Now that the poet RS Thomas has died the role of embittered Welsh stoic and millenarian is surely vacant, and waiting for Mark Jones. The Telegraph obituary, 27 September 2000 R S THOMAS, who has died aged 87, was a fervent defender of Wales and the Welsh language - which made it odd that he should have been one of the best poets writing in English since the Second World War. The style of his verse - spare, harsh, austere (though lit by sudden flares of lyrical splendour) - reflected the appearance of the man. But the economy of the phrasing carries complex meanings, and the surface clarity deep resonance. Such effects were not easily achieved: Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder. While each poem stands by itself, the work as a whole reflects his religious odyssey as a clergyman in the Church in Wales. The early volumes - The Stones of the Field (1946), An Acre of Land (1952) and Song at the Year's Turning (1955) - evoke the tension of his encounters with Welsh hill farmers, represented in the character of Iago Prytherch. Their primitive lives appeared deeply shocking to the young Thomas. Ruthlessly unsentimental, he did not hesitate, in his fiercer moods, to depict the hill farmers as vacant, miserly and mean-spirited. But what had he himself to offer? Ransack you brainbox, pull out the drawers That rot in your heart's dust, and what have you to give To enrich his spirit or the way he lives? Besides, Thomas found a certain magnificence in Iago Prytherch's capacity to endure, which placed him beyond mockery or pity, and spoke of a common humanity: The dirt is under my cracked nails; The tale of my life is besmirched with dung; The phlegm rattles. But what I am saying Over the grasses rough with dew Is, Listen, listen, I am a man like you. The recognition of Iago Prytherch as a universal prototype posed in stark and urgent form the old question of how to reconcile human suffering with the idea of a beneficent deity. "Nothing I'd been told in theological college," Thomas reflected, "was any help at all in the circumstances." He specifically rejected what he called "the grovelling of the theologians", who glibly pronounced that suffering enobled - plainly, it did not - or who hazarded that it constituted some form of test, as in the trials inflicted upon Job. Thomas's succeeding volumes - Poetry for Supper (1958), Tares (1961) and Bread of Truth (1963) - show him sometimes close to despair over the challenge to faith. Yet he was coming to accept that, on the religious plane, suffering is not to be explained, but rather embraced as an ineffable mystery at the heart of existence. The title poem of his next volume, Pietà (1966), reflects this position: Always the same hills Crowd the horizon, Remote witnesses Of the still scene. And in the foreground The tall Cross, Sombre, untenanted, Aches for the Body That is back in the cradle Of a maid's arms. Thenceforth the Cross became a central theme in Thomas's work. And from it came the cry - "My God, my God, wherefore hast thou forsaken me?" - which suggested the hidden God, the Deus absconditus of Isaiah 45: 15. Thomas had introduced this concept in some of his earlier poems, but it found its fullest expression in the volumes he published in the 1970s - H'm (1972), Laboratories of the Spirit (1975) and Frequences (1978): It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has not yet come. I modernise the anachronism of my language, but he is no more here than before. Genes and molecules have no more power to call him up than the incense of the Hebrews at their altars. My equations fail as my words do. What resource have I other than the emptiness without him of my whole being, a vacuum he may not abhor? In bleaker moods Thomas postulates a God moved to demonic laughter at the plight of humanity, or even imagines a creator prepared to scrap his own creation: And God thought: Pray away, Creatures; I'm going to destroy It. The mistake's mine, If you like. I have blundered Before; the glaciers erased My error. By the early 1970s Thomas had travelled far from the dogmas he had imbibed in youth. Institutional religion, he came to believe, was dead. But something was still required: a faith to enable me to outstare the grinning faces of the inmates of its asylum, the failed experiments that God put away. Thomas's final volumes of verse - including Later Poems 1972-82 (1983), Destinations (1985), Experimenting with an Amen (1986) and Mass For Hard Times (1992) - show a mind grown sceptical of "the anthropomorphisms/ of the fancy". He was now searching for a more primitive God, to be encountered beyond the veil of intellect and language. So Thomas wages war with science and technology, which distance the possibility of relgious insight: What anthem have our computers to insert into the vacuum caused by the break in transmission of the song upon Patmos? With a few odd exceptions - as in his poem Suddenly when he discerns the voice of God in the chainsaw - Thomas took headlong flight from the modern world. "The attempt of contemporary Christianity to be reasonable in the face of science," he wrote, "makes it so innocuous." The poet who had once, in his radio play The Minister (1953), savaged the life-denying hypocrisies of Nonconformity, held at the end of his life that such blind bigotry is preferable to the vain assumptions of self-sufficiency which the machine age has conferred. Escape from contemporary life appeared to Thomas to be as much as a psychological as a religious necessity. He even felt the need to be disengaged from his own poetry: "The more one woos words," he noted in the 1960s, "the more desperately in love with them one grows, the more coquettish and refractory they become; whereas a certain insouciance or aloofness in the writer will often bring them fawning about his feet." Thomas's poems frequently open conversationally, as though buttonholing the reader with his latest thought. In his life, though, he adopted an extreme misanthropy; Byron Rogers once wrote that his hardness and severity "make one feel like Edgar Linton". Thomas's final flight was from his own identity: All my life I tried to believe in the importance of what Thomas should say now, do next. . . Impossible dreamer! All those years the demolition of the identity proceeded. Fast as the cells constituted themselves, they were replaced. It was not I who lived, but life rather that lived me. The son of a Welsh sea captain, Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff on March 29 1913. My mother gave me the breast's milk Generously, but grew mean after, Envying me my detached laughter. My father was a passionate man, Wrecked after leaving the sea In her love's shallows. He grieves in me. The boy was brought up in Liverpool and Holyhead where he attended local schools before reading Latin at the University of Wales, Bangor. "I had one or two friends at Bangor," Thomas recalled in old age. "but we didn't keep in touch after. I haven't got any now." There were even people - one or two of them - who ventured on "Ron". But when he played rugger he was distinguished from all the other Thomases in the team by his initials R S. After Bangor, Thomas, who had "heard the call" at 17, went to St Michael's Theological College at Llandaff. It was only at this point, in his twenties, that he began to learn Welsh. Ordained in 1936 he took up a curacy at Chirk, five miles north of Oswestry and only just in Wales. In 1942 he moved further south, but still on the Welsh borders, to became rector of Manafon, then in Montgomeryshire, where he remained 12 years. These remote livings suited his temperament. "One of my problems with the Church was its support for war, praying for victory. That was one of the reasons I was happy to take a rural parish." Another reason was his view that "cities are terrible places. Evil. I smell evil the moment I get off the train. Everything is charade, a play act papering over enormous chasms". Thomas's first volumes of poetry attracted the attention of Alan Pryce- Jones, who in 1952 commended them on the wireless. In 1956 John Betjeman wrote a preface for Thomas: "The 'name' which has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public will be forgotten long before that of R S Thomas." Thomas agreed: "Most people who read poetry are interested in Betjemanesque verse - Betjeman has jingle, I suppose - or in Ella Wheeler Wilcox. My poetry is not for them." Indeed Thomas avoided 19th-century poetry because he feared its obvious rhythms might upset his own sense of metre. In 1954 Thomas moved west to Eglwysfach, 10 miles north of Aberystwyth, where he was vicar until 1967. Most of his parishioners, he admitted, would have preferred a different incumbent. "My nose is too sharp. People don't like to be seen through." Even the permitted pleasures appeared questionable to him. "Happiness?" he queried, "I don't understand about happiness. I find myself saying to countless couples when I marry them, "I hope you'll be happy. But it's too elusive and fleeting. I'm too honest to think anything remains the same." Thomas's next living, at Aberdaron on the Lleyn peninsula, proved entirely to his taste. "We get eight months of winter here," he observed. "Coming here has put me in touch with things just as elemental as Welsh hill farmers," he explained, "you know, the sea, sky, the wind, those sorts of things." There were no newspapers in his house; still less, television. To feed his intellect he read philosophy, while of the poets he favoured Yeats and Wallace Stevens - though latterly he came to prefer T S Eliot to Yeats: "I've had enough of the blarney." Thomas's defence of Wales and the Welsh language became ever more extreme, until in 1990 he called for "non-violent night attacks" on English properties in the principality. He could not support Plaid Cymru because it recognised Westminster. "Britain does not exist for me," he explained, "It's an abstraction forced on the Welsh people." But Thomas castigated the Welsh themselves who, "through indifference, lack of backbone, snobbishness and laziness", had chosen to speak English and to cast away their inheritance. They were, he had written as early as 1955: an impotent people Sick with inbreeding Worrying the carcase of an old song. His last parish was also on the Lleyn peninsula, at Bwich-y-Rhiw, where he was rector between 1972 and 1978. In retirement he continued to live in the area, though after his first wife's death in 1991 he went briefly to Anglesey where he rented a whitewashed cottage in the shadow of a power station. Did he miss his wife, a journalist wondered? "I suppose so," he replied. Was he lonely? "I was lonely when I lived with her." Yet one of his last poems, A Marriage, was a touching and delicate tribute to his wife. Thomas's Collected Poems 1945-1990 was published in 1993, and his Autobiographies in 1997. Asked if he wished to be remembered by posterity, he was typically unforthcoming. "I don't mind at all," he volunteered. "It's quite immaterial." R S Thomas received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964, and the Cheltenham Prize in 1993. "Prizes are irrelevant," he said. He married first, in 1936, Mildred Eldridge, an artist; they had a son. He married secondly, in 1996, Elisabeth Vernon. 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