R.S. Thomas Quotes

I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens

In the silence that is his chosen medium of communication and telling others about it in words. Is there no way not to be the sport of reason ?

Somebody Within this world are the great oceans, And on those oceans the dark smudge Of continents and the green islands With towns and cities, their stone sinews Taut under the soft plumage Of dust and smoke. And in those cities Are streets full of people of many colours, Laughing, sighing, whistling tunes Of times and places that are not now. And one I saw a moment ago, Who tried to keep on his poor hearth Of bone the fire from going out; Who tried to grow to the full stature His shadow attained on the hard wall. And his hands were clenched and his feet sore; His mind ached and his brow was charted With care, and fear formed in his veins. Yet he looked up and smiled, as he passed. 1970

Children's Song
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

The deep spaces between stars , Fathomless as the cold shadow His mind cast.

There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon

Even God had a Welsh name : He spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a peculiar care For the Welsh people. History showed us He was too big to be nailed to the wall Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him Between the boards of a black book .

Seated at table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence; noiselessly
they conversed.

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?

Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.

Verse should be as natural As the small tuber that feeds on muck And grows slowly from obtuse soil To the white flower of immortal beauty

Confessions of an Anglo-Welshman For my own country's part Her lore and language I should have by heart. 'Twas she who raised me, Built me bone by bone Out of the teeming earth, the dreaming stone. Even at my christening it was she decreed Uprooted I should bleed. And yet for another's sake No wound deletes, No patriotism dulls The true and the beautiful Bequeathed to me by Blake, Shelley and Shakespeare and the ravished Keats. 1943

I am a man now. Pass your hand over my brow. You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I have known exile and a wild passion Of longing changing to a cold ache. King, beggar and fool , I have been all by turns, Knowing the body's sweetness, the mind 's treason ; Taliesin still, I show you a new world , risen, Stubborn with beauty , out of the heart 's need .

Deliver me from the long drought of the mind . Let leaves from the deciduous Cross fall on us, washing us clean, turning our autumn to gold by the affluence of their fountain.

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
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receeding 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.

Sunlight 's a thing that needs a window Before it enter a dark room. Windows don't happen. So two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Noisily by them, glib with prose.

I have been Merlin wandering in the woods Of a far country, where the winds waken Unnatural voices , my mind broken By a sudden acquaintance with man's rage.

The darkness is the deepening shadow of your presence; the silence a process in the metabolism of the being of love .

Somewhere within sight of the tree of poetry that is eternity wearing the green leaves of time .

Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being ... ultimate reality is what we call God.

The old men ask for more time; the young waste it. And the philosopher simply smiles, knowing there is none there.

There is always
laughter out of the speeding
vehicles for the man
who is still, half-way though he be
in a better direction.

I am alone on the surface of a turning planet.

Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder.

It is too late to start For destinations not of the heart . I must stay here with my hurt.

Pension Love songs in old age have an edge to them like dry leaves. The tree we planted shakes in the wind of time. Our thoughts are birds that sit in the boughs and remember; we call them down to the remains of poetry. We sit opposite one another at table, parrying our sharp looks with our blunt smiles. 1977

The nearest we approach God ... is as creative beings. The poet , by echoing the primary imagination , recreates. Through his work he forces those who read him to do the same, thus bringing them ... nearer to the actual being of God as displayed in action .

The meaning is in the waiting,

The furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown. Never think to surprise them. Your face approaching ever so friendly is the white flag they ignore. There is no truce with the furies. A mirror's temperature is always zero. It is ice in the veins. It's camera is an x-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own.

I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.

Art is recuperation from time. I lie back convalescing upon the prospect of a harvest already at hand.

To all light things
I compared her: to
a snowflake, a feather

The View from Europe And that was Africa: the long line to the south little higher than the Atlantic that defined it. The sea rolled its drums on the shore, broke in white foam, flowers for the hair of the girls. I sipped the wind with my nostrils, and the smell was the smell of fear. Two million- year-old skulls surfaced from soil fathoms, grinning their disdain at the accuracy of the new weapons. And that was Eden indeed: Adam was black and the woman, Eve, was black; and the serpent, master of the click languages, spoke to them sibilantly of how the machine would sound as it waited under the tree of death, offering them nothing but a pretence of life. 1988

Welsh poet R. S. Thomas often complained of having to go out and "perform cultural exceses on Saxon territory," the term he used for reading his poems to English sudiences.