R.S. Thomas

M. Wynn Thomas

Description

Published to mark the centenary of the sometime ‘ogre of Wales’, this volume (by the executor of his unpublished literary estate) deals with the idées fixes that serially possessed his fiercely intense imagination: Iago Prytherch, Wales, his family, and of course a vexingly elusive Deity. Here, these familiar obsessions are set in several unusual contexts that bring his poetry into startling new relief: his war poetry is considered alongside his early poetry’s relationship to English topographical tradition; comparisons with Borges and Levertov underline the international dimensions of his concerns; the intriguing ‘secret code’ of some of his Welsh-language references is cracked; and his painting-poems (including several hitherto unpublished) are moved centre stage from the peripheries to which they’ve been routinely relegated.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783160211
• Langue: English

Extrait

R. S. Thomas
R. S. Thomas
Serial Obsessive
M. W YNN T HOMAS

University of Wales Press Cardiff 2013 -->


© M. Wynn Thomas, 2013 Reprinted, 2013 (twice)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2570-4 e-ISBN 978-1-78316-021-1
The right of M. Wynn Thomas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham
I fy annwyl wraig

Ac er cof am ein hen gyfaill ni’n dau, Hywel Teifi Edwards (1934–2010)
CONTENTS


Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 War Poet
2 For Wales, See Landscape
3 The Disappearing Clergyman
4 Son of Saunders
5 Family Matters
6 The Leper of Abercuawg
7 Irony in the Soul: R. S.(ocrates) Thomas
8 ‘Time’s Changeling’
9 ‘The fantastic side of God’
10 Transatlantic Relations
11 ‘The fast dipping brush’
12 ‘The brush’s piety’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Permission has very kindly been granted by Gwydion and Rhodri Thomas to publish extracts from R. S. Thomas’s published works, and the R. S. Thomas Centre at Bangor University has generously allowed publication of some unpublished materials.
Several parts of this book have appeared in present or previous form elsewhere. I am grateful to those associated with the following for permission to mine those sources: The New Welsh Review ; Wales at War , Critical Essays on Literature and Art ; Welsh Writing in English , A Yearbook of Critical Essays ; Internal Difference, Literature in Twentieth-Century Wales ; Miraculous Simplicity , Essays on R. S. Thomas ; Cawr i’w Genedl , Cyfrol i gyfarch Hywel Teifi Edwards ; Agenda ; Echoes to the Amen , Essays after R. S. Thomas ; Renascence , New Perspectives in Scholarship and Criticism ; Poems of Earth , Poems and Essays in Honour of Jeremy Hooker .
Permissions to include entirely or in part from the following works have been kindly granted: The Collected Poems 1945–1990 by R. S. Thomas, by permission of The Orion Publishing Group, London; ‘A Flickering Mind’, ‘Joy’, ‘Mysterious Disappearance of May’s Past Perfect’ and ‘Thinking About Paul Celan’ by Denise Levertov, from New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003); ‘Infant Sorrow’ by William Blake, from William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose , edited by David Punter (Routledge, 1988); ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth, from William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry and Prose , edited by Philip Hobsbaum (Routledge, 1989); ‘No Second Troy’ by W. B. Yeats, by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Gráinne Yeats; ‘On the Shore’ by R. S. Thomas, from The Bread of Truth (1968), by permission of Kunjana Thomas; ‘Psalm Fragments (Schnittke String Trio)’ by Denise Levertov, from The Stream and the Sapphire , © 1997 by Denise Levertov, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; ‘Reaping’ by Joseph P. Clancy, Twentieth-Century Welsh Poems (Gomer Press, 1982) from the original Welsh poem ‘Medi’ by Dic Jones, Cerddi Dic yr Hendre (Gomer Press, 2010); ‘Reluctance’, from The Poetry of Robert Frost , edited by Edward Connery Latham, published by Jonathan Cape, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited; ‘Some Notes on Organic Form’ by Denise Levertov, from New and Selected Essays , © 1973 by Denise Levertov, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Over a quarter of a century, I have published more than a dozen books with the University of Wales Press, and am more appreciative than ever of the exceptional services they have rendered me. My sincerest thanks go to Sarah Lewis, Dafydd Jones, Siân Chapman, Charlotte Austin, Steven Goundrey, Eira Fenn Gaunt, Janet Davies and all the other members of a team that, despite the outrageous challenges and difficulties of recent times, have remained devoted to the highest standards of professional performance.
The dedication of this book to my wife and recently departed friend Hywel Teifi Edwards is an inadequate return for all their love, affection and support. And included equally in the embrace of my very warmest thanks are those others dearest to me, Elin, Bob, and of course little Joseph. Mae’r llyfr hwn, gyda chariad mawr, yn gyflwynedig ichi i gyd.
To view this content, please refer to the print edition of this book
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Between pages 146 and 147 Richard Hilder, Cottages at Litlington (n.d.). Donated by the Pilgrim Trust. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Mildred Eldridge, Addoldy-y-Bedyddwyr (n.d.). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Mildred Eldridge, Maes yr Onnen , reproduced in R. S. Thomas, Selected Prose (1982). © Kunjana Thomas 2001. Mildred Eldridge, Soar-y-Mynydd , reproduced in R. S. Thomas, Selected Prose (1982). © Kunjana Thomas 2001. Mildred Eldridge, Peat Cutting, Cefn Coch (n.d.). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Kenneth Rowntree, Conway Castle and Coracle (n.d.). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Mildred Eldridge, drawing of R. S. Thomas (n.d.). Private collection. Mildred Eldridge, drawing of R. S. Thomas (n.d.). Private collection. Edgar Degas, Portrait of a Young Woman , 1867. Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Giraudon; The Bridgman Art Library. Edgar Degas, Mademoiselle Marie Dihau at the piano , oil on canvas, c .1869–72. Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Giraudon; The Bridgman Art Library. Edgar Degas, The Opera Orchestra , oil on canvas, c .1870. Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Giraudon; The Bridgman Art Library. Ben Shahn, Father and Child , painting (n.d.). Toyen, Hlas Lesa I , painting (n.d.). Iwan Bala, Land , painting (n.d.). Wil Rowlands, At the End , painting (n.d.). Christine Kinsey, Yr Adwy 1 , pencil and charcoal on paper (n.d.).
ABBREVIATIONS

CLP Collected Later Poems, 1988–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004) CP
Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (Guernsey: Phoenix/Orion, 2000)
But this one, had he ever been anything but solitary?
R. S. Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow
Introduction
There are deaths that have affected the very weather of the Welsh mind, and for two days after R. S. Thomas’s passing in September 2000, the country was swept by storms. What mattered to many, towards the end of his long life, was that he was still there, magnificently cussed, wilfully bloody-minded, incorrigibly anachronistic. In a world glib with yes-men, his was a voice ever ready to say No! in thunder. And, as a connoisseur of irony, he would have relished the moment at his funeral when, during the still moment of prayer, the jets he had so often cursed screeched unheeding overhead, inscribing their own hostile obituary in the skies of Llŷn. As for the cremation that followed, it was perfectly suited to one who, contrary to public perception, was never a grave man. ‘Poor old Arnold,’ one of the Victorian sage’s friends is reported to have commented on hearing of the great man’s passing: ‘he won’t like God.’ It’s easy to understand why the Almighty put off calling R. S. Thomas home for as long as possible: He knew He would face cross-examination to all eternity. Nor did the ageing Thomas lose his notorious capacity to shock. When I interviewed him a couple of years before his death, he startled his respectable audience by saying that, were he persuaded that drugs would improve his performance as a poet, he would not scruple to take them.
That remark underlined how very seriously he took his vocation – not only as a priest, but as a poet. But how good a poet was he? A century after his birth, but a mere dozen years after his death, it is far, far too early to tell. Quiet consensus – eloquent in its neglect of him – currently murmurs ‘not very’: a marginal figure at best, minor in his achievements, limited in vision, briefly interesting in his early Iago Prytherch years. I belong to the dissenting minority, but have to concede a special, and probably distorting, interest. I deeply sympathise with both his political and his religious convictions, while by no means fully subscribing to either. For me he remains the ‘Solzhenitsyn of Wales’, a necessary extremist, an irritating troubler of conscience, a fully signed up member of the awkward squad. He is a true ‘Son of Saunders’, as explained in one of the chapters that follow. I also particularly value those ‘laboratories of the spirit’, his late, religious poems, each attenuated text isolated on its page like some gaunt Giacometti figure imaging the modern condition. And however haunting the poetically substantial figure of Iago Prytherch, I feel it is high time for some critics fixated on the early poetry to break free of their arrested development: IP, RIP. When in 1992 I asked Thomas if he would very kindly contribute an unpublished poem for inclusion in a book I was editing about his work, he sent me ‘The One’, which captures the essence of his religious poems at their incomparable best. Referring to ‘the word’ of ultimate truth, he notes that

It is buried under the page’s drift, and not all our tears, not all our air-conditioning can bring on the thaw. Our sentences are but as footprints, arrested indefinitely on its threshold. 1
That he was uneven is self-evident – what poet, including the undeniably important, is not? Such volumes as Experimenting with an Amen , Counte