itself?) the contraries which so exercised the imagination of Blake; 'he' may be described only in negatives – in the formulations,
let us say, of those Platonizing mystics (Pseudo-Dionysius, Clement of Alexandria, St Augustine, for example) who argue that since God is beyond
Being, is "superessential Indetermination"3, we cannot say what 'he' is, but may only say what 'he' is not.
"After the Lecture" prompts me to raise a rather different issue: but one that has to be faced. It's a poem which looks forward to those later
pieces which are so dominated by the need to say, to pronounce, that to some readers and critics they have barely seemed to be poetry,
so prosaic are their rhythms, so unconcerned does the poet appear to have been in their making with what I shall call the inevitability of poetic
form. It will probably have struck readers familiar with the arc of Thomas's work that he's a poet whose interest in answerable verse-forms
wasn't great at the beginning of his career and in time disappeared altogether. It will be argued, no doubt, that the urgency that grows through
"After the Lecture" necessarily leaves no room for the poet to consider niceties of poetic structure – for, even, the making of a persuasive
verse-line (why, for instance, end the fourth-quoted line "with"?) – that it's what's said that matters and not the mould into which the words
have been poured. "After the Lecture" is passionately animated, but the feeling that carries it successfully through is absent from other poems,
some of which read exceedingly flatly. I have to say that the forms of Thomas's poems don't always convince me of their inevitability; as often
as not his line-breaks seem randomly chosen. The great poet who has something new to say, or a new way of saying something of perennial importance,
will inevitably be constrained by what he has to say to develop or refurbish a form to say it in: that is, what he has to say will dictate
form. It seems to me that too often what Thomas has to say dictates formlessness rather than form. Having said that, one has to recognise that
there are positive and negative ways of taking this idea. The negative way implies that lines fall as they will because the (prosaic) rhythm
of the words is such that no one mode of organisation has suggested it or seems better than any other; the positive way implies that formlessness
is part of the meaning of the poem – an extension and reinforcement of the pressure of its semantic meaning. But this resource can perhaps only
be utilised occasionally: to employ it all the time is to go for overkill. As it happens, the next poem I will be looking at offers a perfect
example of formlessness as meaning, formlessness in effect refined to a point where it has become virtuous.
2
The collection which in 1972 followed Not That He Brought Flowers was H'm. One might have predicted that the dialectic in the
religious poems would intensify, but from the volumes preceding H'm one could hardly have predicted the kind of poems Thomas would
go on to produce. What "After the Lecture" chiefly has to bequeath is a crisis of belief in God the Father as a god of love who takes a personal
and caring interest in each member of his earthly flock. But, except in one notable poem that I shall come to, H'm doesn't develop the
abstract God of "After the Lecture". The new poems which attempt to account for the condition of the world as the poet sees it are mythopoeic:
they portray the thoughts and actions of an anthropomorphic divinity. Now it's certainly possible to come up with reasons to account for the
direction mainly taken in H'm. To conceive God in human shape enables him to be brought up close: he may be given a psychological life,
his intentions and purposes may be conjectured, be seen as erroneous, malicious, benign. The drawback of the mythopoeic method is that such
a God will look like a human with superpowers, that he will be simplified, de-mystified, cheapened. Interesting though these poems are, I cannot,
looking back at them from the vantage-point provided by the subsequent books, but detect in them a retrogressive impulse. The poet is putting
his God in the dock, and it's an unedifying place for God to be.
What I have somewhat dramatically called "a crisis of belief" in the Christian God of Love may first be illustrated by the title-poem of the
collection, a poem which is not mythopoeic.
H'm
And one said
speak to us of love
and the preacher opened
his mouth and the word God
fell out so they tried
again speak to us
of God then but the preacher
was silent reaching
his arms out but the little
children the ones with
big bellies and bow
legs that were like
a razor shell
were too weak to come
The random line-breaks and the absence of punctuation are functional here, for they inhibit the act of reading and give the poem a series of
jagged edges – that telling "razor shell" made manifest in one's experience of navigating the reefs of the verse. What purchase has Christ's
command that the children be allowed to come to him on a world in which so many of them are starving? "… from as far off as Tibet / The cries
come." The poet seems to doubt whether his children inhabit a world irradiated by the presence of a God of Love; could such a God covet their
souls whilst apparently caring not a jot for their bodies? "H'm" is bitter and sardonic; bitter surely against the God whose name drops from
the preacher's mouth so patly, but so like a dead letter. Bitter too his "He", a poem in which God is conceived as being indifferent to man's
struggle to make metaphysical sense of existence. It ends:
Nothing he does, nothing he
Says is accepted, and the thin dribble
Of his poetry dries on the rocks
Of a harsh landscape under an ailing sun.
That it's poetry that dries out under the sun inevitably imbues the lines with autobiographical force: I take it that Thomas is expressing
a feeling he himself has had that existence is futile and meaningless. "He" is arguably the bleakest statement in the whole of Thomas's output.
In the mythopoetic sense, of course, God is very much present. Now, given the datum that God is an active and purposeful creator, how may we
explain the mess the world is in? The poet can imagine a number of scenarios. There is the macabre possibility of a sadistic God, a voyeur of
suffering. This conception is found in "The Island", in which the poet, having pictured the torments to which God has deliberately condemned
humanity, concludes with the line: "And that was only on one island". Under the laconic surface of these words I fancy I glimpse a suppressed
but savage glee – the sense of release of one who has 'got out from under' in summoning up the effrontery to portray so malign a deity. A different
scenario with essentially the same view of God is proposed in "Echoes". Here the creator is "Enraged" by the earth's refusal to tell him what
it is. He's a God who understands neither himself nor his purposes. He creates humankind to supply the answer earth will not – or cannot: "On
the altars / They made him the red blood / Told what he wished to hear." In a nutshell, creation is a place of human sacrifice. Its purpose
is to confirm the supremacy and to flatter the ego of its maker, who, though not (as in "The Island") deliberately malignant, is stupid and
corrupt in his self-satisfaction. "Cain" shifts the emphasis again. In this poem God asks Cain why he has spilt his brother's blood. Cain replies
that God refused his previous offerings – corn, vegetables, flowers: "things that did not publish / Their hurt, that bled / Silently". God then
recognises that it's indeed "part of himself" that Cain has offered him. The flaw in creation is revealed to be one God did not perceive when
he shaped it. Ultimately it's a flaw in God himself, who, though he is not in this poem malignant, is not omniscient. He realises now that the
flaw will require him to sacrifice himself: "I anointed myself / In readiness for the journey / To the doomed tree you were at work upon." God,
in this version of Christian myth, did not from the first plan to sacrifice the Son: the sacrifice was thrust upon him by his own inadvertency.
It's a sacrifice not only of God to man and man to God, but of God to God.
In these three poems Thomas covers the ground between what might be called the conspiracy and cock-up theories of Christian theology. In "Making"
he presents a very different view of the creation. Here God, having made a teeming world, finds himself still disturbed by an absence:
I slept and dreamed
Of a likeness, fashioning it,
When I woke, to a slow
Music; in love with it
For itself, giving it freedom
To love me; risking the disappointment.
Here the word "love" appears – a word that has had no part to play in the three poems I've just reviewed. God in "The Island" and "He" is a
God of compulsion; the God of "Making" is a god of love who sees that freedom is the only condition in which a love that contains no taint of
self-concern can be nourished. In this freedom lurk all the horrors of human history, for it must be the freedom to do other than love. The
choice not to love God is indivisibly the choice not to love other people. Out of this account of the genesis comes the counter-proposition
that it's man and not God who is responsible for the state of the world: the world is as it is because man has turned away from God.
In a number of these mythopoeic poems, Thomas brings into the debate what he is fond of referring to as "the machine" (sometimes with a capital
M). Two contrasting views of the machine may be discerned, and, since this is an argument which will come to resolution in later poems, some
at least of this group demand discussion. "Earth" and "Soliloquy", different in many respects, concur in viewing the machine as a kind of idol
that man has set up in place of God. "Earth" examines the theme from man's point of view:
The flesh is too heavy
To wear you, God of light
And fire. The machine replaces
The hand that fastened you
To the cross, but cannot absolve you.
The machine cannot "absolve" us of the burden of sinfulness because it is itself sinful: "the microscope / Is our sin": science is apostasy.
In "Soliloquy", which takes the form of an extract from God's stream-of-consciousness, God admits that he is prepared to accept responsibility
for (twice, in this instance) botching the work of creation. Clearly, however, his disillusionment with humanity has been caused at least in
part by the fact that "Within the churches / You built me you genuflected / To the machine". But the machine will be powerless to save humanity
from "the invisible / Viruses" that do God's will. Against the view embodied in these two poems we may set that expressed in "Other". In this,
yet another version of the genesis, we are told that God loves and hates the world "with a parent's / Conceit". Jealous at what he takes to
be his exclusion from his own universe, he plans to destroy it.
The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.
I find this poem unusually satisfying among the mythopoeic poems of H'm because, I think, it gives voice to a response that isn't single-minded.
To begin with, though we presume it to be God's means of destruction, the machine has at its appearance the quality of something self-generated
and self-propelling; it possesses an insouciant air of independence. Second, Thomas connects its activities with the operations of money. Is
the machine itself evil, or is its (unspecified) relationship with money that's the source of disaster? Third, humanity is represented as the
machine's victim rather than its master (the sentence about the villages, incidentally, looks like a glance at rural depopulation, a matter
close to this Welshman's heart). Finally, and with a fine and calculated double irony, when the machine's impact upon man produces a revulsion
of feeling and change of heart in God, he proves powerless to halt its advance. I wonder if I'm being fanciful in sensing, in the poem's closure,
something like admiration for this irrepressible phenomenon – begrudging, perhaps, but admiration nevertheless? If I am, it isn't surprising
that Thomas's long and deep-rooted suspicion of modern science doesn't much outlive H'm.
I suggested earlier that his pursuit of the mythopoeic takes him in a direction very different from that canvassed in "After the Lecture" –
with one notable exception. Here it is.
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
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.
To read this poem attentively beside the mythopoeic poems that surround it is to experience something like a double-take. "Via Negativa" gives
us an order of discourse whose credentials hardly seem to belong to the author of the other poems – although its style is recognisably that
of the same writer. The God who has been brought so near, made so human and fallible in the mythic poems, suddenly, travelling away from us
at the speed of light, shrinks to a singularity and disappears. We are back with the language of the Dionysian mystics, with the Negative Way,
the Way of Unknowing, back with a God who, in the words of St Augustine,
is above all that can be said of Him. We must not even call Him ineffable; He is best adored in silence, best known by nescience, best described
by negatives. 4
"Via Negativa", though in H'm in a minority of one, is to my mind the most important poem in the book. Mythopoeic poems will figure in
Thomas's next collection, Laboratories of the Spirit (1975), but their brief ascendancy is over. "Via Negativa", which picks up "After
the Lecture", indicates the most fruitful pathway to be taken by Thomas in his interrogation of God. That he makes use of the language of Dionysian
mysticism doesn't of course mean that he's a traveller on the high road of mysticism. Taking to J. B. Lethbridge in 1981, he declared: "I'm
not a mystic and never claimed to be a mystic." 5 The mystic, he argues, doesn't need nature, whereas he (Thomas)
does. Nor has he sought to be "caught up and sort of subsumed into The Presence" as a true mystic would. Nevertheless (and I shall return to
this topic later) in order to attempt to define a God consonant with the state of the world in our time, a world which has strained the inherited
Christian notion of a personal God of Love past breaking-point, he reaches for the abstract and paradox-ridden language of an ancient tradition.
He fellow-travels with the language of mysticism, if not with mysticism's practical approach to godhead. 6
Let's pursue this line of inquiry a little further. In Christian Mysticism (1899), W. R. Inge declares, apropos of the Neoplatonism of
Dionysius:
At the bottom, the doctrine that God can be described only by negatives is neither Christian nor Greek, but belongs to the old religion of India.
7
That is, it's Brahminical. Inge's thesis is that this indirectly eastern influence on Christian mysticism rendered it, generally-speaking in
the Middle-Ages, world-renouncing, self-absorptive though in intention self-denying, and inimical to the furtherance of the social aims of Christianity.
Inge says that he regards the via negativa "in metaphysics, religion, and ethics as the great accident of Christian mysticism".8
How then did this come about?
The break-up of ancient civilisation, with the losses and miseries which it brought upon humanity, and the chaos of brutal barbarism in which
Europe weltered for some centuries, caused a widespread pessimism and world-weariness which is foreign to the temper of Europe, and which gave
way to energetic and full-blooded activity in the Renaissance and Reformation.
And he asserts tellingly: "Asiatic Mysticism is the natural refuge of men who have lost faith in civilisation, but will not give up faith in
God." 9 Inge was a Victorian writing before the turn of the century and before Europe's second age of barbarism
erupted. I wonder if, writing in 1979 rather than 1899 he would have felt quite so confident in criticising philosophical pessimism in the face
of world events? For, in face of modern European experience, it has seemed to many people that it's optimism that's the questionable
response before the processes of history. R. S. Thomas certainly shares this aspect of the mystical tradition: his faith in the progress of
civilisation has been shaken to its roots. Yet at the same time he remains constitutionally incapable of relinquishing his faith in God. The
business of a Christian civilisation is to realise in its lineaments what it means to worship the God of Love. But for Thomas that God has shattered,
Ozymandias-like, into fragments; out of the resulting shards he has made his mythopoeic poems. Having said that, I must turn back to "Via Negativa"
for a moment. If we look closely we see that the abstraction of the first sentence is not maintained. The "absence" and "silence" which is God
soon slides into a metaphorical way of speaking: "He keeps", "His are the echoes… the footprints", "His side", we look
at people "he had looked / At" before us. It proves impossible for Thomas (as for St Augustine in the extract quoted earlier) to speak
of God without falling back, to a greater or lesser degree, upon the illusion of anthropomorphism. Trailing the properly "negative" God is the
ghost of Christian orthodoxy. This is a ghost Thomas in later poems is far from willing to lay.
3
This discussion must now choose its pathway. In the third part of this essay I intend to pursue the poet as he tracks the elusive spoor of the
negative God. In the fourth and final part I shall consider another and alternative path taken by him, so performing (I hope) a sort of balancing
of the books.
Thomas is a man, I have claimed, whose faith in civilisation has been badly shaken (on the evidence of some poems, annihilated – though lyric
poems are evidence of the instability of the lyric impulse as much as of the inner psychological dynamic of their creator). A question which
must naturally occur to him is this: Can the Christian Church of the God of Love survive the decay of Christian civilisation? survive not only
the threat posed by totalitarianism, but that threat which exists in both totalitarian and democratic countries – the threat embodied in the
onward march of technology-driven materialism? "Poste Restante" (Laboratories of the Spirit) supplies an unequivocal answer: a picture
of the Cross ground into dust, not so much (as the poet says) "under men's wheels", as under their indifference. We see a church decaying around
its minister, who, through his dogged attachment to the place, becomes a half-crazed solitary. "The Moon in Lleyn", in the same book, is a much
more ambitious poem. It comprises two contrasting statements of belief. The first advances the Yeatsian proposition that
The last quarter of the moon
of Jesus gives way
to the dark; the serpent
digests the egg.
The "moon of Jesus" is the two thousand-year period ushered in by the birth of Christ, the period that Yeats in "The Second Coming" imagines
as drawing to an end and issuing in the awakening of an Antichrist whose spirit will rule the next gyre-spun age in the cyclical process that
is history.
Religion is over, and
what will emerge from the body
of the new moon, no one
can say.
But a voice sounds in the poet's ear, countering the Yeatsian mood with a surge of faith:
These very seas
are baptized. The parish
has a saint's name time cannot
unfrock. In cities that
have outgrown their promise people
are becoming pilgrims
again, if not to this place,
then to the recreation of it
in their own spirits.
#
Prayer, this voice concludes, has, like Yeats's moon of history, its phases, so that its character and function will be subject to change. For
myself, I find the voice of the poet in his Yeatsian mood more consistently authoritative than the voice which sounds in his ear. I can happily
accept, on the one hand, the later's notions about prayer and about people becoming inner pilgrims; on the other, I find the sentence about
the seas being "baptized" rhetorical, while the claim that time cannot expunge the name of the sainted parish strikes me, simply, as untrue
(unless the poet is implicitly claiming that "All time is eternally present", as Eliot put it, which is suddenly to shift the poem from a historical
to a metaphysical plane). But then, the argument the poem constitutes isn't conducted on an intellectual plane, with thesis and counter-thesis
followed by proof and counter-proof, but on an emotional plane: what we have are less testable propositions than emotive assertions. Which of
the two positions a reader prefers will depend very much on his or her own instincts and prejudices, and a positive-thinking Christian reader
will probably find Thomas's second proposition more persuasive than his first. Despite this, "The Moon in Lleyn" is an important poem. Its marshalling
of Yeatsian argument and symbol goes along with an invocation of Yeatsian method: out of a poet's argument with himself comes poetry. Thomas
sets that part of himself which is strongly drawn to the Irishman's philosophy against that part of himself which is unregenerately Christian.
"The Moon in Lleyn" doesn't set up and knock down a vulnerable coconut so much as express a self-division which the poem may be less persuasive
in resolving than it is in expressing.
The priest in "Post Restante", surely an ironic version of Thomas himself, cannot abandon his mouldering church; throughout "The Moon in Lleyn"
we are to picture the poet on his knees in a "stone church". We may well wonder, on the evidence of these and other poems, just how secure,
just how tenable, is Thomas's position within the walls of Christianity. In "The Porch" (from Frequencies, which appeared in 1978) we
are told of a man (whom we presume to be the poet) who, "for no reason / he knew", is driven to his knees in a church porch on a winter evening:
He had no power to pray.
His back turned on the interior
he looked out on a universe
that was without knowledge
of him and kept his place
there for an hour on that lean
threshold, neither outside nor in.
This declares a position which many other poems imply, declares it with a precision and lucidity that threaten to make commentary redundant.
But I venture two comments, one on style and one on a point of interpretation. The plainness of Thomas's later style, its eschewal of colourful
imagery, has been much discussed. It's a style that's unpoetical, if poeticality is understood as literariness (for C. H. Sisson, for example,
the adoption of the plain style is a means to "the avoidance of literature".10 It's therefore worth dwelling
on the wholly poetic satisfactions to be found in the lines I've quoted. If "The Porch" carries no freight of imagery it's not simply
because its theme precludes it, but because the poem as a whole is a metaphor. Then consider, in a paragraph which contains a single adjective,
that one word's resonance (created to a large extent by its divorce across the enjambment – a device familiar in Thomas's poetry, learnt perhaps
from Wordsworth, and sometimes over-indulged); his response to critics who criticised the frequency with which he employed the device seems
to have not been to abandon it but to ration it. "Lean" chillingly encapsulates the poet's predicament as no other word in the poem does: it
is consummate. Now to the point of interpretation, which centres on the clause "a universe / that was without knowledge / of him". The crucial
question here is whether we are to understand "universe" as inclusive of or exclusive of God as a conscious entity. If the first, God's world
beyond planet Earth cannot know man though God himself may (since he, as an omnipresent being, may be imagined as existing both inside and outside
its boundaries); if the second, neither God (who dwells only within creation) nor his universe are conscious of man's existence. The
first interpretation would be, for a priest, the lesser evil; but I think the second the more likely. The predicament of the man in the church
porch is that of Thomas at large in his later religious poetry: neither in the body of the establishment nor yet out in the road, at
odds with orthodoxies11 yet temperamentally unable to make the terrible shift to atheism.
When I employed the epithet "fruitful" to describe the route posited in "Via Negativa", I did so aware of the wicked irony of the word. Fruitful
indeed the route is, for it discovers many poems, but in another sense it's the opposite of fruitful. It is in fact impossible to go 'beyond'
the God of absence and silence; there is nothing expressible to go beyond. One may hold up to this God a variety of mirrors and microphones,
and in so far as the poems that ensue include descriptions of the frames of the mirrors and the look of the microphones, they will differ: but
what the mirrors will reflect and the microphones record will still be absence and silence. One may only write essentially different
poems (as R. S. Thomas does) by retreating from the negative God and thinking in an alternative religious language.
As Thomas explores the negative God, one element in the framework of his mirrors comes to stand out: science. That this should be so is a result
of the single most noteworthy reversal of attitude to be found in his verse. His recognition that science has much to contribute to a man seeking
in the twentieth century to interrogate God comprises two interdependent ideas. One is that the scientist and the poet, far from being opponents,
are natural allies: it isn’t simply that they both seek out truth, much though that is, but that the regions of nature investigated by modern
scientists are as mysterious and paradox-ridden as the regions of the spirit explored by poets. In a poem in The Way of It, "They", Thomas
states:
They interpret absence
as presence, measuring it by the movement
of its neighbours. Their world is
an immense place; deep down is as distant
as far out, but is arrived at
in no time.
The paradox invoked here to describe the activity of scientists is precisely that used elsewhere by Thomas to express his apprehension of God:
"this great absence / that is like a presence" ("The Absence", Frequencies); "deep down" and "far out" – the curiously complementary
realms investigated by subatomic physicists and cosmologists respectively – though impalpable and almost abstract, are, like the spiritual regions
plumbed by the poet, "arrived at / in no time". Thus, prayer and scientific enquiry are different means to the same end, to cracking the "abstruse
code" of God. The second and related idea involves the conception of God himself as a scientist, a master of form and number: for how, without
being such a master, could he have fashioned the universe whose remote depths in inner and outer space we are now, with difficulty, beginning
to appreciate?
The negative God as universal scientist: in this conception one sees how Thomas has his cake (the cake of abstraction) and eats it (the cake
of anthropomorphism). Here is a poem from Frequencies:
At It
I think he sits at that strange table
of Eddington's, that is not a table
at all, but nodes and molecules
pushing against molecules
and nodes; and he writes there
in invisible handwriting the instructions
the genes follow. I imagine his
face that is more the face
of a clock, and the time told by it
is now, though Greece is referred
to and Egypt and empires
not yet begun.
And I would have
things to say to this God
at the judgement, storming at him,
as Job stormed, with the eloquence
of the abused heart. But there will be
no judgement other than the verdict
of his calculations, that abstruse
geometry that proceeds eternally
in the silence between right and wrong.
The poet holds out to us at first the image of a person sitting at a table; then dissolves the table and turns the figure into a cybernetic
mechanism; and finally, in the second paragraph, whisks the whole illusion out of sight, so that we are left with the absence and "silence"
of the negative God. We are invited to imagine God in the role of master-scientist, but are denied him in his Christian robes of ultimate judge.
As soon as the poet's own hurt makes itself felt, God is dematerialised into the abstractions from whence "he" was conjured. No sort of relationship
is possible with this God. The embryonic ambiguity that I detected in "Via Negativa" has in "At It" become a mature strategy. The poem works
extremely well: the outburst of anger in the first half of the second paragraph is defused in the final sentence, whose cool tone re-establishes
the speculative, self-composed rationalist of the first paragraph. In "At It" the poet's head controls his heart.
In the vision of the master-scientist detached from his experimental world lies the basis of spiritual detachment in the poet. What place can
there be, in a creation so unimaginably vast, a creation which may contain tens of millions of other worlds on which sentient beings have evolved,
for a God of Love who is deemed to be passionately concerned in the doings of every man, woman and child on Earth? In another intriguing poem
from Frequencies, "Night Sky", Thomas speaks of "rinsing myself of the darkness / that is in my veins" at night-time, of letting the
stars cauterize his "despair". This despair I take to be despair in face of God's indifference to man and to what man has done, and continues
to do, to man. In "Night Sky" Thomas comes as near as he has done to letting go of God, to lapsing into the stillness and self-possession that
may come with the avowal that God does not exist, that humankind is free of him, that the universe is not a (divinely) purposive creation. How
near to this position he comes depends to a large extent on how one understands the totalizing statement: "Godhead / is the colonisation by
mind / of untenanted space". I take it to mean that human beings spin the idea of God out of the stuff of imagination and locate him in the
emptiness of outer space. In context, however, it's an ambiguous statement, for it may be that we should attribute it to the scientists whose
views the poet sketches in the first two stanzas rather than to the poet himself: he entertains the idea but cannot unequivocally be said to
endorse it. If I interpret the meaning of the statement correctly, conversely, "Night Sky" crystallizes a notion that underlies many of Thomas's
poems about the negative God. The darkness of night serves to "rinse" the darkness out of his veins; in the darkness of mind God is born and
from there transposed to the darkness of space. It seems less true to say that these inner and outer darknesses are complementary than to say
that, metaphysically, they are co-extensive. God isn't to be sought 'outside' at all; if he exists, he exists 'inside'; if he is absent, he
is absent from within. The search for God, as the mystics knew, is a search within the darkness of the psyche, the soul. When Thomas closes
"Pilgrimage" (Frequencies) with the proposition that for him God is "dark… and / inexplicable, as though he were in here", he is again
employing the language of Dionysian mysticism. To interrogate God is to interrogate oneself. In order to find God, the mystic must put off self
in the act of penetrating the inner darkness, for self-will is sin, rank opposition to God's will – something that can only be known inwardly.
Thomas is plainly aware that an extinction of self is necessary if one who has lost God is to find him again. But he is too much of a poet of
the first person (as well as being too attached to physical nature) to wish to perform this necessary sacrifice. He can fragment the self, but
he cannot permanently dissolve it. His 'I' may assert its need of God or may defy him, but it cannot give up its right of assertion. A comparison
of Thomas's poetry with C. H. Sisson's (which shows just how far it's possible to go down the existential track to poetic self-dissolution)
would demonstrate how attached the former remains to self or selves. He does indeed declare, in "The Absence" (Frequencies), that his
whole being, in the absence of God, is an emptiness, a vacuum (compare Sisson's declaration, in "In a Dark Wood", that "I have no person fit
for resurrection"12): but that is only to make a start. The first person in Thomas's poetry remains obdurate
and insistent, it will not go away except briefly (as in "The Moor" and other poems I shall come to): it's that which pronounces on reality,
it's Cartesian, whilst the first person in Sisson's poetry (in, for example, "The Corridor"13), in revealing
itself as hypothetical, a manner of speaking merely, is Humean.
"At It" and "Night Sky" represent Thomas in moods of intellectual detachment, calmly self-possessed. It isn't, of course, a mood he sustains.
Late in Frequencies "The Absence" and "Balance" sound more sombre notes. In the latter the darkness of space seems no longer to possess
the ability to rinse clean the poet's psyche: poised on a metaphorical plank above the depths of what's at once inner and outer space, he tosses
rhetorical questions into the void:
Is there a place
here for the spirit? Is there time
on this brief platform for anything
other than mind's failure to explain itself?
The perspectives afforded by science have, in these poems, no power to lighten his existential doubts. "Covenant", in Between Here and Now
(1981), shows him to have lapsed into a still worse case. Its opening – "I feel sometimes / we are his penance / for having made us" – suggests
a re-cycling of one of the themes of H'm stripped of its garb of myth. It's appropriate that the poem should declare the circularity
of experience: not only is one man in his life doomed to traverse again and again the same psychic ground, he's doomed to traverse ground that
has been crossed innumerable times by others before him. (We should therefore expect the idea that experience repeats itself to repeat itself:
it figured in "Travellers", the first poem I looked at; while other poems thicken the concept by alluding to the Eliot of the Quartets.) But
"Covenant" speaks about suffering with a cutting edge of insight that puts it into a different class to the mythopoeic poems:
Often
I think that there is no end
to this torment and that the electricity
that convulses us is the fire
in which a god
burns and is not consumed.
Humans suffer because God is in them. How hopeless, in the light of this notion, is the predicament of R. S. Thomas and those like him: tormented
by God's presence, tormented by God's absence. A no-win situation, and one that atheists might be pleased to have side-stepped. (Atheists may
of course be tormented by a sense of existential purposelessness, but not by the notion that God rather than the Big Bang (say) and evolution
have produced homo sapiens and its capacity for tormenting itself.)
At one end of the metaphorical rope that stretches across Thomas's mind I have located the negative God, at the other the God of Love. I want
now to look at two poems which enact the tensions between them. The first, "Threshold", the last poem in Between Here and Now, seems
to me to be wholly successful: its anguish arises from the irresolvability of the tension. The opening stanza states what reason perceives:
I emerge from the mind's
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
God is in none of them.
The poems ends:
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What
to do but, like Michelangelo's
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?
In that charged "I am alone…" one encounters the obduracy of the poet's ego, the solipsistic insistence of this first person. It's difficult
to imagine such an ego turning to other people for meaning: meaning is to be sought within the psyche or nowhere (to which one may add that
in some of Thomas's poems the psyche feels like nothing so much as nowhere). Even so, I don’t find self-pity here: the poet's voice is too instinct
with the sober authority that desperation can lend, to fall into that trap. What renders the poem's closure so poignant is the self-conscious
irrationality of the hope it expresses, the hoping in the face of hopelessness for the anthropomorphic God. The heart refuses to accept the
cold conclusions of the mind.
By contrast, "The Tree" (from the 'New Poems' section of Later Poems) strikes me as a failure. It begins: "So God is born / from our
loss of nerve?" The poet it seems, is posing himself a question which he answers by declaring:
He is the tree that looms up
in our darkness, at whose feet
we must fall to be set again
on its branches on some April day
of the heart.
He needs us
as a conductor his choir
for the performance of an unending
music.
The first part of this twofold rejection of the initial proposition is suspiciously sentimental, the second complacently anthropomorphic. The
heart, it seems, has escaped completely from the constraints imposed by mind. In the following lines, then, it's the heart's reasoning, not
the head's, that we hear:
What we may not
do is to have our horizon bare,
is to make our way
on through a desert white with the bones
of our dead faiths.
To this one may immediately be inclined to respond that whilst humanity hasn't yet demonstrated the capacity to live without gods, or faiths
(the latter secular as well as divine), the assertion that it could never do so isn't a self-evident truth. Mankind, despite its artistic
and scientific achievements, is still in a state of evolutionary infancy (taking 'evolution' as a social and moral concept rather than a biological
one). It hasn't yet dominated the earth for more than an insignificant fraction of the time attained by the dinosaurs; and at the present moment,
so benighted is some of its behaviour that there can be little room for confidence that it will survive to do so. Up to this point, roughly
the middle of the poem, the thrust of the argument seems plain. Thomas now enters, however, on a series of qualifications which confuse the
issues at stake and undermine the firm ground he appears to have established. If there were no tree, he says, if God didn't exist, we would
have to set one up, to invent him. What we have apparently done is to set up a rival tree, the tree of technological science, even though
he does exist – with the result that he has, of his own volition, withdrawn "out of reach / of our transmitted prayers".
Nightly
we explore the universe
on our wavelengths, picking up nothing
but those acoustic ghosts
that could as well be mineral
signalling to mineral
as immortal mind communicating with itself.
These closing lines splendidly evoke (with a rare and teasing allusion to Hopkins) the universe of the negative God: what then has happened
to the God of Love invoked earlier? Ought we, retrospectively, to reconceive those early lines as pregnant with anti-romantic irony? Where does
the poet himself stand with regard to the ideas proposed in the poem? Enacting a collapse from certainty to uncertainty, it's left suffocating
in its own contradictions – contradictions, not ambiguities, for ambiguities are contradictions creatively managed, and I feel that Thomas has
not managed them in this instance. Have we created God or he us? (If he's "born / from our loss of nerve", don't we get our nerve back in rejecting
him?) Is the universe evoked in the closing lines not, theologically-speaking, as "bare" a "horizon" as one might wish for?
If there's a loss of nerve" in "The Tree", it's a loss of nerve by Thomas himself. In "Threshold" the ends of the rack on which the poet's soul
is stretched are presented lucidly and forcefully; in "The Tree" the dialectic collapses in on itself, the strains that tug at the poet proving
too much for him to manage. Together the two poems define a boundary beyond which he cannot get. A boundary is in one sense a limitation: some
men get beyond it. Yet the man who lives and moves, in freedom, beyond this boundary, will not produce poems of the order of those written by
R. S. Thomas, and it would be as absurd to indict him for his inability to penetrate this boundary as it would be to indict the other man for
an inability to give expression to the tensions and intensities consequent on existing inside it.
4
It's time now to turn back in order to explore a number of poems which, running alongside those poems in which Thomas explores the negative
God, express a quite different vein of religious feeling. I suggested that H'm, the pivotal collection among his books, testifies to
a crisis of belief in the God of Love. But although the secure positivity which imbues the early poems "In a Country Church", "The Musician"
and "The Moor" is overwhelmed in the pages of H'm, the poet's capacity for joy isn't annihilated. Rather, it's thrust to the periphery
where it survives at first against the odds, gradually strengthening its presence in subsequent volumes. In H'm itself the celebratory
impulse is to be found in one poem only, "The River":
And the cobbled water
Of the stream with the trout's indelible
Shadows that winter
Has not erased – I walk it
Again under a clear
Sky with the fish, speckled like thrushes,
Silently singing among the weed's
Branches.
I bring the heart
Not the mind to the interpretation
Of their music, letting the stream
Comb me, feeling it fresh
In my veins, revisiting the sources
That are as near now
As on the morning I set out from them.
With the objection that this isn't a religious poem, one might both agree and disagree. It certainly excludes devotional language, offering
a Wordsworthian statement about the restorative powers of natural objects. The effect of the river on the poet, however, is essentially the
same as that of the moor in "The Moor": he again experiences a "stillness / of the heart's passions". It may be that Thomas, given the mood
that dominates H'm, would have been unable to write a devotional poem even had he wished to; but it's more likely that the poem simply
presented itself as we find it. It's interesting to hold "The River" up against the significantly later "Night Sky": in the earlier poem it's
the stream that purifies the poet's veins; in "Night Sky" it's darkness that "rinses" darkness from those same veins. In the first poem it's
light and lucidity that refresh him; in the second, in the abstract domain of the negative God, two negatives interact to produce the cleansing
positive. The stars which "inject" him with fire and the stream whose waters "comb" him are both parts of nature, but the first verb comes from
the realm of clinical technology while the second is reassuringly homely. The natural world of "Night Sky" has lost its innocence.
In Laboratories of the Spirit there is a sprinkling of impressive poems in which nature is seen not merely as God's gift to mankind,
but as his gift of himself – the gift of immanence. "The Flower" seems to have been inspired by the life of the Buddha (also the subject of
"Island" in the 'New Poems' section of Later Poems):
I asked for riches
You gave me the earth, the sea,
the immensity
of the broad sky. I looked at them
and learned I must withdraw
to possess them.
The soul which grows in the poet is imaged as an invisible flower by which he sits (the symbolic lotus comes inevitably to mind), a flower "that
was / its own species with its own / sky over it, shot / with the rainbow of your coming and going." Its transcendent beauty is suggested with
economy and delicacy. Although there is nothing disablingly unChristian about "The Flower", it can hardly be called a Christian poem. It seems
to emerge from Thomas's sense that Christianity isn’t the only religion animated by the principle of love. Shortly after declaring himself,
on the soundtrack of John Ormond's film, to be a nature mystic, he says:
God, reality, whatever it is, is not going to be forced, it’s not going to be put to the question, it works in its own time.
14
The equivalence given to "God" and "reality" (even more so, to the throwaway "whatever it is") reveals a heterodoxy hospitable to Buddhist thought,
and Thomas is on record as having implied that his Christianity is an accident of birth15. Had he been born
in China he might well have become a Buddhist – but then, of course, his poetry would have been radically different. (To believers in the God
of Love, Buddhism might well look like nihilism.) In the light of these considerations, it's natural to find some of his poems that apprehend
God in the forms of nature as much Buddhist as Christian in their colouring. I'm thinking particularly of "Alive" (Laboratories of the Spirit),
"Praise (The Way of It) and "Suddenly" (Later Poems). In these, God is a second or third person pronoun ("you" or "he") that's
invested with anthropomorphic qualities at the same time as it's identified as being immanent in the objects and processes of nature. There's
no strain in this accommodation – unlike in some of those poems that treat simultaneously of the negative God and the God of Love. "Alive" concludes:
The darkness
is the deepening shadow
of your presence; the silence a
process in the metabolism
of the being of love.
Darkness and silence, the primary qualities of the negative God, are not here divorced from the principle of love: they abide in the organic
body of nature. "Alive", "Praise" and "Suddenly" are the work not of a pantheist but of a panentheist: God is "artist and scientist / in one",
the physical world is the product of his "workmanship", "an immense poem", it expresses "the purposes of One who is", and what it's made of
is God's own substance.
The existence of these poems alongside those which explore the negative God should not surprise, for an oscillation between what have been called
"states of pleasure" and "states of pain" is characteristic of the mystical sensibility. The rhythmic alternation between affirmative and negative
modes is to be found par excellence in that passage of mystical experience which is known as the Dark Night of the Soul. The experience reflected
in Thomas's poetry confirms, however, that he is not a traveller on "the high road" of mysticism. Some words of Evelyn Underhill will clarify
the point:
The great contemplatives, those destined to attain the full stature of the mystic, emerge from this period of destitution, however long and
drastic it may be, as from a new purification. It is for them the gateway to a higher state. But persons of lesser genius cannot pass this way.
If they enter the Night at all, it is to succumb to its dangers and pains. This "great negation" is the sorting-house of the spiritual life.
Here we part from the "nature mystics", the mystic poets, and all who shared in and were contented with the illuminated vision of reality. Those
who go on are the great and strong spirits, who do not seek to know, but are driven to be. 16
The pattern of experience reflected in Thomas's poems suggests the tensions of the Dark Night. But there is nowhere in his books (so far, at
any rate) any attempt to express that "ecstatic awareness of the Absolute", that "sublime vision of Eternity", the goal of the great contemplatives,
which is beyond language (though Wordsworth and Henry Vaughan succeeded in getting something of it into verse). Thomas doesn’t strike me as
a man determined, after the manner of Pseudo-Dionysius, to
leave behind all things both in the sensible and in the intelligible worlds, till he enters the darkness of nescience that is truly mystical.
17
The negative God is a barrier which Thomas rationally knows, not a condition beyond which he can penetrate to be. He appears to
have been vouchsafed, in Evelyn Underhill's words, "the illuminated vision of reality", the consciousness of nature as it appears at those moments
when it manifests its divinity.
Such a moment prompted "The Bright Field" (Laboratories of the Spirit). Here, biblical allusions render the poem intensely Christian:
I have seen the sun break through
to 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 realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not a 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 is the eternity that awaits you.
The pearl and the treasure are emblems of the kingdom of heaven (see Matthew 13); the field, as in the parable of the tares, is the world.
The momentary illumination of the field by the sun as it breaks through a gap in the clouds recalls to the poet the teaching of Jesus that the
man who has discovered that field must go and sell all that he owns in order to buy it. The brightness of the sun in turn suggests the brightness
of the burning bush in Exodus 3, where God manifests himself to the prophet in flames which burn but do not consume. The mystic's fascination
with moments in which the timeless intersects with time is clearly present in "The Bright Field", yet "the eternity that awaits you" inevitably
closes the poem on a note which signals powerfully in the direction of Christian doctrine.
The mystic who perceives in the forms and processes of nature the presence of the divine will find it difficult to reconcile his visionary perceptions
with the dualism of 'material' and 'spiritual' which is characteristic of Christian thought (the panentheist might attempt it; the pantheist
had better not try). If the material world is formed of divine substance, there can be no 'soul' in a restricted sense; either everything is
soul (as Blake wittily proposes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) or nothing is soul. The variousness of R. S. Thomas's religious poems
is tribute to a sensibility which must pursue as many lines of enquiry and modes of feeling as occur to it, which refuses to be constrained
by received Christian ideology, whose truths are the perceptions of the lyric imagination at given points along its lifeline. To the extent
that he woos Eastern ideas, he moves away from "the anthropomorphisms / of the fancy". In the poem from which I have taken this phrase, "Emerging"
(from Frequencies, and not to be confused with the poem of the same title in Laboratories of the Spirit), he admits that God will
not lean down out of the air "to take the hand / extended to him". Yet if the God of Love must be given up, another God remains available –
becomes indeed the more available to the extent that the first God is put away.
We are beginning to see
now it is matter is the scaffolding
of spirit; that the poem emerges
from morphemes and phonemes; that
as form in sculpture is the prisoner
of the hard rock, so in everyday life
it is the plain facts and natural happenings
that conceal God and reveal him to us
little by little under the mind's tooling.
To say that matter is the "scaffolding" of spirit is metaphorically to glance off the head of the nail: for, as the passage at large suggests,
the material is the spiritual. So ingrained is the anthropomorphic in Thomas's poetic language that even here, when he has denied "the
anthropomorphisms / of the fancy", he shows, in the "him" of the penultimate line, that he cannot do without it. One might want to object that
"plain facts and natural happenings" do not in fact "conceal God" for the person accustomed to make no separation between matter and spirit.
But to throw off the ingrained dualism of Western philosophy and theology is no easy thing. At this point one may remark how inevitable it was
that Thomas should change his attitude towards science and technology: for if God (or Buddha, or reality, or whatever one calls it) is implicit
in flowers, trees, rocks, "he" must dwell also in plastic, rubber, steel. "He" is present not only in the petals of a celandine but the terminals
of a computer and the nucleus of a cancer cell.
The conviction that God manifests himself in "plain facts and natural happenings" can issue in poetry of great simplicity, poetry that must
certainly be regarded as "religious" but which wears upon its sleeve no faith other than the faith that all is well. Such a poem is "Good",
which closes Laboratories of the Spirit, a poem in whose lines even the once-mocked tractor takes its rightful place. On a smaller scale
there is the vision which informs "Minuet" ('New Poems'), from which I quote the second paragraph:
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.
The butterfly is captured in verse that is light and translucent: the affirmative impulse seems effortless, yet it has not been easily won.
The poem's opening – "But not to concentrate / on disaster" – suggests that the writer is conscious of turning aside from issues of a weightier
kind in order to focus on this small, particular perfection, while in the momentary harshness of "not to grind…" one feels the possibility of
a very different order of perception.
"Good", a vision of human order, and "Minuet", a vision of natural perfection, are poems made not in ignorance of man's despoliation of so much
of the earth and of the corruption to be found in human affairs, but in spite of these things. The poems have truths to express that do not
and cannot deny the existence of other and contrary truths. The three poems that close Later Poems are all in the affirmative voice;
yet it's impossible to imagine Thomas maintaining this mood for any length of time or number of consecutive poems. Experience – to find ourselves
back where we began – is circular, and each new poem is a shade subtracted from an infinite spectrum of possibility. The one certainty that
can be predicated of this poet is that he will never opt to paint with a single colour.
Notes
1 The Anglo-Welsh Review No. 74 (1983) p. 39.
2 Poetry Wales Vol. 7 No. 4 (Spring 1972) p. 51.
3 A term quoted by W. R. Inge when discussing Pseudo-Dionysius in Christian Mysticism
(1899) p. 102.
4 Quoted by W. R. Inge in Christian Mysticism p. 128.
5 The Anglo-Welsh Review No. 74 (1983) p. 47.
6 He says in his interview with Lethbridge that in common with Pseudo-Dionysius he believes
that Beauty is an essential "ingredient of God".
7 P. 111.
8 Pp. 114-115.
9 P. 115.
10 The Avoidance of Literature is the title of Sisson's Collected Essays (Carcanet
1978).
11 He has famously and dangerously observed, for example, that he regards the Incarnation
and the Resurrection as poetic metaphors. See Poetry Wales Vol 7 No. 4 p. 53.
12 Collected Poems (Carcanet 1984) p. 21.
13 Collected Poems pp. 227-236.
14 Poetry Wales Vol. 7 No. 4 p. 51.
15 See the interview with J. B. Lethbridge pp. 39-40.
16 Mysticism (1911) p. 456.
17 Inge p. 109.
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