Good Friday is the 100th anniversary of the birth of R.S. Thomas. Everyone has heard of Dylan Thomas, but the Swansea sot was not fit to untie the shoes of his Cardiff namesake, who was surely one of the finest poets — and certainly in the top three or four “religious” poets — of the twentieth century. Thomas was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature — he didn’t get it (but then neither did Wallace Stevens, the contemporary poet he admired most) — but I smile at the thought of an acceptance speech given to a cosmopolitan audience by the cantankerous deracinated Welsh nationalist who once wrote, “Perhaps God is a monkey after all. They like to urinate at strangers”.
It is providentially apposite that Thomas’ centenary should fall on Good Friday because he was a poeta crucis par excellence. Thomas himself confessed that he had little to say about resurrection joy (though chocolate was bliss!), and while his later poetry could be lyrically, if longingly, tender, when, near the end of an interview the year before his death, it was suggested that “we haven’t done love yet,” he replied: “Love will have to wait until next time.” For Thomas God’s agape was agonistic, predatory, burning like a bush set in the bleak Welsh landscape the poet wandered, observed, and incisively etched with words; and his own faith was fiercely fought and relentlessly interrogative. Writing in the tradition of apophatic theology, Thomas was a “Poet of the Hidden God” (D.Z. Phillips), the deus absconditus. Indeed for Thomas, not only Good Friday but Easter itself revealed the absence of God.
But Thomas’ verse does not demonstrate the rather trivial truth that language is inherently unable to grasp God. Rather it is the poetic expression, written on his knees, of persistently probing prayer. Simone Weil observed that “the very reason why God has decided to hide himself is that we might have an idea of what he is like”. What Thomas does is to translate idea into image. He demonstrates (in Phillips’ words) that “to say that God makes a difference to the world by virtue of his absence from it is not to fail to talk of the reality of God, but to show how talk of such a reality gets a hold on human life” — with, in Thomas’ own words, “his talons”.
Here is a triptych of poems - two for Good Friday and one for Easter — from the brooding bird-watching bard, Christ’s curmudgeon Cymraeg.
“The Coming”
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
Later Poems (London: Macmillan, 1983)
From “Crucifixion”
God’s fool, God’s jester
capering at his right hand
in torment, proving the fallacy
of the impassible, reminding
him of omnipotence’s limits.
I have seen the figure
on our human tree, burned
into it by thought’s lightning
and it writhed as I looked.
A god has no alternative
but himself. With what crown
plurality but with thorns?
Whose is the mirthless laughter
at the beloved irony
at his side? The universe over,
omniscience warns, the crosses
are being erected from such
material as is available
to remorse. What are the stars
but time’s fires going out
before ever the crucified
can be taken down.
Today
there is only this one option
before me. Remembering,
as one goes out into space,
on the way to the sun,
how dark it will grow,
I stare up into the darkness
of his countenance, knowing it
a reflection of the three days and nights
at the back of love’s looking-
glass even a god must spend.
Not the empty tomb
but the uninhabited
cross. Look long enough
and you will see the arms
put on leaves. Not a crown
of thorns, but a crown of flowers
haloing it, with a bird singing
as though perched on paradise’s threshold.
We have over-furnished
our faith. Our churches
are as limousines in the procession
towards heaven. But the verities
remain: a de-nuclearised
cross, uncontaminated
by our coinage; the chalice’s ichor; and one crumb of bread
on the tongue for the bird-like
intelligence to be made tame by.
Counterpoint (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1990)
“‘Easter. I approach’”
Easter, I approach
the year’s empty tomb.
What has time done with
itself? Is the news worth
the communicating? The word’s
loincloth can remember
little. A thin, cold wind
blows from beyond the abysm
that I gawp into. But supposing
there were bones; the darkness
illuminated like a museum?
In glass cases I have
peered at the brittle bundles,
exonerating my conscience
with mortality’s tears.
But here, true to my name,
I have nothing to hold on
to, an absence so much richer
than a presence, offering
instead of the skull’s
leer an impalpable possibility
for faith’s fingertips to explore.
R.S. Thomas: Uncollected Poems, eds. Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2013)
, a fascinating and funny account of the comedian’s attempt to walk the route of Israel’s security barrier. It isn’t a book that is likely to appeal to any of Israel’s apologists, though his route took in both sides of the fence and the effects of terrorism are acknowledged from the first. By its nature, this is an anecdotal account rather than a rigorous political analysis but in the end the stories of individuals and families matter more than grand political narratives.